Restaurant owners are still feeling the long-lasting effects of the pandemic. Finding good help that will stick around has been an enormous—and often frustrating—challenge these days. The continued labor shortage has no end in sight, but we need solutions now. The right POS system can provide both temporary and permanent solutions to help reduce your reliance on finding quality employees. So you can get back to what matters—serving the customers.
Tablets Allow Servers To Go Farther
In a server-based restaurant, you know that the distance a server has to walk matters. A server who waits on tables that are spread out all over the restaurant or walks to the other side of the restaurant to enter orders will be far less efficient than one who doesn’t. You can reduce the number of servers you need to cover a dining room when the servers can send orders right to the kitchen using a POS tablet. As an added bonus, a server with a POS system tablet can handle more tables, meaning they will make more in tips, which will help reduce turnover and make it easier to hire another server if needed.
Kiosks Are the New Cashiers
For counter-serve restaurants, cashiers can be the biggest challenge. You need them when you are busy, and you need them gone when you are not. Thus, the cashier’s schedule is something that needs constant monitoring. By replacing some, or even all, of your cashiers with Kiosk stations, you greatly reduce your reliance on personnel while still serving the customer. The best part is, Kiosks are always able to take orders. So, if you get hit with an off-hour rush, you’re not scrambling to keep the lines down.
Online Ordering for More Sales and Less Foot Traffic
Regardless of the kind of restaurant you operate, allowing your customers to place orders from the internet is strongly advised in this post-pandemic world. The key benefit of offering online ordering is that a customer can review the menu, select the items, modifiers, and sides they want, then pay for their order without interacting with any of your front-of-house staff. Online ordering provides the opportunity to make increased sales without needing to increase FOH personnel.
Ghost Kitchens Through Online Ordering Apps
When you are facing severe labor shortages, you may need to take the drastic step of switching your restaurant over to a Ghost Kitchen. In short, a Ghost Kitchen is a restaurant that has no front-of-house staff. They make all sales through third-party online delivery apps like Uber-Eats and Grub Hub. These are integrated into the POS system. Ghost Kitchens require half the staff as a traditional restaurant, which greatly reduces your dependency on the labor market. There are a few notable drawbacks and pitfalls to opening and operating a Ghost Kitchen, which you can read more about here.
It might be a good long while until there is relief in the labor market. But by implementing one or more of these options, you can alleviate the strain the labor shortage has on your business. Total Merchant Supply offers POS systems in Charlotte, NC, that support the features talked about in this blog. Call us today to get back to focusing on what matters—serving your customers.