Casey Brittsan
English Writing 302
Dr. Jordan
Essay #1
WC: WORD COUNT PUT HERE

(Come up with title)

Imagine ordering a couple of pizzas and some wings on a Saturday night and having the delivery person not only be fifteen plus minutes past the quoted time frame, but also receive a pizza that has clearly been sitting in the warmer for far too long, as well as some soggy chicken wings. On an average Saturday night, one in every five deliveries is about fifteen to twenty minutes late, due to the lack of structure in the takeout unit. In about mid-September of 2014, the other Folsom Chicago Fire location, the Palladio, stopped doing delivery and forced our delivery radius to expand to compensate for their customers’ losses. Along with this change came a higher quantity of takeout and delivery customers for which our smaller location was not prepared for, nor equipped to handle. Consequently, in those few months, the quality of our takeout food has declined substantially, due to the lack of a delivery system designed to manage a higher capacity of delivery orders. A solution to this problem is simply to add another takeout person onto Friday and Saturday evening shifts who’s job is to organize and time out delivery orders, to help package and get ready the next delivery order to keep things running smoothly and on time, and to help the customers who are coming in to pick-up their orders. Doing this would result in a more productive environment because employees know their job clearly and can focus on one thing, rather than trying to handle deliveries and walk-in customers at the same time. It would also increase the quality of our food leaving customers satisfied, which leads to an increase in sales. Moreover, one major complaint we have received from customers is the quality of the food being delivered. In a typical delivery scenario, after we have taken a customer’s order, we give an estimate of about forty-five minutes to an hour for delivery, taking into consideration that we have to quote time for the pizzas and appetizers to be made, as well as time for proper and thorough presentation and packaging of these items, plus another fifteen or so minutes for the driver to drive to the destination. In the past, for our low capacity of deliveries, this system seems to run smoothly, but for a high capacity of orders, this system generally leads to chaos and unsatisfied customers.
Although our current system of doing deliveries has worked efficiently in the past, we now have to accommodate for a substantial increase in sales. I have come up with a simple solution that will help the takeout department run more smoothly and efficiently, while also increasing the quality of our delivery food. On an average, busy Friday or Saturday night, there will be four takeout employees on the evening shift. Recently, our delivery numbers have risen from having about five deliveries, to about thirty deliveries on average, resulting in eight to nine deliveries per employee. Since we deliver to a six mile radius, an average delivery takes about a thirty minutes to go and come back, if an employee goes on six to eight deliveries a shift, that is about four to five hours not being in the restaurant taking phone calls or helping customers. Unfortunately, with this amount of deliveries, there isn’t enough time to assist call-in or pick-up customers because everyone in takeout would be gone on deliveries or an employee would get stuck at the restaurant answering phone call after phone call or helping with large carry-out orders resulting in low quality food and late deliveries . The consequences from a typical night like this are unhappy customers, stressed and exhausted employees, and overall bad quality of food and service.
However, a solution to end this turmoil is to have an additional person on takeout who’s job is “in-house” takeout. Basically, the in-house takeout person would be a stationary person who would be primarily in charge of