SPOON not required. Best eaten the old-fashioned way

There are innumerable examples of services that have become a pain because of poorly thought-through implementation of fancy technology solutions for problems that would have been much better addressed by simple old-fashioned solutions.

The food court at Oberoi Mall (Goregaon, Mumbai) provides a glaring case study. It has a dozen+ outlets spread across an area of around of 4000 sqm. But none of the them accept payments. A diner has to calculate how much the family’s order will cost, go to a seperate counter, buy a ‘Spoon Card’, add balance to the card equivalant to the estimated bill and return with the card to food outlet to place an order.

I asked around and found that they moved to this system recently because the food outlets had a shortage of change and it was becoming difficult for each outlet to manage cash.

Oh great! So to make it easier for the people who man the food outlets, they make the customer’s life difficult. To do away with a billing system and save the hassle of keeping change, they came up with the brilliant idea of centralized billing. Only, they did not think about how this impacts the customer experience.

Service Map of a Customer’s Experience at the Spoon Food Court

Click here to see how this centralized billing stystem impacts the customer experience. It adds 8 steps and 30 minutes to a simple transaction of ordering food.   

This is not only terrible from a customer experience point of view, but is also a messy and inefficient service delivery process and a bad retail strategy.

1. Waste of Space: They’ve wasted valuable retail space creating a seperate counter for issuing the Spoon card.
2. Complex and Expensive Technology: The Issuing card counter has 2 POS terminals which are used to charge a Spoon card with the value that a customer required. Every food outlet has a POS terminal to swipe the card, take-off the value of the bill from the card and punch in the order. All of these would be networked and would require a software platform for clearing every transaction.
3. Discourages Impulse purchase: What if I’ve gone through the entire process of getting a Spoon card and just before I place the order, I also feel like ordering a lassi? The entire process is so cumbersome that I’d rather not have the lassi (which means it would be really really cumbersome!)
4. Prevents small orders: What if I’m just passing by and want to have a coke before I head to the gaming zone next door? Will I go through the entire process of standing in a line and acquiring a Spoon card to get a coke? No chance. This prevents customers with small 1-2 item orders from coming to the food zone.  
5. Creates huge lines and chaos: 2 cash counters to serve customers from a dozen+ food outlets. Is this a joke? A Subway that I frequent at another mall has 2 cash counters within it and still makes me wait to pay. How do they expect to provide customer speedy billing and payments with such inadequate capacity? Lines longer than 5 people turn people off and make them reconsider making the purchase.

All this just because its difficult to manage billing and keep change? (something that is such an integral part of any retail business). And if that was a genuine problem, there are other, simpler ways to solve it. If keeping change is a problem, the food outlets could address it by:

• Keeping the pricing change-friendly. Just price everything in multiples of 5 or 10 (50, 90, 120 or even 55, 95, 15). This reduces the denominations of change you need to just 4 (100s, 50s, 10s and may be 5s)
• Get Change. Get together and employ a person whose sole job is to make sure every food outlet has change. Every morning he’ll go to a bank and get change worth a fixed amount and distribute it among the outlets. He also makes sure that during the day every outlet has a healthy inventory of change. At a monthly salary of Rs.6,000 this would be about fifty times cheaper than the complex system in place right now.

“We are surrounded by engineers’ folly: too many technical solutions still looking for problems to solve”
David Tansley

<< FOLLOW-UP CONVERSATION >>

Saurabh Nanda:

They’ve copied the concept but changed it to make it worse.
I went to a food court in MBK Mall, Bangkok. I was given a similar card at the entry *pre-filled* with 2,000 Thai Baht (per person). I could swipe the card at all the food outlets and after I’ve had my meal, on my way out, I had to pay whatever I had used up on the card
There are advantages to this model:
1. If the food court owner and the outlets are on a revenue sharing arrangement then the cash counter can be managed by the owner. He/she will always know each outlets revenue.
2. All the outlets do not need to have cash counters & credit card machines. All of it is centralized.
3. The customer is paying through plastic, so there is always a chance of more purchases.
4. The customer does not have to fork out cash up-front.

Abhisek Sarda:

This system could work as an add-on but can’t be the only payment option. Some people might even be comfortable putting Rs.2000 on the card and using it across 6 months. But what if I am not a regular visitor? There needs to be a cash payment option.
Also, as a tourist the 2000 baht card might appeal to you. But if you are meeting a friend for coffee, would you want to go through the entire process? It just adds steps to a simple transaction.
The cost benefit isn’t that much, because all food outlets have a POS terminal anyway to swipe the Spoon card. Credit/Debit card machines are supplied by banks for free to all outlets.
Also, when you are catering to a very diverse audience, you need to make a system inclusive towards different attitudes to money.

Saurabh Nanda:

Aren’t your arguments applicable to token based food outlets as well? You first by a token/coupon from the cash counter and then you go the chaat stall to get your snacks. Spoon is not much different then. I’m sure there are some advantages in these systems that they are so prevalent.

Abhisek Sarda:

Yes, the problems of centralized billing are common to all formats of the system. However, a Haldiram outlet is much, much smaller, has fewer food counters and the owner has an over-ridding compulsion to centralize billing to check cheating by employees and also free-up the bhelpuri wala to make bhel-puri. At the mall, most outlets have a dedicated person to man the POS terminal anyway.
There are some obvious advantages (tracking sales to share revenues…) but is that good enough to screw up the customer experience? Probably not. There are simpler ways to track sales without inconviniencing the customer.