Customer Service Week 2020, Part 3 - Napkins

Three cents. The cost of a napkin. That’s what stands between a business and an exemplary Customer Experience. For Day 3 of Customer Service Week, let’s get in the Way Back Wednesday Time Machine and go back to the 80’s. The hair, the music, the clothes...and the napkins. The what? Read on, my friends...

Decades ago, I worked my way through University hawking sandwiches for a fast food chain. Or, as they say, “food fast”, not “fast food”. I worked in several of these restaurants and while our food was well liked, ranked as “healthy”, and had a very quick made-to-order-within-seconds turnaround, a point of contention almost every single interaction was how many napkins we gave our Customers.  

Yes, you read that correctly, we fought with our Customers over napkins. The company standard was two. One sandwich? Two napkins. Two, three, or four sandwiches? Still two napkins. In case you are wondering, these weren’t the fancy, white-cloth Four Seasons napkins gently unfolded and placed on your laps by a maitre’d. These were your run-of-the-mill, store-branded, thin, throwaway napkins. Way back then, as now, they cost pennies each. I looked up the going price of bulk napkins today, and the range from one to three pennies. One to three. Pennies. That’s all.

We would place their sandwich and two napkins in the to-go bag and hand it to the customer. Of the approximately 20,000 customers I served during my restaurant years, at least 19,874 of them asked for more napkins. They knew that they would want and need more napkins. Which we would hand them. Because the napkins were behind the counter, so that customers couldn’t just take however many they would need. 

C’mon, does anyone really think they can chow down on a footlong meatball sandwich and only use two napkins?!?  

In hindsight, it was ludicrous to watch the game played out between employees and Customers. How far would a customer walk away from the counter before they looked in their to-go bag and asked for more napkins? Is ludicrous the right word? Perhaps sad is a better word? Illuminating?  

Yes, I know that in the restaurant industry, every penny counts. Which is why food is portioned and drinks are measured and to-go boxes are counted meticulously. And why we were only allowed to give out two napkins per customer. However, from a lost opportunity standpoint, the restaurant chain was leading the way! Around twenty years ago, there was even a few comedians who mocked the chain mercilessly over their “two napkin” policy. Did they lose Customers over their Scrooge-like approach? Probably not. Did it detract slightly from the overall Customer Experience? Probably yes. Could they have built in the cost of a few extra napkins with the overall food? I’m not an economist, but it seems easier than calculations around the Living Wage discussion that is ongoing in the United States.

So, bringing our Bill and Ted-ness back to the present, what’s the point of this journey?

Well, it’s quite simple. What are your company’s napkin policies and how can you change them to improve the Customer Experience?

Thanks for reading,

Brandon

Oh, and for what it’s worth, I’ve never had an issue with napkins at any taco stand. They hand them out freely!