Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets
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Contents
Five loaves, two fishes and six chicken nuggets
Introduction
1. In the beginning
2. It’s only rock ’n’ roll
3. Time for reinvention
4. Only the good die young
5. In defence
6. Crumbug: a call for action
7. You can’t fly solo
8. Even the big cheese must budget
9. The giants’ changing faces
10. No wonder we are living longer
11. Taking to the streets
12. ‘I say, would you mind … ?’
13. First, finish your chicken
14. What a load of haggis
15. Prophecies, prophecies
16. Danger! Genius at work
17. The week that was
18. Go on, surprise me: make my day
19. The defence speaks
20. And now for something completely different
21. Mediocre, sad and cheating: the ascent of man
22. When I’m sixty-four
23. Trattorias, osterias and big quick-serves
24. What I know; what I don’t know
25. Listen ’til I tell you
26. Smile, darn ya, smile
27. A woman’s touch
28. Marrakech express
29. I’m all ears
30. Me? Pose in the nude?
31. Fences of sausage
32. My hit list
33. McD’s and the perfect storm
34. The enemy is inside the gates
35. First impressions
36. Love thine enemy
37. Road of least exposure
38. Everything changes
39. Feeding people? What’s the problem?
40. Next time you post a letter …
41. The rising sun
42. O sole mio
43. The long run
44. I’ll take the high road
45. Oh, won’t you stay?
46. London calling
47. This just in …
48. Nouvelle QSR
49. Big easy lovin’
50. Island in the sun
51. At your service
52. Oops! Sorry …
53. Ever since I could talk …
54. India on 10,000 calories a day
55. I’m thinking …
56. You never can tell
57. Lament for the frying pan
58. Unaccustomed as I am …
59. REM and customer service
More from Infinite Ideas
Copyright notice
Five loaves, two fishes and six chicken nuggets
Urinations from inside the fast food tent
Barry Gibbons
Introduction
My interest in the combination of the words ‘food’ and ‘quick’ started at an early age. And I mean a very early age – probably within a few seconds of me taking my first breath. Let me explain.
I arrived on this planet dangerously ahead of schedule – many weeks premature. I’ve never seen any documentary evidence to confirm it, but apparently I weighed in at less than four pounds. Such was my condition, and the state of medical science at the time (1946), that I was not expected to see the night through. My response was not untypical of many I have given since when faced with one of life’s minefields, namely to utter a rude word and then find something to eat. I slurped heartily during the night and, come the dawn, set off on my life’s goal of putting on another 185 pounds.
My journey has, at times, represented a sort of demented hopscotch. As a student, I had a variety of jobs to help with the funding. I worked in a pie factory, and saw things put in a pastry case that Saddam Hussein would have been reluctant to drop on the Kurds. I drove an ice-cream van, through Liverpool in the industrial north of England, with the external loudspeaker chime set at 78 rpm when it should have been 45 rpm. The locals reminisced that they had neither seen nor heard anything like it since the Keystone Kops. Later, I headed Bernie Inns, the UK’s famous steakhouse chain. In one memorable evening, between 6.00 p.m. and 10.45 p.m., I personally supervised one restaurant serving 385 meals on 100 covers. Most customers enjoyed their meal, but some complained of dizziness.
This particular pilgrim’s progress peaked when I was handed responsibility for every Burger King on planet earth. We were based on the coast in Florida, at the exact point where some god had decreed that Hurricane Andrew would come ashore in 1992, just three years after my arrival. I was an Englishman running an American icon brand – and you can imagine how the American franchisees took to me. To this day, some of them celebrate my memory by sacrificing a goat on my birthday.
I decided to quit ‘big business’ before my fiftieth birthday. It was my choice, and one not wholly celebrated by my bank manager. I set off on a very different journey, splashing about in life’s shallow end. My only goal was to forget one person every day, so that when Alzheimer’s eventually arrived I would be ahead of the game.
Of course, it didn’t work out like that. I ended up giving speeches all over the world to vaguely interested business audiences and writing books that consistently missed the best-seller lists. I invested in businesses that had less going for them than the pie inserts of the previous page.
And then, somehow or other, amidst all that, I agreed to write some essays for a US magazine that is the clearing house for all things to do with the quick-serve restaurant business. This is an industry with which I was obviously familiar, which popularly goes under the name of ‘fast food’ and/or ‘food service’. I repeated my successful formula from previous years, which was to take a brief, study it diligently – and then ignore it all together. Quick-serve food is not just about five global US brands and not just about today. In one form or another, it is worldwide and has been throughout history. If you step back from it, and look at it through a different pair of eyeglasses, you can conjure up some weird thoughts. Did the model for modern franchising (so loved in the quick-serve business) first see the light of day in the way Victorian England handed out chunks of India to loosely agreeing and agreeable princes? When, in history, was the first sandwich made – and of what and by whom? Can it be true that the world quick-serve’s epicentre, Place Jemaa el Fna, in Marrakech, assembles itself from nothing, and then de-assembles itself again, all within the space of a few hours every evening? Is it possible to drive the few miles from the ruins of Pompeii to Sorrento, sit in the town square, and eat a quick-serve that is essentially the same as was being eaten by some poor guy when he was rudely interrupted by his own sudden death?
I am a man of iron discipline. My essays (nearly) always contained the words ‘quick’ and ‘serve’, but they increasingly reflected that particular business in the context of my fascination with history, geography and the issues facing a broader business church. And then something else happened.
The early 2000s saw a geometric increase in the number of people taking pot shots at the food industry in general, and quick-serves in particular. Some of them have been deserved because, on occasion, the industry seems to have a monopoly of daft people, ideas and practices. But it is also, in its widest sense, an enormous positive for the planet. It employs, creates wealth for, and feeds millions (and probably billions if you push the definition a bit) every day. It is hard to think of what the realistic alternative(s) might be.
So, while I was theorising about pre-neolithic flatbreads and business models from Crete, I also sought to provide some balance for the debate. Some famous military leader, whose name escapes me, was once asked why he sought a rather dubious party as an ally. His reply was
succinct: ‘I’d rather have him in my tent pissing out, than outside my tent pissing in.’ These essays are posted from inside the industry tent.
It all resulted in approaching sixty essays, all of which have been rewritten for this book. They have been updated and (in some cases) embarrassingly rewritten as the passage of time occasionally threw doubts on my claim to have a monopoly of forecasting wisdom.
Welcome to this collection of urinations from inside the fast-food tent.
Barry Gibbons
Bedford, England, 2006
1. In the beginning
The idea came at a rather inconvenient time, as most of mine do. Nowadays, I split my time between my UK home, which is near London, and Miami (which is near the United States), and my life is spent advising heads of state, Presidential candidates, and Chinese gangs. I was having a quiet one-on-one with Queen Elizabeth in a KFC in London – she likes food served in a cardboard bucket – and we were discussing my plan to grow Prince Charles’s hair over the tops of his ears to stop him looking like a demented elephant calf, when her cellular phone rang out. It was for me. She was not amused.
It was the editor of a refined US journal, suggesting I write a series of essays on the quick-serve food business – ‘fast food’ to the uninitiated. As this is a subject that has fascinated me for nearly thirty years, I accepted on the spot. I was so happy I knocked over Her Majesty’s bucket.
Serving food for a living is now one of the toughest challenges there is. Success in business is about achieving real distinction and generating widespread awareness in increasingly cluttered and competitive markets. Using that definition, quick-serve restaurants can make the case to be in the most cluttered and competitive market on the planet.
The good news is that the industry suffers less competition from the World Wide Web than most businesses involving a product or service sold to a customer. It’s easy to sell a CD or book on the web, but tough to deliver a turkey sandwich in three minutes. The bad news is that that’s really the end of the good news, because the industry goes about its difficult task with an almost Neanderthal mindset.
This is an industry that loves statistics – usually the wrong ones. During the five years of the First World War, about ten million people died untimely, awful deaths as a direct result of the conflict. About a million books have been written on the subject, and I bow to no one in the depth of my horror at the thought of it all. Immediately after the war, however, more than twice that many people died untimely and awful deaths from a new form of influenza – Spanish or Septic flu. Not as emotive, but in terms of the impact on the human race, profoundly more important. Even so, you’ll have a job finding a book on it. In the same way, the foodservice industry loves statistics on ‘cost of product’ and ‘same-store sales revenues’. I have never put either of those in the bank. The only thing that matters is sustainable cash flow. But that’s like Spanish flu – you never hear about it.
Our SNAFUs are now legendary. Most of the industry is labour-intensive – unsurprisingly given that the middle letter in QSR stands for service – and a thousand gurus in ten thousand business books will tell you the key differentiator in a service business comes from the capability and motivation of the front-line people. So what do we do? We start them on minimum wage. And if we could start them on less, we would: correct? In London, it now costs about £6.00 an hour at a parking meter. If you work in a quick-serve there, you can look out of the window and see an iron pole earning more than you do. We usually train new employees by asking them to breathe on a mirror. If it fogs up, they’re in there straight away, facing the customer, determining their experience. Annual labour turnover on the front line often exceeds 100 percent and sometimes three times that. If we tried, we couldn’t do much more to alienate our troops. And then we leave our brands in their hands.
If sales are lower than planned, what do we do? We cut costs to defend earnings. Of course, if that’s at the restaurant level, the only short-term (variable) costs to cut are those associated directly with the food, labour levels and maintenance – and indirectly with the advertising. So we respond to what is very likely a drop-off in the customer’s perception of our market distinction, and/or their awareness of it, by worsening both of them. So, guess what? Revenues drop further. Now what can we do? Well, this time we’d better really reduce those variable costs …
Despite all this, the foodservice industry still fascinates us. Done correctly, it can still be the nearest thing to a theatre experience in the lives of millions of everyday folk. There are probably more smiles per day in the world’s quick-serves than there are in the world’s family homes. It has a special place in our hearts – after all, we know what goes on. Few people grow up without experiencing a spell working in a quick-serve. Those who do so are the worse for the omission. The pub in London, the noodle stall in Bangkok, the tapas bar in Madrid, and the infinite variety of quick-serves in the United States – they are all part of the host nation’s fabric, which is probably why we tolerate stuff happening in them that would turn us homicidal in a shoe shop.
The Queen is excited by my new project, and asks me to pass on a message. If any of you reading this have an entry-level position open for a trainee, she has at least two names for you to consider. One has big ears.
2. It’s only rock ’n’ roll
The history of the quick-service restaurant industry has an uncanny parallel with that of rock ’n’ roll. Oh, I’m sure some form of quick-serves existed long before Bill Haley glued his kiss-curl into place and launched a hundred thousand cinema seat slashings; I’m sure somebody provided burgers for the Pony Express riders; and an adapted teepee probably dished up buffalo wings (literally) for Native Americans centuries before that. But the fact remains that when Ray Kroc was shaping the genesis of McDonald’s, Elvis was howling his first attempts in the Sun studios for Sam Phillips. That’s alright Mama.
I fell in love with both industries at around the same time. It wasn’t always easy. On our new TV, my father watched as Jerry Lee Lewis sang ‘Great Balls Of Fire’ while playing the piano with his backside. Our TV was situated about three feet away from his collection of Rachmaninov records, which he played lovingly on a radiogram the size of a Land Rover. Thus we began a generation gap that eventually measured 2,309 linear miles in a house of about 1,750 square feet. We eventually narrowed it by me moving out.
I have watched both industries for half a century now. Surprisingly, rock music has some big lessons for quick service. Here are three to ponder.
If it’s long-term success you want, the benefits of constant reinvention are widespread and obvious in rock. Almost the opposite is true in quick service. Take Eric Clapton. Every couple of years, his hairstyle changes, his eyeglasses change, his clothes and imagery change, his musical genre changes, at least slightly, and his musical ‘allies’ and backers change. But it’s still the same brand name, and the same core competence. And it’s still fresh and relevant after forty years in the world’s most cluttered and competitive market. For Clapton, you could substitute McCartney, Paul Simon, Elton John, Madonna, or your own favourite rocker. Compare them with the big names in quick service – where all of them have faltered at one time or other, and had to scramble to try to recover. The lesson is in the adjective ‘constant’ fronting the word ‘change’. Change even if you don’t think it’s needed.
Second lesson? It’s the check and balance for the first one. Change isn’t just about adding. You can get too complicated and confusing. Most rock groups were lean and mean, of necessity, in their early days. But as they stayed around and got richer, they became reliant on studio orchestras, huge concert productions, choruses of backing singers, multimillion-dollar videos, and so on. Winning competitiveness is about being distinct, and it became tough to pin down exactly what these guys were about. Then, when it threatened to get out of hand, realization set in. ‘Unplugged’ saw them re-establish their basic distinction and offering, and many careers were salvaged.
/> In quick service, the lesson is clear. Change is needed, but don’t just grow by adding products, complexity, and confusion. You try something new. Ditch something that’s not working. Can you still perform unplugged? Don’t let the world lose sight of why you were, and still are, good.
Finally, rock teaches this industry that if you can’t perform live, you won’t make it in the long term. If you look at any rock stars who have stayed the distance – some of them for forty-plus years now – they all have one thing in common: they can deliver, live, in concert. Sure, they have complemented this skill with studio technology and theatre, but the long-term winners, bar none, have always been able to deliver the goods on stage in front of an audience. It is very easy to look at the emperors of quick service and come up with ideas that might ‘freshen’ their offering, and draw more new and repeat customers, and heaven knows I am an advocate of trying out new things. But if these ideas are going to go beyond market testing – if they are going to become a part of the daily offering of the brand – you have to be able to deliver them consistently, in all geographies, at all times. They must be delivered on specification in the drive-through on a Monday night, and at 3.30 p.m. on a wet February afternoon. That’s the ‘big test’ to put before the Chairman’s new brainchild, or the new product development team’s proposals. If you want to know how important this point is, buy yourself a ticket to a Rolling Stones concert – not to enjoy yourself, necessarily, but to understand the prime reason why they still fill venues and sell records more than forty years after I first saw them at the Apollo Theatre in Manchester, England. Does your brand deliver, to specification, every aspect of its act when you’re home asleep?
Enough lessons. But I figured out long ago that nobody on the planet has a monopoly of wisdom, and the idea of being able to learn something from ‘Keef’ Richards appeals to some warped part of me. ‘Keef’ really is astonishing. I haven’t seen anything as unwholesome looking since I once pondered the possibilities of eating a McRib.