Asking the kitchen the same question every morning
Items switched off yesterday are not back on today. Somebody has to be asked — and the hard part is what the screen does with the answer.
A dish goes off at seven on a Friday because the shelf is empty. Saturday opens. Is it back?
Nobody knows, and the system certainly does not. The stock did not restock itself, and nothing about the passage of time is evidence. So either somebody is asked, or a guest orders something that is not there — which is the expensive version, because by then there is a paid order and a refund conversation.
Asking is easy; the rules around it are not
Four things have to be true for a morning question to be worth having:
- Once a day, not once a refresh. A kitchen tablet gets reloaded all morning. A question that comes back after every reload is one people learn to dismiss without reading, and then it is worse than nothing.
- Not over the top of a payment. The question has to wait for a quiet moment. Popping it over a half-taken sale costs more than it saves.
- The answer has to stick. "Yes, still out" is a real answer and has to be recorded as one, or tomorrow's question is indistinguishable from today's unanswered one.
- Coming back on is the ordinary act. Switching an item on from this list must go through the same door as switching it on anywhere else, so that everything downstream — the menu, the delivery platforms — hears about it the same way.
Where ours was wrong
The third one is where we had a bug worth describing. The answer "yes, still out" was recorded for every item in one go, and the screen reported how many it had confirmed. That number counted the items it had tried, not the rows it had actually stamped. If the write failed, the till said forty confirmed and had recorded none — and because the stamp is exactly what stops the question being asked again, the list came back the next morning with nothing to explain why.
It also quietly dropped anything past the four-hundredth item rather than saying it could not take that many, which is the same failure wearing a cap. Both are fixed: it writes in one transaction, reports the rows that moved rather than the attempts it made, refuses an oversized list out loud, and says plainly when nothing was saved.
The general version, for anybody running a kitchen off a screen: a daily confirmation is only as good as what happens when the confirmation itself fails. Ask your supplier what the screen says then. "Done" is the wrong answer.