Wasting a basket now asks why
Wasting an unpaid basket on the till was one tap and no record. It asks for a reason now, from the nine the kitchen logbook uses, so the report can count it.
The till has always had a way to throw a basket away. Somebody rings up six dishes, the customer changes their mind, and the operator wastes the lot. Before this week that was one tap: the basket cleared, and nothing anywhere recorded that it had existed. The tester filed it as a missing confirmation. It was more than that. It was food leaving the building with no reason attached, on the one screen where the reason is freshest.
The logbook already had the words
The kitchen keeps a waste log, and the waste report that reads it sorts every entry into a fixed set of reasons: end of day, out of date, spoiled, burnt or remade, dropped or damaged, customer returned, staff meal, training or tasting, and other. Each reason carries a colour, a sentence about what usually causes it, and a flag saying whether it was preventable. The report’s whole value is that the reasons are fixed. A free-text box would give you forty spellings of burnt and nothing to add up.
So the till’s waste sheet uses that list and not a list of its own. Nine reasons, the same keys the report already canonicalises, with the empty-box bucket left off because a person tapping a reason on purpose should not be offered no reason given. The reason is required. Pick one and the basket goes; close the sheet and it stays.
What the operator sees, and what the report sees
From the counter it is a sheet of nine buttons and one extra tap. From the office it is a waste entry that was never there before, filed under a reason the report already knows how to total, and parked baskets and wasted baskets now clear the same payment layer so nothing is left floating over an empty screen. That last part came from a neighbouring row in the same report: parking a basket left the payment screen open over nothing, which is the sort of thing you only notice when you are trying to break it.
Why one list
There is a temptation, when a screen needs a set of options, to write one that fits the screen. It fits for a month. Then the report has two vocabularies, the kitchen’s and the till’s, and somebody spends an afternoon mapping one onto the other. The product has a rule for this: one definition, read by every consumer. The waste reasons live in one module, the report reads them, and now the till reads the same module. When a reason is added or reworded, both screens change together, and the report keeps adding up.