Queuing Up

Long Queuing Time Pepper lunch restaurant is famous for providing hot, fast and delicious food to customers. It attracts many people to visit, no matter in peak hours or off peak hours. However Pepper Lunch Restaurant have a poor queuing for customers to buy their wanted dishes. According a servey, a customers said that when he buying a meal, he counted from queuing to get a meal on the get dishes area, it takes around 45minutes in peak hour while it takes at least 15 minutes in off peak hours.
Customers have to spend much time when they visit Pepper Lunch Restaurant. The picture at the right hand side showed Pepper lunch restaurant had made a notice for customers which listed about the queuing time is around 20 minutes and apologize for that non-convenience issue. Therefore, the following part is focus on this problem and also suggests some improvements for long queuing time. There are several reasons in causing this problem. One of the reasons is the pepper lunch restaurant in Festival Walk lack a smart, fast and effective payment system.
Only cash is accepted. Octopus card is not accepted as a payment method in the payment system. As all known, nowadays Octopus card is a well-known and very convenience payment method for people to use in buying things and pay transportation fare. Apart from the payment method, Pepper Lunch Restaurant only has one cashier for people to buy their meal. In peak hours, there are at least 20 people in the queue. In off peak hours, there are still 10 people in the queue.

A survey interviewed 10 customers who standing outside the Pepper Lunch restaurant, asking whether they would give up if they saw a long queue outside the restaurant. Not surprisingly, 5 people said yes and they would choose other restaurant. The result showed that long queuing time is a serious problem to pepper lunch restaurant. Base on the above problems, we suggest the following improvements. Pepper Lunch Restaurant should install the Octopus card payment system for people to purchase the meal.
The Octopus card payment system is a convenience system for payment. It is already widely used in buying food in some specific store or restaurant which installed the Octopus card payment system. Therefore, pepper lunch restaurant should install the Octopus card payment system for people to purchase the meal in order to reduce the time during the payment process and also to save time for change. Apart from installing the Octopus card payment system in the cashier counter, pepper lunch restaurant can set an auto-machine near the cashier counter.
This auto-machine is quite like the auto-machine used in cinema. People can order their food by using this auto-machine with their octopus card. It will save much time in queuing. Although setting one more cashier counter, a self-purchase machine and the Octopus card payment system might slightly increase the cost, it can highly reduce the queuing time and attract more people to visit the restaurant. It definitely would be the best long-term plan for its business and helps to increase profits.
Beside, pepper lunch restaurant should set one more cashier in the counter to shorter the waiting time for buying meal. If there are two cashiers in the counter, one cashier could be used for cash while the other could be used for octopus. It would be a great payment system and could shorter the queuing time effectively. The below picture is the orginal layout design of Pepper Lunch Restaurant in Festival Walk The fowlloing picture is our suggested layout design for Pepper Lunch Restaurant.