Don’t blame your bartenders when service is slow until you’ve read this.
I have found some bars exceedingly easy to work, and others to be exercises in frustration and futility. Poor bar design is the chief point of failure responsible for the lousy online reviews where customers complain that the bartenders are slow. Often you’ll see glowing great reviews right alongside horrible reviews because the system works well only up to a certain point when it suddenly chokes and can’t keep up with the bartender – or better yet, the bartender becomes frustrated because the bar’s limits are preventing faster service.
Today I’m going to write about the type of one-man bar that wasn’t made for speed. Believe it or not, some bars are (apparently) designed and built with no interest in ever providing high volume fast service, and they’re built this way on purpose. They’re usually designated as “restaurant support bars” because their primary object is to act as service bars for the wait staff. The fact that the bar has a dozen chairs is beside the point – food is served at the bar, so the bar once again wasn’t designed to act as a real standalone liquor bar, but as an amenity for the restaurant, an alternative to table dining, a place to drink more and maybe socialize with strangers while eating.
I’ll leave it to you to speculate why anyone would predict that the bar would never benefit from large drinking crowds, or need to have a second bartender work along with the first should the occasion ever arise resulting in those crowds.
What I’m talking about here is comparing in a logical sense computer system architecture to bar system architecture. When designing computer systems (all of the various components that fit together to make a working computer) what makes them work well is that there aren’t any weak points known as bottlenecks.
All of the components have to work together at the same speed or the whole thing slows down. The same argument can be made for a car factory. The whole assembly line can be slowed down and held up by even one thing being done at half speed. I’ll describe a bar that’s slow. The bartender can be lightning fast, but the bar is loaded with bottlenecks.
First, the bar only has one POS so two bartenders can’t ring drinks at the same time. If it were a computer it would be a single core processor, and one only able to handle processing a single thread of code at a time at that!
If it were a supermarket it would be two lines with two cashiers but both cashiers limited to sharing one cash register, doubling the manpower but sharing one power tool.
The second bartender is waiting for the POS to be vacated. The same bar only has one ice bin and one soda gun (another shared “power tool”), and what’s worse, the soda gun is maybe located on the side of the bar near the POS, but furthest from the area with the highest volume of traffic.
Does any of this sound familiar? …And maybe the soda gun is right smack dab over the ice bin (so the hose is in the way when trying to scoop ice). Bravo! Now you’re seeing the picture. A bar designed and installed by a non-thinking contractor not properly qualified to build bars that can’t ever develope into high volume bars.
How to Rectify (at least temporarily) Bottlenecks in a Slow Bar to Make it Work More Quickly During Special Events*
Remove bottleneck #1 access to soda: Add 2nd soda guns or bottles on right of bar.
Remove bottleneck #2 access to POS: Add 2nd POS on opposite end of the bar (by installing a switch and plugging the spare POS terminal into the switch so it has network access).
Remove bottleneck #3 access to ice: Add additional (plastic) ice bin on the other side of the bar so that the 2nd bartender can now work entirely independently of first bartender and each can work competitively at top speed.
– OR – (for huge busy events) –
…sell drink tickets or “chips” at a few booths or other designated areas as the only way to buy drinks at any of the bars (tables will still take cards and cash). Bartenders take only tickets or chips. (Tips can be included in price of ticket or chip or however it’ll work most securely if bartenders can’t take chips as tips.)
Advantages to all of above with drink chip or ticket system: Minimum tripled speed of service. Tripled cash flow rate. The POS is now dedicated to table servers order requests. Requests are filled nearly instantly as POS isn’t the focus of service for the bartenders any longer, and table tickets don’t get churned out and lost behind a stream of several bartender generated ticket orders.
If a 2nd POS is added to the bar (using a switch) for cash and cards the rate of sales will about double.
Another bottleneck area of great importance often overlooked is water pouring. Soda guns are notoriously slow when it comes to pouring water. sodas are forced out with the added pressure of expanding CO2 gas, but water just trickles. And water is almost always poured into a big glass, with no mixer to take up any space!
The best way to deal with this problem is to keep multiple pitchers filled with ice water behind the bar, and refill them quickly from the tap.
* Some of these changes can be made to be permanent, but there will be a need to have some structural redesign to the bar to add one or more additional workstations in order for all of the benefits to be realized. But in my experience (depositing over a million dollars worth of drinks annually for years), the investment costs of such
upgrade modifications to the bar’s “engine” more than pay for themselves in increased profits and customer satisfaction and return visits.
Site Author, David Jonathan Curtis: David Jonathan Curtis, a seasoned professional in his fifth decade of bartending and bar management, began his career in Midtown Manhattan, NY, tending and managing bars before diving into Manhattan’s bustling nightlife scene. Over the years, he has mastered high-volume, high-pressure bartending as the lead bartender in both iconic Midtown clubs and Wall Street bars, generating over $1,350,000.00 annually in personal drink sales. He has since extended his expertise to establishments in Georgia and now Tampa, Florida. David’s roles as a Bartending Instructor at the American Bartending School in Tampa, while maintaining a second job bartending, and his years experience of managing bars, and working as a Brand Ambassador along with his extensive professional library of over 1,000 bartending books, highlight his dedication to continually refining his craft. He holds a diploma in Bar Management and is BarSmarts certified by Pernod Ricard.
