“Beware of this haunted shop I heard there was a kid who once entered this shop and never came out. His poor mother lives in misery because of her loss” said Cousin Noah. I still remember that day while my cousin and I were walking passing by this shop located in Arad Town. It was before 20 years but I remember it like yesterday, this shop was called the cursed shop, or the haunted shop. Furthermore the title (cursed shop) came because whenever a restaurant opens in this same shop after a while the business shuts down. By time people started believing that this shop was really cursed, it’s funny how some people are naïve.
I kept in mind this shop and the different restaurants that opened there; I said to myself there must be a reason behind this. Further investigation in this case I found out the reason was simple; the restaurants did not have good forecasts for the demands of the customers. A restaurant would open to operate and they would order for example a large amount of Kebab given it’s a restaurant serving fresh food they would have many Kebab left unfortunately some were already grilled and been ready to serve, this is just one example. Of course the forecasting was not the only reason, given the place of the restaurant, prices, and demand of customers played a role.
I believe that this restaurant could have avoided the risk by using the forecast starting from Qualitative method (using surveys or even second hand information.)Also using the Quantitative methods to forecast the demand and base the price on the forecasts.
Friday (11th may) class was an eye opening class, I always wanted to know how restaurants were able to survive and know exactly how much portion of meat, salads , fish , or any type of food to prepare each day. From the class exercise I leaned that there are different types of forecasts that addresses different categorize like (Economic, Technological and Demand forecasts.)Furthermore each method is suitable for a different case or scenario. There are two approaches to this matter the Qualitative including ( Delphi method , consumer market survey , sales force composite) , and the Quantitative method including ( Naïve approach , moving averages , exponential smoothing , trend projection , linear regression. )Moreover the manager has to know what type of forecast to use because each approach will give an answer however only one answer is accurate and reflects reality.
CLICKER TIME:
Do you believe that Forecasting is vital for any restaurant?
What do you think is the best Quantitative method to use for the restaurant?
More on restaurants failure click here:
http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Courses/Ec1F07/restaurantsfail.pdf