The guys who ran the corperate catering at withdean seem to do a great job! And albion fans i would have thought?It certainly would. Nobody would be able to get out of the station & folk would be falling under trains!
Actually Unc, I'm pretty much in complete agreement with your view of the catering shambles. The club should pay top Dollar for more experienced, efficient catering staff (particularly Managers) to get the queues moving. As I see it, if you pay peanuts - you get Chimps (or worse still, absolutely nobody behind the counters at all). They could do much worse than to get the women who served on the Roach Coaches at Withers. At least they were quality (which, admittedly, was more you can say for the stuff they served).
I agree. Very different to slagging off the team.
Amex Catering reached a shocking unacceptable low yesterday- someone from the club please read.
The service was shockingly slow taking about 2-3 minutes per person. Therefore at the back of the queue if you are lucky it is taking 20-30 minutes to reach the front, maybe longer. Because of this you are LOSING paying customers, revenue for the club and profit is walking away with a dissatsified potential customer.
Because it is now so BAD a lot of people don't even bother anymore. Does the club know that lots of people have decided to give up eating at the ground and are stopping at the burger bar at the station instead ?
I have noticed his queue's are getting much larger each game at the burger bar. I don't know how you get a licence but there is a golden opportunity to print money there. It is LOST money for BHAFC.
The quality of the food was shocking. The Christmas pie was an abomination and was only chosen as the Steak , Chicken and Ham, Balti and even Vegetarian pies had all run out by 2.45 pm.
Also Harvey's had run out and the only choice was Fosters, horrible. The Harvey's stand alone kiosks, normally 3, were nowhere to be seen.
You need to sort this out and FAST. If 2000 people a game do not bother now at an average spend of £ 5 a head , thats £ 10000 a game and nearly a quarter of a million pounds lost revenue each season for the club.
The staffing is, sorry, very poor. It is mainly students and people with NO catering experience or customer service levels or bar experience. You need some older and wiser heads to run the show, maybe a catering manager for each area who has experience and can organise each area to run smoothly and efficiently by directing the staff and prioritising what needs to be prepared ready for drinking and consumption.
The Amex stadium and experience is wonderful but this is a MAJOR dropping of the ball by BHAFC so can someone who is in charge of this aspect get to grips with this problem NOW.
Many thanks.
There is an element of 'complaining about the traffic when you're sitting in your car' here.
The length of the queue is surely nothing to do with the service. You can't stop people just joining a queue if they want to.
2-3 minutes per transcation is pretty average for choosing, sourcing, serving, and paying in a transaction. Problem yesterday was 20,000 people turn up all wanting the same thing at the same time. You cfan't compare this witha normal restaurant service
The guys who ran the corperate catering at withdean seem to do a great job! And albion fans i would have thought?
The length of the queue is surely nothing to do with the service. You can't stop people just joining a queue if they want to.
2-3 minutes per transcation is pretty average for choosing, sourcing, serving, and paying in a transaction. Problem yesterday was 20,000 people turn up all wanting the same thing at the same time. You cfan't compare this witha normal restaurant service
The most shocking thing on this thread is the "students are still on holiday so we had to get agency people in" comment from a catering manager.
The club, Azure and Elliott are all well aware of the early season problem and, on the Albion Roar, Elliott acknowledged the problems with staff turn over and the need to have a regular crew who know the products, the processes and the tills etc.
Surely, based on this, efforts would have been made to ensure a significant number of staff were locally based and, as such, not disappearing off at holiday times of the year. Some reliance on the local student population is inevitable, of course, but there must be awareness that it is vital for a decent proportion of the staff to be consistently available to provide an ongoing decent service. If, say, 75% of the staff are locally based all year round then some infilling could occur, placing the new staff in less critical positions where inexperience is less likely to hinder customer service, throughput and satisfaction.
This should just be basic stuff, shouldn't it?
The most shocking thing on this thread is the "students are still on holiday so we had to get agency people in" comment from a catering manager.
The club, Azure and Elliott are all well aware of the early season problem and, on the Albion Roar, Elliott acknowledged the problems with staff turn over and the need to have a regular crew who know the products, the processes and the tills etc.
Surely, based on this, efforts would have been made to ensure a significant number of staff were locally based and, as such, not disappearing off at holiday times of the year. Some reliance on the local student population is inevitable, of course, but there must be awareness that it is vital for a decent proportion of the staff to be consistently available to provide an ongoing decent service. If, say, 75% of the staff are locally based all year round then some infilling could occur, placing the new staff in less critical positions where inexperience is less likely to hinder customer service, throughput and satisfaction.
This should just be basic stuff, shouldn't it?
The guys who ran the corperate catering at withdean seem to do a great job! And albion fans i would have thought?
The most shocking thing on this thread is the "students are still on holiday so we had to get agency people in" comment from a catering manager.
The club, Azure and Elliott are all well aware of the early season problem and, on the Albion Roar, Elliott acknowledged the problems with staff turn over and the need to have a regular crew who know the products, the processes and the tills etc.
Surely, based on this, efforts would have been made to ensure a significant number of staff were locally based and, as such, not disappearing off at holiday times of the year. Some reliance on the local student population is inevitable, of course, but there must be awareness that it is vital for a decent proportion of the staff to be consistently available to provide an ongoing decent service. If, say, 75% of the staff are locally based all year round then some infilling could occur, placing the new staff in less critical positions where inexperience is less likely to hinder customer service, throughput and satisfaction.
This should just be basic stuff, shouldn't it?
Looking at this objectivley, are the club actually losing money? I seem to remember Azure paid the club quite a bit upfront for this contract, so any slow service will be out of their pockets.
On the staffing issue, it must be pretty difficult to get regular people to do this job. I'd guess it would be a bit on the side for most people, 7 hours on a saturday once every two weeks and nothing in the summer isn't very much. If I was looking for work I'm pretty sure I'd only take that if I was desperate, I'd want something a bit more regular.
From an Azure point of view, there will be a trade off between the extra wages of more staff against the productivity those extra staff can offer. The flip side of what they've got now is 10 extra staff in each kiosk, quicker queues, happier customers but they might make less profit.
All that said, I use the North Kiosk at the west end and it's always very good, the staff know what they're doing and it's usually the same ones. Could be quicker if there were more of them, but I understand why there isn't.
The most shocking thing on this thread is the "students are still on holiday so we had to get agency people in" comment from a catering manager.
The club, Azure and Elliott are all well aware of the early season problem and, on the Albion Roar, Elliott acknowledged the problems with staff turn over and the need to have a regular crew who know the products, the processes and the tills etc.
Surely, based on this, efforts would have been made to ensure a significant number of staff were locally based and, as such, not disappearing off at holiday times of the year. Some reliance on the local student population is inevitable, of course, but there must be awareness that it is vital for a decent proportion of the staff to be consistently available to provide an ongoing decent service. If, say, 75% of the staff are locally based all year round then some infilling could occur, placing the new staff in less critical positions where inexperience is less likely to hinder customer service, throughput and satisfaction.
This should just be basic stuff, shouldn't it?
I know you've had elliott from Azure on your programme and I know you've been involved in sampling the new burgers (which havnt yet seen the light of day I believe) but at this stage the only likely improvements in queues will be delivered by less people using the facilities rather than improving the methods of getting to them. I did email azure in early November but did not receive a reply.