Harpos Bar and Restaurant - Term Paper Example

?Harpo’s Bar and Grill: An Analysis Harpo’s Bar and Restaurant, located in Columbia, Missouri. Harpo’s Bar and Restaurant in Columbia, Missouri, is abar and grill that has been open since 1971. It is known to be the most popular bar on the University of Missouri Campus. The bar serves food and alcoholic drinks, and is known for the abundance of big-screen televisions which have on sporting events at all times. The food that is served at this bar and grill is food that is typically seen in a bar and grill – hamburgers, chicken sandwiches, salads, pastas, wings, sandwiches, quesadillas, and other kinds of appetizers. The bar is especially popular on “football Saturdays,” which is the Saturdays that the University of Missouri hosts a home football game. The bar serves drink schedules twice a week, as they feature quarter draws of beer on Thursday nights, along with half price wings and $2 shots. The history of the bar and grill is that it was established in 1971 by Dennis and Randy Harper. The two brothers sold the bar, along with the Harpo’s in St. Louis, Missouri and Kansas City, Missouri, in the mid 1990s. Since then, the bar has been owned by Chuck Naylor and Kevin Fitzpatrick, both local businessmen. Although the ownership changed, the atmosphere and the popularity of the place did not, as it has only gotten better over the years. Product The product that is offered by Harpo’s is food and drink. Below is a picture of their menu: The food is all made, fresh, in house. The food is purchased from all local suppliers, and the food arrives every Tuesday. The drinks are all purchased from Seven Seas Beverage, located in Bridgeton, Missouri. Location Harpo’s is located by downtown Columbia. It is an ideal location, as it is close to the University of Missouri campus. It is walking distance for many students. This is important, as many students do not have a car, as this is a campus that is not a commuter campus. This means that most of the students who attend this school actually live in dormitories or apartments that are close by the school. Students also tend to live in fraternity and sorority houses. As parking is an issue on campus, many students walk to campus. Since the clientele for this bar and grill are mainly students, at least during the school year, the location is ideal. Moreover, it is also walking distance from the football stadium. This is also important, as the bar and grill does excellent business during football Saturdays. People can literally walk from the bar to the football stadium and back again. Whenever there is a big game that is won by the home team, the goalpost is torn down and paraded to Harpo’s, and this is a fun ritual that increases interest in the bar and drives people, in droves, to this bar. Human Resources The workforce at Harpo’s is unstable, simply because the bar hires students to run the bar and to wait tables. Since the students have to be 21 years of age, this means that the students who are hired are in the last two years of college, and this means that these students only work one or two years before they graduate and leave for other places. The way that the work is scheduled at this business is that, once a week, the manager produces a schedule for the wait staff, the cooks, and the bar staff. They try to be fair – for instance, working from 4:30 to close is more lucrative than working 9:30 to close, as the waitresses who work this shift get to choose the area that they wait, and the earlier waitresses choose the areas which are most populated, leaving the later waitresses to wait tables in smaller areas. The job characteristics of the cooks are that they had some prior experience in some restaurant being a line cook. The managers need to know how to order food, how to know when to order food and how much food to order, and they have to know how to dispose of the food that is left over. The managers are also responsible for the hiring of the wait staff, the cooking staff and the bar staff. The waitresses are college women, and a few men, and they are basically hired on the basis of their personality and looks and referrals from others. Since the waitresses do not have an overly demanding job, as most of the product that is served is alcohol, they do not necessarily need to have a waitressing background. The bartenders are more professional, and they tend to be individuals who have been there for a long time. In other words, they are not college men and women, but local people from Columbia, Missouri, who are long-term residents. This is one job that tends to not have a high turnover rate because of this, and because the bartenders can make decent money working there, because the bar is so busy every night. The bartenders who are at this bar are those who have worked in bars before, and they have experience. The one thing that can be improved in the area of Human Resources is the hiring process for the waitresses. This is the weak link in the bar, as the cooks and the bartenders tend to come to the position with experience from a prior bar or restaurant. The waitresses are hired more for their looks than their skills, and this is a possible issue. Sometimes that waitresses give poor service to customer – the bar does tend to get busy, and there are times when both food and drinks are being ordered. This is especially an issue on Football Saturdays, as the bar tends to be extremely crowded during these events, and it is difficult for the waitresses to move around. It is also very chaotic during these days, as the patrons tend to be drunk, or getting drunk, so they become belligerent and demanding many times. It is difficult for the waitresses to handle this sometimes if they are not used to this sort of thing. Also, the bar tends to hire mainly women for the wait positions, and mainly men for the bartending positions. It would seem that hiring more men for wait positions would be beneficial, as men might be able to handle the crowds better, and there is less chance for drunken sexual contact from patron to wait staff if there are more men waiting tables. There are teams in this business, but the teams are the wait staff team, the bartending team and the cooking team. They are unofficial teams, however. But the members of the team do help one another out – if a waitress is waiting tables, and is really busy with her orders and cannot get to an order, than another waitress will help out and pick up the slack. This is the same for the bartenders, as they all work together to make sure that the patrons are served in a timely fashion. The cooks all help one another out as well. These are not formal teams, but they are teams, as they are all assigned similar functions and they work together to help one another out in making sure that these functions run smoothly. Supply Chain Management According to Aitken et al. (2003), supply chains should be matched to customer demands, so this is the best supply chain strategy that can be used. In other words, the food and the drink, which is the product that is offered by Harpo’s, must be matched to the customers’ expectations. This would necessarily involve taking a careful inventory of what food is on hand and what food needs to be ordered, and it needs to match the consumption level of the customers in order for the food to be optimally ordered. Furthermore, it is important that the food be served fresh, and not frozen, which means that the perishable items, such as chicken, turkey, dairy products and other meats, need to be ordered every two or three days in quantities that are not too much, otherwise there would be waste, and not too little, in that the restaurant would run out of certain menu items, which would be a huge turnoff for the customers. Therefore, the strategy that is used by the company is to keep track of menu items by how much they are being ordered by the customers, and use a spreadsheet to track trends over time. This way, the restaurant can gauge how popular a certain menu item is, and how much to order every few days of the products which comprise the menu item. For instance, the restaurant uses a spreadsheet to keep track of how often chicken wings are being ordered, and the trends are tracked over time. If the chicken wings become more popular, then the restaurant will order extra chicken wings. If they become decreasingly popular, then less chicken wings are ordered. This strategy is not generally used for the alcohol, as this is a non-perishable item, and, basically, the alcohol is ordered in bulk, and when the restaurant starts to get low on one product, say there is only five bottles left of a certain kind of vodka, this item is ordered again. The vendor selection for the products is that the company tries to work with local producers. This is important, because the food is fresher when it arrives. This goes for both fruits and vegetables, as well as for the meats and dairy products. The restaurant manager is responsible for procurement. He selects the vendors, and he does the purchasing. The vendors are varied, according to who has the best products and the best price, and this is not always the same vendors every time. As for supply chain management, according to Mentzer et al. (2001), supply chain management means the flow of products from the suppliers to the end users. The supply chain is managed according to the principles above- the inventory fluctuates according to demand. The customers expect fresh food, and this is what the supply chain management affords to the customers. E-Commerce is only used in select situations – sometimes the bar orders special liquors from the Internet, if these liquors are not available on the open market through the distribution chains. Also, some of the products which are used in the bar, such as the tables and chair and decorative items, are ordered online. These are the only products which are ordered online. Quality The quality of the food and drinks at Harpo’s is very high, especially when one considers typical bar food. The meat and dairy products are very fresh, and nothing is ever frozen. This means that the chicken, beef and other meat items taste better than restaurant who freeze their meals. Also, everything is made fresh and in house. The salad dressings are made fresh, as opposed to buying them pre-made from the vendor’s trucks. The fried mozzarella sticks are made fresh, by battering up mozzarella and deep-frying them, as opposed to buying frozen mozzarella sticks and frying them up. The fried ravioli is made in-house, and never frozen. The vegetables are also fresh, as they arrive every two or three days, the same as the meats and dairy products. The cooks are very talented, and the recipes are popular. There are some items which are even somewhat unusual for the bar, and the bar considers them to be specialties – for instance, the Foghorn Dip is something that is unique, and very popular because it is something that the patrons really cannot get anywhere else. Because of the fact that these recipes are patron-tested and made with fresh ingredients, the food is very popular, along with the drinks, and is this combination, combined with the fact that Harpo’s is a Columbia, Missouri tradition, is what makes the bar so popular, even after all these years. Summary Harpo’s Bar and Grill is a tradition in Columbia, Missouri, and has been for a number of years. The reason for this is varied – it is close to campus and close to the football stadium, so it is a tradition for alumni to gather there on football Saturdays, it has really popular drink specials, and its food and drinks are second to none. The bar is well-managed, and does not waste much food, because the inventory is properly taken, and is based upon the popularity of all the items of the menu. This allows the bar to order their food fresh, never frozen, without having excess waste that would cut into the profit margins of the bar and restaurant. If there was one area for improvement, it would be the hiring and the training of the wait staff. These college girls often do not have experience waiting tables, so this means that sometimes the patrons get less-than-ideal service. Moreover, they should be trained better to handle the large crowds of people, and the bar is often chaotic, which means that the wait staff needs to know how to handle the chaos a little better. The bartenders, being long-term professionals, are able to handle the crowds better than the wait staff, and the same is true for the cooks. Other than this one recommendation, however, the bar and grill is run excellently, and people are generally very satisfied with the experience of going there. References Aitken, J., Childerhouse, P., & Towill, D. (2003). The impact of product life cycle on supply chain strategy. International Journal of Production Economics, 85(2), 127-140. Harpo’s Web Page. Available at: http://www.harposcomo.com/?p=2857 Mentzer, J. T., DeWitt, W., Keebler, J. S., Min, S., Nix, N. W., Smith, C. D., & Zacharia, Z. G. (2001) Defining supply chain management. Journal of Business Logistics, 22.2, 1-25. Read More