by bigerne

Created on: January 03, 2010

Managing a restaurant is hard enough during the good times.  Because of this hardship during the bad years, managers and owners must be ready for the worst possible crises and avoid them from the start. However, it is nearly impossible to avoid all problems or incidental situations; therefore, a manager must be ready with a plan to counteract the bad and possibly gain something from the situation. Today restaurants face a multitude of new threats from food security terrorists to problems with labor turnover (Cebrzynski, 1995). In an industry that historically has high turnover rates, low profit margins and relies heavily on reputation, it is important that effective plans are devised to avoid destruction when there is little room for mistakes.  Devising a plan is not easy; the first thing that must be done is analysis of common crises; secondly,  implementations of prevention techniques must be prepared thirdly, management must learn how to identify a crisis in the industry, fourth, management must learn to contain a crisis and finally, they need to learn how to resolve a crisis.      

Examples of Mismanaged Crises

 A very notable situation is the lady who sued McDonalds for coffee that was too hot. The lady claim that she consumed coffee that was too hot for drinking and hot enough to burn her body. She also sued her mother and Wal-Mart for other factors relating to the incident. For example, the Wal-Mart was sued along with the manufacturer of the cup holder because the cup malfunctioned with the coffee in it. The case ended up being settled for an undisclosed amount of money under 600,000 dollars (McDonald’s sued, 2001).                                

Another good example would be the case of the finger found in Wendy’s chili. In March 2005, a patron was in the process of consuming a bowl of chili when she spat out a piece of a finger. She became sick to her stomach and the health department shut down the restaurant for a few hours while they impounded the rest of the chili. The restaurant was open the next day, and people had mixed reactions, but the restaurant tried to maintain a “business as usual” approach (Guara, 2005).

Prevention

 These two incidents unusual as they may be are very serious for restaurants. Restaurant owners are at fault if anything bad happens to a customer who comes in the door and gets

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