IBM's leasing their cafeteria space out to a vendor, and that vendor is making intelligent decisions with respect to costs and benefits--there's a largely captive audience, so revenues are going to be pretty constant no matter what level of quality is provided. The only place they have any ability to control their margins is in their costs of supplies and staffing. So you get crap food and high staff turnover.
In hospitals, cafeteria costs are largely subsidized by the insurance industry, so there's lots of room to provide higher quality without seeing your margins decrease. Also, there are many more visiting customers as a percentage of your total volume, and those customers will absolutely go elsewhere if your food sucks.
Informed health care professionals demanding nutritious food--and food is only nutritious if the patient will fricking eat it--also provide a more compelling impetus for quality than a bunch of engineers who will, largely, eat what's put in front of them because they're just there to fuel up so they can get back to work.
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Date: 2007-01-11 07:10 pm (UTC)IBM's leasing their cafeteria space out to a vendor, and that vendor is making intelligent decisions with respect to costs and benefits--there's a largely captive audience, so revenues are going to be pretty constant no matter what level of quality is provided. The only place they have any ability to control their margins is in their costs of supplies and staffing. So you get crap food and high staff turnover.
In hospitals, cafeteria costs are largely subsidized by the insurance industry, so there's lots of room to provide higher quality without seeing your margins decrease. Also, there are many more visiting customers as a percentage of your total volume, and those customers will absolutely go elsewhere if your food sucks.
Informed health care professionals demanding nutritious food--and food is only nutritious if the patient will fricking eat it--also provide a more compelling impetus for quality than a bunch of engineers who will, largely, eat what's put in front of them because they're just there to fuel up so they can get back to work.