It’s Not Personal

I love Raising Cain’s. Their chicken fingers melt in your mouth, their sauce is top-notch, and the Texas Toast is a perfect bonus. I give it the edge over Chick-fil-A for best fast-foot chicken joint (though it’s close).

A few days ago I stopped by to get my typical 3 Finger Combo (with a lemonade and extra sauce, natch). It was pretty crowded and noisy, with many folks waiting for food, either to eat there, take with them, or to deliver on behalf of another (thanks to services like DoorDash, GrubHub, and UberEats, one can no longer make assumptions about how busy a restaurant is by the line at the counter, which is another customer experience post worth writing, but I digress). After saying what I wanted, I was asked to provide my name for the order. I did so, carefully pronouncing the short u in Jud which I’m regularly doing (it’s not a reference to the 2nd greatest Beatles song of all time, instead it’s pronounced like the country singing mother-daughter duet from the 90s, though only spelled with one d). I think they heard it right, but I couldn’t be sure.

While waiting for my food, I reflected a bit on this experience. I get the objective: make the experience more personal, so that when my order is ready I’m called by name and I thus feel like it was specially prepared. But that approach is flawed, because it fails to work backwards from actual customer desires. I suspect I’m not alone in that I don’t want a “personalized experience” at Raising Cain’s like I do at my job; I want to get the delicious chicken that I ordered quickly and accurately. An order number not only suffices, it does the job better than a name, for numerous reasons:

• A number guarantees uniqueness in a way names do not, decreasing likelihood of an order mix-up.
• Numbers are more easily distinguishable audibly compared to names. My name is often misheard, and it’s not nearly as tricky as many others.
• Gathering a name requires an extra step in the ordering process, slowing it down. A number can simply be assigned.

These benefits have analogs in computer science, for example the advantages of searching a database using a unique identifier vs free text fields. Which someday when I need to explain the latter to someone who’s less familiar with the technology, I might just use the former as a metaphor: the act of ordering is adding a row to a data table of “customers waiting for orders”, and the person calling out the order once it’s ready is querying that table. A good database design seeks to make such queries unique and performant.

Further, the model of indicating a parking space number when getting curbside delivery is remarkably similar to hash-based lookups. Hmm, I probably need to turn this into a larger talk someday.

But in the meantime, when I’m asked for my name at a restaurant checkout counter? Call me “three one four” thank you very much.