The worst branch

The manual has one standard in it. A chain with eleven branches has eleven standards, and nobody at head office could tell you what most of them are.

The mystery shop is what hides this, because a mystery shop reports an average. Eight out of ten across the estate reads as a business in reasonable shape. Inside that eight sit two branches at nine and a half, eight somewhere in the middle, and one at four. The one at four is the only branch some customers have ever been to.

Nobody averages a restaurant. A family drives forty minutes across Dammam on a Friday night, waits for a table that was promised, gets food that is cold and a manager who does not come over. They now hold a view of the brand, and the view is that branch. They are not going to visit the flagship in Riyadh to have it corrected, and when a cousin asks whether the place is any good, the answer travels further in one evening than the chain's media travels all year.

Then watch where the money goes. The new fit-out, the lighting, the photographer, the menu redesign, all of it goes to the flagship. Not because the flagship needs it. Because that is the branch the owners eat in, the one the photographs are taken in, the one a visiting partner gets driven to, and the one the original money is sitting in, so spending more there feels like protecting something rather than starting something.

The branch at four has not had a senior visit in a year. It appears in the reporting only inside an average that it is dragging down and being sheltered by at the same time.

So a standard is not a level. It is the distance between the best branch and the worst one, and the money keeps going to the end of that distance where nothing is broken.