Restaurant Furniture Blog

Does your restaurant furniture provide for maximum throughput of your customers, or do they linger over a long lunch or romantic dinner? Actually, for every formal restaurant there has to be ten informal restaurants and, let’s face it, some restaurants are so informal they work on the principle of the getting the patrons in and out as quickly possible. They often go by the name of ‘family restaurants’ although in reality, they are simply dine-in take-out restaurants.

There is nothing wrong with fast food restaurants. They serve a purpose and they are certainly popular. If you examine some of the more popular and more successful of these restaurants you will get an idea of how they are able to generate so much income.

The food helps - don’t get me wrong, and everything that follows is based on the assumption that your food passes the most important test of all. Children of all ages want it. We all know of at least one restaurant in town that really caters to kids of all ages - from toddler to senior citizen; the moment they walk through the door they become kids again.

So how do these restaurants maximize throughput? The food is served quickly and the seats and tables, whilst comfortable, are not that comfortable. The real success comes from the mix of restaurant furniture used. There are booths, single tables and tables that cater for three or four. The tables are easily cleaned as are the chairs, which are either metal or hard plastic.

The whole idea is not to provide comfort. You are providing for functionality and nothing more. Patrons are not looking for fancy restaurant furniture. In fact, it would look totally out of place in many of these restaurants. If the table holds the food comfortably for everyone and the seating is comfortable, you will have happy customers.

Why mix and match? There are two reasons. The first is to maximize the number of seats without causing too much dissatisfaction. The second reason is to provide restaurant furniture that caters for all tastes. Some prefer booths, particularly those with young toddlers and, of course, teenagers in small groups.

Tables cater to singles and couples whilst the larger tables cater to small groups. By mixing and matching your restaurant furniture you will find that more people will come to dine. They will dine reasonably quickly thus enabling a faster flow of traffic through the restaurant. The more traffic that flows through the more profit there is, and isn’t that why you are in business?