I mentioned in this post that suggesting seating capacity was a bottleneck for Sapporo Ramen defeated the unstated assumption of The Goal. This is mostly because, in theory, increasing capacity is always a solution to a bottleneck problem - not enough production capacity, just add more machines, right? Let’s challenge that assumption today and consider the most appropriate way to think about capacity in the context of bottleneck resources.
A subtle lesson in The Goal is how primary bottlenecks can remain hidden when constrained by other factors in the system. The seating capacity at any restaurant is one possible example, the inability to serve enough customers possibly obscuring a kitchen's limitations. So, although adding two hundred tables might enable any restaurant to eliminate lost revenue due to waiting customers, at some point the kitchen won't be able to keep up with the new orders. Sapporo Ramen's bottleneck is never really going to be its capacity until seating is decoupled from production capability. For most traditional restaurants, such a feat is all but impossible.
A restaurant could overcome the kitchen limitation by increasing production efficiency. Sapporo Ramen could add seats anytime it increased the rate of ramen production. This is why I identified ramen production as the bottleneck of the organization, not capacity, because one follows the other. Restaurants can raise revenue in these situations by funneling production output into takeout and delivery services, often far cheaper infrastructure investments than adding seats. The restaurant could then examine the performance and decide if adding seats would lead to even better results. My guess is that one vital consideration here would be profitable side items - for example, most restaurants cannot include alcohol in its takeout orders. If the potential of these items was significant, I suppose the restaurant might conclude that bringing customers onto its premises would result in higher profits (1).
Does this thought apply in general? It only applies if physical space is related to production. A restaurant works within these limits by linking kitchen size to seating capacity. When capacity is increased, daily costs such as rent, wages, and depreciation all rise and therefore a restaurant must take in more revenue than it did at a smaller capacity. The first step here is to make it possible to increase revenue, and that can't happen unless a portion of the increased capacity is in the kitchen. Organizations that do not follow this rule might seem to have an advantage, but usually this is true of its competitors. The thought might not apply in general, but if it doesn't then its likely in the cases when capacity isn't a relevant concern.
Footnotes / leftovers...
1. Restaurant geometry
The layout of most seating areas suggests that cost per customer will rise at an ever-growing rate as capacity increases. Let’s say your current restaurant serves four people, all seated around one table. If you wanted to quadruple the capacity and you took into account factors like allowing walking space between the tables or ensuring room for people to sit and stand, you would definitely need to more than quadruple the space. The only counter is to line up four tables to make one long table seating eight per side - does that sound like any restaurant you know? I suspect geometry is why I see restaurants open new locations much more often that I do see them expand the size of their existing premises - multiple small locations simply cost less per customer when compared to one giant venue.
