True North — Bay City
What happened
Manager comp concentration
Manager comps are the biggest miss this week — +$268. Comp rate ran 1.5% of sales this week against a 1.5% target. Concentration matters more than the headline number: ~78% of the comp dollars landed on Tue/Wed lunch service — same daypart, same days, three weeks running. That's not a hospitality miss or a kitchen quality issue; that's a staffing miss showing up as guests getting comped to recover ticket time.
Don't train your way out of this with more service polish — the floor is doing fine. Pull the Tue/Wed lunch shifts (linked from the labor page CTA below) and add one server 11am–3pm. Comp dollars typically drop ~70% within two weeks of the staffing fix; re-measure next reporting period.
1 alternative hypothesis
- Manager-discretion comp drift (16%) — Less likely but worth ruling out: if comps are not concentrated on a specific daypart and instead scatter across the week, the cause is manager-discretion comping (a manager developing a habit of comping for small things). The daypart concentration here argues against it.
Crab Cakes
Crab Cakes is the second-largest line miss — +$152 in margin compression. Claw meat invoice cost ran 22% up in 30 days ($9.80/lb → $11.95/lb); the menu price hasn't moved. Gross margin compressed to 65% against a 80% target. This is purely a vendor-cost story — recipe spec is intact.
Two options: raise menu to $21, OR substitute 30% of claw meat with surimi mix (regional comp set runs that mix). Surimi shift needs chef Vladimir's taste call before it ships. If you're holding price, plan on margin staying compressed until the next vendor contract review.
1 alternative hypothesis
- Vendor renegotiation (18%) — If claw meat is a single-source vendor, this is the moment to take competing quotes. Lake Michigan suppliers were 8–11% under your current invoice cost three months ago.
Item-level voids
Item-level voids — +$150 across the week. 0.4% of orders touched a void this week, clustered Mon–Thu evenings on the high-priced entrées (ribeye, salmon, walleye, crab cakes). Pattern's clean — voids spike between 7pm and 9pm, exactly the sauté-station bottleneck window. Customer-side fact-finds (taste, temperature, hair) usually scatter randomly across the night; this is too tight in time and item-mix to be a guest issue.
Pull the ticket sequence for the 7pm-9pm window on the affected nights and check sauté station hand-off times. If tickets sit > 4 minutes between sauté finish and pass, the bottleneck is the station, not the line — re-balance the sauté schedule before the next dinner service.
1 alternative hypothesis
- Item-quality miss on a single protein vendor (18%) — Less likely but worth ruling out: if one of the four entrées is over-represented in the void mix, a vendor-side quality drop on that protein could be the cause (e.g. salmon batch over-fat-marbled, walleye over-iced).
Ground Beef 80/20
Ground beef ran 21.6% over theoretical (+$120). Portion drift — patties landing at ~8oz against a 7oz spec, consistent across all four breakfast and lunch shifts. That's a habit, not a one-shift miss. And the input cost is moving against the line: beef ran 30% up in 30 days ($4.20/lb → $5.46/lb). The recipe-level margin red flag on the Cheeseburger card is where the pricing fix lives.
Scale check at the line plus a portioned scoop, two weeks to verify. If the cheeseburger card also fires on margin compression, fix the price there in parallel — they're two views of the same problem.
1 alternative hypothesis
- Trim / yield drift on bulk grind (21%) — If the vendor switched from 80/20 to a fattier grind, post-cook yield drops and the kitchen pulls more raw weight to hit the same finished patty.
Bacon, applewood
Bacon ran 45.5% over theoretical (+$77). Pattern's clean: AM and PM cooks both running ~1.3× spec, every day of the week. Not a one-shift accident. Spec is 1 strip on the breakfast burrito and 3 strips on the BLT; the floor is doing closer to 1.3 and 3.8.
Two-week fix: pre-weighed bacon stacks at the line (0.6oz × 3 for BLT, single strips for burrito). Re-measure next reporting period — if usage doesn't drop back inside ±10%, escalate to a portioning audit at one of the other locations to rule out a system-wide spec drift, not a single-restaurant habit.
1 alternative hypothesis
- Yield drift on raw bacon (18%) — Cooked-vs-raw yield could be lower than the 1.0 factor in the plate spec if a new vendor's bacon shrinks more during cooking — but no vendor switch in the period rules this out.
Produce waste
Produce waste — +$69 across the week. Waste $ ran 1.9% of produce spend — meaningfully above the typical 4–5% the seg supports. Pattern's not random: about two-thirds of the waste events land on Fridays, on iceberg and romaine. That's a prep call, not a receiving or storage issue. Friday prep is producing more cut lettuce than the salad station consumes through Saturday lunch, and the surplus walks out the back door on Saturday night.
Tighten the lettuce par on Friday morning prep — pull two heads off the prep list and watch Saturday lunch flow. Most weeks one head of romaine wasted a day adds up to ~$60 over the period, so trimming par is the lowest-effort, biggest-leverage move.
1 alternative hypothesis
- Receiving over-counts on iceberg shipments (18%) — Less likely but worth ruling out: if iceberg is being received in 24-count cases but logged as 30-count, theoretical usage looks lower than actual and the surplus reads as 'waste' when it's really a receiving variance.
Cheeseburger
Cheeseburger margin compressed — +$56 this week. Beef cost moved 30% in 30 days ($4.20/lb → $5.46/lb) and the menu price hasn't moved with it. Gross margin is running 77% against a 82% target. The ground-beef variance row downstream is the *operational* view of the same problem; this is the *pricing* view.
Two clean fixes, either restores target margin within one P&L cycle: raise the burger $0.75 to $15.25, OR trim the patty spec from 7oz to 6oz raw. If you only do one this week, do the price — the portion habit takes two weeks to retrain.
1 alternative hypothesis
- Substitute the grind (15%) — Drop from 80/20 to a 73/27 grind for the line and keep menu price flat. Recovers ~$0.40/patty at current volumes but trades against the flavor profile.
The week ahead
- Weekend pattern — Sat–Sun average runs $3482 vs $2569 weekdays in the horizon.
- Local event · Sat, May 9 — A nearby event in the admin calendar lifts Sat, May 9's baseline by ~8%.
- Warm weather · Wed, May 13 — Forecast high of 87°F historically lifts patio + cold-bar mix.