Free Five Loaves, Two Fishes and Six Chicken Nuggets: Urinations From Inside the Fast Food Tent by Barry Gibbons

decided that we were a lot more impressed than concerned. It seems we had dined at a restaurant run by the last person on earth who was both honest and uncompromising – and who was prepared to lose unnecessary money in the pursuit of both values. What a surprise – a pleasant one.
    It’s this ‘pleasant surprise’ thing that got me thinking. Most of us would confess to a natural dislike of being surprised, but what we mean, of course, is that we dislike being unpleasantly surprised. That attitude arises because that’s all we ever get. The world is now geared to bland uniformity via the spread of global brands. Add to that the fact that the whole business universe is involved in a master plan to lower our expectations so that we are not unpleasantly surprised every two minutes. If you book a flight, for example, you might see a take-off scheduled at 10.15 a.m. and an arrival at 12.15 p.m. – that’s a flight time of two hours. When you eventually take off, however, the pilot tells you that the flight time will be one hour and fifteen minutes. So, what’s with the ‘missing’ forty-five minutes? It’s easily found: their whole act is so crappola that they need this to cover for routine inefficiencies. In this way, if you plan around their published times, you get no unpleasant surprises. If they do have a tail wind and arrive at the gate at 11.40 p.m. – i.e. ‘early’ – you think you’ve won a minor prize in the Lottery.
    It’s not just airlines: they are all doing it, trust me. Try ringing up the phone company and navigating your way through the hold-menu. Try calling a plumber. Have you ever tried to correspond with a big private or public sector organisation? The whole process is shaped to lower your expectations to a level where you get no unpleasant surprises. Occasionally, if they do something half-right, you are anaesthetised to such a degree that you believe you have beaten the system and are pleasantly surprised.
    Let’s go back to our troubled restaurateur, and see if he’s unknowingly come up with a business weapon we could all use – one that is also efficient, effective and cheap. I think he has. The key is that what he did was not just a pleasant surprise, but that it was also proactive. No only did he surprise us pleasantly – part of the effectiveness was that it came before we were expecting anything – but it also came from right out of the blue and was mighty powerful. So, let’s call it the PPS – the pleasant proactive surprise.
    It doesn’t have to be expensive, and it doesn’t have to be related to something going wrong. One of the most successful franchisees we had in my time with Burger King was Manny Garcia in south Florida. Sure, he had good locations and a reasonably wealthy market – but so did many others. I’m not daft enough to put his overall success just down to a couple of tiny PPSs, but his staff used to go round the restaurants with free coffee fill-ups and mints, and there was enough positive feedback from that alone that convinced me it contributed. Here’s the power of what I am talking about – the PPS is so rare in modern business life, it’s actually exhilarating when you get one. What’s important is that you do tend to go back to a business that gives you such an experience.
    It’s a powerful weapon because nothing surprises us any more . If I told you there are twice as many plastic flamingos in south Florida as real ones, you wouldn’t be at all surprised would you? Amazingly, you would be right not to be.

19. The defence speaks
    I belong to an elite club. Membership consists of ex-Burger King CEOs. At the last count there were only 175,397 of us still alive.
    As Club VP for External Relations, I have a responsibility. The fast-food industry has come under heavy mortar fire from a journalist by the name of Eric Schlosser in his book Fast Food Nation . We need a response.
    In no particular order of priority, the industry stands accused of