English homework.

This scenario will be the basis for the assignments for the rest of the semester. You may feel free to modify components of the basic case study to make it your own.

You are the owner of Bits and Bytes, a fast-growing chain of restaurant Internet shops with 30 locations. You started your career as a teenager, working at Burger King, and after a couple of years at a local community college and with an inheritance from Uncle Pete (who sadly met an unfortunate end involving a pickup truck, a Frisbee, and a trip to South Carolina) you started your own food truck. Your reputation and your business grew quickly, so you had a difficult choice, drop out of school and continue your business, or stay in school. You chose the former. Your business has been a success: your food truck grew into a stand-alone restaurant and within 8 years you had added nine locations. Now you are up to 30 in several cities. Unfortunately, while you understand food, you are forced to rely on the expertise of others for the financial, marketing, human resource, and communications aspects of your business. You understand how important WiFi is to attracting customers, but when it comes to technology, you barely have had time to learn how to use your smart phone.

You have a reputation for great finger food: tapas and hamburger sliders and dumplings. You are a competitor of other fast-casual dining chains like Chipotle and Pei Wei, but you want your customers to linger; the longer they do the more likely they are to reorder from your menu. You (as a student) should brainstorm your own additions to the menu, think about your locations, clientele, and your employees. Think a little too about how you perform quality control and maintain standards across your restaurants. You may change the name of your restaurant if you like.

Your chain has been experiencing a number of growing pains listed below:

1) Recently, a food critic came to town and found a couple of problems. For one, your “finger” food is loaded with the number of calories more appropriate for entrée portions. This has raised a red flag for health advocates, and one of your items recently made a top 10 list of unhealthy casual dining foods. In addition, the food critic noted that some of your offerings were really good, but others not so much. The quality, she found was uneven, not only in individual restaurants but across the restaurants that she visited.

2) An advocacy group determined that some of your suppliers for your meat and poultry had health violations. And it is alleged that some of your 100% pure beef might have traces of other kinds of animal meat mixed in. It’s time for you to do damage control. This news has been reported in several newspapers and is making the rounds of the Internet. Activists are catching on fast. In fact, there is a new site called morethanabytesucks.com

3) Because of the improving economy, you’re having trouble attracting quality employees, dedicated to doing a good job. Of course many of them are Millennials, and you are not quite sure how to best motivate them and keep them on your employee roster, rather than have them jump ship to Chipotle or Pei Wei. In addition, training has been a problem—Millennials, it seems, would much rather text you when they can’t come to work than call in, and they have very short attention spans. They don’t like doing some of the more tedious chores at your restaurants.

4) You are not quite sure how to take advantage of social media to advertise your food and reach out to customers. In fact, there are many uses of social media that you just don’t have the knowledge of how to harness. You are curious about what you can do with social media.

5) Up until now, Bits and Bytes restaurants have had little uniformity in terms of décor. You have furnished each location with furniture found at flea markets or salvaged from friends’ garages. But with 30 restaurants and growing, it’s time that your restaurants all were redone in the same style.

6) You recently received this irate email from a customer:

Dear Owner of Bits and Bytes,

I recently visited your new location in Annapolis, MD. I live in Frederick and I eat at your restaurants a lot. I like the free Internet, and your food is good too. I like the bacon wrapped beef bites, they are killer.

Well in Annapolis it took me forever to get waited on. There was a shift change and it seemed like every employee was in training, and the manager was having to explain everything, and meanwhile, I’m like, just standing there waiting for my beef bites. Then the cashier took my order but got a text in the middle of giving me change and gave me change for a 10 not a 20. I had to argue with her and she was nice about it, but really.

It’s kind of like Hilda Greenspin wrote in the Washington Post wrote because the beef bites didn’t really taste like the ones at the Frederick place where I go. I think one of my beef bites had chicken in it instead. This is unacceptable.

I hope you folks can get your act together because I really like the Internet and the food in Frederick. Can you send me a coupon or something, because I was really inconvenienced when I visited your store on January 12, 2015.

Thank you,

Alvin Vincenzo (you can call me VinVin).