I'm not sure if it's a spreadsheet or a list or a database or what, but somewhere in an accountant's office there is a big table of all the various tasks and how long each should take to complete.

There is another for how long each drink and food item takes, and a way to see them overlayed with each other in sequence so you can figure out how long it takes to make 100 odd drinks with one person v. with two, etc.

While these calculations are great IF everything is optimal and there are no surprises, the fact is you end up with big orders late in the day. You end up with new people who are less fast/efficient at a task. You end up with broken items, meaning you may not be able to take items out of rotation to clean them AND replace them with a clean one-- resulting in either being down a machine or three in order the last however long before close (which slows down operations) or you leave everything out and run the floor optimally-- but you then have more to clean after close.

Someone might be sick, and if you are already short-staffed to the point your remaining crew can't divide the tasks without compromising any-- well, now you either provide slow service (so someone can be dedicated to clean) or you provide good service, but with more cleaning after things slow down. Or maybe someone is sick AND you have a new person, which makes things really fun.

No one of these things happens daily, but if you are cut and cut your labor while asking for more and more service (and advertising, aka happy hour, evening promos, etc), at some point you reach a point where the only way to keep things running optimally is to have a superb crew of veterans...but if you run them into the ground to the point they leave? Now you lose institutional memory, spend time training new people, gain new veterans, then change up demands and requirements and you start over again.

I know it is not popular with higher-ups and stockholders, but your best operations happen when your crew can work optimally, with functioning equipment, etc. You don't need ten people to close most stores-- but you do need whatever the equation suggests to run the floor PLUS ONE to offer (1) ability to clean appropriately, (2) provide redundancy for emergencies, big orders, etc, (3) other closing tasks (temp logs, pull, organise orders, etc.

In other words, you have to recognise that if you only allow labor to cover the floor, you aren't staffing properly-- you are shorting.

Much of the time managers can figure out how to shift a lot of tasks to mid-day and leave closers with only closing and one or two other time-sensitive "end of day" items, but sometimes they don't schedule that OR they are just below the thresh-hold that would allow them another hire, at which point the "how optimal is your crew" question above comes in. A team of four well organised seasoned veterans can run circles around seven or eight newbies no matter how well organised those newbies are. But-- do you have all those veterans? Are they organised? How many newbies do you have that can do at least two tasks without backup?

So what this boils down to is-- spreadsheets and equations are great, but they don't yet take into account the human factor and the fact that sometimes things go wrong.

Does that mean OP is justified? I have no idea. It could be a store with lots of organisation issues. Or it could be a well organised store that is simply under-resourced and/or the labor schedule is mismatched to the way tasks and customer frequency are spread over the day.

Either way, the stress is real.

I don’t think they were trying to argue or anything. If anything this could be a supportive statement, like “my store does this for us, y’all should have this too.” At worst its a “this is not a corporate problem this is a store problem.”