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Everyone is rushing and fretting but good things are well worth the wait
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THE world today is awash with fast food and fast drink. Let’s toast to our health by saving a place for the art of drinking tea slowly (“How Pu’er tea made my mother-in-law a believer, Shanghai Daily, February 7, by Wang Yong).
How true this statement is, in relation to a process that one participates in. Just like proponents of tai chi that many of my classmates (in their 60s and approaching 70) extol, it has to be done slowly, with purposeful breathing and according to the pace required to attain good health and long life. It is certainly different from a situation when one has to wait to be served. It must come fast and be consumed quickly so as not to exceed lunch hour.
Two weeks before the Lunar New Year, the wife took leave to go shopping. It was a Tuesday and too early for the shops, so we adjourned to a coffee shop for chowchou noodles. The wait would be 45 minutes, declared the lady taking the order. As we had been there before, it was no problem for us. We managed to get the only round table which was vacant. As usual, there were customers waiting patiently, some reading their papers, I spotted one watching his iPad’s video show, others were just chatting away.
Stand and queue
Would that waiting time be a standard threshold for these noodle lovers? A moment after we were seated, a family of three came to share the table with us. Upon hearing of the 45 minutes wait, they went for alternatives available at the coffee shop — coffee and toasted bread with margarine and kaya, a jam made from coconut, a common spread in Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore. Within 20 minutes, they were off to their next activity, not forgetting to tell me, “Enjoy your meal!”
Truly on the dot, the noodles arrived and it took us less than 10 minutes to consume the food. My nephew said that the longer the wait, the better the food tastes!
One week before the Lunar New Year, my eldest son, back from Basel, Switzerland, for the holidays was tasked by his mother to queue for bak kwa, a sweet barbecue pork available all year round. He went to the Ion Shopping center branch of this famous brand. He stood for two hours and bought three kilos, the maximum allowed per customer.
He noticed that another customer went back into the queue for the second time. At US$40 per kilo, it was the most expensive in town and yet here there were long queues. It was reported that at the Chinatown main shop the queue could be four hours long. Serving bak kwa to guests is a tradition among Singaporeans and you can munch on it as you talk about family and business.
Natural process of things
In the competitive business environment, keeping customers waiting is certainly forbidden. Today’s newspaper reported a homegrown supermarket installing handheld scanners for customer to scan their items bought.
This service device is frequently available in Europe; and is implemented for the first time in Singapore. Scan2go, costing a few hundred thousand Singapore dollars to install, enables one to reduce the waiting time at the cashier from 20 minutes to five minutes (Sraits Times, February 7).
Another report stated that the largest local retail bank POSB has rolled out new features at its branches with the objective of reducing queuing times. In a similar vein, the airport authority requires all carriers to ensure that travelers do not wait more than 10 minutes, from the time they join the queue, to check in.
In the highly competitive seafood business, one restaurant has installed an Ipad at tables so customers do not have to wait for service staff. They can order using the IT device.
During a consultancy visit to a well-established bakery some years ago, I was pleasantly surprised to find that to hasten the process of serving customers, the factory produced the bread, baked it partially and then deep froze it. At store outlets, the staff needs to reheat the bread with lesser time in the oven, thus reducing customer waiting time. So I remarked: “Half-baked bread?” The general manager smiled and said, “We called it par-baked, par for partially. “
However, not all things can be hastened in order to produce the end result. Take the metamorphosis of the butterfly. It must be allowed to slowly evolve and shed its pupa coat at the end stage to be fully developed; otherwise it will result in a permanently deformed insect. Just like drinking Pu’er cha.
Author Tan Thian Seng is a senior HR consultant based in Singapore.
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