Introduction
Olive Garden is an untailored restaurant chain mainly situated in America and Canada and concentrates entirely on Italian-American meals. They take themselves as a family with worldwide brilliant meals in an ancient set up and practice thereby making them unique in their product offering and their culture. The restaurants started operating in December 1982 in Florida and spread to other regions in America and Canada to hit a current record of 611 restaurant chains. They offer a wide range of meals ranging from pasta, salads, breadsticks, steaks, and other special meals among others.
Since 1982 the restaurants became known to many and the operating stores experienced increased sales a factor that made the restaurants spread further and open more of its stores in America. The popularity has greatly contributed to their expansion through the restaurants have never encountered real success in their undertakings in terms of their targeted sales and profits among others.
Analysis
There is a number of things good with the restaurants that include the wide range of great meals they offer that attracts many of their customers thereby earning them more popularity and fame. This has made them increase their sales, open more stores to serve more customers to avoid congestion and long queues. In their meals, they allow special requests from the customers to make customers feel appreciated and at home. Their meals have been considered to be of high quality, delicious and nutritious with no much fat associated with cholesterol.
Secondly, the services offered at the restaurants are great as waiters and another staff is fast and effective in handling customers thereby there are less complains from the customers’ concerning the staff conduct hence earning the restaurants an excellent image and reputation. The long queues and long waiting hours are encountered in many restaurants, however, this is uncommon in the olive garden. In case, customers cannot finish their meals they pack the food for them to eat at home. The staffs are polite, welcoming, outgoing, and understanding making customers feel relaxed and appreciated to even come some other day.
Thirdly, there are separate tables or rooms for smokers and nonsmokers to ensure that all feel welcomed and appreciated thereby ensuring that none feels neglected or left out in the restaurant policies. In addition, this reduces the conflicts among the customers in cases where a non-smoker and smoker would share the same table and the non-smoker would feel disturbed by the cigar smoke that would lead to the war of words or conflicts making the two customers feel bad about the restaurants.
However, the restaurants suffer from several bad things as well, this includes the high prices charged for their meals and services making them expensive and unaffordable sometimes. The restaurants charge high prices as a sign of high quality and to meet their daily expenses experienced when carrying out their operations. In most cases, the prices are highly inflated such that only a few well-up people can afford them. This makes many of their customers be put away by the high prices as they are unaffordable in many cases.
In addition, there is a number of food poisoning and contamination that has been reported in a number of the olive garden stores. Customers have complained of contracting typhoid after eating at the hotel a factor that has made avoid the stores for the fear of the disease. In other cases, women customers have complained of contracting syphilis and herpes after eating food contaminated with male semen. These cases have earned the olive garden chains a bad name and reputation among its customers due to the fear of contracting the disease.
References
Lee Simon, restaurant dream, London: McGraw-Hill publishers, 2005.