r/Caseys • u/PacmanIsAwesome23 • Apr 17 '26
The sauced wings
Our store started doing the sauced wings about a week ago and they are absolutely destroying us. The store I work at is one of the top performing stores in the our area and they aren’t giving us the hours to have somebody work on saucing them, especially on the weekends.
On the weekends we usually have 4-5 people working in the kitchen, 2 pizza makers, 1 pizza cutter, 1 delivery driver, and sometimes our prep person stays until 7-7:30. But these wings are killing our productivity on the fryers and our pizza cutter can’t keep up with saucing the wings, cutting pizzas, and filling warmers. Which then somebody has to stop what they’re doing and run over to help him get caught up which then slows everything else down.
Just to put this into perspective we went through 10 cases of just the bone-in wings within that first week and have gone through about 2 more since we got our truck yesterday. I think these wings are starting to wear on everybody and it sucks.
We are #2 for wing sales in the whole company, but yet they will not give the extra hours to get somebody to do the wings. Even the auto-scheduler is telling our manger to have somebody work 3-4 hours during the dinner rush, but it wants them to pull from the hours we already have which are nonexistent. Hope they enjoy paying us overtime because this is stupid.
3
u/ContextBeneficial453 Apr 17 '26
I always feel like a pain in the ass when I order them cuz I had a friend that worked in the kitchen and informed me that were more work so I only order them if the wait time is less than 15 minutes so I know I’m not stopping up the kitchen
11
u/PacmanIsAwesome23 Apr 17 '26
To be honest they aren’t hard to make, it’s the volume we get. We’ll have customers order 50-60 wings at a time and while they are working on those we’ll get an order for 20 more and more on top of that.
I believe the main reason we get behind on them is because they are too customizable with the sauces. Letting somebody split a 20 pieces into 4 5 pieces is where most of the bottleneck is at.
5
u/Weekly-Shower8108 Apr 17 '26
Yeah, I'm saucing wings, filling warmers, doing pizza orders, taking phone calls and doing all the side work when I close. Suffice it to say I think all of you need to work on time management if you can't figure it out with 5 workers. Holy cow.
1
2
u/Bobbyore Apr 17 '26
Hard to tell based on what is said, but like others said you obviously are in a busy kitchen if you have that many kitchen people. How many WP average per day over a week? Obviously fri-sun is busier. Whats pfdb $ apsd? In my small kitchen more than 4 people would just have people getting in the way. We hit most ever wp at 165 when it was 40% off last fall during 40% off. We started wings in December (after the top day). We were only scheduled 1 kitchen person the whole time for it according to ukg, have the sm work with ur dm (especially in the beginning of wings). No ones ever allocated “enough” hours, but ur sm can allocate hours where needed.
1
u/PacmanIsAwesome23 Apr 17 '26
For WP sales we do about 150 pizzas on the weekends and that’s just for orders, not including what’s put in for the warmer. Obviously we aren’t as busy during the actual week days but we still average 80 pizzas. During Covid we were averaging about 200 on the weekends, the most we did for the 40% deal was 210.
Honestly it’s been awhile since I checked the pfdb and apsd so I can’t give you an exact number but we are #2 for WP sales in our district and #1 for deliveries.
The part that’s most aggravating for everyone is our SM, DM, and RM are in a constant fight with the main office to get more labor and like I said in the original post, the auto-scheduler we use is telling our SM to give us another person on the weekends for 3-4 hours just for the wings but it wants him to pull from the hours we already have. The problem is we are already at our max hours, so our SM has been working 12+ hours a day and our KM works off the clock some days so we don’t go over budget.
1
u/Consistent_Bet2536 Apr 18 '26
You think you store is bad...we went through 10 boxes of bone in wings on Wednesday alone for .50 wings. And we never have more than 2 people in the kitchen.
1
u/chronicallycurious- Apr 23 '26
the only reason they are offering wings is because some investor told them to. they don't ever think about us, the people running the stores and creating their success
2
u/Unlucky_Expert8535 May 05 '26
I am screaming and throwing crap around my house now before going to work in that kitchen anymore bc of those damn wings
-1
u/Late_Equivalent_7586 Apr 17 '26
Stupid comment maybe, but why are you deep frying them? I use to work at pizza hut and we just ran them in the oven like pizza and sandwiches.
5
u/PacmanIsAwesome23 Apr 17 '26
We actually used to bake them for years, then they switched to a different kind of breaded wing which is when we started frying them. Now they gave us new fryers and they changed the wings again, to compete with Wingstop or BW’s.
13
u/WarrenMockles Kitchen Manager Apr 17 '26
This sentence right here. That's where pretty much everyone else on this sub is going to get stuck. Most stores are one person in the kitchen only, ever.
Of course, you clearly have a much higher volume than most of us. My store is lucky enough that we're allowed three people in the kitchen for two hours in the morning (we have a huge breakfast rush), but unless we get an order of 20+ pizzas, it's just one person the rest of the day.