Hello fellow Square members! Wondering if anyone has figured out a way to associate a variation to a modifier default?  For Example: Coffee   Variations: Small, Medium, Large   Modifier: Flavor pumps: One, Two, Three   If customer selects: Small -> Pump: One (Selected by default) Medium -> Pump: Two (Selected by default) Large -> Pump: Three (Selected by default) Customer can override the pump selection, but we want the default to change based on the variation that was selected. Is this capable today or does someone have a workaround? @JTPets - wondering if you know of a solution? ... View more

Someone said to me, you have a tough job, restaurants are tough.  And it reminded me that so many of you are out there everyday slinging hash.   They expected an answer about food costs, or labor, or finding staff, but none of those things are actually hard on their own.   Making a sandwich is not hard. Greeting a guest is not hard. Counting a drawer is not hard. Every individual task in a restaurant, taken alone, is manageable by anyone with thirty minutes of training.   The hard part is doing twenty of them at the same time. And then the twenty-first walks in the door.   Anyone who has worked a shift knows this. The never ending to do list.  There is no moment in service where the list is empty. The job is not getting to the end of the list. The job is keeping the list moving while the list keeps getting longer.   Talk to anyone who has worked outside F&B and tried to explain this and they look at you like you got a horn coming out your forehead and are exaggerating. They have never been in a job where chicken portions, a late prep cook, a delivery surge, a credit card decline, and a hood cleaning deadline are all the same problem at the same moment.   A seller walking the floor at 7:15pm on a Friday is pulling signals from five different systems and making a judgment call no single system could make. They are not executing a dashboard. They are holding the whole operation in working memory and triaging.   That is what makes F&B different from almost every other industry. The compounding is the complexity. Nothing alone, everything at once.   Curious whether other sellers feel this. Does F&B work like any other industry you have been in? Or is the compounding the thing that makes this work specifically harder to explain to people who have not done it?  What is your batch of easy tasks that is hard?       https://tableandledger.com/blog/why-restaurants-are-hard/ ... View more

Curious how restaurant and bar owners here are handling customer referrals. A few things I keep hearing from F&B owners I talk to: Most are doing it manually (discount codes, handwritten cards, "tell them I sent you") Nobody's tracking who referred whom, so rewards are inconsistent When they try third-party apps, most are built for retail or salons, not restaurants For those of you running anything referral-related: Are you tracking it, and if so, how? What reward works best in your experience — free appetizer, gift card, % off next visit? Has anyone tried tying it to loyalty points through Square Loyalty? I've been working on this problem specifically for Square merchants (I built a tool called ViralRef), and I'm trying to learn what actually moves the needle for restaurants vs. what we've seen work for salons. Happy to share notes with anyone who's experimenting. — Alejandro, Miami ... View more