Have you ever noticed that a restaurant seems to be in a “modified mode” in the final hours of the day?  At the end of the day, there is a lot that goes into closing the store: prepping, cleaning, doing the dishes, counting the drawers and more.  With all of the tasks that need completed every day at Smoothie King, we begin pre-closing approximately four hours before the store closes.  

The first step in pre-closing is pulling the less frequently used spoons and dishers from the front of the store and cleaning them.  At Smoothie King, we use an abundance of dishes every day. For instance, there are at least half a dozen different-sized dishers that are used to scoop the pre-peeled bananas.  For reference, these dishers are essentially ice-cream scoops. We use so many of these because the recipes are so precise in order to blend smoothies to perfection and maintain accurate nutritional information.  However, some of the dishers are rarely used since they are specific to smoothies that are not ordered very often. Also, the difference between some of the sizes is so minute that using the closest one to it does not make a significant difference.  Therefore, rather than saving all of these dishers until the end of the day, we like to be efficient and wash the less-frequently used ones in the pre-close process. The same thought process is applied to pulling dishes from all of the other ingredients as well.

The next step in pre-closing is to wipe down all of the juice bottles that are stored on the ingredients bar and to move them underneath the bar into the cooler.  For the rest of the night, we just go into the cooler to get them whenever we need them. This way, there is one less thing to put away at the end of the night. The only nuance with these is that the juice holders that hold the juices on the ingredients bar are a pain to wash.  They are metal, rectangular boxes with circular cutouts on the top to hold the containers. In order to wash these, you have to wedge your arm inside through the circular holes, and the holders are so big that they don’t really fit in the sink.

Once these things are pulled, it is time to clean.  There are several cleaning tasks: washing all of the dishes that were just pulled, including the awkward juice containers; windexing the windows in front of the bar; wiping down the coolers; and sweeping and mopping.  As you may have assumed, washing dishes is the task that everybody tries to avoid. While it is annoying to be elbow deep in soapy water and sanitizer for a long time, it is a good way to kill a lot of time. Personally, my favorite cleaning task is sweeping and mopping the front of the store.

These are the critical components of our big pre-close movement.  Once these are done, we operate in a modified, adjusted mode for the final few hours until it’s time to complete the final closing efforts for the day.