From RB:
handing out pagers to people waiting for tables, so they can go to the bar or walk around and the maitre d' doesn’t have to go hunting for them when their table is ready. That's how Lenor Ryan got the idea. "One night, we were at a restaurant and received a pager --- and I decided at that point that we would try it that way."
We being the Pembroke Lakes Mall in Pembroke Pines Florida, where Ms. Ryan is general manager. She figured all those people waiting for hours for their kids to see Santa weren’t buying anything why not give them pagers.
She says, "At first, people question it --- like, 'Oh, you're sending me away. Can't I just stand here and wait?' And then when we explain they can go anywhere inside the mall and we'll page 'em when its their turn to see Santa, then they take it."
Oddly enough. some parents prefer to wait in line to protect their own interests. Ryan says, "Some parents feel that if they're in line, they can see if anybody gets to push in front of them or sneak into the line."
But the longer the line, the longer the wait, the more sense the pager makes.
Ryan adds, "Usually when they come back and it's been a two hour wait or so, then they're very pleased that they weren't confined to standing to a line --- and they tell us that they're happy now that they walked around the mall."
The idea is almost sure to catch on. Almost any shopping mall would rather see shoppers spending their perfectly good money rather than spend their perfectly good time waiting for Santa.
"In the past week, I've had a couple of malls call here just to see how it was going," Ryan says. |
