I know you're saying this in a jokey way, but I have a resolution for this one too.
The catering companies that run the food kiosks at City will know how exactly how many beers they sell in their individual kiosk. They should look back at the data for the lowest number of pints they've sold (let's say in the past 5 years) both pre-match and at halftime.
Around 90 mins before kick-off, they should have staff constantly pouring pints until they hit the pre-match figure. From about 30 mins in the first half, they should have staff constantly pouring pints until they reach the half time figure.
I do quite a bit of work for displays, so I'm frequently on the concourses 2 hours before kick-off and occasionally during the first half of games. The staff stand about with a finger up their backside when it's quiet, there's no proactivity.
The only other option is to move to bottles rather than pints which would speed it up as well.
Yeah it was jokey, but was brought to the forefront of my mind on a visit to AJ Bell stadium to watch Sales Sharks vs Quins last week.
Was in the nearest end-stand. Arrived quite early, queue for pints/pies was already quite long and they had IIRC 6 staff working in pairs for a bar frontage that could handle more than 6 customers at a time. I think it was the 1st day for some of them (so cut them some slack).
The pairs seemed to be mentor+new staff, and the mentor would deal with the non-drinks part of the order and check it's rung up correctly, whilst new staff poured pints, calculated payment and rung it up. All well and good. And perfect for a quiet time.
I think they had 3 sets of beer pouring equipment (3 or 4 choices IIRC) - hence, presumably, 6 staff.
So, apart from the 'have more staff' arguement, that doesn't really fly, as they'll try and keep costs down.
But they could easily have had 4 bar-servers and 2 drinks pourers if the staff were trained up (Can you switch a pump system to water for training (& cleaning) purposes?).
As per your comment, they should know from past experience/ticket sales how many pints they can shift in a match, so ramping up pre-pouring should be a doddle - a pint can sit quite happily for awhile.
So, dedicated pint pourers needed, whose sole (soul destroying) task is to pour pints constantly, whilst keeping an eye on which beer is being used the most, to pour that more frequently.
But, you need an area to store those pre-poured pints, and that's the issue, I presume, bars have.
The pumps could be on the sides/back of bar, with a table area for storing the poured pints. The table can't be too wide, as the pourer and server need to be able to reach the entire table - so it's not much of an improvement on leaving the pumps at the front, and providing a larger flat area perpendicular to the bar front, for the pint pourers to use. But that probably interferes with staff movement too much?
You should have savings in time, by having a dedicated pourer. But then you have the additional time of the handing over of the pourer's pint to the server and then to the customer, with the addition of an extra stage of the pint's travel, that will lead to having more accidents/spillage - ie there are 2 pint handovers between people, rather than the traditional 1.
I can understand why a normal bar with 10's of drinks choices can't do much on the their current designs. But for a bar with only 2/3/4 I'm sure there must be a better design/process.
And as an aside (if any AJ Bell management staff are reading this), you have a nice pie+pint discount price, it would be useful if the software in the tills could automatically work the price out for the server/punter, so that the staff don't have to mentally work out an order of (say) 3x2 different pints + 2x2 different pies, and select the appropriate different buttons for combinations on the screen. It would be simpler to just tap in the entire order and let the software work out any possible combinations - as per how supermarkets have been doing it for a least a decade on combination multi-buys.
