10  Productivity

It is not at all uncommon to find some very sophisticated arguments surrounding the concept of productivity – what it is and how it should be measured can get very complicated sometimes. Hotels and food service operations are part of a class of units which share characteristics of having perishable products, a within unit product range and demand which is variable in the very short term.

These characteristics bequeath to the task of achieving and measuring productivity two intractable problems which are:

1  Having to account for very short-term changes in demand.

2  Accounting for the discrepancy between those products and services consumed and those provided, given that many are perishable.

These problems can be most usefully ...

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