I spent the weekend traveling with a middle school/high school combination robotics team to their finals competition – riding overnight in a coach bus from Denver, CO to Fort Smith, AR. While I was there in the capacity of parent chaperone and marketing team coach, I couldn’t help but wear my retail hat due to three contrasting experiences that we had while trying to feed 30 people, 22 of which had the carefree, insatiable appetites of teens.

First up, a local cake shop. Our team was one of six traveling to Fort Smith from Colorado, and the Colorado organizing body had asked our team, as one of the largest to go, if we could help organize a Colorado group dinner after the competition was over. Our team organizer, Tammi, needed to order cakes for the event, but ordering was complicated by the fact that we had no idea how many people would actually make it – it took us, on our bus, over two hours to just get out of Denver metro, thanks to a large snowstorm and sub-zero temperatures. This same storm happened to be barreling down on Fort Smith, once it got done sending ice across Kansas and Oklahoma. As I sit here writing this article, one Colorado team, St. Mary’s Academy, has one member and one parent on site. The rest were on a flight into Fort Smith that got cancelled. The members of the Colorado organizing body, Rocky Mountain BEST, aren’t going to make it either. And surely there is more to come.

So how much cake do you order for a group that was supposed to be 120 people, and may yet end up being 32? The cake shop could be sticklers about it – you order your cake, you take your chances. But instead, the lady behind the counter gave us her cell phone number and said that we could text her as late as the morning we needed the cake with a final count of people, and she would size – and charge – the cake accordingly.

Great service, and doing right by the customer over making what was a large sale, but might end up smaller.

Second experience: a franchised sandwich shop. They serve breakfast too, so they happened to be open early. We notified them around 9am of a large order of sandwiches that we wanted to pick up at around 11:45am. The shop happily took our order and assured us everything would be ready. We showed up at 11:45am, and they hadn’t even started our order. In fact, they informed us that they wouldn’t be able to complete the order because they had not made enough bread. The person who took the order? Who assured us everything would be ready? Nowhere to be found. He hadn’t let anyone else know that we were coming either, so the order lived – and died – with him.

So we went down the street to another franchised quick serve restaurant (QSR) for our third experience. At noon, the height of lunch hour, we asked if we could order what turned out to be almost $200 of food. There was no manager on duty. The girl behind the counter had a distinct deer in the headlights look. One of the line workers in the back came up, asked what was going on, asked what we wanted to order, went back and took a look at her stocks, and told us that it might take 20 minutes or so, but if we wanted to wait, they could do it for us. We waited. They got the sale.

Here’s my point. Sure, experience 1 and 3 were good experiences in part because the employees taking care of us felt empowered to do so. And that’s an important part of making store operations successful. In the case of the cake shop, I suspect that the woman who gave us her number is either the owner or heavily involved in the business in some way. But that was not the case at the QSR. There was no one there who had “manager ” on their shirt. But that didn’t stop the employees there from acting quickly to secure a sale that probably doubled their lunch-hour total.

That’s all great, and honestly, that’s the hard part of store retailing – getting the right balance of empowered employee vs. single brand face to the customer across multiple stores or channels. But what really struck me about experience #2 was that the issue involved was simple execution. This sandwich franchise advertises heavily about their catering capabilities. When we called in the morning, we verified that we had reached them in enough time to make our order in time for our needs. And the guy on the phone confirmed it, no problem. And then he went home or went on break or who knows, and our order died. At a company that should have the processes in place to make sure that no order of a size to feed 30 people lunch would ever die. I can’t believe there is no process for catering-size orders in some Operations Manual sitting on a dusty shelf somewhere in that store. I have to imagine that, assuming the manager and/or franchise owner ever hears about the order that died today, they will be very upset about that loss of business.

So why is simple execution so hard? If the process is designed well, it should be intuitive. If it’s taught well as part of employee training, it should never be forgotten. And yet my story is one of thousands, if not millions, of bad store experiences that I have to assume happen every day. For no good reason whatsoever. It’s great to talk about omni-channel. It’s fun to get excited over how consumer technology will change retail. But retail itself will never change until this problem – the problem of simple execution – can be solved.