#FoodTruckFan: Your Approachability Factor

I had a group of friends over for dinner the other night, and we got on to the topic of ordering pizza. More specifically, The Fear of Ordering Pizza.

We had so many arguments my freshman year of college about who had to order the pizza, and the arguments were so involved that they usually lasted longer than the wait for the pizza once it was finally ordered. But why? Why was ordering pizza so anxiety-producing?

The anxiety grew from a combination of factors: our inexperience with ordering, the social pressure to not screw up the order, but mostly, it came from talking to the order-taker at the pizza place. To this day, I don’t know if I’ve met someone in a bigger hurry, always rushing through a series of questions (What type of crust? What size? Is that all? Is that all?).

As we were reminiscing, one of my friends mentioned that was how she felt ordering at a food truck. She works downtown, but admitted that she’s never eaten from the food trucks because they make her anxious. She can’t figure out where the line is, if they’ll take her credit card, and where she’s supposed to stand while she waits for her food to be ready.

Her comments reminded me of an approachability exercise from one of our earliest posts on FoodTruckr, all about building super-fans (jump to point #2 for the exercise). Look at your truck with fresh (timid) eyes, from the point of view of someone who is completely new to the food truck experience:

• Which is the line for ordering and which is the pick-up line?
• How can I pay for my food?
• Do I need to decide on anything, like fries or a salad? Is that clear before I reach your window?

How approachable is your truck?

You certainly don’t have to cater to the new food truck patrons, but I will tell you this: once we conquered that initial fear of ordering, we sure ate a lot of pizza.

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Image from British Mum

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