A phone hire, or a fixed plan that doesn't call in sick?

Captured additional orders per month, times average ticket, times (1 minus food-cost percent), minus plan cost. If the result is positive, the plan pays for itself. If it isn't, don't buy the plan. That's the math — no benchmark averages required.

None of these numbers are proprietary. Plug your local wage into the ROI calculator and compare against the plan cost.

Genuine empathy on hard calls. Judgment on ambiguous callers. A face that knows the regulars. Those are real. Some operators keep a phone person specifically for these calls and use AI to absorb the transactional volume that would otherwise burn that person out.

One phone hire cannot cover four peak evenings a week alone. Realistic staffing looks like two part-time hires, plus a backup for callouts, plus training rotations. Multiply hourly wage across that headcount and add payroll tax and turnover, and the annualized cost is meaningfully higher than a single-role writeup suggests. AI phone answering doesn't call in sick and doesn't quit mid-August; the honest comparison compares total cost of coverage, not the hourly rate of a single seat.

A phone hire recognizes the voice of a regular by the third call. They know which caller always asks for the same crust and which one is a repeat catering customer. They can read the emotional temperature of a service-recovery call. Fire It cannot do any of that. Some operators keep a phone person specifically for the calls where empathy or memory matters and use AI to absorb the transactional volume that would otherwise burn that person out. That's not a compromise — it's often the highest-value staffing model.

The ROI calculator asks for additional captured orders, average ticket, and food-cost percent. If you don't have exact captured-order data, run a two-week pilot with a partial-forward at your carrier and use the actual capture count from that pilot. That number is worth more than any industry benchmark — it's your specific shop's conversion, and it's the only input that lets the comparison exit the marketing-slide phase.

The most expensive phone hire is the one who leaves after eight weeks. Recruiting time, onboarding shift wages while they shadow, the manager hours spent training, and the reopened requisition all compound. Turnover-adjusted hourly cost for a hospitality phone role often runs twenty to forty percent above the posted wage once those inputs are included. Fire It's plan cost is fixed regardless of that churn line, which is the underappreciated part of the comparison — the plan doesn't get more expensive because the local labor market got harder in the third quarter.

For shops where the phone person also runs the counter, greets regulars, and pre-bags catering, the seat is not really a phone seat — it's a hospitality seat that happens to answer the phone. Removing it saves nothing because the phone was a fraction of its actual value. In that case, keep the seat, run Fire It as a peak-hour overflow only, and use the transfer path to move any complex or regular-recognition call back to the human. That structure preserves the hospitality value the seat delivers and stops asking it to be a phone-only role during the fifteen minutes of peak when it can't be.