An Oregon restaurant is replacing wait staff with wireless touch screen ordering devices. I've been thinking about this for some time now. Doesn't seem like all the pieces are in place yet. But what about this idea: very soon (in the next 2 years) you could just let people order through their (wifi, bluetooth, GRPS, CDMA, whatever...) mobile devices. You could even identify repeat customers this way. Walk into a restaurant and todays menu is immediately sent to your handheld. Check what you want and send it back. Plus, you could store user preferences on the restaurant server, like: "I always want my hamburger medium rare."

I guess this is one small piece of my larger feeling that digital identity will be tied to our mobile communications devices.
- jim 2-09-2004 7:50 pm

why not make the patrons start to do the cooking as well.

will this actually lower costs, or is it only supposed to improve service? i guess once your bank account is linked up it will further deemphasize the use of currency.
- dave 2-09-2004 8:06 pm


It would dramatically reduce costs. At the price of jobs, of course. And assuming it worked well and didn't drive business away.

Especially for a struggling establishment. Maybe you can cover your rent through a down turn, but you can't afford to pay the staff to sit there while no one is coming in (don't ask how I know this.)

I guess it would be an improvement on bad service (which is fairly common,) but an obvious step down from good service. I don't see this in the future for 3 and 4 star places.

I know you are joking with the Seinfeld link, but to take it seriously, I don't think this would be possible due to health code reasons. Salad bars are one thing, but I don't think there is room in the law for customers to handle uncooked food.
- jim 2-09-2004 8:16 pm


An interim step would be to give the wait staff the computers. They do this at Republic, for instance. This speeds up service, for sure, since the orders go immediately to the kitchen, but much more importantly it allows the management to track what is happening on the floor. With the paper system it is a lot of work to figure out at the end of every night how many Sea Bass you served. But if the wait staff is entering everything directly into the computer system (wirelessly, right from the floor) then you know *everything* that is happening in terms of inventory. Very very nice.

- jim 2-09-2004 8:20 pm





add a comment to this page:

Your post will be captioned "posted by anonymous,"
or you may enter a guest username below:


Line breaks work. HTML tags will be stripped.