5 ms·

Find and solve a pain point in the industry you currently work in. So, in food service, what can you make more efficient, less expensive, or less of a hassle? H

by KGIII 9y ago

Find and solve a pain point in the industry you currently work in. So, in food service, what can you make more efficient, less expensive, or less of a hassle? How can you reduce/remove pain in the industry you work in? When you figure that out, you can work in selling the idea.

jcun4128 9y ago
Maybe I'm not an entrpreneur if I don't actively think of that place that way. I mean I don't know the logistics of the supply of restaurants. Closest thing would be POS/menus for cooking those look realtively old or maybe it's one of those "does its job no need to fix". Haha the restaurant industry for me is like purgatory haha I look forward to the day that I work as a developer full time. Poverty is my never ending nightmare but I live in opportunity up to me to save myself haha.
- KGIII 9y ago
  Just an idea, why have a POS system at all? Why have a waitstaff that take orders? Why not just give the orders to the cooks and eliminate mistakes made by servers? What about in-kitchen optimizations? What about reducing spoilage? The possible places to improve are limited mostly by your imagination. What complaints do the bossss have? What do the workers complain about most? Those are rhetorical questions, I don't know enough about the industry to help. The goal is to start with something, it hasn't even got to sell and make a profit. The goal is to learn and improve, to learn new thinking, to see where changes can be made.
  - jcun4128 9y ago
    Yeah I mean automation is expected to happen however the entire "redesign" of restaurants and the dexterity of human slave hands. I'm glad that hopefully I have a way out of this industry that will ideally be fully automated. I do find comfort in knowing that I could build the scheduling system that they use. Granted not at scale (yet). Any script kiddie I imagine like me could put something together. I don't know, I'm not looking into the restaurant industry" as something to work on passion drives things and the food industry is not for me. Also regarding orders people may ask for some random thing that isn't programmed an "exception". Anyway thanks for responding to my needlessly long initial post, I will actually edit it, (nope I can't anymore) ahh my social interactions are usually a cringe moment due to my own social ineptitude. I'm impatient is all, takes time, work, gotta earn it. Edit: I should expand (human slave hands), I can't judge other people(choices in work occupation/not a choice), I'm laughing at myself/think of myself, well... performing a menial task. But someday if I work hard I will get out. Look at that, two sentences. Grateful to have a chance.
  - pjc50 9y ago
    The cooks are in the back and the waitstaff are in the front, with different specialised skills. Oh and you can't go from kitchen to front of house and back to kitchen without washing your hands or at least changing gloves. The POS system is not just a communications system, it's also a means of taking EFT payment and a means of auditing. Even trivial places like donut shops have a POS system in order to take payments. And as soon as you get a business large enough that the owner isn't the only one handling money, you need an auditing system to avoid being defrauded by your staff. (I work in a POS company at the moment. Our origin story is exactly that of an hotel entrepreneur solving his audit problems by building a POS system - in the early 1980s.)
  - s73ver_ 9y ago
    Here's a tip: Try not to come up with ideas that are going to put large groups of people out of a job.
    - KGIII 9y ago
      Hold back progress rather than have a surplus of labor to solve new tasks? I know what you wrote, but that's what I read.
      - s73ver_ 9y ago
        What new tasks? And how are these people going to train to work on these new tasks if they've just lost their job, and therefore their ability to pay rent and buy food? The "progress" argument doesn't mean much from people who aren't going to have to bear the negative effects of it.
        KGIII 9y ago
        We've had this same conversation since the start of the industrial revolution. Each time, people have insisted that this time it was different and sure to be the end of civilization. Famously, we called them Luddites. As for predicting what jobs will be made available, that's a fool's errand. Nobody would have been able to accurately predict the many jobs we regularly do today. At one point, the expectation for the total number of programmers needed, across the globe, wasn't more than a few dozen. Yet, loom where we are today. Back when I was young, in the 1960s, a common horror and science fiction trope was computers putting everyone out of work. The trope included such gems as the big brain eliminating entire office staffs and those people being unable to get work elsewhere. The trope was so common that the first programmable computer I touched was called a calculator because HP didn't want the term computer to scare people away. This was the early 1970s. Yet, with each stage of automation, we've improved our overall average lives and been able to make use of the excess labor for new and innovative tasks. I see no evidence, other than hysterics, that this is going to be any different. If you want to keep people employed for no reason other than as an excuse to exchange money for labor, maybe you could just have them dig ditches? Holding back progress for the sake of keeping people employed is counterproductive. Automating tasks, making tasks simpler, is the point of technology and is what has afforded you to live the luxurious life you live when compared to the lives of people just a generation ago. I'm not sure where the neo-Luddite trend has been coming from, but it has been strong for the past few years. If you want a suggestion, it is to embrace it and be at the forefront of it. It's not something you can prevent, legally or ethically. Where, exactly, would you draw the lines? No more cars, because it puts furriers out of business? No more computers, because it puts human computers out of business? No more email, because it puts curriers out of business? You live in a society created by the fruits of technology. You're happy to post your comment on HN instead of using the postal service or private currier.
jamesmp98 9y ago
Nothing that I can afford to solve

by KGIII 9y ago

jcun4128 9y ago

Maybe I'm not an entrpreneur if I don't actively think of that place that way. I mean I don't know the logistics of the supply of restaurants. Closest thing would be POS/menus for cooking those look realtively old or maybe it's one of those "does its job no need to fix". Haha the restaurant industry for me is like purgatory haha I look forward to the day that I work as a developer full time. Poverty is my never ending nightmare but I live in opportunity up to me to save myself haha.

KGIII 9y ago
Just an idea, why have a POS system at all? Why have a waitstaff that take orders? Why not just give the orders to the cooks and eliminate mistakes made by servers? What about in-kitchen optimizations? What about reducing spoilage? The possible places to improve are limited mostly by your imagination. What complaints do the bossss have? What do the workers complain about most? Those are rhetorical questions, I don't know enough about the industry to help. The goal is to start with something, it hasn't even got to sell and make a profit. The goal is to learn and improve, to learn new thinking, to see where changes can be made.
- jcun4128 9y ago
  Yeah I mean automation is expected to happen however the entire "redesign" of restaurants and the dexterity of human slave hands. I'm glad that hopefully I have a way out of this industry that will ideally be fully automated. I do find comfort in knowing that I could build the scheduling system that they use. Granted not at scale (yet). Any script kiddie I imagine like me could put something together. I don't know, I'm not looking into the restaurant industry" as something to work on passion drives things and the food industry is not for me. Also regarding orders people may ask for some random thing that isn't programmed an "exception". Anyway thanks for responding to my needlessly long initial post, I will actually edit it, (nope I can't anymore) ahh my social interactions are usually a cringe moment due to my own social ineptitude. I'm impatient is all, takes time, work, gotta earn it. Edit: I should expand (human slave hands), I can't judge other people(choices in work occupation/not a choice), I'm laughing at myself/think of myself, well... performing a menial task. But someday if I work hard I will get out. Look at that, two sentences. Grateful to have a chance.
- pjc50 9y ago
  The cooks are in the back and the waitstaff are in the front, with different specialised skills. Oh and you can't go from kitchen to front of house and back to kitchen without washing your hands or at least changing gloves. The POS system is not just a communications system, it's also a means of taking EFT payment and a means of auditing. Even trivial places like donut shops have a POS system in order to take payments. And as soon as you get a business large enough that the owner isn't the only one handling money, you need an auditing system to avoid being defrauded by your staff. (I work in a POS company at the moment. Our origin story is exactly that of an hotel entrepreneur solving his audit problems by building a POS system - in the early 1980s.)
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  Here's a tip: Try not to come up with ideas that are going to put large groups of people out of a job.
  - KGIII 9y ago
    Hold back progress rather than have a surplus of labor to solve new tasks? I know what you wrote, but that's what I read.
    - s73ver_ 9y ago
      What new tasks? And how are these people going to train to work on these new tasks if they've just lost their job, and therefore their ability to pay rent and buy food? The "progress" argument doesn't mean much from people who aren't going to have to bear the negative effects of it.
      - KGIII 9y ago
        We've had this same conversation since the start of the industrial revolution. Each time, people have insisted that this time it was different and sure to be the end of civilization. Famously, we called them Luddites. As for predicting what jobs will be made available, that's a fool's errand. Nobody would have been able to accurately predict the many jobs we regularly do today. At one point, the expectation for the total number of programmers needed, across the globe, wasn't more than a few dozen. Yet, loom where we are today. Back when I was young, in the 1960s, a common horror and science fiction trope was computers putting everyone out of work. The trope included such gems as the big brain eliminating entire office staffs and those people being unable to get work elsewhere. The trope was so common that the first programmable computer I touched was called a calculator because HP didn't want the term computer to scare people away. This was the early 1970s. Yet, with each stage of automation, we've improved our overall average lives and been able to make use of the excess labor for new and innovative tasks. I see no evidence, other than hysterics, that this is going to be any different. If you want to keep people employed for no reason other than as an excuse to exchange money for labor, maybe you could just have them dig ditches? Holding back progress for the sake of keeping people employed is counterproductive. Automating tasks, making tasks simpler, is the point of technology and is what has afforded you to live the luxurious life you live when compared to the lives of people just a generation ago. I'm not sure where the neo-Luddite trend has been coming from, but it has been strong for the past few years. If you want a suggestion, it is to embrace it and be at the forefront of it. It's not something you can prevent, legally or ethically. Where, exactly, would you draw the lines? No more cars, because it puts furriers out of business? No more computers, because it puts human computers out of business? No more email, because it puts curriers out of business? You live in a society created by the fruits of technology. You're happy to post your comment on HN instead of using the postal service or private currier.

jamesmp98 9y ago

Nothing that I can afford to solve