4 ms·

Here's my experience of POS, contrasted with my experience of the previous system. - Write down words as customer orders on duplicate orderpad thing. One copy

Here's my experience of POS, contrasted with my experience of the previous system. - Write down words as customer orders on duplicate orderpad thing. One copy to kitchen, one to us. - Write down words as customer orders. Get back to bar and start using POS system. Faff around trying to get it to add custom requests. Get moaned at by other person who also needs to put an order through. Click wrong thing, get annoyed. Fix it. Check a final time that it's consistent with my notepad. Send. There are lots of things POS improved if I'm honest, but none of it was an improvement for the waiting staff in my experience. Things are obviously much better now - but the reason everyone hated the machine (even ignoring the freezes/crashes) was because it made a previously simple task have 15 extra time-consuming steps.

shalmanese 8y ago
The reason POS systems win over is because the waitstaff UX is not the primary factor in the pros/cons list. Consider things that are easy to do with a POS that are hard to do with handwritten notes: * Generate a list of how many of each dish sell each night/week/month to decide what dishes to add/cut. * Reconcile sales figures with purchasing to identify abnormal food waste/shrink. * Identify waitstaff who are unusually good/bad at up-selling on wine/desserts. * Automatically reconcile the till at the end of the night to notice any discrepancies. Whenever you have data be converted from an unstructured format to a structured format and then back into the identical unstructured format, the detour in the middle is always going to seem like a pain in the ass because data entry is always a pain in the ass. But the justification for doing so is that other people need the data in that structured format so they can aggregate and analyze that data more easily and you happen to have just shouldered the shitty task of data entry on top of all of your other duties. It doesn't make the system overall a bad one though.
- mvc 8y ago
  > Whenever you have data be converted from an unstructured format to a structured format and then back into the identical unstructured format, the detour in the middle is always going to seem like a pain in the ass because data entry is always a pain in the ass. But the justification for doing so is that other people need the data in that structured format so they can aggregate and analyze that data more easily and you happen to have just shouldered the shitty task of data entry on top of all of your other duties. It doesn't make the system overall a bad one though. This is how the lowest paid get undervalued. Their job has been made harder but it is their work that has allowed "some big-shot restaurant exec" to claim he has added $n in extra value with his changes. BigShot gets a pay rise while the poor sod who struggles to cope with the new system gets fired.
  - empath75 8y ago
    They’re undervalued because they’re easy to replace. It’s as simple as that really.
    - knightofmars 8y ago
      Are you agreeing they are undervalued or are are you saying that they are "easy to replace" and therefore of less value?
      - mastax 8y ago
        Undervalued relative to effort, correctly valued relative to replaceability.
    - fallingfrog 8y ago
      ..and that's why we need labor unions.

shalmanese 8y ago

The reason POS systems win over is because the waitstaff UX is not the primary factor in the pros/cons list. Consider things that are easy to do with a POS that are hard to do with handwritten notes: * Generate a list of how many of each dish sell each night/week/month to decide what dishes to add/cut. * Reconcile sales figures with purchasing to identify abnormal food waste/shrink. * Identify waitstaff who are unusually good/bad at up-selling on wine/desserts. * Automatically reconcile the till at the end of the night to notice any discrepancies. Whenever you have data be converted from an unstructured format to a structured format and then back into the identical unstructured format, the detour in the middle is always going to seem like a pain in the ass because data entry is always a pain in the ass. But the justification for doing so is that other people need the data in that structured format so they can aggregate and analyze that data more easily and you happen to have just shouldered the shitty task of data entry on top of all of your other duties. It doesn't make the system overall a bad one though.

mvc 8y ago
> Whenever you have data be converted from an unstructured format to a structured format and then back into the identical unstructured format, the detour in the middle is always going to seem like a pain in the ass because data entry is always a pain in the ass. But the justification for doing so is that other people need the data in that structured format so they can aggregate and analyze that data more easily and you happen to have just shouldered the shitty task of data entry on top of all of your other duties. It doesn't make the system overall a bad one though. This is how the lowest paid get undervalued. Their job has been made harder but it is their work that has allowed "some big-shot restaurant exec" to claim he has added $n in extra value with his changes. BigShot gets a pay rise while the poor sod who struggles to cope with the new system gets fired.
- empath75 8y ago
  They’re undervalued because they’re easy to replace. It’s as simple as that really.
  - knightofmars 8y ago
    Are you agreeing they are undervalued or are are you saying that they are "easy to replace" and therefore of less value?
    - mastax 8y ago
      Undervalued relative to effort, correctly valued relative to replaceability.
  - fallingfrog 8y ago
    ..and that's why we need labor unions.