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I think it's a strike against our industru thay we failed to define a way to publish standard platform independant menu and price list file that any apply appli

I think it's a strike against our industru thay we failed to define a way to publish standard platform independant menu and price list file that any apply application could parse and represent Instead eveyone is busy building their own little feudal kingdom and they call it platform even if it's actually just a toll booth

mellavora 4y ago
maybe menus and price lists have edge cases?
mattzito 4y ago
The issue isn’t one of format, it’s distribution. Menu data is usually in hard copy form, and the utility to a restaurant in going to the trouble to duplicate it online and keep it up to date is almost certainly not worth it (in their eyes). So I’m sure you could sign up yelp and google and Uber eats and everyone else for a common data standard, but you’d then still have to go chasing the restaurants to go put that information in a system somewhere. We haven’t even really been able to convince businesses to put their opening hours online, it’s still such a problem that one of my interview questions at google in 2018 was “name as many ways as possible you might be able to discover a business’s opening hours online” Menus are about an order of magnitude more complex than that - it’s a tough thing to get restaurants to do.
- ClumsyPilot 4y ago
  My local pharmacy has a website, their hours are avaliable on that website, and the automatic answering machine tells you their hours when you call them Yet their hours are wrong, and different, on google and bing. if I own a business there is no singular place I know of where I can publish my opening hours. My laundrette here can't publish the fact that they will be closed due to sickness except by placing a sheet of A4 at the door.
sgustard 4y ago
There is a standard: https://schema.org/Menu https://schema.org/Menu "A structured representation of food or drink items available from a FoodEstablishment." Clearly the issue is that no one has convinced FoodEstablishments of the business case to spend tech dollars publishing their menus.

mellavora 4y ago

maybe menus and price lists have edge cases?

mattzito 4y ago

The issue isn’t one of format, it’s distribution. Menu data is usually in hard copy form, and the utility to a restaurant in going to the trouble to duplicate it online and keep it up to date is almost certainly not worth it (in their eyes). So I’m sure you could sign up yelp and google and Uber eats and everyone else for a common data standard, but you’d then still have to go chasing the restaurants to go put that information in a system somewhere. We haven’t even really been able to convince businesses to put their opening hours online, it’s still such a problem that one of my interview questions at google in 2018 was “name as many ways as possible you might be able to discover a business’s opening hours online” Menus are about an order of magnitude more complex than that - it’s a tough thing to get restaurants to do.

ClumsyPilot 4y ago
My local pharmacy has a website, their hours are avaliable on that website, and the automatic answering machine tells you their hours when you call them Yet their hours are wrong, and different, on google and bing. if I own a business there is no singular place I know of where I can publish my opening hours. My laundrette here can't publish the fact that they will be closed due to sickness except by placing a sheet of A4 at the door.

sgustard 4y ago

There is a standard: https://schema.org/Menu https://schema.org/Menu "A structured representation of food or drink items available from a FoodEstablishment." Clearly the issue is that no one has convinced FoodEstablishments of the business case to spend tech dollars publishing their menus.