6 ms·
I’m not sure if this could be considered “peak”. The ratio of waiting staff to customers is an obvious bottleneck. This inefficiency is simply accepted and not
by PUSH_AX 2y ago
I’m not sure if this could be considered “peak”. The ratio of waiting staff to customers is an obvious bottleneck.
This inefficiency is simply accepted and not even really thought about, it’s just the way things are. But one thing I can say for this tech is it fixed it and the difference is noticeable.
- digitalengineer 2y agoinefficiency? It's part of the experience. I'm not in a restaurant or café to drink as fast as possible. I'm there to socialize as well. Waiting a bit is not a bottleneck, but a feature. (If I wanted speed, I'd take the drive-through).
- consp 2y agoMight be nice to have but its also expensive in a low margin business. Maybe waiters get paid like crap enough for it to not matter in the US but other parts of the world have labour laws to abide to making it the biggest expenditure (and thus the one to save on by cutting out staff and replacing it with an app)
- TeMPOraL 2y agoLow-margin businesses have you order by the counter and then the food is either delivered, or you pick it up yourself. The app isn't there to improve on this. The app is there to maaaybe cut a little bit of hassle with replacing paper menus, but mostly promises to improve the business analytics site and creates many marketing opportunities, including but not limited to screwing with (er, personalizing) recommendations, creating incentive structures, and better tracking thanks to tricking the user into giving the vendor their phone number and bunch of other data. And, whatever else on top it is, one thing the app is not is an improvement in convenience or experience to the user.
- austinjp 2y agoThis highlights the underpinning problem: wages are so low that people cannot afford to live. Restaurant margins are so low they cannot afford staff. Why contribute to that system?
- n4r9 2y agoHave to disagree with this. At a group meet-up where everyone arrives at different times and wants their order to come shortly after they do, a digital system is so much better. These type of meetups are quite common as a parent.
- GJim 2y ago> where everyone arrives at different times and wants their order to come shortly after they do Good god man! At a social meal, we eat together; children included as this is how they learn to socialise. One would be a little concerned and puzzled if arriving for a meal, one finds others have already eaten.
- RamRodification 2y agoIf only we could have different social norms so you didn't have to argue about it online!
- n4r9 2y agoAs another commenter said, this is probably partly down to cultural expectations. The ideal would be to sit and eat together. In reality, one family might get held by up to an hour because their baby napped later than normal; another family is half an hour late because of traffic; another family had an nightmare nappy blowout situation and has to go back home for new clothes etc... . Being relaxed about arrival times is less stressful all round. The children will still socialise with each other in the overlapping times they are together.
- astura 2y ago>children included as this is how they learn to socialise Ummm... When was the last time you were out in public? I hate to break it to you but this doesn't happen, ever; if I see a kid in a restaurant they are pretty much always watching iPads. If they aren't watching an iPad they certainly aren't learning to socialize, because iPad-less kids in restaurants are almost always allowed to misbehave and be disruptive or even destructive.
- 2y ago
- PUSH_AX 2y agoYou’re proving my point that it’s simply accepted. A non zero number of people want faster service than you do.
- lynx23 2y agoSlow and mostly self-serving service is a FEATURE? Sounds like stockholm syndrome to me. Its easy to socialize with a decently fast waiter. Bootlenecks are just that, a reason to avoid the restaurant.
- earnesti 2y agoOk cool that it works for you, but many don't have the time and patience to wait for the waitresses. Especially when I'm with kids I just love to go to these places where I can just directly order stuff to the table using my mobile. The extra stress of waving and communicating to the waiter is gone.
- lm28469 2y ago> The extra stress of waving and communicating to the waiter is gone. Might as well stay at home if that's a struggle
- Shywim 2y agoI think that works out if you are alone, if you are with other people, the waiter will probably interrupt the socialization you are doing with the people you are with, causing stress even for the waiter. Also we should recognize that the waiter is often looked down at, it is not a very nice job, and as a human being, having a poor experience with some customers will probably pass on to other customers, etc... I'd go as far as having a job with "wait" in the name, and having to wait, calmy and happily or else you don't get your tip, is not so far from slavery.
- Freak_NL 2y agoHaving a waiter come over for ordering causes stress? The whole point of going out for drinks or food is not having to prepare it yourself and having someone else do the dishes. Depending on the venue getting waited on is a feature, not an inconvenience. If interacting with the people facilitating that is stressful I would recommend finding a bench near a vending machine, having someone else in your party handle the interaction, or, not going out. Is this just an issue in countries where waiters depend on tips for their income?
- n4r9 2y agoThe food is still prepared to restaurant standard and brought out by waiters. The dishes are still done by someone else. You just skip the awkward, inefficient, and disruptive step of the waiter coming up to your table (or worse, having to flag them down) to order, order more drinks, ask for the bill, pay for the bill, etc...
- osullip 2y agoAbsolutely disagree with this description of the job a waiter does. A waiter orchestrates and coordinates the experience for the diners they are looking after. They slow down orders to stop the kitchen getting overwhelmed. They upsell on the menu in a way that is helpful and informative. They understand the dietary requirements of guests. They hold complex orders in their head and drop the right plate to the right person. They know the flow of a table and engage or back off as appropriate. Don't undervalue a role that can make a night out magical or a simple coffee memorable.
- austinjp 2y agoThere are plenty of comments disagreeing with you, but I'm fully in agreement. As for the arguments that QR codes are somehow a time-saver, they can be a real time waster. Find phone (not glued to my eyeballs), scan QR, swerve option to install app, wait for enormously bloated website to render badly, get frustrated trying to find what I want, get up to find a staff member to order something but with X instead of Y please if that's possible, can I pay with cash, etc etc etc. Clearly, everyone's needs and experiences are different. If you like QR codes in cafes, fine, but we should recognise that they represent something other than supposed 'convenience'. They are there to gather data, and to allow cafes to hire fewer staff. They represent the creeping invasion of privacy in every possible aspect of life. The fact that cafes may want to hire fewer staff masks the issue that an increasing number need to in order to survive. Small business margins are squeezed by unreasonable costs and shrinking profit margins, and these pressures are instinctively passed down to the customer -- you and me. Rather than mindlessly capitulate to this and encourage the one-way downward spiral, I really would hope for communities such as HN to see opportunities to 'disrupt upwards'. How can businesses resist exorbitant rents? Why are our lives so hectic that talking to a waiter is seen as too slow? Why do we give away data without being an eyelid?
- hot_gril 2y agoI don't understand the privacy part. If you order through a waiter, they still record what you ordered.
- Phemist 2y agoThese menu websites obviously track the living hell out of you and now they can tie restaurant food preferences to everything else they have already gathered. A waiter recording your order is at a completely different, much smaller scale. Additionally, the waiter is an anonymizing wall between the system that records my order and me and will only correlate orders across multiple visits to the same restaurant. Not potentially across single visits to multiple, geographically highly separated, restaurants.
- 2y ago
- falconertc 2y agoTo socialize with the people at your table, surely? Not do socialize with the waiter?
- mikro2nd 2y agoIn most restaurants the kitchen remains the bottleneck. Tech has not fixed that.
- grues-dinner 2y agoHey now, there'll be a startup that promises to bolt AI-powered robot arms to everything, can only cook licensed "Verified Recipes" and will be bleating "we just need more data bro, 6 months more runway, on my mother's life" until they go spectacularly bust at the end of their "journey" having never cooked a single meal.
- cryptonym 2y agoTech "fixed" that with frozen food, fryers and microwaves. Ordering on your phone a microwaved industrial meal is a consistent user experience. That's ok for fast-food but not something I'd enjoy at a cafe or restaurant.
- fragmede 2y agoSoylent and Huel seem to have fixed that issue, for their target market.
- GJim 2y ago> their target market. Those who enjoy tasteless gruel and want to spend their days farting?
- anotherhue 2y agoInvisible farts are a guiding principle of the market.
- mikro2nd 2y agoI've never yet heard of any restaurants that serve Soylent or Huel.
- Dalewyn 2y agoMuch like how widening the I-405 does not improve Los Angeles's legendary traffic jams, slabnus do not improve the bottleneck. Namely, restaurants who move to slabnus simply get rid of the waiters who would have taken the order. You're left with even fewer waiters serving food and drinks, let alone taking orders. The coup de grace is I don't even get a discount for the degraded service. Note: Slabnu because I'm pecking at a slab of silicon instead of a proper menu.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago> The coup de grace is I don't even get a discount for the degraded service. It's like self-service checkouts: the store gets to save on stuff and get their customers do the store's work instead, and we don't even get a discount for that free labor and more time spent in checkout and degraded experience.
- guappa 2y agoEh? Eating in a self service is normally cheaper.
- CaptainFever 2y agoI'm not doubting you, I want to believe this, but do you have any sources?
- jeffchien 2y agoI will gladly do the work myself if it means not being stuck behind people chatting up the cashier or doing complicated coupon/return/exchange/gift card transactions. The value is in the consistency and predictability of time spent for someone who just wants a single bag of onions or a single T-shirt. If stores had no-BS lanes (more than just "X items or less" lanes) operated by human cashiers I would use that too, but I suppose we as a society consider it as impolite or bad service, so machine checkout it is.
- peoplefromibiza 2y agofew comments - you are ordering food and drinks, speed is not essentials, if you're in a hurry you don't sit down in a diner/restaurant - you assume that everything on the menu is perfectly clear, but what exactly is that thing with the mysterious name? (for example peri peri fries means nothing to me) you can ask to a person, not to a PDF - you really want X but you have food allergies or some other dietary restriction, again you can ask that to staff, not to a web site - most importantly, you're assuming that waiting is generally considered an inefficiency, that should be addressed or fixed and that should be the goal of every place serving food and beverages, while it usually is the moment were people sit and relax and have a little chat, it is called lunch break for a reason, isn't it? It's the generalization of XKCD #303. p.s. in my experience in places that use QR code menus orders are not served faster, actually the opposite is often true.
- PUSH_AX 2y ago> you are ordering food and drinks, speed is not essentials, if you're in a hurry you don't sit down in a diner/restaurant Honestly if I received poor/slow service and management came back with this I'd be pretty upset. Especially given a large number of places have an explicit service charge or there is a cultural expectation that this should be paid extra for. You're either trying to solve the problem of service or you're not, it's binary.
- peoplefromibiza 2y ago> You're either trying to solve the problem of service or you're not, it's binary. Do or do not, there is no try They are trying indeed, if they succeed or not is a completely different story. The point is: throwing a QR code at your issues won't solve your issues. > Honestly if I received poor/slow service and management came back with this I'd be pretty upset. I don't understand what you mean, it's probably that I, as a non US citizen, don't understand why people should sit down and enjoy a meal while also being in a hurry, there's no management involved here, it's just my opinion. if I'm in a hurry I'll buy a sandwich or some pizza slice (it has a kinda different meaning here than in the US, but to get you an idea of what I mean)
- lm28469 2y agoLife isn't about peak efficiency The experience is as, if not more, important than the result for most things. Leave that for assembly lines (and even that is debatable) If you want peak efficiency order caffeine powder from Amazon and snort it, it's going to be much cheaper and much more efficient than going to a coffee shop