Posted on 09/12/2014 8:03:39 AM PDT by ctdonath2
At 1:40, demonstrates using an iPhone to bypass a fast-food cashier entirely: open app, recognizes you're at a restaurant, shows the menu, you pick what you want, tap "Pay", authorize with fingerprint on phone, go to food pickup window.
Coincidentally, I heard about Piggly- wiggly just this week on a radio blurb “Why Didn’t I Think of That?” Used to be prior to the ‘30’s you told the clerk I want ten pounds of beans,five lbs. of bacon, some ketchup, etc. and he would leave his register and get it for you in the warehouse out back. The owner brought the warehouse out front and let you get what you wanted. It was so novel, he copyrighted the idea and franchised it to A&P, Kroger and other big name groceries. Sears and other places bought into the idea. Not only did Mr. Piggly-Wiggly make his stores less expensive employeewise, but he gets residuals from the idea, itself.
The only problem is ethanol, requiring them check that a graying man with two school-age kids is over 21.
Updating the app’s menu just becomes an adjacent step to updating & printing the standard menu. No big deal. Easier if you’re talking a chain of stores.
Apple’s clout means the rest of the mobile & payments industry will fall in line, supporting or augmenting the system. Android & Windows will join the fun. And there will be a cash-or-card kiosk available for the holdouts.
Funny that, Amazon is rolling out a grocery delivery service.
What app? Is there some Apple app out there that has even .001% of the country's restaurants' menus on it?
“Is there some Apple app out there that has even .001% of the country’s restaurants’ menus on it?”
Consider relevant precedents:
Facebook.
Twitter.
Google.
Yelp.
Amazon.
...and others.
Those services didn’t exist not long ago; today, they DOMINATE their sphere, knowing “everything”. Google went from nothing to a near-complete cross-reference of _every_word_ on the Internet. Facebook has 10% of the _world’s_ population as members. Twitter is huge. Amazon handles around 1% of USA retail sales. Yelp is huge. Etc. And each one has its own app...and is becoming integrated into the umbrella called iOS.
A great many restaurants already have their own apps, menus on line, allowing you to order & pay. If Apple doesn’t build such a service right alongside Pay itself, _some_ app will arise as the dominant aggregator of menus, notifying you upon arrival at a restaurant, showing the current menu, letting you choose, and handling the payment with just a finger touch. It’s just too darned easy, and profitable, and timely, to not happen.
That's a fantasy. There's too much clerical work involved in keeping Apple's menu database up to date, especially since there's nothing in it for the restaurant. Many restaurants have daily specials, which would need to be input each day. Some restaurants sometimes run out of something, so that would have to be told to the app as it occurs.
When I dine out I don't order everything right away... I need to see how it goes before deciding on a dessert. I also can't predict if I'll have a second glass of wine or not.
How does what I order on the app get communicated to the waiter? How does my order get entered into the restaurant's pos system so they can total out (Apple app orders and all the other customers) at the end of the day?
What if something I order turns out bad and I send it back... does the waiter have some sort of override code where he can get into my app and change my original order?
It’s a whole lot easier than you think it is. Actually, I may suggest it to our sales guys (base infrastructure & app already in place).
You’re also off track: the threads intent was fast-food type menus, where the offerings are stable & national, and clerks are just filling checklists and processing payments.
Even if it's limited to fast-food joints, I see hassles and no benefits to either the customer or the establishment.
It would be much easier for me to walk up to counter and say "cheeseburger, small fries and a coke" than it would be to pull out my iPhone, fire up the menu app and locate the items on that tiny screen and place my order that way.
If you walk in and order things, including a strawberry milkshake, and then learn they just ran out of strawberry milkshake stuff. Does the clerk have some way to modify the order on your app, and if so does that mean that clerk will now need to learn both the regular POS system the place uses AND the system which allows him to modify Apple Menu App generated orders.
There's no real benefit for the customer, and the operator of the establishment would have increased cost of operation to implement and use such a system alongside their regular POS system.
Sure it’s not perfect. Just like the complaints about self checkout lines at grocery stores.
But there are a LOT of customers who will be pulling out that phone anyway while idle in line - nice if the appropriate app just shows up, and with a few taps is done-and-paid with the order well before the overpaid underperforming clerk is available.
Argue all you like, fact is such apps already exist, and people are already using them to avoid dealing with clerks. All the clerk does is enter the information you can/will with the app; why pay someone $15/hr when most customers would rather do it themselves?
I would be interested in seeing these... can you point me to a couple of places that have such a setup?
That’s my experience as well.
I think the scan and bag places have sensors that can tell if your food item is above or below a certain median point and always bed garbled.
The scan and place on belt are good but the only place that has them is Fresh and Easy which I don’t like.
Yes.
Stores know that the purchaser will make decisions to buy based on instant decisions.
I refuse to use Amazon Fresh whee I just give them my list and they deliver what I want.
I want to go to the store and BROWSE. The browsing part is fun and I can decide to buy cookies or a pie depending on which looks better. I want to buy fresh cherries if they look incredible. No lists for me!
Moe’s, Papa John’s, Chipolte come to mind. Some sit-down restaurants are replacing waiters per se with tablets. Plenty of others, just not pervasive yet.
I haven't experienced that yet, and we tend to eat our 4 or 5 times per week (but almost never fast food places). My experience is mostly centered in Southern Florida and Los Angeles, so perhaps it's taking root elsewhere and I'm not aware of it yet.
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