Is the iPad a realistic restaurant point of sale device? | Hacker News Reader

Is the iPad a realistic restaurant point of sale device?

chompstack.com

14 pointsstevenwei26 comments

I'd expect them to get stolen in a heartbeat.

If a piece of gear in a restaurant is worth $500 and doubles as a consumer media device you can expect it to develop little legs and walk off all by itself within a week.

Proprietary and/or tethered devices with limited use outside of their intended area (such as maybe another restaurant ;) ) have much less chance of suddenly sprouting legs.

I would think so to, but there has to be a good way around this. My guess is that you bring the device out to place the order, so it never leaves your sight. I'd also expect it to be inn high end restaurants, so theft seems less likely than say pizza palace.

> so it never leaves your sight.

Let me guess, you've never waited tables :) ?

Keeping an eye on a $500 gizmo that's laying around untethered and that just wants to run out that door is a lot harder than you think. Just take a look at trade shows where there is on-site security and all kinds of paranoia and still the weirdest stuff gets stolen. The only relatively safe place in a restaurant is behind the bar, anything that gets carried in to the store is at risk.

And you can't exactly do a pat-down of your clientèle even if something is missing, a good number of them is not going to come back after being insulted like that. Lose-lose.

Just having those things on the premises is going to attract people that will try to lift one.

And if you 'nail them down' you can expect them to break because people will try to pry them loose.

Restaurants lose all kinds of cheap stuff, plates, cutlery, even the flower pots and the props occasionally disappear.

And then there is this problem:

http://www.mercsystems.com/article_employee-theft-restaurant...

$500 items attract a crowd of people that will want to take them home.

I could be wrong, but I always assumed that mobile POS devices weren't used in American restaurants for some non-technological reason. They're used elsewhere--- some big UK chain restaurants use them (Googling turns up some info on TGI Friday's system), and a bunch of restaurants in Japan use them, for example.

Are the existing solutions too expensive, or in some way insufficient, in a way that rolling a new one out of an Android tablet will fix?

They have existed for a while (I've seen a few PDA based ones out in the wild for a few years now) but none have gained major traction. I think for a lot of restaurants the cost simply isn't worth it.

For most restaurants in the US they are just too expensive compared to the alternative of having a low paid employee walk 15-30ft to a cash register. There's also a problem of paper receipts which many customers still demand. I have seen mobile POS devices with receipt printers. (ballpark $2-$3k as of a few years ago. Basically a Windows Mobile PDA attached to a little Epson receipt printer)

Total guess: Do waiters and service industry workers in Europe get paid a respectable wage? If you're paying someone a living wage saving the time spent going back and forth to the cash register is probably valuable enough to justify the cost of a mobile POS. Maybe the same deal in Japan?

I think the devices _delirium is talking about aren't point of sale devices per se.

In Japan, most chain izakaya (restaurants that serve a wide variety of food an drink) have devices that waiters punch your order into instead of writing it down or remembering it. This is especially useful there, as it is common to go with large groups of people (6 to 20+), and the menu often has about 100 different food items on it.

In addition to staff operated devices, some restaurants have consoles where you can order your food from by navigating a software menu.

Why does this article consider the iPad in the first place? As the article points out, the device is too big and unwieldy in the first place. If you were to use an apple product, an iPod Touch is the first thing that pops into my mind.

The iPad point of sale is the one making the news right now:

http://www.crunchgear.com/2010/04/27/the-ipad-pos-system-com...

I think the iPod Touch is too small to be effective as an order taking tool. Maybe something closer to a Nook size. After all, if you're a server and you need to take down kitchen instructions or find a drink fast, a slightly larger device is exponentially more useful. But in terms of weight and price point I think the iPod Touch is perfect.

Only because it lacks a stylus.

In at least a few places in Aus (Canberra Centre, Melb Airport, Elizabeth St Melb) I've seen ipod touch sized PDA's being used to take down orders at McDonalds.. (including special orders - they got my mcflurry + caramel topping down fine).

Maccas may have a slightly limited menu - but it's still pretty large compared to some restaurants.

McDonald's definitely does have a limited menu and with very limited customizations. I've worked at 17 restaurants (seriously, and I am aware of the jokes which could be made about this). Now imagine working at place where the customer says to you: "I'd like a martini, but dry, with 4 olives, shaken, and can I have Belvedere vodka? And not a chilled glass, please. And for my appetizer I'd like your asparagus soup, but without the croutons. And I'm allergic to garlic, so could I get that steak medium rare with extra crispy fries but without any garlic anywhere near it or I'll probably die? Thanks!" Now try that out on a PDA in real-time with a stylus. I've worked with those PDAs--Micros makes a good percentage of them--and I wasn't too impressed. But I'd like to code something better, on a better device.

If it's at all feasible, it will happen first in the retail Apple stores themselves. If not even Apple bother to showcase their own products in this setting, you can safely guess it's unworkable.

Assuming that Apple is the fount of all retail innovation is a bit unfair to the rest of the world, don't you think? Surely there exists a store somewhere that could make iPads work in this setting, even if Apple doesn't try.

Still, I agree with the post, and would expect a cheaper, more durable device to take whatever market exists. I know that programmers have been dreaming of making a successful wireless restaurant pad for a very long time, so someone might just figure it out.

It's not a matter of being innovative—it's just that, if anyone has a reason to show off their "iPad bling", it's Apple themselves—as you can buy one right there after seeing it in use.

What do you mean? At my local Apple store they were all toting around iPads.

A better application would be to bolt iPads below glass at every seat. Then ordering would require no server interaction. Nor would the payment (think PayPal, Google Checkout, etc). The cost savings to a restaurant owner in terms of hiring waitstaff would be significant.

The average restaurant has 50 seats or so, that's a lot of dough, also the iPads screen will not work under another layer of glass.

If it's going to be under a layer of glass anyway, there's little point in using an iPad. Just put a digitizer on top of the glass and a regular LCD screen underneath, hooked as IO devices to a small-form-factor PC hidden somewhere.

Yeah, bolting down won't work. Restaurants only service x tables at a time depending on time of day. They also only have y percentage using them at any point for the ordering process.

50 * $500 = $25,000. This is about what I would expect a restaurant to pay for a single server in a year. It seems like it might pay for itself quickly.

If the iPad doesn't work under glass, then a cheaper alternative touch sensor could be used, as suggested by others in this thread.

As soon as you start talking about 'cheaper alternative touch sensors' you'll have to interface those with the ipad in such a way that it will still work, that could be a lot harder than it seems. Also, when you customize stuff the cost will go up quickly.

A typical 'asshole' and 'dirty fingers' proof point of sale terminal for in a restaurant goes for 5 grand or so.

But that's only one for all the tables you've got.

Also, don't underestimate the cost of writing the software and integrating it in to the workflow of the restaurant.

too expensive. square and the like make sense from the point that you already have a phone, and it's more peer-to-peer payments than a commercial solution.

Square is badass but it doesn't offer simple menu capabilities such as modifiers. Restaurants have fairly particular needs in terms of data structures. Also, doesn't Square only support personal accounts at this time and has specific weekly transaction limits based on a credit check? Additionally, Square can't control cash drawers, etc, and if you take in a lot of cash (restaurants often do), you need a place to put it and a way to correlate it at the end of the night. But seriously, Square has the most beautiful iPad app/control panel, and for the most part it is very intuitive to use.

Why can't they have a server-based plugin architecture to take care of custom menu capabilities?

No offense, but that may be the most abstract sentence on Earth. Certainly it is possible that they could write some software, possibly taking the form of a plugin architecture, to store menu modifiers (options and choices), and that it would likely be on their server, for download and use by their client app during customer menu creation. It is also possible that they could move to reading RFID cards, or form a softball league. So many possibilities.

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