At the restaurant of the future, tablets take your order | Hacker News Reader

At the restaurant of the future, tablets take your order

theatlantic.com

46 pointsbremac58 comments

This is one of those companies which makes me wish I was an accredited investor, because the first time I heard their per-table numbers I thought "They're going to be an unstoppable juggernaut."

Seriously, in a low margin business they're transformative. I don't mean at the table/waitress level (sucks to be the server, by the way), I mean they literally move entire classes/areas/niches/locations of restaurants into economic viability. (Bad restaurants have -5% margins and close. Good restaurants have 8% margins and stay open. Some of the stats suggest just using this gives +N% with N sufficient to make businesses viable.)

Seriously, I think restaurants will take to this like accountants took to spreadsheets. Or they'll simply die.

The first time I saw a touch-screen ordering system was in an izakaya Japan in 2006, and I'm sure you've experienced them, too. However, since then, I haven't really seen it pick in most Japanese restaurants. I have to assume that there is a significant percentage of the population that actively wants the experience of ordering from a human.

They've been instated in at least a couple of national chain restaurants in japan. My last trip, just a few months ago, I visited a shabu-shabu restaurant and kaiten sushi (rotating sushi bar) that had touch screen tablets at every table. They weren't ipads - that's about all I could tell. In the case of the rotating sushi, it even alerted you to the fact that the dish you ordered was coming on the conveyer belt in a few seconds.

Edit: I just posted a video of it. My nephew and niece in law (?) loved to order for us: http://youtu.be/LxQpJk52Sbc

I was thinking two things:

1) This is an incremental change since it largely replaces what the waiter/waitress is doing with the machine the waiter/waitress is using and

2) The tradeoff is a question of customer service for lower costs. I think to make it work you'd have to take the extra savings and spend it towards further improving customer service. It's not a clear win unless executed very well.

I suspect you could meet the assets test if you valued your business correctly. I've talked to some lawyers, and shares in a non-public corporation at whatever reasonable valuation count. Thus, it's not too hard for an entrepreneur to be an accredited investor after a round or two of financing.

(Ultimately it comes down to the portfolio companies trusting that you won't turn this into an issue later with the SEC, if things go south.)

The problem of not actually having the cash to invest, though, is harder. You also clearly add value being your cash, so you could probably make investments on that basis (as consulting services partially paid in equity, etc.), which don't fall under the accredited investor requirement, since it's not a solicitation to the public.

That was mostly a conversational opener (totally true though, haven't had a startup idea click for me so loudly since Twilio) but thank you for the advice. I'm tying a string around my finger about it.

(I don't do all that much work for startups, or at least not paid work for startups on the VC trajectory, but I'll keep that in mind as an option. It's not something I've pursued much. The biggest reason is my near-term thinking has been dominated by my upcoming marriage and none of the vendors/moving company/tax offices/etc are sending invoices denominated in shares.)

Congratulations and best wishes!

I can think of one place where I don't want the experience of "being served by a human". McDonalds. It would be fantastic if there was just a touchscreen by the register. Even if the cashier was standing right there to take the money. I can't count the number of times I've spend 4 minutes saying "Chhiiickeenn MC-Nuuuuuggeets" as slowly and clearly as I can to a person standing right there, only to get a McChicken sandwich in the bag.

Don't even get me started on the drive-thru.

Haha I hate to admit this since McDonald's is junk but I go there quite often (a few dozen times a year) and I can remember only once not having the right order, in which case the teller has usually corrected it when I drive back in plus added something extra to compensate.

Meanwhile, I've used Seamless.com a couple times and some restaurants STILL sometimes forget to include certain items. Far more often than any other delivery service/fast food joint I've ever been to.

The Jack in the Box near my house has a touchscreen machine you can use to order food. My order was perfect, but navigating the UI was much slower than simply saying what I wanted.

A restaurant in Indianapolis has iPads at every table that include lots of things like the ability to like on Fbook, Twitter, etc, view and write Yelp reviews, view the menu, learn about the staff and restaurant, etc...

In addition, the servers carry these small devices not much bigger than an iPhone that have touchscreens to send the orders back to the kitchen. In addition, the devices have card readers and a small receipt printer so the server can handle everything from right at your table. It's pretty cool and futuristic, especially for a brewery/pizza joint.

Come to think of it, there's a restaurant at La Guardia airport in NYC, of all places, that has iPads at every table. They use that as a selling point. In a busy airport, it seems popular.

Have that at JFK too. Haven't used it but seems useful, especially since it's mixed in with a lounge area so not everyone there is ordering food.

At the restaurant of the future, water will be wet and food will cost money.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about waitstaff/ customer interaction at restaurants as I neither like cooking or being disappointed by my food. I just don't see this as something that will appeal to a lot of people.

There are too many cases where it falls down. For example, my girlfriend will ask almost every server their opinion of two items on the menu. She doesn't always choose the one that they recommend, but feels it to be useful input in her decisions. Another time when the waitstaff are extemely useful are for people with alergies, or lactose intolarance.

Yes the second case can be solved by lists of ingredients, or icons indicating what each meal is free of (lactose free, soy free, gluten free, peanut free, etc...) all of which would be provided by the computer interface. But is that really what I'm looking for when I go out to eat? No. I like being able to ask, "Does this have cheese in it?" or "Do you like A better than X" and getting a yes or no answer.

I believe we will see a restuarant that is McDonalds meets RedBox in the near future. However, until there are serious advancements in language processing so that I can ask questions about the food I am about order (and pay atleast 200% mark up on) I don't expect many resturants to be shedding their waitstaff in favor of customer opperated touch screen devices.

I think it's great that technology can be put to use to improve our everyday lives. But when it comes to replacing human contact with a touchscreen, I'm going to have to decline. As a programmer I can spend up to 8 hours per day staring at a screen and being frustrated. I don't want the same to spend my time outside of work doing the same. Can't we improve the backend technology but retain the brief human contact? It may be more efficient, but is that really all that matters?

If ever there were a surface that screams "touch me and spread germs everywhere", this would have to be it. Right there at the table with you and your food. Yikes!

what's the difference with holding (and flipping, if it's a book) the menu? unless of course you already know what to order.

...right. Upvoted because I feel dumb for not thinking of this too.

Don't worry, you've already touched every germ you're going to encounter for the night on the door handle to the restaurant and the table you're sitting at.

People underestimate the sheer quantity of microbes you encounter on a daily basis, and conversely, overestimate how susceptible you are to them. You're immune system is really good at what it does!

Just don't order the sticky BBQ Ribs and then try to order dessert.

This parallels the changes in consumer banking since the introduction of the ATM. It's now rare for most people to interact with bank staff beyond opening an account or taking out a loan.

Supermarkets are another great example of self-service automation. For example, my local supermarket has 8 self-checkout lanes occupying the same space as 4 full-service cashier lanes. Only one staff member is required to support these lanes -- although they should have two considering there is no training requirement for the customers :). It's interesting to note that there is no discount for using the self-checkout, although you are now scanning and bagging yourself as opposed to the full-service you receive in the standard cashier. I assume this is the "cost" of progress (and shorter lines).

In the long-term, I think the restaurants that leverage technology to enhance the dining experience will benefit greatly (e.g. enhanced menus, reduced printing, order ahead, entertainment, brand engagement, etc.). Restaurants that simply use tablets for cost-cutting will lose customers. Dining in a restaurant is more discretionary than banking or supermarket shopping.

> It's now rare for most people to interact with bank staff beyond opening an account or taking out a loan.

Loans I wouldn't know about, but opening accounts at major banks without entering a bank branch is generally quite easy, particularly if you can afford to wait a few days for physical mail to go back and forth. One hopes that particular anachronism becomes increasingly rare, too.

It's surprising that you can open a customer bank account over mail given the Know-Your-Customer (KYC) laws which I thought included a physical presence check. Something to Google on a rainy day...

I've never heard of a physical presence check being required, and I've opened a couple accounts "remotely" in the last five years with institutions I'd never done business with before. They practically demand your life history, but not that you walk into a branch.

Physical presence checks would simply put some of them out of business. There are national banks with no or very few physical branches.

It could be gotten rid of, but remember that 99% of the population will probably open, what, 5 bank accounts in their life? Whereas 90% of the population probably us their ATM card 5+ times per month.

The restaurant of the future.

Or the Japanese restaurant of yesterday.

Honestly, I use this all the time at Yaki-niku places.

"It costs about a dollar a day per table, it can even go lower depending on if you have sponsors involved because all the alcohol companies want to get involved"

Great. Ads during my restaurant dining experience. Gosh, what an exciting prospect.

There's been lots of basic technologies that could replace waiters, even phone switches + operators, but the reality is people want interaction. In some cases this will make sense, but not for 90% of restaurants.

To actually be useful everything on the menu would have to have at least an allergy list. They'd also need to be customizable or the restaurant will actually lose business.

I won't eat asparagus or whole mushrooms. I have friends that are vegetarian, or that wont eat veal/lamb, etc. It's hard enough finding a good restaurant to go to and accommodate everyone, let alone go to a restaurant that can't even afford to hire waiters and can't ask does xyz have peanuts in? Cause you know buying lunch really sucks when someone goes into anaphylactic shock because their waiter app can't handle allergy info.

I think they can do that actually.

So give the waiter a tablet.

Give me a way to see my favorite meals with the swipe of a card or somehow connecting with my smart phone.

And if you make everything to customer order like Subway, give me a way to re-use my old instructions.

Imagine the table-top tablet having a button to activate a voice connection to a remote call center, with a cheery, knowledgeable voice on the other end of the call. (I thought I'd read somewhere that some fast-food restaurants do this already for their drive-through windows.)

It could even be a video connection, with a small screen on the tablet, and one or more cameras to show all diners at the table.

The potential loss of privacy could be an issue for customers. The equipment to bug your dinner conversation would be sitting right there in front of you.

1. it will be nice to not tip. dropping total cost to a customer by 12% will increase demand for restaurant meals.

Also, it'll be nice to pay at the table and jet. call me a crank, but i hate waiting to pay.

2. it will be good to have timed order-to-delivery stats for the manager, so we can get consistent performance.

3. if they can get some smart data mining going on, then could raise revenues for the restaurant. "people that liked burgers also liked vanilla shakes. would you like one?". swipe in with your credit card, and it knows your favourite meals.

Reminds me of the story of the Automat http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automat

People thought these were going to replace all restaurants too.

Story author here... I loved that one of the ladies that I talked to NAMECHECKED the Automat! Totally unprompted.

No Wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

I actually just interviewed someone from E la Carte [1] about their job positions. This is a pretty cool company, working on a pretty cool product. It's nice to see a startup building a physical product that is already providing a lot of value to customers.

[1] http://startupfrontier.com/2012/02/e-la-carte/

Wagamama and Legal Sea Foods have had earlier versions of these kind of technologies for a while. This is the next step in evolution.

If it cuts costs (for the restaurant owner / manager), improves the customer experience, and 'encourages' customers to spend more ... you can bet that owners will be all over it!

I'm with you, but I am very dubious that these things will actually improve customer experience. The experience of going to a restaurant is very much one of being served by another human being.

Eh, that's the part I like the least about restaurants. I really don't like the feeling of being served at all. And I certainly don't like someone bugging me every twenty minutes asking if my food is ok (while I invariably have food in my mouth).

I go to restaurants to enjoy the food and enjoy the company. If everything else could just get out of the way (like the waiter) I'd be happy as a clam.

I'm with you on that. I detest the time wasted waiting to place an order. And even more I detest the time wasted waiting to pay and making payment. For some reason restaurants really like to drag the latter out as much as possible.

I'm fine with people adding value. Adding in unpredictable delays for them to carry paper between me and the cooks or me and a credit card machine is not value.

I agree with both of you. And I don't think anyone likes to have to wait to pay. But as far as not liking being served, we are not the norm. I hate it, but I guarantee it is the psychological aspect of servitude that is most appealing to a wide swath of humanity that "treats" themselves at restaurants. I admit that it may be a matter of context. Going out from work to grab a quick bite might be different than an "evening of fine dining" even for normal people.

In my life, I've found that those most interested in being waited on are those whose normal lives put them in positions of feeling put upon by others most of the day.

That's a very good point which I hadn't considered. :)

I just want an app where I can type in my fast food orders, and have them ready when I get to the window or brought out to the parking lot. I'm thinking Jack-in-the-box will be the first chain to do this, they already have machines in store that allow you to order without interacting with the cashier.

For anyone Angelenos, there's a restaurant called Stacked in the South Bay near the Del Amo mall that dors ordering and purchases at all tables and bar seats through iPads. I happened upon it purely by chance and it was just awesome, and their app design and ux alone is worth a look.

Next will be a "Page my waiter" button. That could be a win for diners in a restaurant with busy wait staff. Perhaps the tablet already has one; I couldn't tell from the article.

Dammit. I go out to eat for the experience. Touchscreens are an experience. But if they start replacing all the waiters? That's just going to piss me off.

Which is why there will always be waiters, just as there will always be live theater.

At least, until, the software starts doing a better job. And that is a long way off.

The restaurant industry will certainly produce numerous options catering to your preferences, and they will be marketed using copious helpings of "Only poor people would order food from a machine. Rich people like yourself deserve to talk to an artist."

A lot of conveyor-belt sushi restaurants in Japan have this. If you go to one chain (kappazushi), your sushi gets delivered to you on a bullet train.

Is this a single founder story? According to crunchbase it only has one founder.

Please select your order method: 1) Human or 2) Tablet

Less server interaction = less tip?

Just kidding, by then i bet they'll demand 40%

They say that the tips actually go up, probably because the suggestion is 20%.

When I was a kid and video game arcades were still popular, there was a huge one in the mall.

They had a restaurant and you could order food from a touch screen, and play games on it while you wait.

I hated it. A waiter always came by to make sure your order was correct. I had to wonder, what's the point? It was gimmicky and useless.

This was probably 13 years ago.

My startup is looking to stop having every resturant instead my startup will scan 2d menus and display the food in 3d as well as let you order it. I think it would be difficult for ever restaurant to have a app. I also say web apps are not the answer.

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