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posted by Fnord666 on Tuesday August 29 2017, @09:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the your-number-is-up dept.

The early diners are dawdling, so your 7:30 p.m. reservation looks more like 8. While you wait, the last order of the duck you wanted passes by. Tonight, you'll be eating something else — without a second bottle of wine, because you can't find your server in the busy dining room. This is not your favorite night out.

The right data could have fixed it, according to the tech wizards who are determined to jolt the restaurant industry out of its current slump. Information culled and crunched from a wide array of sources can identify customers who like to linger, based on data about their dining histories, so the manager can anticipate your wait, buy you a drink and make the delay less painful.

It can track the restaurant's duck sales by day, week and season, and flag you as a regular who likes duck. It can identify a server whose customers have spent a less-than-average amount on alcohol, to see if he needs to sharpen his second-round skills.

So Big Data is staging an intervention.

Both start-ups and established companies are scrambling to deliver up-to-the-minute data on sales, customers, staff performance or competitors by merging the information that restaurants already have with all sorts of data from outside sources: social media, tracking apps, reservation systems, review sites, even weather reports.

Because most restaurant goers eat at the same place often enough to generate data sets with statistically reliable predictions.


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  • (Score: 2) by t-3 on Tuesday August 29 2017, @10:14PM

    by t-3 (4907) on Tuesday August 29 2017, @10:14PM (#561188)

    You don't need a buzzer, the restaurants just need competent management. There is a very large restaurant near my house (it also has a large bar section), it is busy (the very large parking lot is always full) from 8AM to 2AM every day of the week. I never have to wait to be seated, never have to wait for a bill, the food is excellent, and the prices are great. The problem with other restaurants is that they lack competency in management, which trickles down as serving staff and kitchen are uncoordinated, overworked, and undertrained.

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