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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.
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Wednesday August 30 2017, @03:04PM
Yeah, that's great if you're feeding six people. If you're cooking for one, the restaurant could actually be cheaper for a lot of meals (although pasta still probably isn't one of them) because they're cooking at a much larger scale. If I want to cook a nice steak with some fresh mixed vegetables and potatoes, we're talking $50+ by the time I get all the spices and stuff, half the vegetables will get thrown out because they'll go bad before I'm able to use all of them, and it won't taste half as good anyway. Or I could go to a restaurant and pay half as much...and save a few hours of my time while I'm at it.
And ultimately *time* is why I don't really cook much. On a good day I might have five hours at home after work. I'm not going to spend three of them stuck in the kitchen! Not that I'm eating out either...I just eat things that most people would not consider a "meal" -- like frying up five servings of frozen mixed vegetables and just eating that. Or a massive bowl of instant mashed potatoes. Or Soylent...