decastpb

So here was an interesting article I found, Chili's has implemented 45,000 tablets at 823 of their restaurants so that people do not need to interact with a human to take their order. This was done because Chili's does not want people to feel any judgment upon ordering the less healthy (and more expensive) food items.



The pros chili's has experienced from this are these:



A greater willingness to buy expensive and unhealthier items (the primary goal).



Customers spend an average of five minutes less sitting at their tables and thus they are able to serve more people daily.



A greater increase of impulse buys in both appetizers and desserts (up to 20-30% for the desserts).



http://www.theatlantic.com/technolog...urants/372836/



Now this hasn't eliminated the need for waiters altogether since someone still needs to deliver the food. However this leaves me with a few questions.



How long until we completely eliminate the need for waiters, or at least when it comes to big chain restaurants who can afford to do this?



With less for the servers to do should their be less in the overall tip?



Can we further reduce the amount of work for servers by setting up soda machines the same way Buffalo Wild Wings has done?

Tibbi

Genghis Grill has done this too. After years of patronage I refuse to go back.

majik

I like the idea a lot at Genghis Grill because it allows you to order your drinks, an appetizer, and go get your food right away. Your service experience should be better as a result, assuming someone is available to ACT as soon as you enter your request.



Servers will still need to provide value to your experience and the ambiance. I saw this when I Was at Chili's 3-4 weeks ago, probably the first time I've been in Chili's in well over a year. You were also able to pay through the device and it printed a receipt. The server did check on us quite often to see if we had questions about anything on the menu and to ensure we didn't need anything else. My personal experience was that it freed up the servers to spend more time at the tables.



I, too, contemplated the idea of replacing servers altogether. Implementing a conveyor belt that ran between tables could deliver trays directly to a table. However, servers are a CHEAP addition to a restaurant. $2.13/hr is hard to replace, and people still want human interaction. I don't see it going away soon

i8acobra

I've only said this about 10,000 times, but I'll say it again. Americans don't view customer service as a valuable service worth paying for. We want it cheap and now. That's the ONLY reason stores like Walmart exist and the only reason restaurants can eliminate staff without reducing prices. It's also why every store is slowly adding self serve checkout lanes and reducing the number of staffed checkout lanes.

Tibbi

I can't vouch for yours, but my GG has lost all of its customer interaction completely. No exaggeration. As in, the drinks come to the table and not a word is said at all to anyone seated there. It was so bad we walked out and have not set foot back. It went in mere days from one of our favorite spots to eat to the worst service I have ever had. They cut the workforce there by half which didn't help, plus they got rid of the best servers they had. IMHO the change just bred laziness and apathy.

Visionz

Now that minimum wage is going up to $15 an hour in some states because fast food workers are crying about not getting paid enough, I suspect you'll see this kind of thing with tablets a lot more than people realize.

bdiggy

Different than waitstaff though V. Waiters have and always will be well below the min wage pay grade. This is allowed because generally they make all their real money in tips. Every time min wage goes up, that pay grade tends to not change on their end. Waiters in CT make $4.62 an hour.

pnutkitten

Our Outback Steakhouse has these tablets. You can also play games on them and stuff. I'm not really a fan of them to be honest. Sure I guess they could streamline some of the process, but I would rather have the face-to-face interaction throughout the entire process.

tiburon01

Maybe its just my luck but every time I eat out, something about my order is messed up. Im probably the minority here but I approve of the tablets because that means I get my food exactly how I want it based off how I order it. I dont have to rely on a server messing things up when they enter it in their systems.

JonGTR

I agree that these should replace people who are crying about minimum wage. It's really a bullshit job in this day and age that requires hardly any REAL talent or education. Those people can (or should) get off their ass and go to school to do something beneficial to the community. I see this as a step in our evolution towards enlightenment. I hope all the low-skilled jobs start to vanish so that people are forced to better themselves through higher-education and meaningful careers.



We got rid of the screw-up gas-jockey's at the full-service stations in favor of the pay-at-the-pump and never turned back.