Summary.
A new restaurant chain is opening in California. The restaurant is called “Stacked: Food Well Built” and will feature an iPad at each table to replace a menu and a wait person. Just as the name implies, the customer will choose not just a hamburger but the bun and the fixings that will go on the burger. This is done by the customer touching the iPad to order the type of bun they would like and then the fixings. This will not be the first restaurant that offers ordering technology, restaurants at New York’s JFK and LaGuardia’s airport also have iPads at their tables. The restaurant chain is targeting young adults from the age of 18 to 34 year olds. The restaurant chains will be in high traffic malls next to movie theaters to attract where this age brackets likes to congregate. The owners feel that this is the wave of the new restaurant and every restaurant needs to beef up and get on the technology band wagon bringing menus to be obsolete in the future. The iPad ordering system was in the making far before the iPad came out. The owners do not want the restaurant to be known as the iPad restaurant but as a unique restaurant where the creativity is left up to the customer.
Response
I do not agree with the owner of the restaurant chain “Stacked: Food Well Built”. I do not believe technology such as the iPad will not be in every restaurant in the future. At least not in the near future. Technology will take the ambiance and romance out of the high class restaurants. The target customer is the younger generation. I believe that adults over 35 have an average guest check larger than the target audience. I also believe that older adults frequent more expensive restaurants than that of the target customers that “Stacked: Food Well Built” will be serving. I myself do not want to walk into a restaurant and have to fiddle with an iPad and make all the decisions that a menu makes for you. If the customer makes a mistake and the order comes to the table will the customer be held responsible for payment? The use of iPads will eliminate a lot of jobs from the hospitality industry. There is a place for technology, I do not believe technology should replace the personalization of what a server has to offer.
Horovitz, B. (n.d.). iPads replacing restaurant menus, staff. Retrieved February 20, 2011, from USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/food/2011-02-16-ipadcafe16_ST_N.htm
I kind of like the idea of the customer ordering at the table using the iPad at a restaurant with burgers and quick service type food. I think some people would like not having to deal with a waiter at these types of places where they get to choose what goes on their hamburger; however, many times people of all ages do not want to read a menu and make a ton of decisions and do work to order their meal. The server is there to take all of this away and help make quick, easy choices, without customers having to do anything. Servers have a purpose of making customers have an easy time at a restaurant, even giving recommendations without the customer having to look at the menu, and making customers use the iPads just to decrease labor cost is not good.
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