Is Tablet Ordering at Restaurants Already Obsolete With Mobile Ordering?
It wasn’t all that long ago when some restaurants started setting out touchscreen tablets at tables, offering options to not only select a meal for the evening, but even pay for it at the table.
This isn’t universal as of yet, with plenty of restaurants still turning to paper menus, but tablets are still regarded as the top of the line in restaurant ordering. Now, there’s a new technology that’s threatening to supplant this high-water mark, and it comes from an even older technology: smartphones.
Tablet ordering in restaurants goes back to 2011, about the time when the first iPads emerged back in 2010. Offering menu options, the ability to select desired dishes and even pay for them, the tablets even offered games for patrons to play while waiting for dinner.
It was sufficiently noteworthy to be attractive, but proved a niche technology often limited to sports bars and family-friendly restaurants. In some senses, it’s actually a fairly dated technology, with nearly five full years of use on its side. There will likely also be tablet use for some time to come, though use is still somewhat limited.
Mobile devices are promising a whole new frontier for restaurants, though, as there’s one major advantage involved: restaurants don’t need to provide the mobile devices.
With smartphones becoming almost universal, restaurant patrons can readily select menu choices and make further orders as desired throughout the experience without the need to wait for live waitstaff to swing back in their direction.
Mobile payment systems can be incorporated directly into the experience, and even in some cases credit card systems as customers send purchases directly to point of sale (POS) terminals, doing the job that would have been done by live waitstaff only recently.
With just over three quarters of the United States currently owning a smartphone—a Comscore report puts smartphone penetration at the 77 percent mark—the idea that a restaurant’s operations could be handed over in large part to smartphones makes sense.
Indeed, it doesn’t even need to be a complete handover; with those able or willing to use smartphones for ordering permitted to do so. The idea of tablet ordering was exciting, granted, but when restaurants don’t have to buy the tablets and can instead turn over ordering and menus to those devices that are probably on hand anyway, it’s a win-win.
Naturally, there has to be provision made for those without smartphones who’d prefer to pay cash, but it’s still going to drop wait times through the floor as well as staffing needs.
The restaurant business isn’t easy, and hosts of competitors keep businesses looking for the best edge. Tablets may have seemed that edge for a while, but the smartphone is making whole new inroads to be the king of the high-tech menu.