Waze Navigates Users to Order Ahead Options

For anyone who’s ever been out driving somewhere unfamiliar, the value of a navigation app is hard to understate. Showing you where to go, where to turn, and most everything else in between, navigation apps are a great way to get around in unfamiliar settings.

Waze is one of the big leaders in navigation, but now it’s added something extra for the mobile payments market: the ability to order food while figuring out where the food is.

Waze has already offered an extra feature showing where fast food opportunities can be had—particularly noteworthy for anyone needing a navigation app—but now it’s taken the next step up by allowing users to actually place orders from the car at at least some of those locations.

Now, with the new features, you can not only find a place and get directions to it, but you can also place an order ahead for you to pick up when you follow the provided directions to the end.

Right now, there’s only one such place at which this will work: Dunkin’ Donuts. That’s not the greatest news, but the upshot is that if this particularly effort works out well for those concerned, it can be fairly readily expanded to just about any place with drive-thru windows and a willingness to bring such a system into play.

Indeed, some are already projecting that a system like this could be applied to a whole lot more than donuts, or even food; why not use a system like this to find and pay for open parking spaces, or order a prescription filled right from the car? Conceivably it could be tied into almost anything; imagine pulling up at the grocery store and picking up a sack or three from a drive-thru window, paid for right from the car?

This might even be a way for brick and mortar to fight back against the growth of online: if shoppers place an order, the store can tell the customer when the order is ready for pickup, even if the item isn’t immediately in stock.

The customer then picks up the order, and takes it home. It takes advantage of online’s biggest fault, shipping times, to get ahead. That’s good news for physical stores, and may be the start of something great.