Yishun Park Hawker Center To Get a Mobile Edge

If you’re not familiar with the term “hawker center”, then don’t worry; it’s just a good bet you’ve never been to or extensively studied Singapore and a few other areas in that general vicinity. Think of it like a big mall, but one focused on prepared food. The Yishun Park Hawker Center, one of the most recent in the country, will be opening up in September and delivering value, but with a distinctly mobile edge.

When it opens, Yishun Park will feature 45 separate cooked food stalls—each of which is required to offer at least one meal at three Singaporean dollars—and about 750 seats total, meaning that this place could be packed at its best times. Additionally, space is planned for a game room, known as Games Square, that features pinball and arcade games, along with a slate of big-screen televisions showing sports events.

If that sounds like a sports bar writ large, you got the same idea I did, and it gets better from there. The Yishun Park complex will also boast mobile capabilities on a spectacular scale. Not only will mobile order-ahead options be on hand, but the stalls will have mobile payment options in place as well. Customers using the mobile app to pay for food and drink will net a 10 percent discount on their orders.

There’s also word about a radio frequency identification (RFID) system for tray return systems, which could help speed up the process of tray return by letting workers know exactly when to pull a tray and when to replace it, but that’s apparently still in the early stages.

Still, what’s here is noteworthy enough on its own. Individual restaurants have been adding mobile-order systems at a good clip for some time in the United States, and offering a straight discount for using mobile payments systems is a great way to ensure such are used. In fact, in an environment like that, mobile payments would probably be safer; there’s less risk of getting robbed that way.

It’s an unusual environment to see such large-scale mobile payments movement in, but the Yishun Park Hawker Center should deliver some impressive meals with a mobile edge for area residents, and provide some potential new ideas for other countries as well.