WHY NOT CHALLENGE TABLE 17 FOR THE BILL?
Let's not tell the folks at Waiter Chat about this, but imagine a dining scenario where you don't have to wait to order, don't need to listen to your server recite the daily specials, can take control of your own peppermill, are spared the wait for your cheque to arrive so you can leave as soon as you want to, and what's more, you can dispense with the calculating of a tip because there is no obligation to tip in the first place. And you an do all this from someplace other than in your car.
In a business model that must have been inspired by self-serve gas stations, automated airport check-ins and ATM bank machines, a California entrepreneur has come up with a design for a sit down style restaurant that eliminates the waiter from the dining out equation.
We could be talking about a certain kind of restaurant here, mostly of the fast food genre, where service tends to be paid at minimum wages and operates at its lowest level as an art form anyway but uWink, Inc., a publicly-held company based in Los Angeles, resists being lumped in with that group. Instead, it claims to be a unique category unto itself -- a “new digital entertainment� style of dining experience.
Under the uWink format, the restaurant is set up with touch screen terminals at every table where customers may select their own meal items from an online menu of freshly made to order and popular “comfort food classics�. The food is brought to the table by runners, and in the meantime, while they wait for their dinner, patrons can amuse themselves with the games, table-to-table tournaments, selected internet fun, edutainment, and movie trailers that are also accessible from the table top terminals.
When they want to leave, they just bring up their own bill on the screen, swipe a debit or credit card though an attached machine and go.
“It’s the way of the restaurant industry’s future� says Nolan Bushnell, the founder of uWink (as well as Atari Computer Games and the Chuck E. Cheese restaurant chain) who already has an operating uWink restaurant in Woodland Hills which has been earning $200,00 a month since its October 2006 opening.
The whole idea of robotizing yet another service job will horrify a lot of people for certain, but for harried parents trying to eat with a squirming, restless brood in tow, it may just be looked upon as just one less person to have to wait for and negotiate with during the dining out process.
But is it really all that new? We suspect that the tabletop video terminal/kitchen ordering device is already a common item in Korea and Japan.
See the video here
(if this takes too long to load, log on from the home page at www.uwink.com)
Read more here: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/biztech/articles/070218/26eespotlight.htm
