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To Survive in Tough Times, Restaurants Turn to Data-Mining (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The early diners are dawdling, so your 7:30 p.m. reservation looks more like 8. While you wait, the last order of the duck you wanted passes by. Tonight, you'll be eating something else -- without a second bottle of wine, because you can't find your server in the busy dining room. This is not your favorite night out. The right data could have fixed it, according to the tech wizards who are determined to jolt the restaurant industry out of its current slump. Information culled and crunched from a wide array of sources can identify customers who like to linger, based on data about their dining histories, so the manager can anticipate your wait, buy you a drink and make the delay less painful. It can track the restaurant's duck sales by day, week and season, and flag you as a regular who likes duck. It can identify a server whose customers have spent a less-than-average amount on alcohol, to see if he needs to sharpen his second-round skills. So Big Data is staging an intervention. Both start-ups and established companies are scrambling to deliver up-to-the-minute data on sales, customers, staff performance or competitors by merging the information that restaurants already have with all sorts of data from outside sources: social media, tracking apps, reservation systems, review sites, even weather reports.
I'd rather eat at restaurants that were competently managed over restaurants that rely on spying on their customers in order to avoid having to be competently managed.
You're just living in the wrong part of the country. Some areas have a surplus of vegan options.
Are the other dining guests too noisy? Is there enough parking? Is the surrounding area safe?
Is the food served fresh? UK has a TV show with a famous chef helping diners solve their customer problems. Once place cooked everything fresh to perfection, then put in a deep freeze to last the whole week. Food was served half defrosted, or completely mushy.
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I would rather a business focus on me today then use what I did to further their own goals. It used to be you did not need data mining to determine what people want. Which is good attentive service which is what keeps people coming back. The trouble is, that this data mining has become all the answers businesses want on their customers or so they are sold from the companies who help collect that data. Of course the excuse is always this will benefit the customer, or end users who provided the data. We all know that is just a bunch of BS.
You can get water at any restaurant, quit your bitching herbivore.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Businesses adopting data mining practices
The rest of the news from 2006 will be forthcoming shortly
Yeah, but nobody wants to live in an area where the majority of people are vegans who actively want to pay twice the going rate at restaurants - just to show how gluten-free they are.
No sig today...
Rabbit Season!
"How did you know I wanted a medium rare filet? I haven't even ordered yet."
"It was easy sir. Our sewer system is routed through the kitchen where we perform mass spectometry on your waste matter. Out of your last 73.4 feces samples you've provided, we calculated an 89.27% preference for medium rare filets on Tuesday nights before 8PM, especially after you've had sex in the missionary position."
Are you saying... you were vegan before it was cool?
Who cares what you want, consumer whore? Most people make their own food at home with friends/family and are better for it. Lazy consumers want to be princesses, fuck you back to Chipotle.
People like you belong in the kitchen of a restaurant, not in the dining area -- and more specifically, you belong in the food storage areas; you eat what food eats, therefore you must be FOOD. You can either be hunter, or you can be PREY; you've clearly given up the right to be at the top of the food chain, and that means you become FOOD for those of us at the top. Don't worry, we'll be sure to 'humanely' slaughter you, you won't feel a thing (or much anyway). In any event it'll be over quickly, and we'll do you the justice of not wasting a single morsel of you, and arranging you tastefully on the plate. Do continue to breed, too; we especially find the young ones to be sweet and succulent.
;-)
Don't bother fighting it. You also gave up the ability to make yourself strong and effectual enough to defend yourselves, and since you also eschew firearms or weapons of any kind, you really have no defense anyway. Trying to forestall the inenvitable will just make things more traumatic for you -- and also the stress chemicals make your meat less tasty. Be calm and serene and let us usher you into the oven quietly and calmly, really, it's the best for you and everyone else.
The nice thing about using Vegans as a meat source, is we can get you to raise your own feed. That makes you less expensive by the pound than even chicken, but with the quality of Kobe beef! Win-win! We can also get you to keep your own 'living quarters' in good order and clean, so no labor costs there, either. In your spare time we can even get you to do handcrafts and other profitable work. Seriously, how few positive-sum games are there out there? You raise and feed yourselves, take care of yourselves, and then at your prime we cook and eat you, wasting nothing. Perfect!
If it makes you feel any better, you can even choose what dishes you want to be a part of.
Data mining is creeping me out. I constantly feel that I'm being manipulated. And it's getting so bad that I'll even talk myself out of buying things. I think to myself, "I'm somehow being manipulated into buying this. Walk/click away."
I have never regretted it.
Offering good food, pleasant service and a nice atmosphere at a reasonable price.
If I have to go to any of these restaurants (probably in a group where I have no input) I wouldn't be paying in anything other than cash.
If they're data mining they're probably not bothering to fix the things that are really wrong...
I'll just pay with cash everywhere. I'll turn my nose up at restaurants that don't accept cash. If none of them accept cash then none of them get my business and I just cook my own means 100% of the time. I pay with cash at the grocery store so good luck tracking that. You datamining faggots and your faggot privcay invasion can go fuck yourselves sideways with an AIDS-and-Zika infested chainsaw, we're sick to death of your shit.
Do people eat that much duck that this is a problem?
How is eating factory-farmed specially-bred species that you buy in the supermarket the same as hunting?
Code that.
Have cash. Will pay where I want to, eat where I want to, and if you're "too full" there's another better restaurant on the next block.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Because real wages are in the toilet and folks are too busy paying student loans and rent to eat out. Data's not going to fix that. Unions and left wing politics in education funding and housing development might.
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The hypothetical in TFS assumes that restaurants are so busy that they don't have to give a crap about individual service. So now "tech wizards" are going to solve this "problem" by adding data mining, a concept that is approaching the popularity of coronavirus?
Where are the chairs with built in anal probes? It allows to monitor the customers digestive track and, as a bonus, it makes sure the kids do not run through the restaurant.
Almost no one is a vegan you stupid fuck. And there are plenty of options for grazers and sheep like you.
Well, that takes care of the drink...
Even if only half a percent of the USA population is vegan that's still 1,615,500 people. My home town only has a population of around 12K, so there's over 134 of my town full of vegans. Since all places serve meat, being specialized in vegan meals means practically zero competition.
Vegans can't eat from kitchens that cook meat now?
People are social creatures, unless they have normal, good food the Vegan place will go broke. Most people won't be pushed around by herbivores.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"Good luck with that. You cannot do data-mining on clients you do not serve."
All I have to do is open my eyes and watch people in public.
Apparently your under-18 self never heard of 'people-watching' as a means of identifying new trends.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Good, I hope they stay home, such boorish behavior to degenerate what other people eat, we would prefer if you kept that to yourself at home. Continue to whine and stomp your feet, it amuses me.
You mean I can go to a restaurant and order a vegan taco filled with real vegans?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
"being specialized in vegan meals"
If you can't handle every fucking cuisine you can't call yourself a cook, let alone a chef.
That's 20+ fucking years of experience behind me talking. Maybe you weak millennials will accept a meager fresh out of culinary school 6-year student who can only do Wellingtons and Eggs Benedict, that won't fly with us born in the kitchen fire cooks who learned an entire swath of cuisine (in my case, Oriental, vegan or otherwise) through hard work and a real hands-on education.
You paid to learn how to cook. We got paid to cook while we learned because we had talent that was recognized off the bat, with no formal introduction required. There's your difference.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"Vegans can't eat from kitchens that cook meat now?"
Outrage is so bad now-days that the smell of meat sends most vegans into an unconscionably-deep fit.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
All farming (not just animal) destroys natural habitat for wild animals so don't be so smug. The only truly green option is don't eat.
Speaking as a fifty-something Bitcoin millionaire, I don't like being tracked, analysed, watched, and served up as a product by big data.
I don't do facebook.
This evening I ate out with my wife and daughter. As I paid cash, I suppose I'd better share: I had the chicken.
As to having something to hide... that's not exactly it. It's more about, when I am working overseas, do I really want the spooks at GCHQ watching the video chat I am enjoying with my wife? Or... if I want it generally known that I prefer a Spanish wine to a French wine, I'll tell you. If I care enough about telling you, I'll start writing a blog. I'm more likely to keep it quiet because I don't want to start getting junk mail about wine.
It demeans us all for you to find out by trawling my Internet history, restaurant history, credit history or rubbish bin (trash can)
Restaurants that serve good food and understand their customers and control costs and are in a sensible location will do fine. Restaurants that ignore these realities do poorly. Restaurants that chase the latest fad tend to die when the fad does. Running a restaurant in the best of times is a complicated, demanding, and low margin business. It's easy to get into but few last more than a year or two. Have food that people really like, cook and serve it competently, find a good location, and don't be stupid when it comes to costs.
Data mining will NEVER be a savior for a poorly run restaurant. People might try your place once but they aren't going to come back if they don't like the experience. At best it might help some chains identify poor performers and to compare between stores but to be frank, if the owner/chef of the restaurant doesn't already know this then they are pretty bad at their job.
Partially because of wait times, which, at times is the FAULT of the public. Playing with their phones instead of looking at the menu, playing with their phones instead of EATING, taking selfies at the table, taking photos of their food. On the OTHER side...food prices are too high, portions are too small, people don't want to wait for poor service, people don't want to wait for the food. Our society has become accustomed to INSTANT everything. They don't want to wait for anything. I don't like putting up with rude people that can't put their stupid phones down WHILE EATING. It's just rude to the ones you are with, rude to the staff that has to wait for you to PUT THE PHONE DOWN. Manners have gone out the window, as has respect. For what places charge for dinner, I'd expect GREAT food & service. I have one or two places I frequent. NON chain stores, and, if you saw the outside of the buildings, you'd say to yourself there is NO WAY I'd go in there! The staff is VERY friendly, will come to your table just to chat, if they aren't busy, the food is great, price is right, and portions are acceptable. I think the NON chains, most of the time, have better food and experience.
"Data mining market so saturated that startups and established companies are now pursuing even the restaurant industry"
I doubt it. Real vegans have to be imported from Vega, and that's expensive.
Ezekiel 23:20
It's reasonably good food.
your restaurant only serves dead animal chunks like cavemen
I haven't been able to find a restaurant that has cavemen on the menu. Do you know of any in the Los Angeles metro area?
Well played, sir. Well played indeed.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Veganism and "gluten-free" are two different things. Gluten comes from wheat, not animals, Being vegan is a choice driven mainly by philosophical and ethical considerations. For most people, going "gluten-free" is just idiotic pseudoscience. Unless you have Celiacs disease or some other gluten related digestive disorder, there is no rational reason to avoid gluten.
Vegans eat gluten, dude. It's called seitan.
Oriental?
unless they have normal, good food the Vegan place will go broke.
Not in California. My city (San Jose) have several 100% vegan restaurants.
Loving Hut is a restaurant chain that serves only vegan food. They seem to be doing well. I have eaten there many times with my vegan daughter, and the food is pretty good.
LOL vegans confirmed for not having a sense of humor whatsoever!
Also your insults are unimaginative to say the least; clearly evidence of the unavoidable progressive cognitive deficit that results from chronic amino acid deficiencies inherent in strict vegetarian diets.
Do yourself a favor, friend, and go eat a steak every day for a month, the damage to your brain might be reversible.
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So a restaurant in a town of 12,000, with competition from other restaurants and from the grocery store, that has to cover costs such as rent/lease, food costs, spoilage and payroll is supposed to turn a profit on product that is inherently less expensive with around 134 customers? Do you have much experience with how restaurants operate?
If all 134 ate at this vegan restaurant every night (not just Fri/Sat), that's 33 four tops. With a perfect 3 turns, that's 11 tables with at least 2 servers, at least 2 in the kitchen plus a bar back and maybe a dishwasher.
No way that could be profitable. You need a much larger customer base to support something that specialized
Since some of them want to live as 'naturally' as possible, we'll just set up 'hunting preserves', fenced in of course, where the Vegans can run free. Then we come in and cull the herd every so often -- purely for conservation purposes, of course; don't want them over-breeding and exceeding the food supply. xD
Because Subway's pricey.
but Y U SO MAD THO??????
All farming (not just animal) destroys natural habitat for wild animals so don't be so smug.
But growing meat requires a lot more.
Isn't this place called California?
That's explains why you are so skinny and couldn't win an arm wrestling match with an average toddler
Oh stop talking economics and profit/loss to the vegan. They don't believe in all that mumbo jumbo anyway.
Nope. Oregon and Washington.
you could just remember patrons the old-fashioned way and use that piece of meat resting on top of that neck of yours.
Try and follow along. How would that work in a town of 12K with about 100 (based on 0.5% pulled from GGPs dark smelly places) herbivores.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Am I the only one who finds it hilarious that a Vegan would accuse someone else of being 'emo'?
You can data mine and compile all the stats you want but it won't help if don't have a quality consistent product.
A new restaurant open a few month back and we waited awhile to make sure that the kinks were all worked out. The meal and service were fine, nothing exceptional for the price, just good food.
Went for Sunday brunch and the experience was less than fine. The churro waffle was overcooked and dry and the pork belly was overly greasy, seasoning was off and the temperature as well.
Went back a third time and ordered the same meal as I get on my first visit. I was expecting a decent meal experience but was greeted with a cold chalky flour tortilla, tepid carne filling all covered in lukewarm sauce. Yuk!
Seasoning, temperature and texture are basic to cooking and if a restaurant can't consistently nail these then no amount of data mining will help them.
As in Patrick McGoohan's The Prisonner: "I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered". That kind of innovation will drive me away from restaurant that use it.
Data Mining only improves product not the service. Restaurant is about the mix of both.
It doesn't take a genius to see that a dirt cheap waiter/ waitress forgetting an order, too busy with their phone, or impatient with serving their customers result in fewer customers to the restaurant. Mining the customers does nothing to improve the most common underline problem.
If they want data from customers, they are already too late as they should have known their customers before starting the restaurant. Let's use an example. If they wanted to create an India Curry Restaurant, they'll get people that 'like' India curry, not people that 'don't like' India curry. No matter what they do even with the data, they can't get the large share of people that want pepperoni pizza to eat India curry. (if they add pepperoni pizza in an India Curry Restaurant, they might want to rename the restaurant to 'Food Court' or 'Buffet')
At most, they can gather the demand of their orders which doesn't even need data mining. If more people ordered chicken curry, the restaurant should buy and sell more chicken curry. It is that simple. No data mining required.
It seems like the data mining thing is really just hypes for brainless manager to believe they did something, when it really didn't do anything helpful. We should just let supply and demand kill off those incompetently managed restaurant.
isn't this just user experience improvement?
If your service consists of checking back once before bringing the check you have problems small, medium, and big data can't fix.
You: "Hi, I'd like to make a dinner reservation for Friday at 6:30."
Restaurant employee: "Sure, let me pull up the calendar." (The computer identifies you by caller ID and notes you don't drink alcohol, so it's a bad idea to let you take up a table at their busiest time.) "I'm sorry, we don't have any free seats then. We do have openings at 5:30, or after 7."
No possibilities for abuse here, none at all.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
He sings racist songs while operating the fryalator at Burger King.
"Ting tong, something wong,
Gotta cook the fries.
Ching chong, smoke a bong,
Chinks have slanted eyes."
Management and customers put up with it because he's fucking retarded, and damned good at making fries.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
ROTFL, 'Oriental' is a cuisine?
If you can even say that then you dont have a god damn clue about 'oriental' food.
I guess you cook 'both' types of food right? 'oriental' and 'western'? the difference is if the chilli sauce is sweet, right?
I am pretty sure the rather highly acclaimed pastry chefs (sorry, keeping the words simple for you here) I know don't do great 'Wellingtons and Eggs'..
My local Malaysian/Chinese chef does about 30 pretty damn fantastic and authentic dishes, but cannot fry a steak properly.
But dont worry, I am sure your are right, food is all just generic.
Just checking, you are American, right?
If you want to know about the dangers of gluten, especially for men... Then I suggest you watch southpark!
I worked at a wafflehouse and I'm pretty sure that everything was determined by big data; how many servers and cooks they had on a shift, the amount of food they ordered from corporate, the type of food. I'm pretty sure that the only restaurants not using this kind of information would probably be local restaurants but a lot of times they're either not big enough to use it, or it's just too expensive or complicated.
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And yet again the problems that are unique to massively large metropolitan areas that have a lot of rich people living there is extrapolated to become an "everywhere in the USA" issue when it isn't. Maybe next they can tell us about how data analytics can help with caviar, which just simply must be a problem every restaurant in the country has to deal with.
First sentence: Huh, Okay, this guy has some information to impart, let's hear it. Second sentence: Oh. Oh well.
It drives me crazy. My wife is a diabetic. Almost 10% of the population in the U.S. is diabetic. People with Celiacs disease make up less than 1% of the U.S. population, yet just about every restaurant touts their glute-free menu options. Meanwhile someone with diabetes has to guess what items on the menu are safe to eat. Sure diabetics know to avoid desert and high carb items, but beyond that it's a crap shoot. Does that particular dish use a high sugar lacquer as a base for its sauce? What's the carb content of that dish? Most of the time there is no way to know, and no help from the restaurant industry.
Thinking about the places we go to regularly, I can't imagine any of them data-mine. Why? Because they ask.
The reason is that it probably makes little sense financially. Data mining requires a large data set and unless you are a large chain most restaurants simply don't generate enough data to make the cost of getting it worth the bother. Their POS system captures plenty if it is reasonably modern and they should be having regular staff meetings to go over what happened each day. Data mining for a small local restaurant is like hunting sparrows with a howitzer. It's overkill and expensive overkill at that. It will just tell them stuff they ought to already know if they are paying attention.
If you're McDoonald's, big data might mean something. If you are a local joint, the personal relationship is going to crush that shit.
Exactly. Well said.
until Reagan pulled the funding for the follow up programs to give those people jobs. Move a bunch of people to the city, stuff 'em in a building and give them no work and no future and outsource their jobs and everything goes to hell. Who knew?
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Yup. I have a friend whose life was almost ruined before she got her diagnosis (don't know if it's actually Celiac's Disease) to replace the earlier one of congestive heart failure.
I also have a friend, who I see more often, with a sulfite problem, and that's not on labels. I've gotten pretty good at reading ingredient lists, but it would be really nice to have some sort of labeling.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I don't know about you, but I've slaughtered far more plants than you've slaughtered animals. I'm a far better killer than you. Just try to eat me.
Or anything else based in reality.