Slashdot Mirror
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.
"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."
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.