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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.
Data mining is creeping me out. I constantly feel that I'm being manipulated.
Because you are. Manipulating you is pretty much the entire value proposition of consumer data mining.
Do people eat that much duck that this is a problem?
It actually works the other way around. Low volume dishes have more potential for volatility and that is problem when trying to balance between having too much (waste) and having too little (can't fill customer orders).
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.