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To Survive in Tough Times, Restaurants Turn to Data-Mining (nytimes.com)

Posted by msmash on from the tech-to-rescue dept.

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.

4 of 175 comments (clear)

  1. Data mining not needed by JohnFen · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Data mining not needed by JohnFen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      They're got nothing to hide and it makes everything that happens to them more relevant and personalized. What's wrong with that? (shrug)

      Having something to hide doesn't enter into it (and that's a stupid argument any, since everyone has something to hide).

      In terms of restaurants, though, if the restaurant is even halfway decent and you're a regular, you will get relevant and personalized service without the spying. It's called personally knowing your customers.

    2. Re:Data mining not needed by JohnFen · · Score: 4, Insightful

      There's a distinction to be made between paying attention and spying. Is the waiter just keeping an eye on my table? That's paying attention. Is personal information about my "experience" being entered into a database for further analysis, where it's shared and combined with data from other databases? That's spying.

  2. Re:Duck?? by erice · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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).