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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.
Good luck with that. You cannot do data-mining on clients you do not serve.
Why is there so few vegan options in restaurants? Because people don't ask for it? No, it's because your restaurant only serves dead animal chunks like cavemen so those people are going somewhere else or are eating in the comfort of their home.
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.
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.
Businesses adopting data mining practices
The rest of the news from 2006 will be forthcoming shortly
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?
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?
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.
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"
It's reasonably good food.
Because Subway's pricey.
you could just remember patrons the old-fashioned way and use that piece of meat resting on top of that neck of yours.
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."
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?
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.
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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