Excerpts from an article in The Atlantic:
A man walks into a restaurant. He doesn’t have a reservation, but that shouldn’t be a problem; there are ample seats at the bar, visible just over the hostess’s shoulder. “Of course,” she says, smiling. “We can seat you right away.” As she gathers menus, he absorbs the pleasant hum of a busy dining room, breathes in the tantalizing smells from the semi-open kitchen. Then, the hostess stops, Columbo-like, to interrupt with one more question: “And what’s your phone number?”...Like pretty much everyone else, I am well aware that my information is strip-mined wherever I go, in more ways than I can count and in many that I will never know... Much of the data collection has been justified in the name of customer service—a way to track allergies, preferences, birthdays, and so on, thus bringing technological efficiency to a job previously handled by a heavily notated reservation book or the encyclopedic mind of a gifted maître d’. “We try to build a database on everybody and get as much information as possible,” Vilkhu told me when I called him a few weeks after my dinner. His restaurant uses OpenTable, and he knew, for instance, which bartenders had served me, the friend who had joined me, that I had complimented the cocktail list and enjoyed the crawfish dumplings. This information, he assured me, was shared with the Kingsway’s sister restaurant but nobody else: “We just want to be able to curate the experience as best as we possibly can.”...Most striking was OpenTable’s promotion of a feature, currently in beta, called Global Insights. Until now, as Vilkhu had told me, whatever data a restaurant collected through the reservation platforms remained confined to that restaurant or restaurant group. Global Insights, which is available to OpenTable Pro subscribers, is the first feature to jump that garden wall and allow other restaurants access to the same information—in OpenTable’s words, to “get an idea of how your diners behave at other restaurants across the OpenTable Diner Network.” With an account, any restaurant can identify big spenders, diners who tend to linger at a table, diners who order a lot of drinks, frequent late-cancelers, and chronic “no-showers."...Curious to see what insights on me OpenTable might share with that hypothetical restaurant, I sent the company a request for my personal data....
Continue reading at the link. My goal in blogging is to drive people to links, not steal content.
Stop collecting data and start making better food.
ReplyDeletehe knew, for instance, which bartenders had served me, the friend who had joined me, that I had complimented the cocktail list and enjoyed the crawfish dumplings. This information, he assured me, was shared with the Kingsway’s sister restaurant but nobody else
In college, I went to a bar every Sunday. It was bottle night - bottled beer was half-price so they could clean out inventory before fresh bottles arrived Monday morning. Waiters (pretty much all of them) knew my first 4 go-tos and just served me without even asking, at the right pace. Cell-phones didn't exist, but waiters still had enough memory to remember things for the regulars. Of course this requires owners to treat their staff well enough that they stick around for a while. That's the problem these days.
Side-story. One of my buddies tried to hit up one of the waitresses. This ended up very poorly. Ugly words were spoken. She never spoke a word to him again and would ignore him at the bar. Nevertheless, she knew his go-tos so she could just bring out what he wanted without him having to ask. She'd then chat with me as if he wasn't there. So funny.
Codex
ReplyDeleteData mining.
I thankfully grew up at a time we're bouncers and restaurants knew me. Not hard, don't need them to remember my preferences.a friendly hey how are you suffices.
Then closures started so loyalty was impossible.
When I order delivery I use text. No number. They practically force it to the point that I was told it's a "legal requirement ". It obviously isn't.
I live in a pretty large university town, and have had luck with several restaurants' staff remembering us because 1.) we tip like mad and 2.) my husband is a great raconteur and the wait staff seem to truly enjoy his stories. Or they just like the big tips. I don't care, it works for us, we even got to know many of the servers and become friendly outside of their places of work. We've never made a reservation at a single place, we just go when we know it's typically slower.
ReplyDeleteSadly, our community's reddit spaces are full of people who like to tear down small businesses for slights, some real, but mostly imagined. So in the last 5 years, several of my favorite places were run out of business by endless negative feedback, even though service and quality were still quite good.
The internet was a mistake. Except, of course, for great blogs like this!
Arbys has started doing this. I suggest a mass boycott, and making sure to tell them exactly why when you take their surveys.
ReplyDeleteThey're also openly spying on their employees with AI monitoring now, and firing people who don't stick closely enough to the script that customers don't want to hear anyway.