Daniela Galarza, writing for Eater:
NYC restaurateur, Shake Shack founder, and millionaire Danny Meyer is having a good week. He’s invested in a home-cooked food delivery start-up, introduced paid parental leave for all of his employees, and today almost single-handedly made the Apple Watch — a very expensive trophy gadget at best — relevant.
Trophy gadget? Um. No. But to continue:
When Meyer’s 30-year-old Union Square Cafe reopens in Manhattan next month, every floor manager and sommelier will be wearing an Apple Watch. And when a VIP walks through the front door, someone orders a bottle of wine, a new table is seated, a guest waits too long to order her or his drink, or a menu item runs out, every manager will get an alert via the tiny computer attached to their wrist.
This is a new use case for Apple Watch, an interesting idea. If it lives up to its potential, no reason this won’t spread to other restaurants and make the Apple Watch a standard element in restaurant systems.
Intriguing. Don’t know if a wrist wearable is right for me, but I’m curious about new use cases that sprout organically.
I think it’s a massive stretch to say that he’s “single-handedly” making the Watch relevant, but I definitely like seeing how people implement the new device.
Too many notifications is as bad as none.
Every manager gets pinged when a table is seated? Why?
(I work in software in the restaurant point-of-sale sector, and “VIP entry”, “item 86’d” and especially “slow service” notifications are sane.
But “table seated”? Unless their model is very strange, this is just noise, distracting a busy manager*.
And the article makes much more sense in detail than the summary – a wine order doesn’t ping every manager (which would be daft), just the sommelier, saving a print slip and delay.