Profits In Hand 

The Handheld Future of Great Service

Consider a typical (for lack of a better word) bar and grill that uses, say, four or five waiters or waitresses to service a dining room.
The waiter goes to the table and asks if the guests need anything, and a guest asks for a bottle of ketchup. The waiter gets the ketchup and returns and asks if they need anything else.
    Now, another person wants a glass of water. The waiter gets the water and brings it back only to find another person at the table has decided she wants ranch dressing. Meanwhile, guests at other tables suffer while the waiter struggles to accommodate the one table.

Changing Business
    Enter wireless technology. Instead of putting orders on paper and running it back to the waitstaff station, the waiter or waitress can do it on the fly, without leaving the customers.
    “What wireless does now is you have two or three waitresses, and they have runners,” says Ken Arthurs, owner and operator of Wolfendale’s in Indiana, Pa. “The waitress is assigned four to five tables. She just stands there, and if she needs a bottle of ketchup, she sends a wireless message back to the runners saying a bottle of ketchup is needed at Table 14. Out comes the bottle, and she never has to leave the table. Meanwhile, she can attend to another table while the stuff is being run out to her.
    “Basically, you’re almost getting a four-star rating, where somebody is standing nearby your table, and you can always ask for something if need be. Some restaurants have changed the way they do business.”
    “Some” is the operative word, for now at least, but the future world of profit and efficiency actually may be closer than many might think. Price is one factor that is holding handheld technology back from being the standard presently (Wolfendale’s paid about $900 for each of its handheld units, to say nothing of the software costs), but it may not be long before operators are able to wash their hands of paper pads.
    “It’s like anything else,” Arthurs says. “As things become more popular, prices decline.”
    Another factor handheld technology holds in common with other advances that experienced a curve toward mainstream use, Arthurs says, is that the interfaces are not yet as user-friendly as they may evolve to be.
    “The graphic interface is not as user-friendly as we have become accustomed to with touchscreen systems right now, where you turn around and you want to order a Bud bottle, and you open up the screen, and there’s a picture of a Bud bottle. Most of the (handheld) systems I’ve seen are text interfaced; they’re not graphic interfaced.”
    The users of handheld units, though, should not be a factor in acceptance and smooth integration of handheld technology, considering the young age of most waitstaff.
    “These kids are used to PDAs and iTunes and stuff like that, so they’re more adept to it than, say, someone over 30,” Arthurs says.
    Being “busy,” Arthur says, is no longer an excuse for slow service. “Are you ‘busy’ because you’re busy, or are you ‘busy’ because you’re slow?”

Getting Your Hands On It
For the operator willing to take the step toward the future, the dividends can be great. As for the sticker shock of what’s out there right now, Arthurs points out that these systems soon pay for themselves, because of the efficiency the technology provides and the table turnover and guest satisfaction it creates. NCB