Projects: Pizza Hut’s Tabletop Ordering Concept
March 3, 2014 by Dave Haynes
Here’s a concept tabletop ordering system being touted by Pizza Hut as the possible future of dining in your local mega-chain pizzeria. It has about as much chance of being commonplace in the chain as food critics describing the stuff coming out of the ovens in glowing terms.
I like the concept and the execution on the user experience. Pretty nice. But the average Pizza Hut costs around $500,000 just to build and open, and it’s either heavily or totally (like in Canada) a franchise model. You get the odd outlier in the franchise QSR world that wants to outdo his competition and fellow franchisors, but from my experience franchisors are not people who get very bouncy about the notion of spending $5K-$10K per booth for a cool tabletop ordering station that won’t really negate the need for serving help.
If head office paid for it, different story.
That and the grease in those places, on those tabletops, would be beyond nasty to deal with. Not sure I’d want to touch that touch screen.
There’s a restaurant like this in central London. Projectors above every table and a touchpad built in the table. Very easy to use and reasonably beautiful.
Perhaps too easy to use… I watched with rising amusement when I ate there, as a family of five received dish after dish that their 2 and 4 year old had ordered without realising…