I was thinking about someone elses' message on here about Tips. Here's an Idea I was just thinking about. Call it Digital Waiter or something. It looks like one of those digital coasters you get in line. Basically the over all objective of the "digital waiter" is when the waiter comes to your table, they put it on your table, it displays their name and starts a counter. Each time the waiter comes to your table they simply swipe their RFID card, and it logs how many times they are coming to the table and such. It could track other things... or even have a button where the table could call the waiter. All the data is sent wirelessly to the computer... when the waiter is printing the bill, the statistics are printed right down near the TIP line... and calculates suggested tip amount based on bill and number of trips. Or even some how make it calculate the number of refills, trips, speacial requests, etc. This would be a great managment tool as well, to track how well waiters are doing. If someone complaines, well, the manager can see how many times the waiter went to the table... etc. The main objective is to express to the customer higher tip suggestions based on TIME, and overall proformance of the wiater. As well as provide the cusomter with a better way to interact w/ the waiter either by calling the waiter or some other method of feed back.
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Having a swipe card would slow the server down continually, maybe if they wore some kind of small proximity device, like a clip on keychain, that worked whenever the server went by the table.
Of course, I don't think it would work anyway. No matter what you suggest, some people don't tip well, period. Also, service can be such a subjective thing. What if the waiter keeps forgetting parts of the order and has to make two return trips to ask further questions? Now that's three trips for service that would have been better had the waiter/waitress gotten all the information on the first trip. It's more important as to WHY the server is visiting the table, and possibly also the friendliness of the server when they get there.