Saturday, June 14, 2008

Research Status

Today I went to the library to perform research on how restaurants are evolving to meet the consumer's digital needs. I found an interesting article on Papa Johns. They created a service that allows users to order, pay, and have their order delivered via text messaging. How smart! The concept is simple to use. The user needs to create an account on Papa Johns website with a few pieces of information and they are set up to go. The article also stated that this service is easier to use than Domino's web ordering service. I also found an article on how Arby's created a facebook page to start a social-networking campaign.

I found this information on a website called http://www.nrn.com/. NRN stands for Nation's Restaurant News. They call themselves the "The News Leader of the Food Service Industry." I'm currently searching to find more articles on technical innovations. One piece of information I'd like to find is when/how pagers were incorporated into the food industry. Outback, Olive Garden, and many others use the pager service to alert customers when their table is ready.

I'm still trying to come up with an outline on how I am going to approach this subject. It is pretty huge and I want one single theme running through the document rather than a dozen ideas.

I'm having trouble locating scholarly articles on how restaurants have evolved with digital technology, but I'm going to be focusing on some journals databases I found today and hopefully will come up with some more information. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears!

2 comments:

Debra B. said...

I've noticed in traveling outside the U.S. (mostly in Europe) that the restaurant industry utilizes technology more than we do in the states.

Examples, several years ago I first experienced the waiter having a hand-held device to swipe the credit card, take orders, and complete orders.

I've enjoyed your information already because restaurants could improved their efficiency and thus save money.

Have you heard about Hyperactive Bob? I came across this technology two years ago while doing some research. It's a technology that is used in the fast food industry to predict what a customer will order based on the make/model of the car!

Happy hunting.

Debra

Becky/Rebecca said...

Great that you're finding information, Ali! Your pizza info makes me wonder: Is there a learning curve? Have people steadily been doing MORE ordering via texting? etc.

I love the idea of looking broadly at how tech is changing restaurant biz as an intro, then focusing on one or two examples. But then, that's me...you should figure out what YOU want to do--wich, given your interests, might be more in line with sampling restaurants in the area. :-)