Restaurant Technology in the Post-COVID-19 World | HosPitality Technology - 0 views
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Those who believe that business will resume under the same rules and rituals from before COVID-19 are not reading the social and emotional cues that have taken place over the last few weeks.
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Our conventional payment models of cash and plastic credit cards are a petri dish of germs and potentially contagious agents. According to factmonster.com, a $1 bill is in circulation for 18 months; $5 bill, two years; $10 bill, three years; $20 bill, four years; and $50 and $100 bills, nine years. The number of hands that this currency will go through during the life of the currency presents a clear concern in the minds of a new germ-conscious consumer who emerging from the COVID-19 crisis will be better informed and educated about contagion.
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The new awareness and concern over contagion will be a major driver for existing technologies to be fully implemented; this includes EMV, contactless, tap and pay, and mobile wallets. In each of these cases, there is no person-to-person transfer and the chance of passing any germs is greatly mitigated. All of these technologies have existed in the restaurant industry for years, and for the most part have been slowly and often begrudgingly adopted. 
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It would be an interesting capability should timeclocks have the ability to take a temperature either through some biometric means as part of the clocking in process, with the ability to alert the manager should anyone clock in with a high temperature.
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t has been clearly established that germs can exist on plastic surfaces for several days, and the newly educated customer base will be sensitive to the notion of being handed a menu that could easily be cycled a dozen or so times during this period. Restaurants should look to providing an option for a guest to pull up the menu on their own device as well as look to leverage digital menu board technology wherever possible. In some cases this may mean an alteration in the current serving model or perhaps new hardware to be developed that allows a server to bring a large digital menu to a table for ordering, but the intention is to avoid another concern that p-C19 customer will certainly have.
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Organizations that do not embrace and promote a contactless payment environment will find themselves suddenly behind the operations-technology curve.
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Employees interact on a regular basis with pOS hardware and other types of technology during the normal course of their business day. Many of these surfaces are plastic and allow germs to survive on them for an extended period of time. Surfaces like a pOS touchscreen, a KDS expeditor, or a biometric thumb scanner can be used by dozens of people on any given day. It will be important for employers to look at solutions, such as anti-microbial pOS screens, as well as improved cleaning habits, in order to avoid passing germs as well as to set their employees at ease. This may also be the kick-in-the-pants that the technologists need to further refine and perfect the voice ordering capabilities in order to virtually eliminate the need to use a pOS touchscreen altogether. We have long spoken about the promise and potential of this technology only to see it expand rapidly in our personal lives with Google and Amazon and yet be almost non-existent in our commercial operations. Now would be a good time to step up development and implementation of this technology.