Thursday, April 20, 2017
Today's Specials:
TECH: 3 Common Pitfalls of Implementing New Restaurant Technology
Implementing new restaurant technology is no joke. But do it right by avoiding these three common pitfalls to restaurant technology implementation.
DID YOU KNOWs…
Two Birds, One Stoner
In honor of today’s unofficial holiday surrounding cannabis, Munchies appropriately recommended their 12 most essential weed-infused recipes. We’re not talking about brownies; we’re talking about a three-course weed-inspired meal. High-class.
McMoble Pay
McDonald’s is officially rolling out their mobile order and pay system which will be available in all 14,000-plus of its US locations by the end of the year. Starbucks has seen more than 20% of total sales from their mobile app after launching it in 2015. TBD if McD’s will see the same.
Drink Smoker
In case you’re that host that’s totally extra, Neiman Marcus is now selling Fortessa’s Crafthouse Cocktail Smoking Box for $250. The box will provide any drink with the elegant smoky flavor and comes equipped with its own Smoking Gun.
RESTAURANTEURS AGAINST TRUMP
Why it matters to you: A major restaurant association is suing Trump for potentially stealing their international patrons.
Two days ago, the Association of Restaurant Workers teamed up to add to the lawsuits on Trump’s plate. The Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (a non-profit with over 25,000 restaurants workers) has joined a suit that alleges President Donald Trump has violated the Constitution’s emoluments clause. The clause states that “no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
The organization suggests that despite supposedly backing away from his company, Donald Trump is still benefiting financially from the restaurants and hotels in his name. The major problem they claim is that having Trump’s name tied to his restaurants will lead foreign officials to dine at Trump restaurants instead of other elite dining establishments in places like DC and NYC. Many big name restaurateurs have backed the ROC’s decision to join the suit such as Danny Meyer, Tom Colicchio, and Alice Waters. Suing the President for this reason, in particular, will be a tricky task, therefore it will take time and most likely won’t be in a small claims court.
NEW INSTAGRAM ‘COLLECTIONS’
Why it matters to you: a new Instagram feature can make marketing easier to manage.
Last week, Instagram introduced yet a new feature that could help with marketing techniques for your restaurant. Now you have the ability to save posts into individual ‘collections’ by tapping and holding a saved post to add it to an existing collection, similar to the Pinterest setup. Instagram’s saved posts as well as their new collections feature are private and are visible only to the user. So you can’t publicly share your assortment of chosen content unless you want to individually share a bunch of separate photos. However, this feature can make marketing much easier.
Many times when we’re on Instagram, we see content that we would like to recreate but it often gets easily lost. Now it is possible to save posts all in one place so that we can keep track of what competitors are posting, what is new, and what we might want to recreate. Most often this can be the case for clever captions or unique post ideas, but it can also serve as a preliminary content calendar of marketing ideas seen from other restaurants or users. Instagram says that 46 percent of users have saved posts so far, most likely for these reasons.
