Bartending, RFID Style — Now if you take this technology and “chip” the bartenders you can’t go wrong. Right?
On a busy Saturday night, a good bartender makes a lot of money for the bar’s owner, but an overly generous bartender — or one fond of pouring free drinks for friends — can cost the owner even more.
A Miami-based 7-year-old beverage-monitoring software company is drinking from the keg of RFID and is selling a tilt switch that attaches to bottles and updates an Internet database every time the bottle is poured. Hilton, Hyatt, Outback Steakhouse, TGI Fridays and others are reportedly testing the system.
It’s not merely recording how many times the bottle is poured, but it factors in the tilt of the bottle, the duration of the pour and the bartender’s pouring style to calculate how much liquid is leaving the bottle.
I don’t know how well this is going to work in certain areas. I’ve been at bars on a busy night where you have multiple bartenders going crazy. And I can’t forsee a bartender telling a client – hold on one moment. I have to log into this bottle.
At the end of the night, it may show how much was poured and how much was sold, but it’s still hard to pinpoint problems
Why don’t they develop a digital scale instead (like is used in the self-checkout lanes at stores) and just weigh the bottle before and after the pour? Seems that would give a more accurate figure than some formula using time of pour and angle of tilt. And they wouldn’t have to fumble with attaching the RFID tag to the bottle or removing it when the bottle is empty.
Why dont bars just make a commercial version of the KegBot?
I don’t go to bars anymore as the drinks are hideously expensive and I don’t want to be arrested on the way home. As for the technology in the article … to bad for the bartenders. They should feel lucky they haven’t been replaced by robots. I guess the owners need to get that last drop of blood out of the stone.
Interesting.
I had a collegue who used to audit a restaurant chain and the bar sales were a major source of theft. Over-pour, short-pours, filling the straw with straight booze, etc. – all kinds of tricks of the trade that bartenders play to steal $ without actually trying to steal the liquor stock itself.
If you get too stingy and too expensive, patrons will go elsewhere. An extra pour now and then keeps customers happy and coming back. Its bad enough that the entertainment industry is attempting to soak us dry without having your local pub do the same. Technology is not the answer to everything.
“Technology is not the answer to everything.”
Heresy! 🙂
Bartenders hate these things and sooner or later finds a way to make them fail. Anyone who was worked on developing food and beverage systems discovers pretty quickly that helping the operators provide a better product and service is vastly more effect than big brother bean counting technology. Customers don’t respond positively to these kinds of systems historically. They like the idea that the bartender is their friend who will pour them a more generous drink than the next guy. Also, any half assed point of sale system used in conjunction with an inventory system will give an operator ten times the inventory control information they need, or that most are willing to put to use. Sure a bartender may give away a few drinks to friends, but a smart bartender gives away a lot of free drinks to customers that attract other customers. Guess which ones those are.
If these aren’t reasons enough to have low hopes for this product, most of these devices are just plain nasty. Any pouring device I have seen can’t be properly sterilized (maybe this new one can be). After a few days splash-backed milk, juice and whatever other bar grunge will be homesteading inside these dumb-tech gizmos.
Wow, I’m never going to that bar!