Is this going to be affordable for smaller operators? The chains are going to start first because they’ve got deeper pockets. You might think, “Wow! This will really be a lot of programming.” But, actually, it’s not. All buildings today, and for quite some time, have been made on a CAD system. That’s a Computer Aided Design program. So if you build a building, blueprints are not used very much anymore. It’s all Computer Aided Design. Well, the 3D building for online can be constructed in seconds based on the CAD design.

By taking this program and essentially designing around it for online? The exact location of the door, of the walls, the bathroom, everything—poof! It’s all of a sudden constructed and there. All I have to do is look at the particular store on Fourth Street in Miami, get that CAD drawing of that store, and create that store. All I need is graphic artists to make sure the colors are right. And, by the way, graphic artists are far cheaper than programmers.

Aside from big companies, who else will this appeal to at first? If your market is baby boomers, you probably aren’t going there first. If your market is 20 somethings, you are probably going to say, “You know, this is how we’re going to steal customers.”

What about in-store kiosks? We’re talking about basically taking an entire human element out of the hospitality experience. In developing competitive advantage, you have to decide what brand experience you want, and as it goes forward, you have to ask yourself, “What is it that I want to keep and what is it that I want to let go of?” So there’s competitive advantage in finding that mix for you. There’s not a one size fits all. Thank goodness, otherwise they’d just have one restaurant that did everything. There’s competitive advantage in finding what’s the right mix for your crowd.

Secondly, there’s another strategy I’ll share. I call the strategy Both/And, which means that we tend to think either you’re going to do this or you’re going to do that. In other words, we have people or we don’t, but that’s the Either/Or. I don’t like that strategy. I like to have different mixes.

Self-service is better than bad service. That’s an important one. So maybe during the rush of lunch or the rush of dinner when service falls down because they can’t hire more people for the rush, that’s when the kiosk takes over. But maybe that’s in one place. Maybe another place all they have are kiosks. Have kiosks helped the jam at checking into a flight? Yes. I’m disappointed when they don’t have kiosks.

Going back to the Both/And concept, the key is, When do you use the human?

You have to figure out where and when it’s best for your concept to use the human and when to use the machine? For example, some might want the people that are in line to be experiencing the person who’s putting the meal together and picking how you want it. Again that’s up to you deciding what’s your brand and how can you best bring the brand and use this with your brand.

What kind of learning curve for customers is involved with using these kinds of technology? Well, luckily, the consumers are running into kiosks every time they go fly. So, you know, the kiosk experience five years ago or four years ago would’ve been fairly new for most people, but today anyone who has flown probably already has experienced what a kiosk is like. Secondly, processing power is getting more powerful, and that allows us to make the technology easier, use better graphics, make things more intuitive. So that’s one of the benefits of powerful technology is as it gets more powerful, you can make it easier and faster so you don’t have to wait.

There will be a learning curve. There’s always a learning curve when you do new things, but one of the things to do as an owner/operator is to avoid being on the bleeding edge. But you may want to be on the leading edge.

How do you lead without bleeding? You learn from other industries that have already done the bleeding. What did they learn? One of the first things I would do if I was interested in kiosks is talk to the airline industry and the others and find out what they are learning now so I don’t have to make their mistakes.