How Tableside Payments Are Changing the Restaurant Industry

How Tableside Payments Are Changing the Restaurant Industry
Bryan Solar, GM of Square for Restaurants, shares how Square's mobile POS is changing tableside payments for restaurants.
by Bryan Solar May 19, 2022 — 3 min read
How Tableside Payments Are Changing the Restaurant Industry

Restaurants have always been forced to adapt and change on the fly. That’s why they invented the daily special. But being an agile restaurant owner today isn’t just about maximizing margins, it’s about building up your entire business to be flexible, transformable, and constantly optimizing. 

The restaurants that survived wave after wave of the pandemic not only pivoted to become contactless, takeout businesses overnight but dealt with everything from feeding hospital workers to coaching guests on how to use QR codes. These are the same businesses that continue to take the brunt of the global labor shortage, supply chain instability, and the rising costs of everything, with no clear rebound in sight. 

Restaurant operators have and will continue to lean on technology to help them move from survival mode into thrive mode. They need to reach more diners and extend their hospitality beyond the dining room, with delivery or curbside pickup to meet growing diner demand anytime, anywhere. As the GM for Square for Restaurants, I’m passionate about giving restaurant operators POS tools that automate front-of-house and back-of-house processes, give time back to owners and staff, and provide everything they need to gain a competitive advantage.

Industry challenges bring new waves of concern

Success in the Food and Beverage business is notoriously challenging, and the unique circumstances of the past few years have created new headwinds. Some of the biggest challenges I see restaurateurs facing today are: 

  1. Rising costs: Overall, costs of operations and ingredients are going up. Whether it’s due to supply chain shortages, Covid closures, inflation, or geopolitical conflicts — all of these factors have a major impact on both businesses and their customers.
  2. Staffing shortages: Many restaurants are in crisis right now, trying to cover even more job responsibilities with fewer people –  both finding and retaining staff continues to be a major struggle across industries.
  3. Volatility: With supply chain instability, evolving health and dining regulations, erratic weather, constantly changing consumer behavior, and more, flexibility is still the key to success. 

Tools tailor-made for restaurants are the solution

Before the pandemic, contactless and tableside ordering and payments was a nice-to-have idea, at least in the U.S. But now, adding handheld devices to your existing POS can be the key to helping your restaurant survive the volatility the industry is suffering through. In fact, it can empower restaurant staff to manage more orders, no matter where they are placed. 

As more restaurants discover the power of tableside ordering, they’re seeing its potential to help do more than they realized. A handhled POS device small enough to fit in a server’s apron pocket has the power to drive up the average check size, increase tips for servers, reduce comps and voids, and enhance the customer experience. It can help restaurants increase sales, even when short staffed. In my mind, this is the key to putting operators back in the driver’s seat for the new era of restaurants. Best of all, it puts the focus back on hospitality – and profitability – where it belongs. 

Bryan Solar
Bryan Solar is based in Austin TX, and before coming to Square he spent over 5 years at Google where he served as General Manager and Product Lead of the Google Restaurants Tools Team. Prior to that, he led SMB New Products & Markets, and Reserve at Google. Before Google, he was Co-Founder and CEO of a company named TownHound (which was acquired by Google) that built real-time marketing technology to help restaurants and small businesses drive customer traffic during low traffic times, and prior to that he spent three years running a nonprofit that helped turn around struggling restaurants.

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