Why Restaurants Are So Hungry for Your Personal Data

Why Restaurants Are So Hungry for Your Personal Data

Can a specific value be placed on personal privacy — say, the cost of a latte? A new coffee shop called Shiru Cafe is betting people will be willing to spill the beans on their personal data in exchange for a free cup of coffee, NPR reported last week. The cafe, an offshoot of a Japanese chain now open in Providence, Rhode Island, mainly serves students from nearby Brown University. For each transaction, a cashier asks for customers’ names, birthdays, phone numbers, email addresses, majors, and professional interests before serving them their caffeine fix — no U.S. currency accepted (professors are allowed to pay for their drinks with cold hard cash, however).

On Twitter, opinions on the cafe’s business model ranged from “terrifying” to “depressing,” with some pointing to the personal-data-for-goods exchange as evidence that a dystopian future is already here, comparing it to an episode of Black Mirror. But consumers should know that in 2018, basically every restaurant and business is trying to collect personal data — some are just more up front about it than others.

Data is now known as “the new gold,” and much ado has been made about how companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon collect and utilize user data. The results range from simply creepy to, as in the case of Facebook, dangerous: The social media publisher is currently trying to explain a massive data breach. But it’s not just the world’s biggest tech corporations (and somewhat murkier “data brokers”) that are tracking our every move: In recent years, customer data has become increasingly valuable to restaurants. Hospitality businesses are eager to obtain everything from diners’ dates of birth and marital status to specific opinions on how they liked a particular appetizer. Here’s how it happens, why it’s only going to get more common, and what it all means.

Restaurants, be they independent fine dining restaurants or quick-service chains, have long tracked customer preferences via various methods (think of a savvy maitre’d who remembers a VIP customer’s birthday, or a server who automatically brings a patron’s favorite cocktail). But as the restaurant industry grows more competitive and sales growth has slowed, restaurants are resorting to new ways to remain competitive, and obsessively tracking data to figure out what exactly their customers want is a big part of that.

It’s no longer enough to collect demographic information — these days, using apps, location tracking, and free wifi sign-ins, restaurants from Starbucks to Sweetgreen are creating individual customer profiles tracking everything from Frappuccino flavor preferences to what time of day someone typically comes into a store to their behavior, tracked as a pattern over time, once inside a business. Collecting and analyzing all this information helps restaurants figure out what exactly customers want and how they can create new dishes or tweak existing ones, and how to better tailor their marketing to individual customers, all with the ultimate goal of boosting sales.

“Gone are the days of trying to figure out what millennials want versus boomers,” Sherif Mityas, chief experience officer of TGI Fridays, said during a panel on restaurant data analytics during this week’s MUFSO conference in Dallas. “We want to know what Mary wants versus Susan, and we need an unprecedented amount of data, analytics, and machine-learning to utilize this data in the best possible way.” By focusing on customer data collection and analysis and combining those insights with artificial intelligence, Mityas says TGI Fridays has doubled its to-go business over the past 12 months — thanks to moves like sending “Mary” personalized push notifications from the restaurant’s app at precisely 6:30 p.m, just as she’s running out the door to get her kids to soccer practice.

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