Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
I'm rich Tamiro and this is rich on Tech Daily.
If you go to a restaurant overseas, chances are you're
gonna pay for your tab right from your table. The
waiter will come over with some sort of wireless device,
they'll dip your card and you'll be on your way,
no tipping necessary. Now Here in the US, the process
is a little different. Usually, you wait until the end
of your meal, you wait for your bill, then you
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hand over your credit card. It disappears for a while,
and finally you get your receipt, you sign it, and
you're off. Well, now we're seeing a trend of more
and more restaurants embracing pay at the table technology. Now,
I visited one of these restaurants in downtown Los Angeles.
It's called seventy one Above. This place is seventy one
floors above the street and it has amazing views. But
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they're also using this cool new table top payment system
called table safe Rail. And it looks like your typical
check presenter, but when you open it up, there's a
small screen inside and it's kind of like a little tablet,
and it lets you see your bill, of course, but
you can do some really cool thing. You can split
up your bill in various ways. So if you just
want to divide it by two couples or four couples evenly,
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you can do that. Or if you said, hey, you
know what, I just met my friends for a drink.
I just got a salad, so I'm just going to
pay for that portion, you can split it up like
that as well. And you don't need your waiter's permission
or help or handing over a bunch of credit cards.
You can do it all at your own table. I
love this technology. You can swipe your card, you can
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dip your cards, you can use the chip, or in
the future, very soon you'll be able to use Apple
pay in all the various mobile payment systems. So again,
this is a lot more secure than handing over your
credit card or debit card. In fact, when I go
to a restaurant, I'm usually hesitant to use my debit
card because you know, you don't see where your card
goes for five or ten minutes, and so that usually
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forces me to use my credit card, which is a
little bit more safe. So this is really cool. We've
seen a lot of other restaurants do this as well. Now,
if you think about it. The chains are where you're
seeing this. The most seventy one above is an independent restaurant,
but it costs a lot of money to implement this
new technology, so we're seeing it take off at the
chains a lot faster. So folks have tweeted me, and
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of course I've seen it at Chili's myself, but other
people have seen it at Red Robin, Tgi Fridays out Back, BJ's,
and a whole bunch of other places. So what do
you think? Do you love or you hate this technology?
Some folks on my Facebook page said it's way too impersonal.
You know, I'm paying for my meal out. I think
they should do the work. But I love it because
I'm in control, and especially when it comes to splitting
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up the bill. That's really nice because a lot of
times you have to tell the waiter, hey, can you
put twenty five on this card and thirty five on
this card? And they have to remember which card is
which and who it belongs to. So this takes a
lot of the guesswork out of the equation. So check
it out on my Facebook page, Facebook dot com slash
rich on tech. Let me know what you think of
these new pay at the table Technologies. Thanks so much
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for listening. I'm Rich Damiro I'll talk to you real soon.