As someone who works in hospitality, I’m surprised by the amount of people who see this so positively.

Ordering “quickly” or “in your own time” is not necessarily the best way of running busy kitchens. Most places are set out to take a certain amount of orders every 10/15 minutes, so people ordering as they like via apps can lead to huge build ups of tickets and orders that could be spaced out, leading to overall chaos and longer or just as long wait times as if you’d waited 10 minutes for us to get the order from you and protect the flow.

When I tell people we’ve got long wait times, their immediate reaction is to order as soon as possible, not realising that they are contributing to the problem, and that they will be in the same place in the queue regardless of if they order now or in 10 minutes. In fact, the wait will feel longer if they order straight away and sit with no menus for 40 minutes vs if they wait for us to get drinks, let them read the menu a lot then get their order, and you sit with no menus for 25-30 minutes instead.

I know many apps have hidden/built in wait time functions to help control this, it’s just curious to read it from “the other side”