Is this the end of asking for the restaurant bill?
MANY of us enjoy treating ourselves to a restaurant meal, but trying to pay for it can be a real pain.
Now Barclaycard has come up with a gizmo it claims skips the chore of having to catch the waiter’s eye or split the bill.
The card company’s Dine & Dash concept works in a similar way to ‘tap and go’ technology, which is changing the way customers pay for items with a card.
A small black box – or totem – sits on the restaurant table and takes care of the entire bill-paying process.
Diners, who have downloaded the Dine & Dash app to their smartphone, tap the handset on the totem when they sit down. They then order from a waiter after their totem starts flashing blue. Customers can also use the app to add a tip or split the bill between several cards.
So-called proximity tracking, using beacons that create a detection field, can identify when people have left the restaurant and will charge the cost of the meal to their card. Once a bill has been settled, the totem flashes green.
Barclaycard said the technology was launched after research showed 36 per cent of diners said waiting for the bill was the most frustrating part of eating out. A survey found that some people have had to wait as long as 19 minutes to pay and get out of the door.
The new technology is to be trialled on March 13 at a Prezzo chain, in London.
The managing director of Future Payments at Barclaycard, Nick Kerigan, said the system was a ‘win-win for consumers and restaurants’.
Supermarket checkouts could be a thing of the past thanks to a smartphone app. Tech company Supersmart’s app lets shoppers scan items on the go using their phones. Customers then pay after a special floor pad weighs the shopping – with cameras keeping an eye out for items they have forgotten to scan.