Do You Eat, Play With Or Photograph Your Food In Restaurants?

The Smartphone revolution has amazing side effects.

Do you remember those good old times when an evening out at a Restaurant was enjoyed sans brick / cell / Smartphone? Well, even in the times of the brick-phone ( incidentally, we all thought it was the coolest thing out back in the early 1990's ) it was firstly too heavy to cart around in a smart purse and secondly the thought of taking pictures with it was still decades away...

Times spent eating out were great. Full focus on the company, food and ambiance. If you did want to tell your friends about it the next day, you painted the scence with your wordsmith qualities. You know what, we saw the worded picture.

The other day a report was doing the rounds on the social media circuit. Yes, I know it is ironic to read about it on there. A restaurant in New York City was trying to figure out why their customers complained of extremely slow service, despite there being enough staff in all sections of the restaurant. Fortunately they had security footage of a decade before and thus the consulting company was able to compare then and now.

Good golly gosh, it is no wonder service seemed slow:

• A decade ago, nobody had a Smartphone but now, most customers do.
• Customers whipped out their Smartphone to take a few pictures of the menu etc, before they even perused the menu.
• Not surprisingly, they took numerous pictures of each plate of food, making sure the lighting was great. When eventually the picture was uploaded through their Smartphone to wow ( or bore ) their social network friends, guess what...oh yes, the food was not hot anymore. What a cheek, some even sent it back to be reheated.
• The waiter was frequently asked to take a picture of the patrons. Not once but a few times until it looked good enough to upload...
• Here is a link for details of the report.

We don't own a Smartphone yet but the way technology is heading, one needs to have one eventually. More than likely, the first week we have one, will be spent taking pictures of everything and everybody that crosses our path, but I hope that after the first week this craze would have settled down.

Here is a scary thought: Taking so many pictures on Smartphones and using these picture to communicate your actions will make us loose our diction and ability to read.
That adage of

A picture is worth a thousand words

was clearly coined in the dark ages before Internet & Smartphones.

Let's try and get our words back...proper words not abbreviations or phonetic sounding words.

Biggi

P/S: Yes, I am aware that this makes me sound old or at least middle aged....