They wait somewhere comfortable
No crowd jammed inside your front door. They walk, they shop, they get a text, they come back. Your host stops repeating “about twenty more minutes”.
Waitlist
A forty-minute quote on a Saturday sends people down the block. If they can wander off and get a text when you’re ready, most of them come back — and you got their number, with permission, on the way in.
Why it matters
No crowd jammed inside your front door. They walk, they shop, they get a text, they come back. Your host stops repeating “about twenty more minutes”.
The tablet learns your actual turn times by day and hour, so the quote you give is close to real. Nothing burns goodwill like a twenty-minute wait that runs forty.
With a clear opt-in at the host stand — never a pre-checked box. Over a season, that’s the list you text on a slow Tuesday.
How it works
Mounted, charged, on your wifi, with a stand that survives a busy Saturday. It’s ours — if it breaks, we swap it.
Ten seconds. The customer sees exactly what they’re signing up for.
One tap. If they don’t answer in five minutes, it nudges them once and then moves down the list.
“Saturday nights we were losing four or five parties an hour to the wait. Now they walk down to the bookstore and come back.”
Questions
No. It’s included in the Premium plan and it stays ours. If it dies, cracks, or someone knocks it off the stand, we replace it — no charge, no claim form.
The tablet keeps working on its own cellular connection for the texting side. You won’t lose the list mid-service.
It’s two buttons. We train whoever’s working the day we install, and we leave a card by the stand for the person who wasn’t.
No. If you take reservations on OpenTable or Resy, keep them. This handles the walk-ins standing in front of you, which is where the lost money is.