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From ZDnet: technology companies and restaurants are experimenting with electronic menus. These can be deployed as portable devices like electronic books, or built into a table-top display screen like Microsoft’s Surface technology. Customers could place an order with the electronic menu, play games, and monitor their order’s progress from the kitchen to their table.

Restaurateurs may see reduced error rates and lower expenses if order-taking becomes more automated. Electronic menus might be tied directly into kitchen, POS (point-of-sale) and inventory systems, allowing restaurant chains to develop more accurate real-time sales data.

Seasonal choices can easily be accommodate with an electronic menu. When the kitchen is running low of an item, the menu might indicate that there are only “x servings left” this evening. When the supply is exhausted, the menu suggests an alternative.

Electronic menus could also drive increased impulse sales of high-margin items like beverages and desserts.

The adoption curve for electronic restaurant menus resembles mobile phones in some respects. There may be several iterations of widely incompatible systems before consumers are interested enough to try the technology. Costs are likely to be high.

Waiters and other floor staff may reject the concept completely, especially in Europe. Someone still has to bring the food and beverages to the customer, and those employees may receive lower tips if they did not take the customer’s order.

Europe and Hawaii may be excellent regions to try a key feature of electronic menus. Just like e-books, an electronic menu could support any number of languages through Unicode and graphical displays. A tourist might order competently from an e-menu, instead of guessing at cognates and grumbling about the results. Happy customers are more likely to come back for more, and to tell their friends.