"Waiter, check please?" Nah, just use an app
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
A startup from Resy and Eater co-founder Ben Leventhal is now aiming to make end-of-meal check requests a relic of the past, while also generating valuable data and potentially boosting loyalty for restaurants.
Why it matters: Restaurants are generally in better shape now than during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but they're still hunting for anything that can boost their often razor-thin margins.
Driving the news: The startup Blackbird Labs today is rolling out Blackbird Pay, a new blockchain-enabled payment option for restaurants and their diners.
- With Blackbird Pay, diners can pay their bill at any point during the meal through a smartphone app with their usual cards — no printed check required.
- They can also use Blackbird Pay to split the check with their friends, pay with rewards points earned from using the app, or pay with USDC, a "stablecoin" cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar.
The other side: Restaurants in turn get a host of valuable information about Blackbird Pay users when they check in, including what they've ordered in the past and how frequently they stop in for a bite.
- That can help restaurants get to know their regulars better — enabling them to offer a round on the house, for example, to boost customer loyalty.
- Restaurants also benefit from cheaper transactions: Blackbird takes a 2% cut, whereas credit card merchant fees can run as high as 3.5%.
What they're saying: "In the restaurant industry, as big as it is, margins are declining. Connectivity between customers and restaurants is eroding," Leventhal tells Axios.
- "Our view is that it's tied to the technology infrastructure that restaurants have available to them, in particular around payments — and really a lack of data fidelity that restaurants have about who their customers are."
Zoom in: A handful of buzzy restaurants have already signed on to Blackbird, including Bangkok Supper Club in New York, Birdsong in San Francisco and Rancho Lewis in Charleston.
- "We like Charleston for the obvious reasons," Leventhal says, adding that it "punches above its weight class in terms of the quality of restaurants and the affinity for restaurants in the city."
Reality check: Other companies, like InKind, are also trying to get diners to pay their bill through an app in exchange for various rewards and perks, while many restaurants are offering QR codes on printed bills or handheld point-of-sale systems for at least slightly quicker check-paying.
- Some restaurants' sales systems also already let them keep tabs on their customers' past orders.
Yes, but: Getting people to use a new app to do pretty much anything is always an uphill battle.
The bottom line: "There's a real sort of explosion of new stuff, new technologies, new ideas in tech to service restaurants. It leads to some amount of chaos before it leads to real progress," says Leventhal.
- "But it's great to see the overall volume of startups and legacy players that are pushing on innovation and thinking about new functionality and added functionality for the tech stack, which ultimately leads to both competition and innovation."
