Today, Denny’s is launching a massive push to get you to eat more Denny’s. This comes in a revision to the restaurant’s app which will now let you order take-out or even, in some places, get delivery. Hot on the heels of McDonald’s getting into the delivery game, it’s a preview of the much stranger future of food we’ve got coming.
All this was started, we’ll remind you, by Starbucks’ coffee ordering app. Chain restaurants are increasingly a casualty of the overall death of retail: Many of them are staring down a divide where consumers either want a fancy meal or something quick. So when Starbucks had to announce on their earnings calls that business had picked up so much from the app they needed to hire more customers, every chain started looking in the same direction.
Will it work? The jury’s out. While Domino’s remade itself as an ecommerce company, the rest of the food industry was built around malls, foot traffic, and “casual dining experiences.” Denny’s, by setting up an app that lets people skip the booth and just treat the place like another take-out joint, is effectively admitting that has to change. It’ll be curious to see which chains join them. For now, though, doesn’t a delivery Grand Slam sound really, really good?
(Via Denny’s)