Don’t you just hate it when you arrive at a restaurant to find out the wait is about 2 hours long? Or maybe you found a really cool bar your friends told you about, however, when you got there it was pretty “dead”? The ambience of a bar or restaurant can be very unpredictable sometimes.
A popular app called Dash has a new feature that will allow you to be ahead of the game before you go out.
Within the Dash app, there is a feature called venue vibes that will allow you to see the rowdiness of a place at a glance. It shows how packed a bar or a restaurant is in real time. Ratings range from “lively” to “quiet” on a four-point rating scale.
Overall, dash is an unique app that helps you find places to eat, make reservations, and pay – all from your smartphone. To facilitate those payments, Dash is integrated into venues’ point-of-sales computers. Each time someone sits down at a table (whether they’re a Dash user or not), their server opens a tab. That information allows Dash to calculate how crowded a venue is. (Chan, 2014).
Aside from Venue vibes, splitting the tab with a friend just got easier. If you are eating out with a friend, you can invite them to join a tab (in dash), and then assign however many dollar amounts you would like and then simply pay.
The only downside to this app, is that dash is only available at select venues in New York City and Chicago, but considering how user friendly and how much it would make our lives easier, I am sure it will be coming to a city near us soon.
I could definitely use this app. I get really upset when I have to wait for a long time at restaurants. Hopefully this will allow for a great change in how restaurants and bars operate. Kudos to this great app that is emerging and making a statement!
jesscdaily 
Jess,
I wanna start by saying that I really enjoy the format of your wordpress blog. This post is very interesting, I have never heard of Dash but it sounds like I would use it if it came to Blacksburg. I hate when I got downtown and there is no-one out. Apps these days are continuing to amaze me!
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Jessica,
I’m going to play devils advocate and say that this app may be bad for a restaurants business. A few years ago I worked at a popular restaurant where I live. It was pretty crowded during weeknights as most people would use it as a place to grab dinner after work. Since we didn’t take reservations, people would call and ask how crowded we were, and if I told them there were a good number of customers they would usually say something like, “Okay, I think we’ll go somewhere else.” This is because they didn’t feel like waiting for seats to open up. But had they not called and just showed up and we didn’t have seats open we would suggest to have a seat at the bar, grab a drink and wait for a table. More often than not people would do this. Dash could be bad for business because it would lead to people choosing not to go to a particular restaurant just because it’s busy at that particular moment. As anyone who has worked in the industry will tell you, how busy the night will be is unpredictable. We may be swamped with people at one moment, then 20 minutes later we could be half empty. Dash would discourage people, in my opinion, from going to busy restaurants and bringing their business elsewhere. Without Dash these same people may show up to a restaurant and realize that a 15 minute wait isn’t all that long especially if they can have a drink to pass the time.
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Hi Jessica!
Nice post. I’d never heard of Dash before which makes sense being I’m not living in Chicago or NYC, but it is such a cool concept. I hope that it makes it way to VA sometime soon so I can download and make use of it.
Monica
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That is a really cool idea!! Definitely needs to be implemented in the bigger, more popular restaurant spots in Blacksburg (Mellow Mushroom, Gillies/any brunch place on Sunday) It seems as though it would save a lot of time and should be more of a big deal than it is now since this is my first time of hearing about it. Let’s get this thing viral!!!
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Jess,
I’ve also never heard of Dash, but it definitely sounds useful and something any “socialite” would definitely make use of. It seems to draw from apps like Foursquare, where you can tell your friends where you are and how you like/dislike that place. I think this app will become a lot more popular over time, especially with college towns!
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Wow, this is really cool. I’ve never heard of Dash before, but it sounds like an awesome idea. The Venue Vibes part is so cool, and is totally unique to everything else. I have used apps like Yelp before to find out about restaurants and as far as I remember, they have never had anything like this. So Cool.
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