Wait times at some campus Dining facilities will be reduced if the implementation of a service that allows students and faculty members order food online is successful.
The service, which officially began Aug. 6, will be available for people eating at the Atrium or at Woodworth Commons.
Touch-screen kiosks will replace traditional paper or face-to-face ordering at McKinley Grille and Block and Barrel in the Atrium, as well as Della Casa, Deli World and Woody's Grill in Woodworth.
After customers order their food online, they will receive a confirmation e-mail.
They then go to a station in between McKinley Grille and Chick-fil-A in the Atrium to pick up their food. The pick-up station for Woodworth is still undetermined, as renovations on the hall are not yet complete.
People who use the service will be given a receipt at the pick-up of their food that is scanned at the cashier instead of the individual stickers of each food item, Rodney Brooks, general manager at the Atrium, said.
"With the kiosk now and ordering online ... you won't have that six-to-eight minute wait for food to be prepared," Amy Wagner, coordinator for the Web Dining program, said
Those who order their food at the kiosks in the Dining Halls do not print a receipt and will still scan each stickered item at the cashier.
Wagner said she hopes the new ordering systems will help students use their meal cards rather than letting their money go to waste.
"I think it goes a long way to customer service," Brooks said.
If a customer does not pick up their food, however, her Bursar account will be charged, and after the third time she places an order and does not pick it up, she will be locked out of the system for an undetermined amount of time, Wagner said.
"We're trying to make sure students have service at their fingertips," she said.
Planning for the new system started about three years ago and has since been in development to work out any bugs.
Dining Services tested the program over Summer Semester, Wagner said, and 20 live orders were sent through without any apparent problems.
Online orders sent to dining locations will refresh every five minutes on the cook's ordering screen but will be limited to 15 orders at a time to keep the staff from getting overwhelmed, Brooks said. Kiosk ordering is unlimited.
Atrium Chef Jason Reynolds said the online ordering and kiosks correspond with the already implemented cash registers that accept debit cards.
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