Ask HN: How can I automate ordering lunch for my team in NYC?

8 points by s_r_n 6 years ago | 10 comments

Every week, my team has a company-provided lunch. Since we are a startup and don't have an office manager, I have become the one responsible for ordering. It's not a big deal--it only takes 15 minutes or so--but it's a distraction that I wish to automate.

My current process is finding a new restaurant on Caviar, sending a Slack message to the team asking for their orders, and placing the order. Anyone know of a good app that automates this process, or solved this experience somehow?

Fjolsvith 6 years ago |

Back in the 90's I worked at a small PC manufacturing/Cobol coding company (6-7 employees). The site had a fax server on the network. You could print from MS Word directly to the fax server, using a preset destination fax number.

Once in a while, the owner would call up and have me order mocha's for everyone. I'd pull up the order doc and print it. It got faxed to the espresso shop and 15 minutes later, hot mochas got delivered.

davismwfl 6 years ago |

Not everything is worth automating. And things that deal with people's choices specifically are never easy to automate.

Hire a part time office manager/assistant, or full time if you can justify it for other tasks too. Or hand off the task to a different person each week to handle the selection and ordering. This way it is a shared pain and people will do their best to make it not painful on their teammates.

duxup 6 years ago |

15 min ... man that's pretty low on the time scale of useful things to automate considering the complexity here.

People are going to want to make choices, someone / thing is going to need to place the order, different restaurants.... there's a lot of potential complexity if you are going to solve it yourself, and a product that fills all those gaps might be more costly or limiting than 15 minutes.

keiferski 6 years ago |

https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/lunchbot-how-we...

This guy solved your exact problem with Slack and Google Sheets.

chris11 6 years ago |

Doordash lets people place their own orders when placing a group order from a restaurant. You still have to deal with getting people to place their orders though. But I wouldn't want to optimize to much further, as an employee choosing my own food would be more important to me than saving 15 minutes.

tedmiston 6 years ago | |

Second this - I like being able to pick my own food with a DoorDash group order vs everyone getting the same thing. The only caveat I've hit is order maximums requiring splitting into multiple orders for bigger groups.

twunde 6 years ago |

Caviar used to have a link where everyone could sign in and order by n time to get lunch. Seamless and stadium both have the same thing. The other alternative is to get catering and just set a weekly schedule.

quickthrower2 6 years ago |

Use the same restaurant every week would make it simpler. Slack channel. Ask who wants to order. Order what is said in the replies. No reply = no lunch. Everyone will soon learn.

Arrange with the restaurant to take an email order. You just forward it over.

ianceicys 6 years ago |

Hire an office manager.

ksherlock 6 years ago |

Seems like an opportunity for your company to pivot into the nascent and lucrative automated lunch ordering industry.