iPads used in restaurants in China to prevent overcharging

Don’t you hate it when sometimes you go to a seafood restaurant and you end up getting ripped off? Well it seems that due to tourists complaining about exorbitant seafood prices at Sanya in Southern China’s Hainan province, the local government has decided to act upon it by introducing a new order system that will hopefully put an end to all the rip offs and cheating. Utilizing an iPad, it seems that restaurants who have 15 or more tables will have to use this new system, while smaller restaurants will have to rely on PDAs.

Through the installed software, customers will be able to read the menu and place their orders directly on the tablets/PDAs which will then be sent to the kitchens via WiFi. While the rest of the menu’s prices is set by the restaurant, the price of seafood will be set by the local government, so if the restaurant charges higher than what the government has set, an alarm will go off and the bill will not be printed. At the moment about 20 out of the 200 restaurants in Sanya will be undergoing this trial, with the government offering up to 9,000 Yuan per restaurant in subsidies for the iPad, software and training costs.

If you understand Mandarin then you can check out a local Chinese news report on the system below, but what do you guys think? Pretty cool system, no?

Tyler Lee
Categories: Apple, Tablets
Tags: China, iPad