The honest buyer's guide to kitchen displays

Price is the last question, not the first

Most kitchen display shopping starts with a row of prices, which is the one comparison that cannot tell you whether any of the products would work in your kitchen. Three questions decide it, and none of them is about money. Two of the three have an answer that should send you somewhere other than here.

One: do you need something on day one that the product has not built?

Not next year. On the first shift you run it. Label and ticket printing, text messages to guests when an order is ready, ingredient counts for the day, live metrics on the screen, coursing and hold-and-fire for full service, a customer-facing order tracker, a manager phone app. All of those are on our plan and none of them is built, and our features page lists them in a table with the same visual weight as the things that do work.

If one of those is the reason you are shopping, a system that has it today beats a system that promises it. Buy the one that has it. We would rather say so now than take thirty days of your attention first.

Two: do you want the display to come from your point-of-sale company?

One vendor, one bill, one phone number to shout at. That is a real requirement and plenty of operators hold it for good reasons.

We are not your point-of-sale company and we are not trying to become one. If that is the requirement, the display your point-of-sale company sells will meet it and we will not. It is a reason to buy something else, and it is not one we will argue you out of.

Three: your internet drops mid-service. What has to happen?

Be honest about this one, because most kitchens have lived through it. There are two acceptable answers and they lead to different purchases.

If the answer is that you can work off paper until it comes back, then your kitchen genuinely does not need the thing we are built around, and any of these products will do. Compare the numbers and pick the cheapest one that runs on the tablets you already own.

If the answer is that the screens have to keep taking bumps as though nothing happened, that is the one thing we are built for. Orders already on the screen stay on the screen, every bump is recorded, and it syncs when the connection returns. That is the architecture rather than a line on a feature list, and it is the case where paying more for us is the rational choice.

Where the prices are, and what we will not compare

Our comparison page carries what the other systems charge, each price beside a link to the company's own pricing page and the date we read it, and it refuses to print a number where we could not read one on the company's own page. It compares prices and nothing else, because a feature claim about somebody else's product needs checking exactly as strictly as a price does and is far harder to check from a marketing page.

There is no ranking on it, no score out of five and no winner column. The chooser underneath the table asks you these same three questions and will tell you to buy something else in two cases out of the four.

The one thing to do on your next shift

Answer the three questions before you open a single pricing page. If the first two send you elsewhere, you have saved yourself a month of demos. If they do not, the third one tells you whether the cheapest option on the table is good enough for your kitchen, which is a decision no vendor can make for you.