Printed at the pass is not silent about the kitchen
A rival’s orders print a ticket at each dispense point. Our table left their kitchen-screen cell blank, as if their site said nothing. It says something else.
One cell moved in our comparison table on Saturday. A rival’s kitchen-screen cell had been a dash since August, meaning their site did not say how the kitchen gets an order. Reading all of their pages as text, it plainly does say. Orders are sent to print at each dispense location, priced per point. A case study describes an order sent to print at the allocated bar. Two venue pages say the customer’s name and chosen slot are printed on the ticket. Their sign-up form asks how many locations should get a ticket when an order is placed, maybe two in a kitchen and one at a bar.
Silent and different are not the same blank
A dash has one meaning on our page: their own site does not say. That was false for this cell. Their site describes a complete answer to the row’s question, and the answer is a printer rather than a screen. Leaving the dash would have told a reader we found nothing, when what we found was a different design. So the cell is now a half, and the note beside the row says what the half means: their orders print a ticket at each dispense point rather than showing on a screen.
Half is the right state because the row is named for a screen. A printed ticket does the first job a kitchen screen does, which is getting the order to the station that cooks it. It does not do the rest: bumping a ticket when it is done, showing how long each one has waited, or surviving a paper roll running out. Those are why we built a screen. They are also why the row is not simply a tick for anyone who can get an order into a kitchen somehow.
What an operator should take from it
When a supplier says orders reach the kitchen, ask by what. A printer at each station is a real, working answer and plenty of kitchens prefer paper. A screen is a different answer with different failure modes. We run a kitchen screen, and we also print dockets on the one printer model we have proven on real paper, because some stations want both. What we will not do is mark a rival down for choosing paper, or mark them blank for having chosen. The table says what they do, and the note says how it differs from the row.