Arun's Meal Pickup Order

Travellers order food while passing in the morning and collect it on the way back at night, changing what they want as many times as they like.

Who this is for

Arun Kumbhar runs a dhaba on the Pune-Bengaluru highway, eleven kilometres past Satara. Six tables, two tandoors, his nephew Sagar on the counter. At half past eleven a family stops for tea, says they will pass back around nine at night, and asks him to keep pithla bhakri ready. Arun writes it on a chit and pins it near the till. By four in the afternoon the chit is under a crate of onions.

How the job is done today

Arun keeps a long notebook with a rubber band around it. Some orders go in there, some stay on chits, some stay only in his head. Travellers who took his number send messages at odd hours saying make it four thalis instead of three, and those messages sit in a phone that is charging in the back room. At seven he shouts the night's list across to the cook from memory. Two things happen often. A family arrives at ten and the food was never started. Or the food was started at eight, sat under a cloth for two hours, and Arun ends up giving it free because he is ashamed to serve it.

The screens, in order

1. Menu and time page — Lets a traveller who is standing at the counter or sitting in the car pick dishes and say roughly when they will pass back.
2. Your order page — Shows the traveller their four digit pickup code and everything they asked for, so they can shut the phone and drive.
3. Change or cancel page — Opens from the same link hours later so the traveller can add a dish, drop one, push the time later or call it off entirely.
4. Tonight's pickups — Arun's own page, orders lined up by the time each family said they would arrive, with a button to say this one has gone on the fire.
5. What it was before — Shows the earlier shape of any order in plain words, with a button to put it back the way it was.

What it keeps track of

• Orders — who ordered, their phone number, what dishes and how many, roughly what time they said they would come, the four digit code, whether cooking has started, whether they collected it, whether money was taken
• Menu — dish name, price in rupees, whether it is on today, how many minutes it takes
• Earlier shapes of an order — what the order looked like before the change, who changed it, when, and whether it was put back

The one decision that matters

When a traveller edits, does the new order write over the old one, or does the old one stay behind as a saved version Arun can go back to? Writing over is simpler and each order stays one clean line on the night's board. But the only reason Arun will trust this thing is that nothing he or Sagar taps is final. So keep every earlier shape of the order behind a plain link that says what it was before, written the way he speaks it, seven fifteen this morning, two pithla bhakri and one thali, with a button to put it back. Cancelling should be undoable too, for an hour after. The cost is a little more storing. The gain is that Arun stops being frightened of his own counter screen at nine at night with a car waiting outside.

What to leave out of the first version

No money online. The traveller pays at the counter when they collect. Once you take money up front, every change becomes a part refund and every family that never turns up becomes an argument, and Arun is changing orders all evening. Also leave out any way to send the traveller a message when the food is on the fire. Let him ring them the way he already does. The first version only has to hold the order and let it be changed without fear.

How you would know it worked

A car pulls in at twenty to ten at night, someone says the code through the window, and hot food is in their hands in four minutes. And one evening Sagar wipes an order by mistake, Arun taps put it back, and the family never learns anything went wrong.

Build it

Paste this in and let it run.

I run a dhaba on the Pune-Bengaluru highway near Satara. Make me a website where a traveller passing in the morning can pick dishes from my menu, put their name and phone number, say roughly what time they will come back that night, and get a short code to show me. They should be able to open the same link later and add a dish, remove one, change the time or cancel, as many times as they want, until I mark the food as started. Give me my own page showing tonight's pickups in order of time, with buttons to mark started and collected. Most important, if my nephew or I change something by mistake, I want to see what it was before and put it back with one tap, because I am scared of spoiling somebody's order. Prices in rupees. Money is taken at the counter, nothing online.