Shopping for Computer Restaurant Management Systems

A myriad of computer management systems are available for the restaurant business. The author discusses all aspects of evaluating, purchasing, and using such systems for a restaurant operation.

A Relationship of Wine Ratings and Wholesale Pricing, Vintage, Variety, and Region

Wine reviews, such as those from Wine Spectator and other consumer publications, help drive wine sales. The researchers in this study utilized standardized wholesale “line pricing” from a major wholesale distributor in the Southwest to compare pricing to the ratings published by Wine Spectator and to determine whether there were any correlations among other key attributes of the wine. The study produced interesting results, including that the wholesale price and vintage of a wine are significant in the prediction of the wine’s rating.

A Preliminary Evaluation of the Millennial Shopping Experience: Preferences and Plateaus

This study identified and examined the concerns of hotel general managers regarding ethics in the hospitality industry. Thirty-five managers were interviewed during and immediately following the economic recession to determine which ethical issues in the hotel industry and at their own properties concerned them the most. Results showed that more people and organizations attempted to renegotiate hotel rates, which actions, in turn, led to some lapses in ethical behavior. Managers said that because of the economic downturn, they felt pressure from both private owners and corporate headquarters. They also said a lack of work ethic, low motivation, and low pay caused many workers to underperform in ways that raised ethical issues. Managers also mentioned diversity issues and theft by both guests and employees as ethical issues of concern, and shared stories about their experiences.

A scalable multimedia content processing framework with application to TV shopping

The advent of smart TVs has reshaped the TV-consumer interaction by combining TVs with mobile-like applications and access to the Internet. However, consumers are still unable to seamlessly interact with the contents being streamed. An example of such limitation is TV shopping, in which a consumer makes a purchase of a product or item displayed in the current TV show. Currently, consumers can only stop the current show and attempt to find a similar item in the Web or an actual store. It would be more convenient if the consumer could interact with the TV to purchase interesting items. ^ Towards the realization of TV shopping, this dissertation proposes a scalable multimedia content processing framework. Two main challenges in TV shopping are addressed: the efficient detection of products in the content stream, and the retrieval of similar products given a consumer-selected product. The proposed framework consists of three components. The first component performs computational and temporal aware multimedia abstraction to select a reduced number of frames that summarize the important information in the video stream. By both reducing the number of frames and taking into account the computational cost of the subsequent detection phase, this component component allows the efficient detection of products in the stream. The second component realizes the detection phase. It executes scalable product detection using multi-cue optimization. Additional information cues are formulated into an optimization problem that allows the detection of complex products, i.e., those that do not have a rigid form and can appear in various poses. After the second component identifies products in the video stream, the consumer can select an interesting one for which similar ones must be located in a product database. To this end, the third component of the framework consists of an efficient, multi-dimensional, tree-based indexing method for multimedia databases. The proposed index mechanism serves as the backbone of the search. Moreover, it is able to efficiently bridge the semantic gap and perception subjectivity issues during the retrieval process to provide more relevant results.^

Using secret shopping to assess student assistant training

This paper aims to describe the results of three rounds of secret shopping conducted at the Hubert Library of Florida International University, and how the results affected and were affected by changes made to circulation desk student training programs.

The Mysteries of Secret Shopping and Student Training!

In 2011 the Reference Department at the Glenn Hubert Library (HL), Biscayne Bay Campus, Florida International University (FIU) moved to a joint ser-vice desk with the circulation desk. Shortly after the move reference librarians became concerned with the misinformation that the circulation department’s work-study students sometimes provided to patrons. As a result, we felt a Secret Shopping program would be a good method to evaluate the information provided. Furthermore, it was seen as a method of improving customer service and com-paring the self-perceptions of service to patrons’ perceptions.