
Ask HN: How can I automate ordering lunch for my team in NYC? - s_r_n
Every week, my team has a company-provided lunch. Since we are a startup and don&#x27;t have an office manager, I have become the one responsible for ordering. It&#x27;s not a big deal--it only takes 15 minutes or so--but it&#x27;s a distraction that I wish to automate.<p>My current process is finding a new restaurant on Caviar, sending a Slack message to the team asking for their orders, and placing the order. Anyone know of a good app that automates this process, or solved this experience somehow?
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Fjolsvith
Back in the 90's I worked at a small PC manufacturing/Cobol coding company
(6-7 employees). The site had a fax server on the network. You could print
from MS Word directly to the fax server, using a preset destination fax
number.

Once in a while, the owner would call up and have me order mocha's for
everyone. I'd pull up the order doc and print it. It got faxed to the espresso
shop and 15 minutes later, hot mochas got delivered.

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davismwfl
Not everything is worth automating. And things that deal with people's choices
specifically are never easy to automate.

Hire a part time office manager/assistant, or full time if you can justify it
for other tasks too. Or hand off the task to a different person each week to
handle the selection and ordering. This way it is a shared pain and people
will do their best to make it not painful on their teammates.

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duxup
15 min ... man that's pretty low on the time scale of useful things to
automate considering the complexity here.

People are going to want to make choices, someone / thing is going to need to
place the order, different restaurants.... there's a lot of potential
complexity if you are going to solve it yourself, and a product that fills all
those gaps might be more costly or limiting than 15 minutes.

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keiferski
[https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/lunchbot-how-
we...](https://medium.com/geckoboard-under-the-hood/lunchbot-how-we-combined-
google-sheets-with-slack-to-simplify-team-lunch-d309844a22ce)

This guy solved your exact problem with Slack and Google Sheets.

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chris11
Doordash lets people place their own orders when placing a group order from a
restaurant. You still have to deal with getting people to place their orders
though. But I wouldn't want to optimize to much further, as an employee
choosing my own food would be more important to me than saving 15 minutes.

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tedmiston
Second this - I like being able to pick my own food with a DoorDash group
order vs everyone getting the same thing. The only caveat I've hit is order
maximums requiring splitting into multiple orders for bigger groups.

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twunde
Caviar used to have a link where everyone could sign in and order by n time to
get lunch. Seamless and stadium both have the same thing. The other
alternative is to get catering and just set a weekly schedule.

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quickthrower2
Use the same restaurant every week would make it simpler. Slack channel. Ask
who wants to order. Order what is said in the replies. No reply = no lunch.
Everyone will soon learn.

Arrange with the restaurant to take an email order. You just forward it over.

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ianceicys
Hire an office manager.

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ksherlock
Seems like an opportunity for your company to pivot into the nascent and
lucrative automated lunch ordering industry.

