If you drink frequently, you’ve probably searched the app store for a special drinks app, something that will tell you which drinks are on sale at which bars / restaurants in your immediate vicinity. Depending on where you are, you might be able to find something that works half-baked, but the quality of these apps is surprisingly poor. They are often outdated, have little coverage or local establishments, or just don’t perform as advertised.
Why not?
I would dare say that these types of applications do not work and here is why. Almost all of the ones out there right now are dependent on individual people hitting the bars, writing the specials, entering them into the app, and then getting posted. Do you see the problem here? No one person or group of people can be tasked with constantly going to all the places in a given area that sell alcohol every day and doing this. It is impossible. This is why the current stable of drink specials / happy hour apps is down.
A new model?
I want to propose a new method or model to do this, one that does not depend on people but on the companies themselves. If there were some kind of central database where each restaurant / bar could enter their specials, you would not suffer from the problems mentioned above. If the company manages its own special offers in this “central database”, it will always be up to date and will be “official”. Anyone should be able to access that central database through a website or native application interface. This model would be very beneficial for anyone looking for specialty drinks in a certain city.
The adoption problem
With any such idea that requires widespread use to “work” or be useful, you have the initial problem of getting people to join in. In this case, companies would have to think that this database is a good idea and start entering their special offers before their customers use the application; that is the problem of the hen before the egg.
It is difficult to convince business owners to adopt any type of new process or software, which goes back to extremely human nature. People resist change and that makes it difficult for innovators to succeed in promoting new technologies.
The only way to solve the adoption problem is advertising – by getting some companies to join something, others are likely to follow.
