Tapingo quickly became popular after NC State partnered with the app in November 2015 and has since kept dining employees constantly working on large amounts of mobile orders.
Tapingo is a mobile app that allows customers to order food for delivery or pick-up. According to NC State Dining, Tapingo allows customers to pay using a credit card, meal plan or AllCampus student account. Currently, it is offered at 14 different dining locations on campus.
While Tapingo has proven to make ordering easier for students on campus, the app’s enormous popularity has caused incorrect wait time estimations and a backlog of orders.
Allie Davis, a third-year studying accounting, currently works at Port City Java in Talley Student Union. Davis said she feels that Tapingo can be stressful when trying to close at the end of the day, and the app could be improved by shutting it down 30 minutes prior to closing.
“When we are closing at 10:30 sometimes, we get like 10 [drink orders] on Tapingo at 10:28,” Davis said. “We are still making those drinks when we are doing a bunch of cleaning and trying to close.”
Shawn Hoch, interim senior director of hospitality services, said his goal is to support students who need food when studying at all times during the day and night. However, he said that an exception to providing that service would be if there were a multitude of orders coming in the minute before closing time.
“[If] we have 50 people, let’s say at 11:59 p.m., that are submitting an order as we close, we may need to figure that out,” Hoch said. “I will have to go look and see what the orders are in the last few minutes of the shift.”
Leif Eckstrand, a second-year studying materials science and engineering, is a student worker at Jason’s Deli. Eckstrand said he believes that the time estimations on Tapingo are frequently incorrect and that it can cause issues for students who are in a hurry.
“Since I have been there, I have noticed people come, see if their order wasn’t there and leave and never show up, and then we have orders that did not get picked up,” Eckstrand said.
Randy Lait is the senior director of administrative services for campus enterprises and has worked at NC State for 35 years. Lait played a large role in partnering NC State with Tapingo and explained that time estimations have been an issue from the beginning of its usage.
“The wait time on [Tapingo] wasn’t really designed into the system in a complex way,” Lait said. “On a college campus when classes let out, it’s a real flood of people, and so what we found is that you’d get this flood of orders that would come in, and it required a better way of addressing a lot of orders in a short window.”
According to Lait and Hoch, NC State is currently working on solutions to increase customer and worker satisfaction with Tapingo, such as renovating the Starbucks in Talley Student Union this summer in order for the cafe to run more efficiently.
Despite Tapingo having some issues, it continues to bring in multiple orders to dining locations throughout the day and has been shown to help students in a hurry between classes.
Anand Srinivasan, a graduate student in industrial engineering, works at Los Lobos. Srinivasan agrees that while Tapingo can be overwhelming during rush hours, it is a useful tool for students and is good for business.
“Students can order from their classes, so it makes their time more valuable,” Srinivasan said.
For more information about Tapingo, students can visit the NC State Dining website.
