Where does a tag go on a restaurant table?

What a table does to a tag

It is wiped between every service with something wet, and in most rooms with something that dissolves grease. The adhesive is what gives way first, which the adhesive page ranks above every other failure.

Hot plates arrive on it. A tag under the spot where a dish lands sees a temperature cycle several times a day, and the temperature page gives the order in which that ends a tag: the adhesive, then the substrate, then, rarely, the chip.

People pick at it. A sticker with a lifted corner is a sticker somebody removes while waiting for a dessert, and a tag that is picked off is a tag that was also a tamper opportunity, which matters once the tap carries money.

And the surface is rarely friendly. A metal table needs an on metal construction, which the on metal page covers; a glass one is transparent to the field and unforgiving about adhesive residue.

Give the tag a body

A table stand, a block, a menu holder or a laminated card carries the tag away from the surface being cleaned and lets the object be replaced in a second. It also gives the tag somewhere to be marked, which a bare sticker never has enough room for.

Laminating the tag into the card is a manufacturing step with its own risks, which the lamination page sets out; buying a finished card is easier than making one.

Where the tag must be on the table itself, fix it mechanically or under a coating rather than with adhesive alone, and accept a replacement cycle. A tag in a dining room is a consumable.

Keep spares behind the bar. Replacing one in ten seconds is the difference between a system that works and one that quietly stops working table by table, which the replacement page plans for.

The gesture at a table

A seated guest will reach forward about as far as their plate and no further. A tag on the far edge of a table for six is a tag three people cannot use without standing up.

Put it where a phone already rests: beside the place setting, on the condiment stand, on the holder in the middle of a small table. Then mark it so people aim, which the signage page found to be the highest return change in any public deployment.

Keep it away from the metal of a cutlery rest or a table frame, since a tag flat against metal reads nothing at all, and the failure looks like a broken tag rather than a placement mistake.

One tag per table, or one for all

Showing a menu needs no identity at all. One address, the same on every table, is cheaper to write, cheaper to replace and impossible to get wrong.

Taking an order needs the table, and that is the only reason to give each one its own address, which the ordering page works through. The shared tag page makes the general version of the same decision.

Where identity is needed, keep the mapping on the server rather than in the tag, so that renumbering a room does not mean rewriting anything.