Digital Menu

[srobison62]

Hey guys I am in unfamiliar water here so I wanted to see if any of yall had any ideas or experience with this.

To give you alittle background I am the Marketing Director for a chain of truck stops, and inside the convenience store one of our biggest money makers is the deli. As I am sure everyone here has experience with the day old corndogs and sketchy meat pies that alot of gas stations and trucks stops serve, our goal is to provide good food at a decent price and we have been pretty successful with it so far. However my conveience store district manager came to me today and said that she saw menu boards that were on tv screens (at mcdonalds, movie theaters, airports, etc) and she wanted to see how hard and how much it would cost for us to do it. The geek inside of me jumped for joy at this! They want to start it out simple at first but of course my brain always goes to the elaborate. The first thing I thought about was running a pc with something like eyefinity to three screens in the stores, then running some sort of schedule program where we could run commercials along with our menu and in the future actually sell ad space to our vendors. Well thats in the future so right now I am trying to come up with the best way to get our menu on the board. I have heard that you can use a usb capable pc to run pictureas and/or videos from a usb drive, but sadly I know next to nothing about TV's. The only thing I could really think of was a workstation with three video cards so I could run a seperate image on each monitor.

Thanks in advance for the help!

 

[mrali1]

Hi, ironically, I am a territory manager for a small c-store chain and wanted to see if you had any luck with your TV for menu idea. The owner of our chain has put in in charge of this project and i've tired a couple of thing with limited success. Is there a company that you worked with or a particular setup that worked. I would love to come up with a reasonable solution as we are a small chain. Thanks in advance for your response and you can email me at Thanks!

Hey guys I am in unfamiliar water here so I wanted to see if any of yall had any ideas or experience with this.

To give you alittle background I am the Marketing Director for a chain of truck stops, and inside the convenience store one of our biggest money makers is the deli. As I am sure everyone here has experience with the day old corndogs and sketchy meat pies that alot of gas stations and trucks stops serve, our goal is to provide good food at a decent price and we have been pretty successful with it so far. However my conveience store district manager came to me today and said that she saw menu boards that were on tv screens (at mcdonalds, movie theaters, airports, etc) and she wanted to see how hard and how much it would cost for us to do it. The geek inside of me jumped for joy at this! They want to start it out simple at first but of course my brain always goes to the elaborate. The first thing I thought about was running a pc with something like eyefinity to three screens in the stores, then running some sort of schedule program where we could run commercials along with our menu and in the future actually sell ad space to our vendors. Well thats in the future so right now I am trying to come up with the best way to get our menu on the board. I have heard that you can use a usb capable pc to run pictureas and/or videos from a usb drive, but sadly I know next to nothing about TV's. The only thing I could really think of was a workstation with three video cards so I could run a seperate image on each monitor.

Thanks in advance for the help!

 

[srobison62]

Well that's pretty cool that we are doing basically the same thing. We actually had what I consider to be great success. It has really been long enough for us to test sales increases but this what I did:

I bought two 42 inch LCD monitors that have USB support from amazon I got them for like $400 a piece. Then I created a photoshop document that was the actual size of the tv and I made the menu on there also I added a neat effect after I realized you could make a slide show. I made the menu boxes stationary but I had the backgrounds change so basically the menu remains easy to read but you can do other things with the backgrounds, namely advertising for things in the store. Everyone seems to really like the menu boards and the hardest thing was working out our menu because there are almost 100 items. My first draft was almost impossible to read. But in the end I think it came out well. Send me an email if you have any other questions.