CHEQ Mobile 4+

There are certainly merits to this concept in the context of a large food festival, or food area at an event, in that you don’t have to line up to order, but there are definitely down sides to events that force every vendor, including the non food vendors to have to sell using this app. If I’m just trying to buy a candle, or a jar of jam, or a pre packaged cookie, and be in my way, it’s 100% more time consuming and complicated to have to download the app, bring out your card to put in all your info, order, and then tap AGAIN to pick up my cookie/candle. I also found it made the event experience 100% more stressful to arrive at something like a food festival and find out then that you HAVE to use this app to make purchases all day long, burning through your battery and data to search for your vendor if it’s not popping up, look up menus, see prices, make orders, etc, cause if it were known this would be the only way, then I could also make sure to bring things like external chargers etc, which I don’t always expect to have to bring on a day out when I’m not that far from home, but far enough for it to be a problem to have a dead phone. Sorry. This app has its merits, but shifting towards this being the only option to order is more problematic than it is helpful as a net experience.

As a co-owner of a dessert business. My family and I were very excited to participate in the bite of Seattle as a vendor. We are native Seattleites and spent many years attending as guests. I want to first say thank you to all of the attendees and customers. You were incredible and we appreciate your business. Cheq however is a different story. Between the smug, condescending, and rude behavior of the CPO Aniket Naravanekar during initial demo, weeks before the bite. He refused to acknowledge the concerns of the vendors, all of which came true. The outages that occurred without any notification or explanation from Cheq, our own sign being misprinted and then taken away to not be fixed for 11 hours. Closing of our shop on the app 30 minutes early on Friday without any warning to vendors or attendees. And lastly, the fact that every vendor had to spend time training attendees on how to properly use the app, taking time away from prep, service, and most importantly the attendees overall experience. Cheq owes an explanation and apology to every small business that was present as a vendor at the bite of Seattle (the country’s largest food festival).

Downloaded because it was the only way to purchase items for the Bite of Seattle. Made the whole experience terrible. CHEQ’s whole pitch about order ahead so you don’t have to wait in line?! Total joke. You order on the app (which may crash) and then you have to check in with the food vendor you ordered with which may have a line (which could be a long wait). So we had to wait over an hour to get our food items- this happened to alllll the people around us at the popular restaurants and no one knew what was going on despite how incredibly hard the food vendors were working. Also the app would crash for restaurants if they ran out of ingredients and needed take off something for their menu. It was a disaster. Everything would have worked so much smoother and easier if we could have just used Square to tap our cards rather than use this app. What did you did to the Bite of Seattle? Please don’t come back next year.