Winter has come to Kolkata (hopefully), and not everyone likes those fleshy vegetables every other day, no matter how green and fresh they appear to be. As such, I frequently take to ordering food from my neighbourhood (over telephone, usually), to save my mother the trouble of cooking for the night. And today, I decided to give the Dominos Pizza India app a shot, to see how the City of Joy is catching up as a smartcity against the likes of its cousins like Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai.Basically, I wanted to see how automated and smooth can the services get, and how much can we actually receive with the use of nothing other than an Android. The experience was... moderately well.
As you guys know, eBay, Flipkart, Snapdeal etc all provide doorstep delivery services (CoD, thankfully for us) here in Kolkata, and around. But this was my first time ordering food with android. And it shows me one thing - Kolkata is really catching up with the rest of the modern world.
The terribly inconvenient official app
So, while watching TV (an episode of The Originals) today, I saw an advertisement for Food Panda, a much hyped smart-service featuring doorstep delivery. Naturally, I got curious and downloaded the app. First I saw the reviews by users, complaining that not many restaurants are being shown available for their areas, and such. However, I downloaded it to test it myself.
Gorabazar, Dum Dum, my area, showed me a handful of restaurants. And I decided to order 2 pizzas online on Dominos. However, that's when I got my first hiccup.
Food Panda's app simply took me to the online UI of Domino's, and I had to re-enter my location there. I didn't find Golpark, Gorabazar etc in the locations' list, and thought of giving Ramgarh a shot. Ramgarh is just adjacent to Gorabazar here in North Kolkata, just by the side of the famous Clive House (residence of Lord Clive). However, after my order was placed, I was contacted by Domino's contact person for confirmation of my order, and they told me that the order has reached Ramgarh (Garia) instead! Totally on the southern extremity of the city!
Anyway, the guy was friendly and I got my order cancelled. Next I downloaded Domino's Pizza India app, from Play Store (here: http://goo.gl/MjhTZH ). Although this app is shown as Official, the interface is primitive and terribly unofficial, I must say. Anyway, I was asked to enter my mobile number, and an SMS with the 4 digit passcode reached me immediately.
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| Yeah. this area is called Ramgarh too... |
Logging in was smooth, but the real pain was to find my nearest Domino's store. Naturally, as you might have guessed, there's no facility to auto-locate the closest one using GPS or somethimg, and I had to manually select the city (!), the locality (Dum Dum Road) and the sublocality. Dum Dum Road showed me around 7 pizza outlets, and I had to manually search for each outlet's location (such as Dr. MN Saha road, Rani Devendra Bala Road etc) on Google Maps to find the closest one! Really painstaking and inconvenient, it was. Finally, I discovered that the Dr. MN Saha outlet is the closest to my place, and placed my order.
Here, I must admit that the app is truly horrible! My phone, with 2 GB of RAM and quad-core qualcomm processor, crashed when using it, around 4 times! And not even the highest end games do that often on my phone.
Delivery
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| The app is really, really primitive, and needs immediate attention |
The package was smoking hot when delivered, and I really happen to admire the manners of the folks.
Conclusion
Kolkata, like its first-world counterparts, is turning smart. The WB government may be quite possibly the most inefficient one in India, but private companies are quite competitive here, as they are everywhere else. But the problem that remains is the average Calcuttan's lack of familiarity with these hi-tech facilities. Ordering a pizza online is indeed very hi-tech to him, but I'm certain that this will change with the generational shift.
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