NBA’s Pacers Have a Plan to Connect Fans to Beer, Burgers Faster
- WaitTime startup to help improve concessions, reduce idle time
- Team paying $150,000 installation fee, plus $9,000 per month
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The Indiana Pacers want fans at their home games to spend more time cheering for the team and less time waiting in line for tacos.
To that end, the National Basketball Association team is working with a startup called WaitTime, which will use cameras and artificial intelligence to send fans to the shortest lines. If it works, the Pacers could stand to make a lot more money -- a report this year by Oracle Corp. estimated that more than 40 percent of American fans said they’d abandoned queues in the past year without buying anything because they got tired of waiting. The same report estimated that fan spending in the U.S. would jump 42 percent if wait times were halved.