There’s a new app available to Fresno State students, and if you’re an avid consumer of food on campus, it’s a game changer.
Tapingo, a food-ordering app, recently contracted with Fresno State to bring its service to students.
If you haven’t downloaded the free app yet, do it!
Simply add your credit card information, peruse a menu of one of the eateries on campus, order and pay for your food on the app, and pick up the food at the estimated time or wait for the “it’s ready” text message.
As much as I hate to tell people about this cherished secret that allows me to get food quicker than anyone else, and suffer an added wait time because people are actually using it, I fear that people not using it will cause its discontinuation.
The app currently supports Taco Bell, Panda Express, Subway and The Bucket. You can use the app to shop through the menus of the individual restaurants and place an order that’s usually ready for pickup in under 10 minutes. Bonus: There’s no additional cost to you.
Meanwhile, the wait in line can far exceed 10 minutes in most cases if you just go down there. Why would you not want this app in your life?
The downside has more to do with the businesses on campus than the app itself. While Tapingo has different tabs for pickup and delivery, no restaurants currently offer a delivery service.
On top of that, there are restaurants absent from the service. It would be nice if Juice it Up was an option, and even more notably missing is Starbucks.
Now it may seem like a pipedream to have Starbucks make ordering available online, but the mega-company is already set to begin offering delivery by the end of 2015.
It makes sense that a company like Starbucks would institute an online-ordering service before they bothered tackling the complex physical mechanics of delivering 20 hot beverages that will ride in the passenger seat of a Starbucks employee’s car.
Alas, it isn’t likely that Starbucks will be added to Tapingo. If the company did begin using an app-ordering service, it would most likely be proprietary software to be utilized on the Starbucks app that already exists.
But fear not, you still have the satisfaction of skipping that awful line at the likes of Subway and Taco Bell and others, and walk right up to front to collect the food you’ve already paid for.