Factors affecting Hong Kong young adults’ acceptance of self-service restaurant ordering systems (SROS)

- Background: As the pace of people’s lives accelerates, more and more restaurants are pursuing high efficiency by using self-service restaurant ordering systems (SROS) allowing consumers to complete their order without going through a waiter/waitress.
- Objectives: This research is going to measure the young adults’ acceptance of SROS in Hong Kong and trying to find out the influencing factors behind with the expanded unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model.
- Methodology: The research objectives were achieved through the mixed method with a designed questionnaire referring to the UTAUT model and Likert five-point scale, and semi-structured interviews. During the data collection, convenience sampling and snowball purposive sampling were used to find 251 respondents; and 20 interviewees were selected among these respondents according to their wishes. Finally, the data collected was analyzed through both descriptive statistics and inferential statistics with CFA, correlation, and regression analysis by using SPSS Statistics 27 and Amos 27.
- Originality: There is no such research about consumers’ acceptance of SROS done in Hong Kong, and most previous studies in other countries or regions were done with only TAM or its extensions. This research combined UTAUT with “Jan4 Cing4” culture to complete the research.
- Practical implications: This research can supported that Hong Kong young adults have a high acceptance of using SROS in restaurants, and provide advice to restaurant owners that QR codes are more popular with young adults, so they can consider adopting it when their target consumers are young people. Moreover, the findings provide information to SROS designers to refine the system for improving consumers’ using experience.