Earlier today I visited this place called Geprek in Melbourne that sell ‘smashed chicken’ or what we call ‘ayam geprek’ in Indonesia. It’s basically the type of dish where you literally smash the chicken and then mix sambal (chili) with the chicken. The original one is known for its spiciness, but nowadays there are other varieties with different spice level.
I won’t talk too much about my experience, because that’s what Google Maps review is for.
What I want to discuss is the importance of capturing temporary information that might be benefical to other users, only for certain period of time. This place doesn’t have a website, but they do have an Instagram page (won’t link it here, but should be easy to find) with generic information. It may or may not be up to date with updating temporary information. That’s why I feel it’s always a good thing to try capturing these kind of info when you’re on-site.
If you look at the image below, you can see that there are some items that were sold out.
Whether they’re actually sold out or not, we don’t know for sure. In Indonesia, it’s pretty common for businesses to say ‘sold out’ whenever they don’t have the items in stock. It’s almost a running joke, really. This is something that can change day by day, so in this case we can utilize the ‘Updates’ feature on the Google Maps listing.
I’m not exactly sure if this has been utilized well, but I do like to give the ‘Updates’ tab a quick look whenever I’m checking out a new restaurant/business, and see if there’s anything interesting going on at the moment. Sometimes the business will post the info themselves, sometimes you’ll see posts from other contributors.
As the post will say the date of the upload, it will give you an idea whether the information is still valid or not when you’re visiting. I think this is important to avoid disappointment when visiting the business.
Other than showing the sold out items, you can also see that for the sambal bawang dish it has the warning ‘spicy (for real)’. I actually got a bit of chuckle reading at it. I wonder if many people ordered the dish and wasn’t able to finish it. I feel challenged now