Dave & Buster's is America's premier entertainment and dining destination, pairing restaurant-quality food with expansive arcades across 177 U.S. locations under the promise to "eat, drink, play, and watch." Its dual-revenue model and large, multi-entrance venues — ranging from 30,000 to more than 70,000 square feet — demand precise visibility into customer flow and occupancy to deliver great service across both dining and entertainment.
The Challenge
For years, Dave & Buster's relied on manual processes and proxy metrics. It used arcade "power card" swipes as a traffic stand-in, which captured gaming guests but missed anyone who came primarily to eat — a significant blind spot. General managers counted occupancy with handheld clickers, a time-consuming, inaccurate task that pulled staff away from guests. Without real-time visibility into true foot traffic, locations struggled to optimize labor, segment dining versus gaming guests, make data-driven layout decisions, and forecast accurately.
The Solution
Dave & Buster's deployed RetailNext Traffic Analytics across all 177 stores, placing sensors at every entry point — including direct and mall-connected entrances — and integrating the data with its BI tools and data-lake architecture. Sensors captured total visitors, occupancy, entry patterns, and customer flow, surfaced through both web dashboards and mobile apps so managers could see store conditions in real time, from anywhere.
The Results
Managers gained instant, phone-based visibility into occupancy, replacing manual counting and freeing teams to focus on the guest experience. True foot-traffic data became a new input to staffing decisions and to AI/ML forecasting models alongside historical revenue and weather, while transparency across all 177 stores enabled performance benchmarking and best-practice sharing between locations.
