← Back to Daily Builds

Daily build note · October 5, 2026

Walk-in Wait Board

A front-desk wait board for walk-in shops — queue parties, staff chairs, and get an honest live wait quote plus a text-ready message.

Local Business Automation Interactive demo live Static HTML/CSS/JS

What shipped

Walk-in Wait Board is a self-contained front-desk tool for barbershops, food trucks, salons, and any counter where people just show up. Set the shop name, how many chairs (or windows) are staffed, a turnover buffer, and your services with typical minutes. Add walk-ins to the queue, hit Seat when someone sits down, and Done when they finish. A small simulation hands each waiting party the earliest free chair, so every person gets a start-time estimate and the board shows the live wait for the next person through the door, rounded up to five minutes with a range (WALK RIGHT IN / SHORT WAIT / GRAB A SEAT / LONG WAIT). TV mode blows the board up for a lobby screen, and a text-ready message (“current wait is about 45 min, reply STAY to hold your spot”) is one click from the clipboard. Presets cover Barbershop, Taco truck, and Nail salon. Saved in localStorage under walkin-wait-board-v1.

How to try

  • Open the live demo (iframe on the right, or full-page link below). The Barbershop preset loads first.
  • Seat the first person in line and watch Chair 3 fill and every ETA shift.
  • Bump Chairs staffed from 3 to 4 and watch the big number drop from red toward amber.
  • Flip on TV mode, then copy the text-ready message for a customer who called ahead.

Scope trim

No SMS sending, no booking or POS sync, no accounts, and no multi-location view. One shop, one queue, a greedy earliest-free-chair simulation, and local persistence. The point is an honest quote the front desk can say out loud without doing math.

Limitations

  • Estimates come from your typical service minutes; anyone running over is assumed to need about two more minutes.
  • Everyone can be served by any chair; there's no “I want Dee specifically” routing yet.
  • The queue lives in one browser, so a lobby TV and the front desk won't sync.
  • Clipboard copy needs permission; otherwise select the message manually.

Suggested next steps

  1. Per-staff preferences (“waiting for a specific barber”) in the simulation.
  2. Learn real service times from Seat and Done timestamps instead of fixed minutes.
  3. A tiny shared backend so a lobby TV and a phone at the desk show the same queue.