The bk Group supercharger lounge revisited (#R15F1)
Well, told ya I’ll be visiting the strange bk world supercharger lounge again. I actually did a month ago, but here we are.
So, the good news first: It’s actually working now. It did require re-registration, but after a couple of minutes of fiddling on the smartphone, I finally got a barcode that unlocked the doors! Let’s just hope this isn’t required ever again, e.g. due to killing inactive accounts or a system migration…
The outside of those two wooden cubes was already featured in the original post #R15, so let’s start inside. Please excuse the crudity of those images, I just took my phone and went through the thing. No time to build it to scale, to paint it, or to use a camera with tripod. Luckily, nobody was around so I was free to move. So, from left (the only entrance door) to right: (oh the WordPress “add media” feature is terrible in keeping the original order!)
QR Shop link for your convenience – yes, that is a very odd mix of a few somewhat related items, bluetooth headphones and the most recent GoPro. I don’t know who would want to buy a GoPro in there, but…you could. Apparently.
QR link here – completely different website that just explains the concept in a few more words.
Prices for coffee drinks (exact sizes aren’t really mentioned anywhere) – now I don’t drink coffee and I don’t shop food and drinks on highway stops in general so I have no direct comparison, but 3.50€ for a large cup seem average for such items. Starbucks is certainly more expensive, but the barista with a PhD in name mutilation of course offers a superior experience that is worth the premium.
Just another QR link with pretty little explanatory text on their coffee sources.
This is on the opposite side (facing the chargers), it’s one badly lit cubicle that I don’t think is all that sound-proof and has not even a chair or something to sit down. There’s a second one on the other side of the room. If you got a Tesla (and that is right now still a very likely scenario, not many superchargers are open to other cars/brands), working in the car is likely easier than fitting in there. Unless you got like kids with you, but then…
…just drop them off here! That’s a great idea to keep them entertained, although a full 20-way supercharger will likely exceed the capacity of that single console. Still, thumbs up from me.
Anyone else needs to can sit here. Schuko plugs all around – again, great idea, but maybe some foreign ones would be helpful as well. Probably free of charge, haven’t checked, haven’t had anything pluggable in the car except for the slow charger and 20+11 meters of extension cord, sorry 
This QR links to yet another shop site, this time for local delicacies. I’m sorry but this is where it goes silly expensive, e.g. a variety of six different types of sausage in a can is for sale at 22€/kg, or a nice assortment of local cheeses at north of 35€/kg, or five 100ml flasks of organic oil at 80€/l (with none exceeding 40€/l in a regular shop, certainly not the rapeseed and sunflower ones). Nothing flamboyant really, just somewhat regular items (for the area) at hugely inflated prices. Don’t know if they sell much – especially when you cannot grab the items right away but they are shipped to you. Bonus information for bk world: Not declaring base prices in € per liter or kilogram is likely in violation of the law, just don’t get caught and get fined…
More products that are to grab right away: This is more of highway stop pricing for drinks, e.g. 2.50€ per 0.33l bottle of cola or 3.50€/0.5l for apple spritzer. For foreigners: That’s around triple to quadruple the price of similar above-average products in a store, which themselves are about twice as much as the cheapo store brands. The Netto supermarket for example sells six bottles of 0.5l apple spritzer at 2.49€ – but of course only during their business hours…
I’m also very much in doubt if those fruit salads (or pasta bowls!?) are fresh enough to be an option, who knows how many of them sell at 3.90€/300g and how long they’ll sit until they get thrown out. Not a fan of highly perishable types of food on low-throughput points of sale, sorry.
And something for the lulz: They use those godawful paper-ish spoons…but in a clever way: For holding the door open that leads to the right cubicle. It’s just a lavatory plus a sink on the corridor and an exit to the right. I don’t even know if they charge for a pee, I only used it to wash my hands since I was about to go outside and order a more exciting food item.
Now this is a bit embarrassing, I didn’t even take a full shot of the thing. There’s a 24/7 pizza maker placed right next to the chargers. I’ll just borrow the promo image from bk world, posted here and on their facebook page. It’s also much better than taken with a phone camera at dusk…
Well, the PR text from March 2022 says pizza is between 5.50€ and 7.90€, which has gone up to 7.90€ to 8.90€. Maybe that’s variable and depending on day, hour or stock levels? Or the type of car you drive, since there is a CCTV camera nearby that both captures the pizza machine AND wide parts of the chargers? We’ll probably never know 
Anyway, I’ll guide you through the pizza order process.
(order cancellation)
(bonus game after order, maybe you’ll get another pizza for free or something…)
The actual order works with contactless payment without issues. The progress status is somewhat hilarious:
Produkt gefunden – “found it” (I wonder how large the freezer is…!)
Vorheizen läuft – preheating (pizza smell starts to seep out)
I took photos here at the start and close to the end to check their timer accuracy via photo EXIF data. Indeed, the timer is not fake and it was a bit over four minutes as displayed, but that does not take into account the preheating phase. So “four minute pizza” isn’t exactly true, but they are not far off.
This is not a German keyboard layout despite the QWERTZ arrangement, that’s clearly bad l10n. “Rückkehr” is the wrong translation of “return”, that’s more like coming back than deleting the last character. “Raum” is clearly translated from “space”, but translates back to “room”. And “Aufgeben” is equally hilarious, as that originally comes from “quit” but has the meaning of resigning and surrender.
Anyway, final moments of delivery are as follows: The screen says “Synthese läuft” (synthesis in progress) and out pops the hot pizza in a box.
Yes that is a friggen Youtube Short and it even fits the portrait requirement since their big-add screen is mounted that way! Too bad WordPress integration of videos is still a heap of …..
Box looks like this….
Pizza looks like this…
And once you’re back in the car you can throw away the useless paper knife and grab something from the glove box. Despite of course not looking like on the advertisement or being close to a real manufactured pizza, that thing is in fact edible and certainly a valid choice if the need for fresh pizza arises at 4am. There’s an aluminium platter on the bottom that very much helps cutting the pizza base, since it’s not crisp but more like doughy, so it’s more a thing of pressure than sharpness of the blade or cutting motion. Again, that included “knife” is utterly pointless and ripping it apart by hand is a much more viable option.
The offer of getting a receipt via mail does work – it comes from noreply@smart-pizza.fr which is a bit odd since it’s otherwise fully branded, but it came right away and is complete. I wonder if that is a business expense now 
One last thing: This is their makeshift garbage cans. They are locked away and there’s cutouts in the solid metal fencing. Probably not a good idea to keep the entire bin open for rain to pour into, but it works. Tesla started deploying garbage cans only very recently, whereas those from bk even offer the usual separation into paper, organic and residual waste.
That’s it, bk world in Endsee, Germany is up and running, and so is the pizza machine nearby 
