My family and I go to a cafe for breakfast most saturday mornings.
The one place we usually go to has no phone signal at all anywhere in the ~150 seat restuarant. Its part of the reason I like going there.
We turned up last weekend to see they had put new QR code menus on all the tables. I had no intention of using them so I ordered from the counter as I usually do, knowing they wouldnt even work because of the lack of phone signal.
I spent over an hour that day silently chuckling as I watched pretty much every single customer pick up the QR code menu and try to use it. I saw a few get really annoyed and end up leaving.
Im not sure how much damage the place did to their clientel in a single day, but I went back yesterday and they had all been removed.
Slight tangent: I've noticed that robot waiters seem to never actually be doing their jobs, and the presence of one in the store is the sign of the restaurant being poorly managed.
The idea that there could be hucksters selling these door to door to bad managers explains so so much.
Small businesses often get sold tech things that don't make sense. VOIP is one I see frequently. There's nothing quite like a small business with a 2Mb/s upload, several Dropbox/OneDrive clients, and a VOIP contract.
Why does VoIP not make sense for a small business? From my experience working at small businesses it looks like VoIP and the features it enables is a huge gain. Call waiting queue, voicemail to email/website, automatic hours/go straight to voicemail, holding/transferring calls, multiple lines with only one phone number, etc.
It's the 2Mb/s upload in my example that's the catch. That'll often be asymmetric at a 10:1 download:upload ration (or worse), so it's almost impossible to do any kind of traffic management to make it work well.
I'm talking about places that can't get an internet connection that can support the VOIP systems they're sold.
I hear you with the 2Mb/s upload, but that isn't a problem for VoIP in and of itself. What makes 2Mb/s upload an issue with VoIP is not having a good router (i.e. one with CAKE queuing support or something similar) and then getting hammered with buffer bloat making your latencies go to 1000+ ms because someone's iPhone decided to back something up (don't know why it never seems to be an issue with Androids).
^ The above is precisely my experience and is a large part of why my workplace hasn't moved to VoIP yet, despite needing the features.
2 Mbps is tight but can definitely support 0.1 Mb/s calls. The vendor needs to ensure the phones tag audio packets with EF priority and the router uses a strict priority queue. (Whenever a voice packet arrives it pauses handling non-voice traffic until the voice queue is clear. This ensures a voice packet is never delayed by more than 1500B / 2 Mbps = 6 ms).
Even Comcast is doing 50Mbps/15Mbps with overprovisioning giving you an extra 10% or so.
AT&T, CenturyLink and other telecoms have ceased making ADSL and often VDSL2 readily orderable, and jacked up the rates on legacy customers to push them off old, slow connections on their aging DSLAMs.
I travelled about 13,000km around the country less than a year ago. At very few points in that trip did I have 2mbps, let alone more than that, not even in some of the fancy places.
I definitely had better than that in Perth, and Kalgoorlie, and I had surprisingly good speed in Ceduna - maybe even 10mbps. It was pretty good in the Barossa, too - it's fine if you happen to be near a city.
But the places with good internet represent perhaps 1% of the area I covered.
Where in this self-reporting and not-at-all-independent pdf that you've linked to does it talk about what percentage of rural customers are on this fixed wireless service you speak of?
Seems to me they're saying that 92% of fixed wireless users are above 25mbps, but I don't see anywhere where it says what percentage of rural users have that service, as opposed to e.g terrible long-haul adsl connections getting a couple hundred K if they're lucky.
If they're saying that 92% of users are over 25mbps, and you believe it, then my response is a simple chortle. Maybe 92% of fixed wireless have it, but if that's the case then about 5% of people in the outback are on fixed wireless, it would seem.
A couple of places I visited told me "oh, no, there's no phone or internet at the moment, hasn't been for a couple of days"... like it wasn't at all unusual or unexpected.
Yeah, QR codes should come at a minimum with a WiFi password written on them exactly because of this. Even better would be not to even bother with all of that but it's easy for owners to fall for grifters selling "the future" to them.
If you're forcing me to look at your menu on my tiny screen, optimise for that. Do !not! optimize for fricking print when you're not going to give me the printed version! Grrrrrmbl.
My favourite are the ones that straight up give you the print-prepped PDF: CYMK color space, bleed, crop marks, test patterns and a whopping 12 MB for a single page.
I'll buck the trend and say that I love QR code menus. It lets us order at our own pace, even after our initial order, without waiting on the waiter. Additionally, my wife and I can both queue up what we want in the cart on each of our own phones and discuss before submitting the order. It's just way more convenient, the whole "wait on a stranger to take our order" thing isn't a necessary component of the restaurant experience for me, and if I need to ask questions, I've never had issues waving over a worker to help.
Full mobile ordering is great, but there’s lots of places that have the worst of both worlds: a QR code linking to a digital menu, but still take orders with the waiter
FWIW, I vote heavily against full mobile ordering. The more I have to do on my phone the worse it is.
Things that admittedly make this worse:
- Using an older phone.
- Not saving credit cards to your phone.
It's just slow and clunky, and -- it feels like work.
I don't want to file a JIRA ticket to get my appetizer. I don't want to fill out a form. I just want to sit down and tell somebody.
Another way to look at this is that it's the "self checkout" version of dining out. Self checkout is slow, because it's different at every store, and you will never be as fast as a cashier who has some practice with their particular system. Same deal here.
The UK also does "chip and pin" authentication for requests, so the waitstaff are forced to either bring a portable cardreader to you or for you to walk to a terminal and enter a code. I think this is why mobile card readers are so common.
In the US, most credit card transactions are simply "(swipe or chip)". If you have the card, you can use it. Gas stations seem to be the slight exception in America -- they generally require "(swipe or chip) and billing zipcode". This is quite funky and not at all secure against fraud.
In the US a few months ago, a food truck used one of those carbon copy card swiper things. And yesterday I tried to pay for a cabin reservation and the lady took it down over the phone and said she'd run it next week. Many grocery stores and gas stations still swipe. Our tax people still use faxes and our hospitals manually create and deliver CD-ROMs for medical imaging. We're not a very advanced country, lol.
I wish swipe/on card numbers were completely gone here and chip only too. I use my phone for most purchases, but most restaurants here haven't caught up on wireless pay.
because america hasn't caught up with the rest of the world. I'd guess about half of all restaurants still take your card to swipe it at a machine tethered to the register. it's getting less common in stores and fast food restaurants though.
Probably at least 80% of sitdown restaurants in my suburban town in the US seem to have those portable card readers. Now I can’t even think of the last restaurant I ate at that didn’t do that.
Handheld card readers are price competitive, or at least marginally more expensive. I’d attribute it more to the time investment of switching POS systems.
Everything is weird in the US so can't tell how different it would be, but in Chile you can get a handheld personal car reader [1][2] for around ~25USD to 50USD, even if they needed something more specialized I really can't see them becoming prohibitively expensive, even the matching POS from the same company is just like 400USD[3]
I can get the same deal here if I look for it, nothing special about Chile, etc. Most restaurant/business owners aren't tech savvy and will switch when their equipment fails, not to keep up with tech trends.
most restaurants here are take your code to their payment station. With all the insurance against fraud in the USA I don't care. I've only had it happen once and I'm pretty sure it was with a skimmer/MITM at a big box store roughly 15 years ago. They actually had used my 3 digit code on the back in an online purchase.
I'm afraid most US chains/restaurants will only change their equipment when their equipment dies. It's going to be a few more years to a decade I think. Most of these units are pretty reliable and can go for a decade or more easily. At least most POS at gas stations, chain stores take NFC now.
Tap phone, confirm payment, tap fingerprint reader to confirm.
vs
Try to flag down waiter (x5), ask for the bill, wait for waiter to return with the mobile POS, fiddle around in your wallet to find the card, tap card, decline tip, write PIN code, finally get to leave.
>Additionally, my wife and I can both queue up what we want in the cart on each of our own phones and discuss before submitting the order.
This is exactly the thing I loathe about QR code menus. It normalizes having phones out at the table, with everyone looking at their own. Defaults are powerful, and "phones out" as a default leads to increased distraction and inattention among the people you're dining with.
it's ok to do your own thing sometimes. if you want to share a nice meal with your wife without your phones just say so. people are often more social now than they used to be, at the cost of some personal attention, sure.
i hang out with and eat out with my partner almost every day all the time. i don't need to be present 100% at every single moment, and if i or he wants to be during a meal, we will simply share that thought. i've never had issues having normal social interaction with people when out, even with some phone usage. it's normal.
Many restaurants (quite possibly most) take away the menus after you've ordered and traditionally had to bring them back if you wanted dessert/another round of drinks/etc. If they left menus, they're fighting space on what is often a table barely large enough to hold a plate for everyone seated at it
Nah. They take away physical menus because they need them for the next guests. Restaurants never - even high-end ones (which might be surprising, but high-end restaurants have more-expensive to produce menus) - never have enough menus. Owners skimp on printing menus because they're as penny-foolish as any other out-of-touch manager. At the worst places waiters hurry guests' orders, and hang around trying to intercept menus from each other. It creates a whole load of unnecessary stress: just make some more damn menus!
Source: waited lots of tables in lots of restaurants.
Most of the time the only reason is there is just no room on the table for the menus to be kept.
There are a few places (usually burger joints) where the menu is a piece of paper that actually serve as a placemat that the waiters won't take back from you. I doubt a lot of people are changing their mind. I've rarely seen that.
I'm describing regular sit down restaurants. Everything about the restaurant is the same except ordering with the waiter is replaced with a webpage you order off of. The QR code even automatically enters your own table number since each table's QR code is unique. The PDF thing sounds super lazy, thankfully never come across that before.
I have only seen online ordering from a table as you describe at a couple of places. Maybe two times. Most QR codes I see link to a (often nightmarish) website or a PDF that would be suitable for printing a paper menu.
I often end up ordering more thanks to QR. No longer do I have to try to flag down a waiter to get a menu looking for desserts after I'm done eating. Then having to flag them down again to order. Such a hassle I often don't bother. Same with getting another drink.
With QR? Just scan it an order. Done eating? Just leave, having already paid in the app. Also removes the whole stupid tip thing.
> I'll buck the trend and say that I love QR code menus. It lets us order at our own pace, even after our initial order, without waiting on the waiter.
Why not a paper menu plus order online? You could even have the order QR code and URL printed on the menu.
I like the mobile order option the best, but very few places I've been have that.
The QR option is nice, as long as it's just an option. A physical menu is, generally, much nicer to use. That being said, sometimes you want to go back and reference what you ordered, or other options (like for drinks) and ... the menus have all been taken away.
I don't have any issue with them, but I would hope they would have a reasonably recent paper version available for downed internet or older customers. I don't think it should be the "only" option. Also please make your menus searchable. Sometimes I just want to see what all your chicken/beef/veggie options are.
They’re certainly good at sushi conveyor belt bars, where most people don’t care which food they’re selecting beyond what it looks like but a small minority want to know what they’re actually biting into.
Wrong. When you pay with a credit card it gives your name and amount. Activate a QR code and you're giving up your IP address at the bare minimum, it becomes possible to calculate how long you've been in the restaurant and who knows what else based on the cookies that come back or pdf telemetry. Every day there are stories here on HN about how people's data can be exfiltrated from their phones, but somehow you think this could never happen in a restaurant?
> you're giving up your IP address at the bare minimum
Your phone's dynamic IP. Which is a redundant, and much weaker, identification than your payment info.
> it becomes possible to calculate how long you've been in the restaurant
Also doable by the staff.. using their eyes. And most restaurants will use some form of system anyway to track the orders and payments, because that information is vital to running a functioning restaurant.
Conventional observation by restaurant staff isn't bundled and resold by data brokers. I find it astonishing that a reader of HN would be unaware of commercial data collection and resale practices.
Your credit card transaction is bundled and sold. Because it has value in establishing a consumer profile for marketing.
The fact that you visited some restaurant PDF or webpage from a dynamic IP address is not.
Like the parent commenter said, any information about how long the table is being occupied comes from the POS and reservation system. But that data is for the restaurant -- there's no market in selling it, though it absolutely has value to the restaurant for its business decisions. But your phone isn't being used for that part.
Data collection is certainly a thing. But it happens in specific ways for specific purposes.
Using a credit card tied to your identity, but then worrying about revealing your phone's IP address while ordering, doesn't make any sense.
No, it's you that don't seem to understand. I'm well aware that paying with your credit generates information which is repackaged and sold. But following a QR code to a webpage potentially opens your phone up to cookies, tracking pixels, and all sorts of other things, depending on what permissions you give it or what exploits can be leveraged. All the major fast food vendors have their own apps now, for example. One hopes they don't exfiltrate unrelated data from the phone, but it's not a certainty and it's even less of a certainty if individual restaurants start encouraging their customers to install a generic 'my tasty meal' app.
I get the nostalgic nature of the article, but it feels unfair as it seems to compare the "best physical menu experience" to the "worst digital" one.
At its best, a menu can be a nice leather "book". At its worst, it is a one page plastic menu that has been touched by hundreds of people before you and never cleaned, it is also probably ruined or broken on the corners and in the middle, and has also a lot hand-made corrections to ingredients and prices that makes reading it way more frustrating.
At the same time, a digital menu can be easy to navigate (with sections based on first courses, second courses, appetizers, etc.), it can show you the pictures of the food you're going to order and, sometimes, allows you to order without waiting for someone.
Even at their worse, I still prefer the digital version as it is more hygienic and I don't have to wait 15 minutes for a waiter if they forget to bring one to the table (and then we also have to share that between 6 people).
Physical menus can include photos and be easy to navigate. Most physical menus have separate sections for appetizer, side dishes, main course, etc.
It's possible to incorporate ordering online into a paper menu (QR code/codes) for folks who don't want to wave at a waiter.
In addition, a physical menu does not require you to use data or log on to the restaurant's wifi, is guaranteed not to track your browsing through the menu, can take up far more physical space than available on a phone screen, and won't start the dinner by everyone looking at their phones (and someone forced to help out the technically-challenged party member).
Ordering without waiting is nice. Navigating a digital menu is too often a pain. Want to add a drink? That's on another tab, please wait while we load&render, no it's further down, oh you wanted non-alcoholic? Want to change your main? Okay, let's first remove it (load basket), go back to ordering, go back to main dishes... Oh didn't you want that appetizer? Load again and scroll to see if your memory triggers... etc etc etc. sigh.
I kinda make a point of asking the waiter for a physical menu anymore, and they usually give a very understanding smile and go grab one for me. I hope if enough people ask (in a non-shitty way) for paper menus that restaurant owners might get the picture.
Or they'll just implement the standard business playbook, which is "do what we really want to do and claim it's what the customers demanded"... or the new twist post-2020, "do what we've been desperate to do for years and claim it's for health reasons"
I refuse to go to any restaurant in Switzerland that has qr only menu and does not accept cash.
Not accepting cash is against the law[1] but sadly there is no penalty defined. The argument is always it costs to much to deal with cash. You know what also costs money? Cleaning the kitchen, I wonder what other laws these companies think are ok to ignore.
Why do you want to use cash though? NFC tap to pay or QR code-based mobile payments, which is what everyone in China uses, are so much better. No need to carry around a heavy and bloated wallet full of physical coins, no need to touch dirty bank notes that have germs and even drugs on them [1]. As a child, my parents always made me wash my hands with soap whenever I touch money, since you never know where the note has been. It just seems so unsanitary to handle physical cash in a place that deals with serving food to customers.
The issue I have is that there are middlemen when using non cash payment systems. Until the central bank provides an anonymous digital payment system there is no alternative to cash.
I don't want my purchase habits ending up in a database located who knows where and as a merchant I don't want to pay x percent to middle men handling the transaction.
I also don't want foreign companies deciding what I am allowed to purchase or sell. As we have seen many times visa/mastercard will prevent you from selling and/or buying items legal in my country.
The central banks job is to provide a currency for payment and I want them to keep providing this service.
Switzerland has pretty low fee debit cards (Maestro?), which I used extensively during my time there, as a foreigner I didn’t qualify for a credit card with BCV, so no visa/mastercard, but I really didn’t need it.
Back in my he states, I avoid any business that takes only cash, because I’m not carrying anything but my phone and a backup credit card in case tap to pay isn’t accepted. I also think businesses should be allowed not to accept cash given that those that do are targets for armed robbery these days (a problem I expect Switzerland not to share).
Privacy. I'm not opposed to using my card at restaurants or other stores, but I don't at all want a future where every single transaction is tied to an identifiable account.
Restaurants will end up (and already do) buy systems that keeps track of Bluetooth and WiFi MACs that walk in the place. Your cell phone has to tell your carrier where it is for calls and data to be routed to your handset. You were picked up on a dozen security cameras dumping their feeds to "the cloud" walking to the restaurant. Your license plate was caught on another dozen cameras driving to the restaurant.
You were already caught up in the Panopticon. Refusing to use a credit card at the restaurant is a completely empty gesture and provided you no extra privacy.
I'm not saying give up on privacy or anything but pick your battles.
That is not the case in Switzerland which has privacy laws. Private cameras for example are not allowed to film public areas. Cameras on private property need to state where the data is stored, how long etc.
Because we've already seen thag they don't. It doesnt have to be logical, it's just the way things have worked out, and there doesn't seem to be any will to change that.
This is the trajectory "they" want the discussion on. Eventually people start asking you why you would ever want to use cash, then that bewilderment turns to suspicion, using cash becomes something that drug dealers, homeless people, and thieves do. Until trying to use cash becomes grounds for infornal interogation and the last few holdouts become exhausted, and then eventually they can get rid of it altogether, since only bad people use cash anymore.
Becuase maybe, just maybe, not all of us fetishize "convenience" at the expense of all else in this economic world, and want to be able to buy things without having our transactions parastically logged, stored, traced and later used for all sorts of bullshit commercial/government survey tracking purposes. If you like the budding Chinese dystopia and all its garbage just because you can't stand to get your hands "dirty" with a bit of paper (as if the million other things you touch per day were much cleaner) that's your business, but hopefully you can at least see the notion of someone wanting a modicum of very basic privacy.
We're not talking about "not legally obligated to do it", we're talking about "being legally obligated not to do it". The law forces them to accept cash, they can't just say "I'm gonna impose my own social norms that are above the law."
the equivalent to your example would be them accepting cash even if they don't legally have to. Which is literally the opposite of what they're doing.
Fuck their invented social rules. If cash is a legal tender medium of exchange, one should not have to walk into a place that's designed to serve them as a customer and be forced to obey arbitrary customized rules of convenience for the place itself.
Interesting law. That means that if you want to take a holiday from work you can just pay your employer the equivalent cash value of your labour instead of showing up and there is nothing your employer can say about it since they are always required to accept money as payment. In fact, you can evade all contractual obligation by offering money in place of what was expected to be paid.
The law doesn’t say that at all. It only applies to instances in which payment is made, and says you can’t accept credit card and not cash:
> Everyone is obliged to accept up to 100 Swiss regular issue coins in payment. Regular issue coins, commemorative coins and bullion coins are accepted at nominal value without restriction by the Swiss National Bank and the public cash offices of the Confederation.
Nowhere does this imply that you can trade working for paying an equivalent cash amount of your labour.
Yes, that's right, labour offered in a trade is a form of payment. All trades sees both sides of the transaction make a payment. In the most common case as it pertains to employment, I pay you labour, you pay me money, at which point the trade is settled.
But since the law states that money must always been accepted as a form of payment I can also pay you money in place of my labour. Per the law, the employer has to accept it. Thus, any time you don't want to go to work you simply have to offer money instead of labour, which you will get back since the employer is still obligated to fulfil their side of the trade.
It's an interesting approach. But doesn't seem tenable in the real world, so it is not surprising that it is oft ignored.
> and says you can’t accept credit card and not cash
Exactly. Credit cards don't offer money, but instead offer tokens that you can later trade for money. Practicalities aside, no different than accepting chickens and then trading those chickens for money. Or no different than accepting labour and then trading that labour for money. It's all the same. A trade is a trade is trade.
The law here requires that the cash must be accepted as a substitute in a trade.
You're mixing creative usages of language with legal terminology.
Colloquially, in English, one could think of "labor" as a form of "payment" in the way you describe.
In the legal context, things like "labor" and "payment" and "trade" have specific meanings. These meanings cannot be interchanged with any other "technically not grammatically incorrect" definition of the same word as it might be used in spoken English.
Misunderstandings like this are also leveraged by, for example, the Sovereign Citizen movement, with similar levels of validity.
No, that is considered unpaid leave and it is a common practice where the cash amount is deducted from your salary. The terms of unpaid leave are determined by employment law and your employment contract.
It doesn't mean any of that. "Obliged to accept as payment" does not mean "obliged to sell things that are not otherwise for sale."
You've made three different comments now smugly pontificating on the implications of a law that you made up in your head and acting like it's equivalent to an actual law that we have the text of. What's going on?
That is what the law, as provided, states. Naturally one understands that law isn't just the words on the page, but also a tangled web of precedent. No doubt there is already plenty of precedent to invalidate usage of the law in many contexts, but that's where someone who understands the legal state in full detail would come in and add more colour, not just retort with "It doesn't mean that. I can't say why, but trust me, I know!" Ouch.
And, well, if nobody here knows, at least I get to enjoy the button presses. Imagine people taking time out of their day to press a button just for me. I feel the love, for sure. That's worth something.
Any unauthorized leave, whether paid or unpaid, would be a violation of your employment contract. The terms are set by employment law and your employment contract.
Wouldn't it be much be easier to list the small handful of cases where you want it to apply?
Think I am going to pay you in my house when you pay me money for said house? Ha! By this law, I can simply give you your money back. You are obligated to accept it since you must always accept money as payment, and now the house you lived in prior is gone. Seems incredibly problematic for the vast majority of transactions.
You are really hung up on misinterpreting this. I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but this is like the 4th place you've confused "must accept cash for payments" with "must accept a cash replacement for goods or services purchased". Clearly, if I buy a good from you, you have to deliver me that good. And I have to pay you in some form. Because I am giving you a credit card or other cash equivalent, you have to accept cash (up to a certain level).
A million Swiss francs in bill form isn't that much. We have CHF 1,000 denominated bills and the law states the maximum in coins is CHF 100 that you have to accept.
> Think I am going to pay you in my house when you pay me money for said house? Ha! By this law, I can simply give you your money back.
No. That would be a violation of your sales agreement. That is a contract to transfer ownership of a property.
Likewise after six months on a waiting list a surgeon cannot then say to their patient "Haha! No actually here's a cash payment instead. It's cash and you are obligated to accept according to Swiss law!". There would be legal consequences. It's not a contract to exchange a monetary value. It's a contractual obligation to provide a service and it is regulated.
It really seems like a lot of little complaints people have about little technological choices (like QR code menus) are increasingly complaints about the larger technological context they exist in (like the mobile ecosystem, controlled by the apple-google duopoly to fragment our attention, harvest tons of personal data, and lock us in to the platform)
I used to think this was an old person thing, but I see a lot of younger people who seem to resent their phones lately too. I got into tech because it was and still is fascinating and full of potential, but it's hard to deny that tech companies have become the poster child for this monopoly-sludge economy that is making so many people persistently miserable.
That's how I read this article: A person who views even a pretty minor aspect of an experience (The florid prose and descriptions the author likes in menus could easily be on a QR-accessed menu too) as tainted by the presence of tech. It's a weird little tic of a complaint without that context, but in our current cultural moment it's not that strange, and says a lot about said moment
Yeah I convinced my nephew to buy a 96 F150 extended cab that was basically rebuilt from the ground up and while it doesn't have all the modern amenities, he's the one everyone wants to hop in the car and go somewhere. they think it's cool and see that it's basically a great experience, if a lot more minimalistic than a Tesla. It's still got AC/heat/great stereo system(thanks to me!)/power steering/foot room. I think younger people can appreciate that tech doesn't necessarily bring a lot of added utility.
What I hate about QR code ordering is that it puts me in charge of getting everything right. It takes way too much time, so when I go out with my family I have to hunt around for each item, make sure I put it in exactly how they want it, and now any mistake even if the kitchen goofed is now my mistake. "Dad, you ordered it wrong! There's ketchup on my burger"
Plus half the time I forget to even enter my own order trying to get everyone else's and double checking it's all correct. So my meal comes out late.
The paying and getting up and leaving without having to wait for the waiter to bring the check is nice, but the ordering part is not worth the hassle.
> and now any mistake even if the kitchen goofed is now my mistake.
Funny, in my experience it's precisely the opposite.
It means I never have to feel awkward because there's no longer any uncertainty over whether I said the wrong thing or the server wrote it down wrong.
If the food or drinks come out wrong, there's irrefutable proof I ordered correctly, and it's the kitchen's job to fix it.
(And in my experience in restaurants, 95% of the time something has come out wrong, it's been the server's fault, not the kitchen's. So with QR ordering the problem almost goes away completely.)
Yes exactly, it's so annoying to have to make sure if the server actually heard what I said. And often near the end of a meal we would be waiting for a dish that never came and be unsure whether the kitchen is just taking a long time, whether we forgot to order it, whether the server forgot it, etc. If there had been a digital order receipt then there would never be any question.
(I wrote an earlier reply to you, then deleted it, but keep on thinking about your post, so have come back to it. Please feel free to ignore me completely, but be sure that this brief comment is written with the very best of intentions.)
I (obviously) have no particular insight into your situation, but I can't help thinking that in the situation you describe, QR code ordering isn't the root cause of your stress, but is maybe triggering stress related to other issues within your group dynamic?
Consider a generic family group: in general, on most occasions, should they be able to work out how to order food together without too much stress being generated? I don't think that's an unreasonable expectation.
And if you're not able to do this, maybe it's time to both introspect and discuss (with your partner, and/or children?) why - and consider new approaches to the situation and the problem.
Nice restaurants have (physically) big menus that are easy to scan and read. You can see sections, specials, and you can browse easily.
Smart phones are typically less than 7" across. Best case scenario is they learn from McDonald's (which uses like a 35" screen...) with big categories to click and then a few items per category. But it'll still be tiny.
Usually nice restaurants have small menus with only a few carefully selected options based on the season. Which restaurants are you referring to that have "big menus"?
I know a wide range of nice restaurants. There's the seasonal French guff you mention, but there's also pizzas, places that have breakfast menus, curry houses...
I'm personally a bit torn on this. One of my local restaurants has the QR menu and it is a whole system. The waiter doesn't even come to the table, you just put your order in on your phone and they deliver it when it is ready. All in all, it's much more efficient and it means you're never waiting for your waiter to reappear if you want to order another drink or something. You also pay the bill through your phone, which avoids the need to hand your credit card to the waiter. It probably saves at least 5-10 minutes per table, meaning possibly one more turnover during each dinner period.
You do lose a bit in the personal interaction. There's also no chance to ask the waiter questions about the menu or ask for recommendations.
A local restaurant did this. However in making you pay for your order up front they also ask for the tip then. And they play the usual games to try and get you to pay more than the typical 20%. The server drops your food off and you never see them again. It's a horrible experience.
20% ? what the fuck justifies that as an automatic tip, except exceptionally good service. Absurd nonsense. All the more so if you barely interacted with the supposed waiter during your ordering process.
I have left many coffee shops just after enter without ordering because they only have QR menu and no WiFi.
It feels insulting that I need to spend my limited Data package just to help you earn money.
Even when the waiter offer to show me the menu on his phone, it felt overcomplicated process and I cannot imagine a business delibrately making it that difficult to order without expecting profits to decrease.
I can imagine if it hasn't happened yet, it will happen soon enough where QR code menus will be tailored to the person. Change the order of items and possibly even costs to try and drive the individual diner to choose the options that are better for the restaurant. Digital menus already offer many of these perks for the restaurant, and I suspect forcing around the margins can definitely make a difference at the expense of the customer.
Yeah, this is why I don’t want to use QR codes. Prices need to be set in writing and be the same for everyone, although I’m okay with things like discounts for seniors, students, active service members, etc.
I don't see that happening except at very big businesses like chains. Most locally owned restaurants have trouble maintaining a working website let alone something so complicated.
That's where a lean and hungry third party startup comes in and offers to take a little piece of that action in exchange for handling all the backend work.
Tack on some image recognition to gauge customers "value" as they walk in and track where they sit. See a party sporting luxury bags and watches and charge them a little bit extra eh? Add in some facial recognition too to keep prices consistent between visits and voilà.
I believe there was a Planet Money (or similar) piece about this recently. There are already services to enable dynamic pricing for restaurants. E.g. on super bowl Sunday ordering wings will be more expensive. (They don't like the term "surge pricing" though:-)
However it can also go the other way and lower prices to incentivize demand during slow periods like middle afternoon.
Can't say I blame restaurants for this. As many other comments mention, it is all about having good UX
Restaurants already know how to design menus to drive diners to choose the options that are better for the restaurant. I don't see how personalisation can improve the situation. Maybe the illusion of personalisation?
Side Topic (Menus With Photos): There seems perception in the US that menus with pictures of the food are less sophisticated or cater to a less discerning clientele. In Asia, photos of the food in the menu is more of the norm than the exception (even for more upscale places). I discover more items I like when the photos are present. I would take QR codes with foods photos over a physical menu without (even for a $$$$ restaurant.
Agree. That's point. I'd rather scan a QR code that links to great photos than have a printed menu with no photos. They informally call them food picture books in restaurants I've eaten at in China, Indonesia, Japan, and Singapore. Example: https://www.kawanointernational.com/assets/file/KADO%2008%20...
But also, letting me pay and leave without having to catch the eye of an overworked, underpaid waiter, mime paying and wait for the one card-reader to become available is golden.
Why not both? Online ordering via table-unique QR if you want it, otherwise wait for service. They're all going through the same system so you can mix and match.
Sadly, you are correct. It used to be that prices didn't change that frequently and a printed menu would not be too much overhead. Now, prices are changing so rapidly, it's a non-trivial cost associated with printing new menus every time the price changes.
I think digital menus are accommodating of the restaurant owner, in this regard. But they sure suck for customers, or at least, for this customer.
If the restaurant has so many things on the menu where it's a cost savings to do this, there is no cooking real happening there. Everything is frozen and reheated .
Lamination solves the problem of them getting dirty and damaged.
The QR code thing happens more often than not at chain restaurants, which are just reheating frozen slop, rather than bistros that are changing their menu daily.
Laminating menus is even more expensive and makes the problem worse.
> The QR code thing happens more often than not at chain restaurants, which are just reheating frozen slop, rather than bistros that are changing their menu daily.
This is the opposite of my experience. I can't think of a chain that uses them. Chains have enough money to print laminated menus, and their menus don't change.
In theory a digital menu should be better for accessibility but I’ve found they’re either a link to a PDF (which offers some ability to zoom in) or they’re a hideous nightmare website with no easy way to increase font sizes due to them being more like a presentation rather than a simple menu.
Yea, my experience as well. Cramming a 11x14 foldout menu onto a phone pdf is not a good UX.
That said, I find the kiosk app at Panera Bread a much better experience than ordering from the menu simply because there’s a lot more information. Options, bread types, ingredients, etc. You can claw that out of the clerk, but it’s a bit arduous.
So it can be done well. It just isn’t. And it’s don’t really blame the restaurants either. A comprehensive digital experience is really not their ballywick.
Then there was a time I went to an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. There, we had no menus.
The server came up, “What do you want?”
“Well, what do you have?”
“We’re an Italian restaurant. What do you want?”
And I told him, and I got it. I mean, indeed, it was an Italian restaurant.
The only time I can midly bear a digital menu is if it's a single PDF file that I can pinch and zoom. Otherwise it just feels obnoxious to have to tap thru menus or only see my choices isolated in multiple pages based on a category or something. It feels awkward to sit down with people at a restaurant then we all are tapping away thru some stupid interface for a menu. If it's a single PDF file that one can pinch and zoom around thats the only time I dont get extremely annoyed by this whole thing.
Always get a local SIM / eSIM from where you’re traveling. I doubt there’s any country in the world that costs more than $20 / 10GB (give or take). I’ve done this through several countries in Latin America, Singapore, Malaysia, and all over Europe and it’s worked like a charm every time.
You should never use your home carrier and roam when traveling internationally, unless you have something like Google Fi which explicitly states that your data allocations apply worldwide.
The data to download a menu is more than the meal. Is free wifi common in Europe? I remember it being quite hard to find a hotspot. Same in the UK.. UK had those “the cloud” things in places.
Most of the kids in my 12 year old’s class have their own phone. For now, we have one “kids phone” that we let them pass around in case one is getting dropped off at sports, or a friend’s house or something.
Interesting that the person in OP was in Italy when they realized they hated QR menus. I'm in a South American city where the QR menus are pervasive, and I love it because it's so, so easy to immediately translate it to English. I get that you can take a photo of a physical menu and do the same thing with Lens, but the QR menu removes a few pieces of friction and has generally been a positive feature.
Wifi passwords... just let people scan a photo to join the network. Duh!
Sharing your contact details... why are we messing with Bluetooth when both Apple and Android support QR codes?! Next time you're at a convention, just set your contact card (Vcard QR Code) as your phone home screen image... so much easier to share details vs. watching people try and bump between devices not knowing if it'll work. "Did you get it, I don't know if I'm bumping in the right place... did it send? Do you have airdrop on?" Ha. It's silly. No clue why Apple and Android don't just have a QR share option. =P
Sending SMS... I love the "vote for X with this code, vote for Y with this code" options. Just an easy way to network people, again, regardless of what device they are on.
QR codes are great! Maye not if you want to go to Italy and feel a paper menu, maybe not so much... but there's still plenty of great uses for QR codes.
Now that there’s no longer a giant pool of unemployed workers in North America who could otherwise be employed to courier food orders from a restaurant’s table to its kitchen, there’s a real tradeoff between a human doing a job that only a human can do and a human doing a job that a robot (or a website) could easily do with current tech.
Slightly off topic, but since we're complaining about restaurant menus I think most of them are a complete mess in the first place.
They either try to cram too much on one page, or require too many pages. It's not even necessarily that there are too many items, but that the design is shitty. Extra turd points if the page wastes the margins with noisy decoration or stock photos of drunk people smiling wielding margaritas or whatever and half of it is redundant ads for their specials. Don't get me started about glossy paper that's impossible to read under the glare of the accent lighting festooning the tables.
A pub I used to love is now order on the QR code menu, pay on the app it leads you to -- you see a server exactly once to drop off your food. I still tip 20% every time because that's how I roll, but it doesn't feel great, and mostly I just don't go there anymore.
I'm on the computer and mostly by myself all day, if I'm out I actually want to not be on my phone and be interacting with humans?
If I am out with a group, the last thing we want is to all by on our phones ordering (and being distracted by notifications etc)
I remember a lot of the breakfast places in Taiwan they had this little notepad on the front counter. It had the entire menu on it, printed on plain paper about a5 size. You'd take a piece of paper, and tick the boxes next to the item you wanted to order, then take it back up to the front.
Solves all the problems this QR code thing does, while being cheaper, more convenient, and reliable.
You can show your menu in every language imaginable.
You can let guests filter for allergies or dietary restrictions.
You can easily update your menu's if something runs out or changes.
There are many benefits. But please, people. Have a normal menu, too. You are not McDonalds, and if you want to be I expect McDonalds pricing too.
I've seen this argument come up frequently and I find this is just a weird hill to die on. I can see where the author is coming from as far as taking you out of the experience, but QR codes and NFC absolutely have a place in the restaurant ordering experience and I'm here for it.
I have extensive restaurant experience on all levels and while philosophically the importance of that experience would subjectively suggest a bias in my statements, I assure you I offer only my philosophical approach to this particular dilemma in the industry.
QR codes aren't novel in their approach to information; they are rather applicably similar barcodes. I think generally speaking most would agree.
This is the disconnect for most of humans. Generally speaking, when instituting out-of-the-norm operating standards in a generally selective common environment, most tradition is bonded with rather than against.
Such as a QR code as an example in replacing physical menus with physically-required experiences. Such as; walking in to physical place, sitting down or standing somewhere, picking up or looking at a written menu, speaking to someone (perhaps soon enough to be, some thing), ordering something to eat, eating said items, paying for said items, maybe a visit to the loo or not, and leaving the physical establishment.
When you insert a new method that (generally speaking) detracts from societal norms, it isn't a question of whether it works or doesn't work it's purely a matter of fucntion for the experience.
Example:
If there were a true 'ghost kitchen' which also had a (let's just say hypothetically) street-facing counter window due to (again, hypothetically) extremely small real estate space for the transactional process of obtaining the food, like a 2x2' window where you pickup the food - and the entirety of the transactional process from the financial arm of this experience, were to functionally as such: scan QR code above window, place order, pay/send order, wait nearby window, pickup food as ready.
That'd make sense.
But not so much when you or you and a group or more are interested in sitting down inside a physical space, expecting a physical experience.
The two are not equal and should be used as the experience is required, in my very humble, 25+ years of experience in this very industry, opinion.
What I've been doing for fast-food is to order ahead of time, usually while I'm en route on the bus. Google Maps has a unified interface that links out to the various delivery services, and the restaurant's own website if it's available.
Then I order a meal for pickup, and it's all specified and paid in whatever app I used.
Then I arrive at the restaurant and my meal is all bagged up to go, then I tell the counter girl that this meal is "for here" and may I please have a knife? "No, we don't have knives anymore." How about a tray? "No, due to the COVID-19 pandemic."
So far they have tolerated my presence as I sit at a table and eat the meal on top of the paper bag.
Here in Barcelona it's mainly Asian restaurants that still do this. Indeed extremely annoying.
It also kinda breaks the etiquette "when in a restaurant you're not messing with your phone" because all the phones end up on the table and stay there.
I prefer a real menu, but there are people that feel pressure when holding one, or interacting with the personnel, but I’m not convinced they do the right thing for themselves trying to keep it digital to avoid interaction in the real world with real people.
There are of course a few advantages to having a menu available immediately, including for ordering something afterwards, but I got into the habit of always asking for a menu to be left at the table. Not only for this reason.
In general I also enjoy interacting with the personnel when ordering, having a real menu definitely helps with that.
Honestly, if I'm going to a restaurant especially with other people, I prefer to leave my phone behind. I try to never bring a "smart" device.
This QR code thing is just another mine in the field of trying to live in society today without a smartphone. Other notable mines being online banking, apps to access government issues documents.
A lot of this nowadays require an app. If i want to find out my health insurance status? it's an app, no website. Heck even checking my grades at uni requires i install some sketchy app! it used to be posted at the department entrance...
I totally agree with the premise of Anne's article. Using a QR code for a menu or to place an order is so sterile and just ruins part of the reason for going to a restaurant in the first place, which is some sort of social interaction. Using a QR code to pay the bill is even more obnoxious as now a third party is being interjected into the payment/data tracking wheel of user surveillance. Technology is a great thing, but it can certainly be used in ways that are just plain degrading to a considerate life as a human being.
A different point of view from a particular experience. In a country with rampant accelerating inflation, QR codes brought on by pandemic protocols were an unexpected saviour to the problem of having to mark up prices every week or month. The experience itself sucks in most places as you might have seen due to terrible tech stacks to host the menu, but the benefit of not having to print or markup so many menus have made QR a must.
Funnily, I have an unfounded hunch that making price hikes so easy have in fact helped speed up inflation by a small bit.
when people feel the need to write "impassioned polemic"s about the use of technology in reducing paper waste and moving the world into the modern era, i have to think of principal skinner from the simpsons.
i love and appreciate the world greatly, and physical objects too, but i've never once felt a thrill from touching a paper menu which outweighed the convenience of using a QR code and mobile system to order food. the joy of dining out comes from social interaction not holding a menu
And people cook the food, people do the dishes, people clean the restaurant, do maintenance on the chairs... All costs that should simply be part of the quoted price.
I’ve yet to experience the self-ordering QR code thing, which sounds quite useful. In the UK, some chains had apps where you could order.
In the US, at least here in New England a menu QR code is a link to a PDF or a nightmare website (recently saw one that was a canva.com presentation formatted for a desktop computer or a TV) — a paper menu is almost always better around here.
It's fascinating to me that we went from "embedding important information in QR codes is silly because they look ridiculous and no one will ever use them" ( https://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/ ) all the way to "sweet, I can read the whole menu online and order and pay when I'm ready, this is great" in like 3 months.
As a millennial I actually prefer QR/order to table menus apart from fancier restaurants (places like Gordon Ramsay's).
This guy talks about appreciating the weight and realness of a physical menu, but the proceeds to write an article about it that I'm reading online and not in a paper newspaper or magazine.
QR codes seems to be living on borrowed time, saved from obscurity by the pandemic.
Why can't my phone just read a printed URL by now? There's no reason the same information can't be human readable as well as easy for my phone to scan.
I suppose it would require some kind of design paradigm to really denote text that could also be scanned, maybe a specific font style.
Anyway it seem likely to me QR codes are eventually replaced by simple text.
And not human readable, is my point. The value tradeoff in accuracy and compactness is the question. Will that be enough to sustain QR codes? I don't think so.
Also most QR codes seem to include a text url nearby the code anyway, so there goes the "compactness" argument. In that case it's redundant information as well.
I've encountered so many QR code menus that don't work that I don't even bother anymore. At this point I act mildly insulted when I'm told that there's no paper menu. (I say something like, "Really, there's no more paper menu? I don't do QR codes.")
Go ahead and call me stubborn: I have a 0-tolerance policy for broken tech, and that bridge is already burnt.
I don't mind QR code menus too much but often they are paired with ordering/payment system and these are too unreliable. Sometimes it can take my order, sometimes it just can't or I have to ask a friend with a different phone. Also, typing you card number on a phone is irritating, not to mention that I know nothing about that website and how secure it is.
Much prefer the touchpad approach, where they have one near each table, you pick what you want and it goes directly to the kitchen and runs up a tab. At the end you pay like normal and that's it. It's a digital menu that doesn't require my device in any way. These are rare from what I've experienced though.
I’d just like restaurants, cafes, etc to have an easier time operating here in the states. There is so much overhead to just serve people food, the most foundational service to offer a person. Do I have specific examples? No, but industry friends, anecdotal stories, etc…
I've seen this maybe once or twice. Maybe it's just a matter of which restaurants we choose to patronize, but virtually all of them offer paper or laminate menus for us to use. The only time we are forced to use an electronic menu is when we order via DoorDash.
I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone forced to use a QR code restaurant menu. As other comments have said, the wait staff is usually more than happy to grab a physical menu for you.
For me, though, I use it as an opportunity to ask the wait staff what they recommend.
I think they are great. Last night we went to a little Thai restaurant in New Hampshire and we self-seated, sat down, realized there was a QR code for menus and to register that the table was occupied; a half hour later two bowls of pad thai were delievered to our table for 70 dollars plus 20% tip. For 84 bucks we had a small meal and almost no human interaction: the perfect night for half of us, and the worst experience possible for the other. Whether I'm being completely sarcastic or not is not detectable because this thing is damned divisive.
I like the modern trend of ordering through a website and having your food served at the table without needing to interact with anyone. The amount of forced interaction in normal life is already unbearable. Anything that removes it is welcome.
oh i hate these too, and especially the places which completely remove the paper menus and leave only the digital version available, setting a requirement for customer to have a charged smartphone with internet connection with you. I don't even always carry my phone with me when i'm dining out, and even when i do, it can be out of battery or data plan, so it is always some asking for the freaking charger and wifi password, waiting until it have enough juice to turn on, going through public router captive menus etc before i can see the menu, absolutely outrageous feature of the new world
My main complaint about QR codes used like this is that at most restaurants I have been to will link to a pdf file that you then have to pinch-zoom all around the document to read it on your small phone screen - a bad UX.
I don’t like them. But I’m not sure how many people in this thread have friends in hospitality who are owners. They LOVE them.
Labor costs are killing restaurants, not having wait staff makes a huge difference to them
Well you could be getting priced differently. Restaurants could place different QR codes at "desirable" tables compared to the average or worst tables in the house. Would you know?
I'm not aware of any place doing this but it's a simple example that wouldn't even require any type of dynamic pricing setup just a second or third version of the menu with a unique link.
Just don't use the QR. Flatly refuse. you're the customer and it's not an unreasonable line to draw. If they don't like it enough to not adapt, one less customer.
1. Stand up, say to cashier "I'm going somewhere that has an actual menu"
2. Go to another restaurant that has an actual menu
3. Order Food
4. Eat Food
One weird thing I’ve noticed is that many of these pdf menu in the us are hosted on an s3 bucket in the EU. I’ve tried ti see a pattern in the applications but haven’t noticed anything
Really enjoy the irony that an article complaining about how technology ruined dining shoves a full-page popup in your face while you're halfway through the article.
This reads like a farewell and it probably is the next generation of dining. In North America the workforce isn’t there to staff restaurants and some of these digital menus allow you to order without staff needing to support it.
We should start to encourage some online menu standards though to
welcome it in.
I'm probably in the minority, but I don't see what's so appealing with physical menus. I never actually cared whether a restaurant has one or the other, I will just use whatever they have, but I would much rather use a QR Code menu on my phone (especially if it allows me to order without talking to a waiter) than using a greasy, bulky menu that everyone else touches. I get that there are some disadvantages, but some of the ones listed in the article seem to be grasping at straws. Important historical documents? Give me a break. I don't know if this is a generational thing or not, but my friends (from 20 to 35) don't care for physical menus either.
It's not so much that physical menus are good/better, it's that needing to open a digital menu on your phone when you're already in the restaurant and (presumably) paying to be served is the literal opposite of service.
The really fancy restaurants even have the waiter verbally tell you their menu, or at least their special(s) of the day.
I think that's completely subjective, because if I'm indifferent between the two mediums, then the service is not worse. I'd say it depends a lot on the restaurant. If I'm in a pricey restaurant, then give me both, because I want an experience tailored for me. If I'm in a Pub, please give me a digital menu, because god knows what is encrusted in those physical menus.
Now, having to listen to a waiter recite a menu from memory is just plain bizarre. I've been to a lot of fancy restaurants and I've never seen this. The specialty of the day? Sure. But never the whole menu. Worse than having a written menu in a format you don't like would be having no written menu at all.
The one place we usually go to has no phone signal at all anywhere in the ~150 seat restuarant. Its part of the reason I like going there.
We turned up last weekend to see they had put new QR code menus on all the tables. I had no intention of using them so I ordered from the counter as I usually do, knowing they wouldnt even work because of the lack of phone signal.
I spent over an hour that day silently chuckling as I watched pretty much every single customer pick up the QR code menu and try to use it. I saw a few get really annoyed and end up leaving. Im not sure how much damage the place did to their clientel in a single day, but I went back yesterday and they had all been removed.
You couldnt make it up!