It varies through regions. It is completely the opposite in China because:
- No extra app. People scan the QR in WeChat (everybody has it) on the table, it will call a mini-app dynamically (somewhat similar to React Native but interpreted in WeChat).
- You are putting orders directly.
- You are paying within WeChat as well so it's seamless.
- The app is smooth because almost every restaurant is using the takeout giant Meituan's mini-app.
- Almost every single restaurants in China is tech savvy enough to use those systems because it's already a take-out centered society. Restaurants not leveraging these systems have virtually zero chance to survive the competition.
- You don't have to wait for anything or talk to anybody in the whole process.
The problems people mentioned in this thread:
- Minorities, people without smart phone or those are less tech savvy, are left behind.
- The walled garden and monopolies and such.
These problems are real, but it's probably not the QR menu to blame, because it's a far greater problem - in China, you are not allow to go anywhere without WeChat and scanning QR code due to those draconian regulations.
I lived in China and I thought it sucked there too. I always found it an epic cop-out by the restaurants and cafés who refused to answer questions about their dishes or allow a simple additional request like adding more spicy. Invariably the restaurants with QR code menus were also the ones that featured pretentiously-named menu items so you had very little idea what it was going to be until after you ordered it. Fortunately while I lived in China (up through the early months of COVID) the vast majority of small restaurants still kept their classic red-and-yellow menu board that literally just says in the name of the dish exactly what you are going to get. And it was no problem to ask a question to clarify an ingredient or ask for something special.
What I don't understand is if you're just going to order off an app, what's the point of even going to the restaurant in the first place? That no-human-contact experience already exists in delivery apps, so why bother leaving your home or office if when you go out you just end up with the exact same experience? It's not like most of these restaurants are snazzy KTVs or tea houses where you get a private room and bottle service, they're just bog-standard food court style restaurants with hard chairs and dirty floors. You could just as easily order online and eat the food on a park bench. To me the whole thing just came across as inconvenient at best and actively destructive of local communities and their social restaurant culture at worst.
We go to restaurant with friends, not for social interaction with waiters, I don't miss the human-contact experience at all. I don't know why it is part of experience of restaurant, I am interested in food, and chatting with friends. I don't care about the service, except the speed of the service. Additional bonus of the app is that it has pictures of everything you order, and also you can order at your own pace. The restaurant owner don't have time to entertain you, they are selling at a reasonable price which doesn't including entertaining you, and you don't tip them in China as well.
In my experience going to a QR code restaurant with friends means everyone spends their time fiddling with their phones instead of discussing with one another the food that they are actually at the restaurant to eat. The pictures are useless, since in China the vast majority of them are stock photos that don't depict the reality of what you get. It is much easier to choose from a menu board which just says "dry fried green beans", "red cooked eggplant", "celery and dry tofu" etc than get the (much more common on QR code menus) "house special secret recipe greens" plus a random blurry photo that doesn't even make clear what green it is.
I don't expect a restaurant owner to entertain me, but I do expect them to be able to tell me what is in a dish, suggest a suitable equivalent if the restaurant doesn't have exactly what I'm looking for, tell me what's good or fresh that day or bring me something with more or less spicy depending on my preference. Any of these very short and simple interactions about exactly the product they are selling are much easier to have in person than trying to express every possible branch of a back-and-forth conversation in a tiny text box on your phone - and that's assuming there even is a text box.
I've walked out of several restaurants where they had real humans "serving" who either were completely ignorant about the food they had on offer or too lazy to bother engaging with a potential customer. "Just check the app." (Which doesn't have the answers.) What's the point, then? If all you care about is talking to your friends and not getting restaurant service, then just order online from a delivery service and enjoy your meal with friends in the park, in a square, in your office kitchen, in a hotel room, at home, wherever.
And please don't think I'm asking for American style "service" where you practically have servers begging you for tips every 2 seconds. There is a comfortable middle ground, and pretty much every small restaurant and da pai dang in China does it perfectly fine without a QR code menu.
No but they do introduce themselves by name, ask you how your meal is going and check in every now and again. That’s not a bad thing, but it is different, and seems in my mind related to tipping culture.
Generally they check in only once a meal and in the better restaurants, they are better about when to approach your table. There is a way that the tipping system helps - my boss tips massive amounts every time we have lunch (once a week or so). Like close to 15-25%. Especially in Indian restaurants (we are both Indians in the US). But in return, he hates waiting and expects top service. At least since I joined his team, we have gone to one new restaurant that opened up where he got pissed at the service and made them hurry up and serve our table better, then tipped them 22% or something cos he was like the food isn't bad so I'm coming back here and I want good service.
I, on the other hand, am content with waiting for the food if it takes too long and don't need any special service and would prefer to leave the (societally required) minimum tip of 10%.
15% is the socially required minimum tip in the USA. The signal sent by 10% is “I want to insult you by implying that I know tipping is required, but I’m going to make the tip so small you will know I didn’t like you”.
Tipping is a terrible system I would prefer we dispensed with, but abusing the very poorly paid people enmeshed in the system is unkind, if you can afford to eat in US restaurants.
May be true elsewhere but not in New York. I can play off the uninitiated immigrant card. The system is bad but that doesn't mean I comply with it. I know one of the consequences of my action is a poorly paid wait staff. But it is the right game theoretic move at scale. If everyone did it, we could shame restaurants into charging higher food prices and paying their staff more money in a fixed amount.
All this is beside the point that I don't eat outside in general. I prefer take out so I tip only rarely.
I hate having waiters keep pestering me every 5 minutes while I'm having a conversation with my friends but I wonder if it's as much due to the tip culture as due to the fact that it's considered impolite to wave a waiter over when you need them.
At high end restaurants with better trained wait staff- they are looking for visual cues on when to approach your table. Empty glasses, napkin on plate, menu down on table when you're ready to order, one customary check on the food shortly after it arrives, not so early that you haven't tried it though. But this is learned behavior on the part of the customer as well.
I hate that it's impolite to wave waiters over as well though. That would make the whole process a lot easier.
>I hate that it's impolite to wave waiters over as well though.
Depends where you are. In a lot of restaurants in Singapore, not only do you have to wave at waiters, you have to go to extremes to get their attention.
Guests fiddling with their phones is not QR-dependent from what I experienced.
Also, waiters can be helpful, and friendly even when there's no paper menus. In my current city most restaurants are QR-enabled, and they serve food as nicely (or not) as paper-based. Absolutely the same experience except how you looking into menu. I just stopped noticing the difference.
EDIT: Maybe important note that I'm neither in US, nor an EU country.
I have to say, you are not the typical customer of a Chinese restaurant. A good restaurant is busy, the chef will not change the recipe for your taste bud, you go there for exactly what they are famous for :)
America is weird because you can actually make a lot of money waiting tables.
But in the Netherlands nobody tips so it is not exactly a very desirable job. Restaurants have to literally close because they can't find staff.
Automation is the only possible future for the industry whether people want it or not.
I was in Amsterdam a few years ago and said a few words in Dutch to the waiter, who was really amused by it. He asked where we were from and ended up sitting down and chatting with us for like half and hour, and drew us a map of his favorite spots nearby. We also met a few really chatty bartenders, including a guy how ducked behind the bar and came back up holding kittens. I’m not sure why we had such good experiences, but it was great.
Restaurants are hardly the only industry in the Netherlands having trouble finding staff at the moment. There are quite literally less trains because the train operators can't find enough staff.
Thanks for this comment. I love experiences like this and this makes me want to go to Amsterdam even more at some point. I've experienced this in random small towns in the US, but they are few and far between.
Last time I was in Amsterdam I couldn’t even speak Dutch to the waiters. Pretty ridiculous. I don’t think that happens in U.K. or US unable to speak English to the waiter of a chain restaurant
It's not true that nobody tips in NL, but it's not mandatory; I still tip if the quality of the experience merits it. That goes beyond the responsiveness of the waiting staff, but also the ambience. If I'm eating in a glorified mess hall, which most restaurants devolve to if they optimize for number of seats, I don't tip. To me, a real restaurant also takes care of acoustics and privacy: you shouldn't have to raise your voice to be heard over the noise of the tables around you (or worse, the muzak).
It's also why the whole concept of QR-code menus is antithetical to my idea of a good restaurant: if you're dining out, you're doing it to enjoy the company you're in. Having everyone at the table space out into their private phone world is not my idea of a nice evening.
Yeah, it's relative. Bartenders can make decent money in America, but I'm guessing it's a modest salary in most of the EU.
I just moved to the Netherlands and have no qualms with the service in most restaurants. At least in my region (Brabant/Limburg) everyone is very nice. If I had to complain about anything, it would be sitting for 20 minutes after the party is finished eating, waiting for someone to clear the table. The service has been excellent and I enjoy paying the price on the receipt with zero surprises!
There’s plenty of people going to the restaurant alone and I bet the human experience is a big part of their motivation. They may not be as noisy and visible as groups of cheering young folks but you’ll notice them for sure if you take time to scan around with your eyes and not your phone (pun intended, not disdain over techies). Think of old widows, singles, workers away from family/friends, peoples with difficulties to have social interactions.
> and I bet the human experience is a big part of their motivation.
Restaurant business is one of the rare where "free market" is really fully functional, and market will quickly self-regulate and award the good ideas, and punish the bad ones.
If your guess was right then the restaurants without it would loose the customers, and niche restaurants with the "human experience" would start popping out attracting those unsatisfied customers. Since this is not happening in China (yet?), then perhaps it's about the difference in the culture and your bet is wrong?
While I actually like the food, I've found myself on several occasions just deciding that I don't want to go eat at Nandos because they've managed to make entire process so entirely hostile to basic human interaction. Just let me order my food from a real person please. It's so much easier that opening a digital menu and then needing to input my card info. It just makes me feel like I'm eating at a fancy McDonald's.
That hasn’t been my experience. (Living in a tier ome city since mid 2019.) Maybe it’s different now that QR menus are more the norm, or maybe we just go to different restaurants. If anything it’s easier to talk to a server, because they’re not handling the mechanics of order collection and bill payment for everyone else. I don’t miss having to get the server’s attention to try to settle the bill.
So if you lose your phone, forget your phone, if you don't have any battery, or if you have any internet issue, you can't order.
You cannot have the whole menu in front of you, you have to scroll and change sections. If it's cold, you can't order without talking your gloves off, if it's sunny, you better have a very bright phone or the menu will be unreadable.
As everything in China, you cannot pay without being electronically tracked, and you can't give a tip without going through a system that will likely take a cut. I will refrain to reach the Godwin point here since I assume it's been debated ad nausaum.
And of course, if something is not on the menu, you can't order it.
As usually with systems that are 100% digital, it gives you zero margin of maneuver outside of the happy path.
I don't want every restaurant to turn into a Mac Donald. If I want Mac Donald's, I go there.
McDonalds (and most of their competitors) are actually pretty good/ok for customizations. Usually what's missing is some edge cases like "no ice" or fully exhaustive lists.
This is not entirely correct, many places still do accept cash and allow you to order without your phone. It just so happens that most people prefer to order and pay by phone.
We had a sushi restaurant (in Canada) that belonged to Chinese expat that worked with the whole QR code + order + pay on your phone and I did find it pleasant. I would go as far as saying that I prefer it.
It might be cultural, but I can count on a single hand the number of times I went to a restaurant and the interaction with the waiter/waitress improved the overall experience.
While it is not something common, it just happens.
In Australia the food culture is you can customize almost anything on the menu and customers expect to be able to pretty much choose whatever combination they want as long as you have the ingredient and they can pay for it.
In France, a menu may not contain something you can eat, but some restaurants will create a full dish for you on the spot. It's very common restaurants with a Michelin star for example: as a veggie and foodie, I get regularly this treatment since french cuisine is very centered on meat. Some restaurants have the menu changing every day (I ate in one this week) depending of the farmer's market. The waiter just let you what's available. I know of at least one restaurant with no menu: you express a theme, and the chief will try to invent something matching it.
In Thailand, there was a restaurant were I used to go that had a regular menu for tourists with high margin meals, and a secret menu for regular customers that was actually good.
In Mali and Argentina, some restaurant menus are fake. You can't order most items, while there are items that you can get pretty much everywhere (riz au gras, pollo a la milanesca) even if it's not in there.
Now, it's tempting to decide that one path is optimum and shape society to only provide it. However, you kill diversity, margin of security, innovation, charm, and so on.
Don't get me wrong. Making the happy path the easiest and proffered way is OK. Offering a digital menu and payment system as a main option is great.
But making alternatives close to impossible is, at best, a good way to end up with with a bland life, and at worse, will create a dangerously inflexible and intolerant system.
It's why we should keep cash, paper forms and phone support despite the automated main experience been more efficient when all goes well.
They give you a beautiful piece of paper, and when you order something on it, the waiter tells you it's not available.
After the 10th item on the menu not being available, you start to understand that the menu is more like a checkbox a restaurant must have to appear worthy of the name, rather than an actual useful object.
Not all restaurants are like that in Bamako of course.
But it's a great fun to take new comers to diner, and let them be puzzled for a while until reality sink in. I still remember my first time, my colleague looking at me ordering ice cream with eyes saying "oh, sweety...".
I'll let you in on a little secret: you can order anything they can reasonably make without inconvenience. E.g. "Can I have a vegetarian version of this?" often yes, sometimes no, but you can ask.
I’ve never had trouble ordering a custom dish or special options. If there’s a price difference, the server tells us what to order on the menu, and tells the kitchen what to actually make. If it’s a family shop, sometimes they update the menu for next time.
I’m sure there’s places that won’t let you order off menu. I wonder whether QR menus increases the number of them, though.
I agree it's hard to run a profitable restaurant, but I disagree it works fine in Singapore. I just had lunch at a QR based restaurant here and it was a bit painful. Staff shortages are a real problem though in F&B so something has to give.
Thankfully printed menus are making a comeback. Even when the apps work fine I still prefer a printed menu.
I hate them. It's 100x easier to browse a paper menu than the scroll through 2-5 dishes per screen, and often have to navigate sub menus trying to find what's available.
I didn't come to a restaurant to fiddle with my phone for 5 to 10 minutes
> You don't have talk to anybody in the whole process.
It is a subjective matter anyway. I love menu with pictures, digital menu is very good, you can see what you are getting, even some descriptions if the menu is designed very well. Much better than the one page menu small restaurant offers. And you don't have to talk to anyone, meaning you don't have to rush because people are waiting, no need to hold your hand in air for very long, trying to catch the eyes of a waiter.
If there was no obsession with registrations, it wouldn't have been a problem at all.
For the menu no app is needed, the places I go always open a web page menu(provided by a service specialising in this particular niche).
The payment could be completed through things like Apple Pay, per table basis. So you scan a QR code, it instantly opens a session for you and you can start ordering things and once you are done you close the session by paying through some payment processor.
Also, the technology to open apps with temporary sessions without installing the app exist both on iOS and Android but for some reason it never got popular.
I think that's the custom in the vast majority of restaurants, but I don't think it's incompatible with the system described. It doesn't stream payments in real time, does it?
Same experience in Norway. Most day-to-day operations are handled using apps. Ordering at restaurants using QR codes, finding out bus routes and paying for a (digital) bus tickets, paying for a parking spot, using EV charging stations, etc. It is all done using an app. Apple Pay is a blessing. It takes a bit of getting used to. Especially as a tourist. But it works great. But I hate think what would happen if a loose my phone…
Interesting. As a counterpoint, I was in Norway a month ago on business and as a tourist. Did the Norway in a nutshell thing from Bergen to Oslo with time in Bergen, Flam, and Oslo. I used the Bergen and Oslo day passes for unlimited public transport in those cities. The later was especially handy, as it generates QR codes for both public transport and entry to most museums. My travel passes were handled via barcode docs on my phone. My tickets to a concert in Oslo was via an app on my phone. Route planning for site-seeing (which bus, tram, ferry, or rail) was via an app on my phone.
I paid for restaurants using credit cards directly to payment terminals.
I found the whole experience very easy and enjoyed how much I could handle on my phone.
I don't know about Norway, but here in Sweden you'd have one app per task, but since they integrate with each other it really isn't a problem. For example, I have an app for my region's public transportation and when I'm buying a ticket it uses the Swish (peer-to-peer payment system everyone uses) app for payment, which in turn may use BankID (national identification service) for identity verification, which uses my phone's biometrics. It sounds like a lot, but since every part is well integrated the full flow is just: tap ticket, tap buy button, fingerprint/face id, done.
As for the first point, Apple has a solution called App Clips (https://developer.apple.com/app-clips/) however I have never seen it in the wild even here in the Bay Area. Some commenters last time it was mentioned said they’ve used it at gas stations? I’m not sure if Android has anything conceptually similar.
I think "Instant Apps"[1] are/were meant to be the Android analog, but I haven't seen them used anywhere.
Also can't find any proof that they are still a thing... except for this[2] sketchy looking app that has 1 billion+ downloads, offered by "Google Play Store"
Ah, thanks for that. I had no idea how the following worked, but it was quite heavenly. Was at a restaurant who dropped the bill on my table after dining. It had a standard receipt on a black tray like you'd see anywhere in the US. But the receipt had a QR code along with a note about Apple Pay. I thought, "Hey I'd rather do Apple Pay than give them a CC so I scanned it.
I was prompted with one of those App Clip interfaces, double-clicked to approve the Apple Pay, and done.
It was such a nice experience, no nagging prompts forcing me to download some crappy App. Just a simple clean, Apple Pay checkout.
Note I agree with TFA about QR menus. But this level of phone integration was the perfect amount on top of a traditional dining experience.
The only time I’ve ever used this was trying to buy something in person at an Apple Store. Scan a QR code, something like the store app pops up, payment doesn’t work, staff can’t figure out what’s wrong. Waste 10 minutes and finally realize I’d deleted the full app because I never use it.
They’re extraordinarily convenient; a cafe I enjoy uses it for the total bill. Instead of handing off your physical card, the QR code presents your bill within the app clip, complete with apple pay (or enter your card details), done.
I live in China and here's an anti-anecdote. I had a terrible QR code menu the other day where you'd sit down, order, but there was no pay button. This set of my alarm bells immediately. And indeed, for a dinner that was supposed to be around 200-300, we wound up paying nearly 100 in additional fees that were mystically added to our apparently open bill without declaration. I complained about this at the counter when leaving and they refused to engage. The food was bad too, it was clearly a scam. I left them a terrible review and immediately decided never to dine at a QR code menu only restaurant again, and have so far stuck to my guns. Incidentally, I also work in foodtech.
I built a web-app MVP which is basically a QR menu app, as a web-app with URLs for each menu in the format webappDomain/RestaurantName, for example my demo is at tearounder.app/TheLoremIpsum
My MVP solves quite a few of the grumbles people mention, and other grumbles either dictate the sort of venues that shouldn't adopt this tech, or show why this tech should always be as well as traditional service not "instead of". (There are also some grumbles that require more development to iron out)
Stuff my MVP does that solve grumbles mentioned in this thread:
- simple URL format means you can use the URL rather than scan a QR code. If the restaurant name is long, a shorter version of the name should be used for good UX. I see QR codes that point to those URLs, as a good and easy option to provide for those people who now expect a QR code, but not the main way to access the menu.
- web based means no need to install an app (I have also met some of the basic requirements for a "Progressive Web App" so some browsers will let you save it to your device once you are on the website if you want)
- I keep file-sizes low, and put thought and effort into making it load and continue functioning smoothly even over slow and patchy internet connections. There are some things I could do to improve performance and smoothness on poor connections, particularly during building up your order, but it was easy to make it so that you can browse a menu to your hearts content even if your connection drops completely right after page load. Right now data for entire menu comes over at page load as JSON (that was created when restaurant last changed their menu), all UI up to placing order is handled in one page via client side JS, then as you add items to your order ajax calls add those items to a WooCommerce cart and tapping order sends you to a WordPress/WooCommerce checkout screen. Extra dev time to make a buffered version of that system, would get the connection need down to just the pageload and checkout/pay, but with the basic setup I have right now there is also need for a connection each time you add an item. The MVP setup would also require restaurants to have their woocommerce orders page up on some device behind the bar, which is not a great UI for their needs - so a "full" version of the web-app would need a custom page, and only use WooCommerce as a back-end if that made sense for that restaurant.
The problem with QR menus is not that they are inefficient, often they're very efficient. It's that it's impersonal and demeaning, the waiters are reduced to food carriers.
I like it. It's annoying to wait for the waiter to come over with menus, it's annoying to wait to ask them to bring a menu back because you want to order more, and it's gross when you get a menu that hasn't been wiped down properly and is sticky with god knows what, and it's wasteful when they're printing hundreds of fresh menus a day for the places that give everyone a fresh one.
Keep a few backup printouts for those who need them (like your phone gets no signal), but otherwise it's a fantastic step forwards. Goodbye to grimy wasteful printouts.
Plus the bonus of never having to experience "oh sorry we're out of that" if they update the menus dynamically is fantastic.
The only annoying thing is that the menu it opens is a pdf that was designed to be printed on A0 apparently, with times new Roman 10 point font, food on extreme left and price on extreme right.
And then you keep scrolling back and forth on your iPhone trying to read them.
Bonus points if you put the pdf in an iFrame in a site that’s off the bootstrap template but they forgot to include the js file so it zooms the hamburger button instead of the pdf when you pinch and refreshes the page when you jerk it too much.
If so many of the menus weren’t PDFs, I think the overall idea wouldn’t get such a bad rap. But yeah around half of all restaurants still do it in my experience.
It’s remarkable how particular non-IT industries attract personalities that are more or less technically averse than others. Arts and media, retail, building contractors: generally quite competent. Lawyers, medical: usually pretty bad.
Restauranteurs: the most technically inept grandparent you’ve ever encountered, the one who insists that if they ever touch a mouse it will catch on fire, and then somehow proves it
Go look at hobby sites for hobbies that are heavily weighted towards the elderly. OMG.
It's way better now, but for a long time I would go to woodworking sites (before it was trendy), and if you got much past GeoCities level sites it was almost a miracle.
I remember helping an older relative. They said they needed my help ASAP because Dish network was coming because they deleted their account. Couldn't get any details. Eventually saw they simply deleted an email about their bill.
Only sorta related but I wonder why it seems so hard for some to adjust while others do just fine. It seems like it would make sense that "email is just like real mail, its just on a screen." Maybe the "infinite options" scare them a bit?
Honestly, I think it’s the “mysterious beige box.”
When I was a teen in the nineties, I was the go-to guy in the neighborhood for fixing computers (beats mowing lawns). One trick I figured out was, I could demonstrate something like plug in a RAM chip or CD-ROM drive, take the parts back out, and then tell them to do it.
Even though their problems were invariably software-driven (fcking windows), just having that hands-on experience — not much different from changing your oil — would usually be all it took. The fear would be gone.
I've literally never seen that. It's almost always some web app type thing where you can select what you want, order it, and pay using apple pay/Vipps (my country's main electronic money transfer thing)/card. The UX isn't always perfect, but it has always worked too.
Edit: Downvotes? For simply sharing my conflicting experience? Okay.
You forgot "customized", and order drinks before food too - separately. The other part is: I dislike touching a phone screen while eating, so it needs to accommodate that too.
Edit: on a 2nd thought - how would family order look like - the kids need some way to link their orders (albeit having phones) to the payment. You'd need a temp password/pin for everyone to link to?
The ones paying the check are the ones making the orders. Makes splitting the check a solved problem by default. If it is a family with kids making the order, the kids simply pick what they want (no linking required for just browsing the menu), tell the parent what they want, and the parents order from their device. I don't think it is a hard necessity for everyone ordering stuff by themselves. Whoever pays the final bill can handle actually ordering the food.
At some point kids like independence... at least to choose/read the menu - around 5-6y of age. It'd mean sharing the phone with them one by one, instead of having a menu each.
Normally I'd pay the bill entirely (split whatever is non-issue at all) - however picking items for everyone is just bizarre, e.g. everyone would have to tell what to order, I would have to find and not mess up - in short not fun at all, cosplaying the waiting staff
Probably for US there is a market, but here in Europe restaurants mostly have a facebook page and that's it. They mostly don't really have an online presence and they don't really care either. That's what high taxes do, penalizing high achievers so ultimately every service 'stops' at a good-enough level.
It's also annoying to have to bring a phone to a restaurant. Not everyone carries them everywhere. I resent having to have one with me to participate fully in modern society, always listening and collecting data for its corporate masters. I occasionally wish I could throw mine into a large body of water; who knows, maybe some day I will.
Now I'm imagining a restaurant handing out iPads instead of menus to keep you "safe".
If I recall correctly before Covid Applebees had some weird off-brand tablet thing on the table that looked like you could badly order via it, but mainly what it did was not work for playing some horrible Android game.
Happened to me pretty recently in Bogotá, Colombia. At the table waiter handed us two very old iPads with broken screens to read a PDF of the menu.
In Santiago, Chile I was handed waiter’s phone with a menu from some local takeout when I informed them that I can’t read their menu hosted via QR since i don’t have data.
In South America it’s unfortunately popular to just have QR leading you to a huge PDF hosted somewhere in US to read a menu. Even in places that barely have internet like in the mountains… And more often than not they don’t have paper backups.
I was at a restaurant in LA that had a tablet-like gizmo on the tables. You could order through it, call the waiter, and pay at the end. It wasn't presented as for keeping us safe, though.
The fun fact was that the waiter actually gave us paper menus when sitting us, without even asking, though they also introduced the gizmo.
I actually found that quite nice, since they had a wide selection of beers and there was a beer-selection app that would go in the details of each beer and allowed us to easily choose the kind we wanted.
This is a bizarre take. I dine/eat out fairly often to a point I know the staff names in quite a few places (it's Europe, no tipping culture, either). I don't quite see how I could customize any order with a web interface, realistically (food intolerances).
>when they're printing hundreds of fresh menus a day
They change the menu every day? Around here the menus are commonly placed in a book alike folder or the least they will have a plastic slip. As for waste the online part (with datacenters and all) would be more wasteful/less green.
>Plus the bonus of never having to experience "oh sorry we're out of that" if they update the menus dynamically is fantastic.
So they need to link the kitchen to the menu system in real time. That feels unliklely - most of the menus would mostly static web (or worse pdf) interfaces, and an order button.
> That feels unliklely - most of the menus would mostly static web (or worse pdf) interfaces, and an order button.
You say that like it's a given, but why? Products that can dynamically update the menu when something is out of stock with a couple of touches from FOH staff already exist. It's not exactly complex.
> I don't quite see how I could customize any order with a web interface, realistically (food intolerances).
This is harder, but that's why I don't think you can replace all your staff with a web interface - you still need a human in the loop to ask about important things like this.
My phone doesn't have a smudge of ketchup and a spot of sticky dried Coca-Cola on it that get on my thumb.
Also... I can imagine why it could be reasonable to assume my phone might have the same number of germs as the menu... but how on earth do you guarantee it has far more?
To be fair there are probably some good bacteria-static agents inside of the ketchup and coca-cola :) These smudges are probably a tad healthier than random smudges on your phone. At least for a day or two :)
> if they update the menus dynamically is fantastic
Until it's the prices that are dynamically updated.
Soon enough they'll use the information collected from your device to look up your income level, how often you've visited in the past, what kinds of things you're most likely to order, etc and use that data to set a price for your menu alone and suddenly you're paying more than the person next to you who is ordering the same thing.
Does that ever happen in the US? 90% of the menus I've seen via QR codes, and more generally online, are out of date. Often by months. I've gotten "sorry we're out ofthat" just as often with the new tech as with the old. I guess it's great that restaurateurs elsewhere get this right - most of the positive comments seem to be from Europe - but for the OP and a significant percentage of HN readers that's clearly not the case.
Same. Depends a lot on how it's done though. Toast is the best that I see regularly. Menus designed for phones, easy to customize orders and pay. Hard to mess up.
I hate QR code menus as they are often poorly implemented.
However, I just experienced a QR code check for the first time. That was really nice .. I scanned the QR code with my iPhone, it downloaded the Toast "app clip", which allowed me to pay the bill with Apple Pay. It was totally seamless and far better than handing my credit card to a server to get lost or cloned.
> It was totally seamless and far better than handing my credit card to a server to get lost or cloned.
In the civilised world, we don’t do that. Instead, the waiter brings a terminal to the table, or if they don’t have any, we go pay at the desk. Nobody gives their card to anyone. That is a problem with much better solutions than online-only menus.
In fairness, that civilised solution is extremely slow. If you have a meal with 10 people want to pay separately... that's a lot of wasted time just waiting for a card machine.
I was pretty shocked when I first went to America and they just took all of our cards into the back. Hilariously insecure but you can't say it wasn't more efficient.
App payment seems like a good solution.
Currently the only reasonable option seems to be for one person to pay and then split the bill on Monzo - that does work well but some people don't have Monzo still.
Historically the laws around credit card fraud in the US was more consumer friendly, and so the risk to letting your card out of sight was low enough people didn't care.
Laws have changed over the past 20 years, but the culture around how we treat cards has not.
Anecdotally, I've never heard of anyone having a problem getting the charges refunded on a card that's been used fraudulently, regardless of the state of the law. If people were actually losing a lot of money to this type of fraud, I am sure the culture would change, but right now it doesn't seem to be a major problem.
Credit card companies or their insurers I suppose. They must figure it's worth it to pay out in order to maintain their reputation as a secure payment method.
In the United States they never bring the terminal to the table. I remember the first time I went to Canada being surprised when the waitress did that.
Because they have that tipping ceremony - they take your card to the back office, swipe it there and return to you with a paper check and a pen to scribe the tip amount. Also they only very recently introduced paywave cards.
Tipping is part of the terminal flow. You touch your card or mobile device, choose the tip, then choose how you want your receipt. (This is in southern California, where terminals exist but are still rare.)
As a Canadian travelling to the US for the first time in 2+ years due to COVID, I had a very odd experience in the Minneapolis airport. My meal was clearly done, I'd said I was ready for the bill, but 10 minutes later... nothing. I flagged down the waitress, and she was equally confused that I was still at my table!
I was expecting a wireless terminal, or at least a "come to the cash when you're ready". Wireless units were probably at 75% adoption in early 2020, and went to 100% when things started to reopen as a (perceived at least) way to minimize intermingling among patrons. When I mentioned I was surprised the credit card wasn't wireless (and also did tipping on paper, not in the terminal), the waitress said she'd never even seen a wireless terminal before!
Growing up, tech in Canada always seemed to lag behind the US, and it's weird to see it the other way around.
Not never, but definitely its the default. I certainly prefer the terminal wherever its offered.
If there was a way to avoid that last step, it would probably save restaurants a lot of time. Guests could leave sooner as they wouldn’t have to wait around for payment.
The alternative is to pay on the way out. Requires a single terminal at the exit (or just anywhere, s.g. at the bar). It works perfectly fine. Cafes and restaurants across Europe do this more or less as the standard, the more fancy ones bring the terminal to the table.
I don't know about "Europe", but in France it's pretty common to get the terminal at the table, even at "non-fancy" random eateries.
Sure, you could pay on the way out, but that's often painful. Many others are having the same idea, so now you have to wait around, lining up in a place that wasn't designed for people to wait around, bothering waiters who need to run around serving clients. It's usually less of a hassle to just wait around at the table for the waiter to bring the terminal to you.
My pet peeve with the terminal at the table thing is that, despite card payment being extremely common in my area, the waiter will not bring a terminal over when you ask for the check, you'll have to wait some more.
OK but being able to just pay and not waste a waiters time is basically only upside? Sure, if you have a special case you can still ask, but for most people it's just like "OK going to give the money now". No needing a waiter to come run over to the cashier to deal with you on top of everyhting else
> OK but being able to just pay and not waste a waiters time is basically only upside?
Yeah, that’s a nice positive aspect. Personally, I don’t think it out-weights the negative ones. Too many bad experiences with badly designed digital menus.
> Sure, if you have a special case you can still ask, but for most people it's just like "OK going to give the money now".
My experience (around here, so obviously YMMV) is that waiters don’t know how to handle exceptions in these restaurants. When you have to escalate to the manager just because you have issues with the menu and the waiter hasn’t been trained properly (of course they haven’t: training costs money), it removes any positive aspect.
> No needing a waiter to come run over to the cashier to deal with you on top of everyhting else
In these cases I just walk to the bar to pay and everything is fine. It is considered rude in some settings, but then these settings are also when waiting for the bill is not acceptable.
This is easily solved by requesting customers to pay at the bar. I don't know why many restaurants still have waiters running back and forth with a payment device or the card.
Around here it’s the contrary. Paying when ordering is only on the low-end or when speed is a selling point. In any other setting you pay when leaving.
Making customers pay upfront is a huge “we’re too cheap to pay for waiters so the customers have to do their jobs” warning sign. They are the kind of places where you’re expected to clean the table when you leave. Ok when all you need are calories quickly, but definitely not pleasant places.
I’m so used to it it’s now bizarre I need to have waiter walk to my table 5 times for a 1 euro coffee. It’s also supremely slow and I keep forgetting to pay.
Pay up front is a sign that either crime is so high in the area that they don't trust you to eat and then pay (as opposed to walking out the door); or a sign that inflation is so bad the price will change by the time you are done eating. Either way not the type of place you want to live.
Or it's a sign that they want you to be able to eat there on your lunch break. I've certainly written off restaurants that made me wait a long time to pay.
QR code menus 99% of the time just link to the website menu (which existed before the QR code for menus became popular, and is still wack). And it usually sucks just as much as it did before.
QR for a check is a beauty. Exact same experience as yours, there is a local restaurant that did it, and I was prepared for the worst. But I scanned the code, it did the Toast app clip, and the entire process was extremely smooth. I went to that restaurant multiple times since then, and I would be lying if I said that the "qr to pay the check using the app clip" didn't at least partially contribute to that.
- You need good signal or connect to wi-fi to pay (not a given in many restaurants)
- The restaurant can get your email address by default when paying with Apple Pay
- Much slower than just tapping my card or phone on the POS
Compared to the waiter walking away with my card, handing me a receipt to sign and top to fill in, I kind of understand the trad-off – but at-the-table POS solutions have existed for many years now.
It isn't "much slower" when you actually account for the time spent waiting for the server to come around, getting their attention to ask for the check, waiting for them to come back with it, waiting for them to do their lap and come back to collect the card, waiting for them to go run it, and finally waiting for the card to come back.
This weird system is one thing I don't enjoy about visiting North America. Where I live, you never deal with the servers for payment. When you're ready to leave, you just leave. Every restaurant has a payment desk near the door where they show you your bill, you tap your card and you're on your way.
No need for the waiter to walk away with my card if they have a mobile POS, as I mentioned above. Tapping my card and selecting a tipping option takes less time than even opening my camera app.
Ironically, many of the QR payment places I‘ve been to actually have these as well.
I get that jumping from a central POS to a device per waiter is an investment – but why switch to QR codes if all your staff is already equipped with a strictly superior solution?
In my experience, US restaurants either have something very new (i.e. combined POS/ordering handhelds), or very old (i.e. centralized/non-mobile, sometimes even magstripe only POS, no PIN or contactless capability).
The ones I‘ve seen that have switched to QR payments had mobile POSes before.
They have started appearing very quickly. There is definitely a long tail, but these days I would say I see one at least ever other time I go to a restaurant or bar.
Customers can ultimately set whatever they want as an email address there, and it's not verified in any way by Apple before completing the payment, but defaults matter: The default on my phone was my real email address from my contact card, and I did not even notice that it was preselected in the payment sheet until I got a confirmation email by the checkout system.
In an online payment context, this makes total sense to me: The merchant needs some way to identify the buyer even just for digital goods, after all. But it came very unexpected for me in a restaurant context, where I know that Apple Pay (via tap and pay) normally does not even reveal my name.
I really hope that Apple realizes the pretty big privacy gap here and starts integrating their email relay service into Apple Pay sooner rather than later, as well as making it possible to override required fields in some way.
I've only seen this madness in the US. The first time they took my card away from my sight I went with them to see what the heck they were doing. Crazy system, unsafe for no reason, they can bring terminal to you in the same amount of time, no signatures needed either. All of Europe works as you described, few countries in Africa I've been in the same, I wonder how it came to be like this in the US.
Besides being historically grown like that, I see two major differences to the rest of the world:
Credit cards have no PIN in the US (and debit cards can usually be used without one as well), which makes this approach possible in the first place, and the tipping culture that can make it desirable to get a quiet moment with the check to figure out amounts.
Practically, it also means that even larger restaurants usually only need very few POS terminals at a central location, rather than one per waiter, requiring wireless infrastructure in larger restaurants etc.
This is changing very fast, though – I‘m seeing both combined order and payment handheld devices (that support tap-to-pay, i.e. also Apple Pay) as well as the QR payment solution in more and more places.
Just want to correct this idea which has been repeated several times on this topic:
You only need 3 or 4 for a larger restaurant. The entire restaurant does not pay simultaneously.
When you (the server) are done with them you just put them back in a charging dock or some other communal space.
Sure, that is possible too, but what I‘m seeing frequently in the US is a new type of combined order management and payment handheld.
It makes a lot of sense, in my view: Handling orders tickets digitally is probably incredibl useful for the kitchen (especially considering a mix of dine-in and takeout orders).
From there, it‘s only a small (ok, not really small because PCI-DSS, but at least possible) step to also having these things do payments.
It's like that everywhere in the EU (UK/Europe overall) - the card providers are the same, either way - Visa and MasterCard. However, each country has a max amount to use without PIN (usually around ~50euro[0]), and PIN can be requested regardless. While 50euro is on the low side of a dinner bill, it's likely okay when paying for a single person only.
[0]: The European Banking Authority (EBA) calls on traders to make use of the exemption for strong customer authentication up to 50 € as allowed under Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389.
While they a weren’t _huge_ they weren’t very easy to bring to the table and use, so I imagine we just got used to the experience of the server running off with our card. In wasn’t until the pandemic that I noticed most restaurants using handheld terminals.
I actually used one of these at an Apple Store a several years ago because their payment processing was down. I didn’t have a iPhone at the time, so the alternative was the least-elegant, non-Apple-ish solution ever.
Even that solution wouldn't work today. My cards are all moving to a smooth surface with the card number printed on the backside. I still have a few cards with the raised numbering but each new replacement card I get, as the old ones expire, is the flat style.
In 2005 we were still using knuckle busters with airport shuttle customers who didn’t prepay. Also alpha pagers, VHF radios, and Thomas Guide paper maps. I have to admit they were all reliable out in the middle of nowhere.
1. We adopted chip cards quite late, so a lot of legacy hardware still exists - including payment terminals built into restaurant point of sale machines with a magnetic strip reader, instead of a separate card terminal.
2. Wireless card terminals are not common in the US, outside of things like Square or Toast readers. Readers are usually hardwired to the POS and aren't able to be "undocked" and carried around.
3. Outside of contactless, signatures are still usually required, and people are still used to having the receipt printer at the host stand alongside the terminal, instead of built into the card reader.
This is all slowly changing, and I honestly chock a lot of it up to stuff like smartphone payments (remember, we got Apple Pay before having contactless embedded in the majority of cards!) and smartphone-based POS systems like Square.
Contactless cards did appear in the US before Apple pay. I had one issued in 2006. It was just rarely supported by vendors and disappeared as the banks lost interest.
And, from a US perspective, that sounds absurdly overly dramatic and worrisome. The server is there to serve you, and the amount of money on the line is so comically small as to be hardly of concern. Sending them off with your card in hand is a semi-logical extension of sending them off with cash and expecting them to return with change.
I've never expected change when I pay with cash at a restaurant. Admittedly, this is mostly because of our crazy tip culture; but I just round the charge+tip to a convenient amount.
The money on the line with handing your card to the server is not comically small. They can max out your credit card with whatever charges they want. They don't even need to go through their POS system, as they can charge your card with any online retailer.
Fraud on credit cards from theft or merchants incorrectly billing is also far more protected in the US than in most any European country, and probably most other countries as well. It’s far less of a consideration in one’s mind when every bank I’ve had in the US defaults to believing the card owner over the merchant unless proven otherwise. These protections are more “balanced” between both sides in a place like Switzerland, for instance.
> Fraud on credit cards from theft or merchants incorrectly billing is also far more protected in the US than in most any European country, and probably most other countries as well.
It’s a common comment from Americans, but is misleading at the very least.
I have never even heard of a fraudulent transaction that was not reversed almost immediately, and I have been living in 3 EU countries (well, one of them ex-EU now). The procedure is: call the bank, notify them, they suspend the card and send you a new one (usually for free once a year or so, for about €20 after that). Usually they call you before you notice it; they are very good at spotting this.
It’s the same thing for card-present fraud: you have some time to declare your card lost or stolen, and all the transactions after the time you lost it are reversed. Your liability is €50 for the transactions that happened before you called them, and nothing afterwards.
I am willing to believe that consumer protection is better in the US for some specific aspects, but I am yet to see relevant examples.
When were you living in the EU? Credit cards have been around for a while, laws have changed over that time. Also credit cards have realized making it easier to reverse charges for fraud makes consumers more likely to use a card. Both are factors, and thus both of you are completely correct.
I have been continuously living in the EU or the UK for ~20 years. I have never had a credit card.
My first experience was with a bog standard Visa debit card at a French bank 10 years ago (card not present; someone apparently used my card at an ATM in Singapore to withdraw €1200 total; the bank notified me and refunded the first €500 withdrawal that went through).
My second experience was at a British bank just before Brexit (standard Visa debit card as well). I had lost my card without realising it. I called my bank when I found out and they went through the recent history to check every transaction. It turned out someone bought something with the card (can’t remember whether it was online or contactless; a small sum regardless) and that was refunded.
The regulations are very consumer friendly, even for debit cards, which everybody uses. And while they do indeed change with time, so far it has been in the direction of better consumers protections.
I don’t claim that Europe is better or anything like that, just that “the consumer is liable for frauds with their card” is wrong. IIRC, their liability is €50 maximum (and €0 in some countries) for transactions that happened before the bank was notified, and €0 after. Beyond that, the onus is on the bank to demonstrate negligence or fraud on the consumer’s part. In that case of course the consumers is liable and gets a fine at the very least.
> just that “the consumer is liable for frauds with their card” is wrong
To be clear, I neither said that not intended to imply that, so I find it a little questionable that you placed it in quotes. I think the protections are more or less fine, but seem to vary more and aren't as clear-cut for zero liability as I've found in the US, but I'm sure this varies a lot by country anyway. In any case, I've lived in multiple European countries for years now, so my experience is not solely from the US.
I think one reason we don’t use those PoS terminals too often in the US is because of tipping culture. There is this insane expectation to tip at least 18%, and in fact most receipts have suggestions for 18, 20, and 22%. Any time a server has brought me one of those portable PoS terminals, it felt really awkward, as they stare at me thinking about how much tip I should give for the half-ass snooty service. I imagine many others feel this way, which is probably why it’s not popular. I spend quite a bit of time in Europe and have seen more of the PoS terminals used there, but it makes way more sense because there’s no expectation of a tip.
Flipping that iPad with 20, 22, and 25% tip presets for a takeout really grinds my gears. But even for non-tip services, people tend to use iPhone attachements to scan the card rather than using a POS machine in the US.
Canada has the same tipping culture as the US and we've had portable PoS systems in restaurants for like 10-15 years now (and I feel like I'm being conservative there).
The machine just asks for a tip and lets you put a % or $ amount in, usually with a suggested amount. I'm not sure what difference you perceive here between writing it on a piece of paper and entering it on a terminal.
This just seems really paranoid to me? They can't see what you're entering and sure they can scan the receipt for what you put in after if they want but I've almost never seen them do more than shove the receipt in their pocket and quickly move on. If it's not busy half the time they just leave the machine and come back to get it after taking someone else's order or something.
Here we both tip, and use the portable POS. First the check arrives (on paper) and you can check that. At that point you write in the tip amount. 10% is normal.
Then the waiter returns with the machine, enters the total (including tip) - you touch your card to the machine (and if the amount is high enough enter a pin.)
The waiter does not handle the card.
There is no awkwardness at all.
I recently joined a newly-arrived US friend at a restaurant, and he paid, but clearly didn't understand the edit-the-bill process, so we tipped in cash then gave quick education.
It's a system that works well, is effecient and secure. Overall you stay in control of your card and your card is only processed once.
I hugely dislike the POS terminal for exactly this reason: "The waiter brings the POS terminal and you pay at the table."
The experience I dislike goes like this: The server gives you the hand-held terminal and then stands watching you, tapping his/her foot impatiently, while you hurriedly verify the check, then calculate a tip amount under the server's scrutiny. I guess I'm a wimp. With the server's eyes on me, I feel the pressure to tip generously, no matter how poor the service or the overall experience.
By contrast, I find the traditional system, where the server would drop off the paper check for you to examine on your own time, to be private, un-rushed, and less prone to error.
After three decades of paying my restaurant checks without a POS terminal, I've never encountered any monkey business during the brief time the server is in possession of my credit card. Is "restaurant credit-card fraud" really a thing?
He means most countries that are not the USA. Haven't been to Applebees in ~5 years or so but they didn't do it then either. USA doesn't bring you a terminal on average. I travel around the world for work and my experience is that most countries outside the USA do.
Ah, you edited your response. Mine still is valid I guess.
Haven't been to Applebees in ~5 years or so but they didn't do it then either.
Must have been the Applebees that you went to. I went to one in 2014 that brought the POS to the table. I remember the year because it was in a state that I've only been to once, for a business trip.
Beat middle class restaurants tend to use tableside POS systems. Applebees, Chili’s, Rock Lobster, Outback, etc etc. I understand them and love them for what they are, but it always feels jank to have to deal with a computer when I’m out for dinner. I’d pay more to not have to do that, which is the experience higher end restaurants provide.
I don’t have a computer screen in my car for the same reason. Software engineers tend to produce shit tier user experiences. (Speaking as one)
Young people now never pay with their cards, they are using phones with NFC function. So the POS terminal is brought to the table, because no one will give their unlocked phone to someone to take away)
Coincidentally I encountered this system for the first time last night. Unfortunately it never finished loading and I embarrassingly had to switch to a physical card after stalling for 30 seconds.
But how does it even work if there are more than one person? Does each person pay for what they order? What if you're inviting someone? Do you have to order in their stead so that their plates show up on your bill? Or can they somehow transfer their orders to your phone?
It seems this is a "solution" to a problem that never existed in the first place.
Here's how it's implemented on the one that's used pretty much everywhere where I live.
Option 1: Everyone orders and pays independently. Website takes payment through all the usual options + Apple/Google pay. So long as the whole table orders within 5 minutes, all the orders come through at once.
Option 2: One person sets up a tab, which generates a QR code. The other guests scan that code instead of the one at the table. People can order their own food/drinks as above until the tab owner closes the tab. If you forget to close the tab it closes itself at the close of business.
This should instead be labeled "the restaurant industry's worst implementation".
Just last night we were trying to order from a restaurant that uses a service called qrfy.com for their menu.
I assume from the URL that this service specializes in this. Despite that the UI is... poor.
The font is too small (probably fine for the 20 something designer that built it). That's not a biggy, but then someone decided to disable pinch zoom.
Being techy, I can show the others how to work around that by doing a screen shot, then looking at the result in the gallery, where zooming does work. That's a crap experience though, because I can only see one page at a time. I just want to browse a menu! And I need to do tech support to show others how to do Android screen grab (gorilla swipe from right to left).
All so very fucking ridiculous for something that could do easily be so much better.
Browsers shouldn't need a setting for this. Whoever decided to allow websites to disable zooming should be shot, along with whoever decided to allow them to disable copy/paste or hijack ctrl-f.
It's so weird to me that this initially became common with websites that were "optimized for iphones". Boggled my mind, since pinch-zooming was what made iPhones so cool initially
I think it's because pinch-to-zoom is actually terrible, although it has a cool name and looks cool. The problem is that it requires two points of contact to move apart, and you also have to hold the phone at the same time.
The best way to do it was screw-to-zoom, where you draw a spiral to zoom in or out; righty-tighty to zoom in, lefty-loosey to zoom out. "Screw-to-zoom" is a bit gross for marketing, though. Maybe "spiral-in, spiral-out"?
Requiring it to be usable is terrible. That said if images are important to the content, it's almost impossible without zoom to get a decent experience on a tiny screen.
So true. Funny seeing people complain about sites that are not mobile friendly because they require pinch zooming. Pinch zoom is what makes sites like HN so much more mobile friendly than others!
There could be a modicum of use for it in some rare, rare cases, but the value provided in those cases is far outweighed by the value lost when it is prohibited.
You can try that, but then you get sites where stuff goes flying off the screen when you zoom. Honestly, it’s hard to believe that websites can be so poorly designed, but they are!
If a restaurant wants you to use your phone and proceeds to serve a website that doesn't work on people's phones, that's on them, full stop. Even if the user can accommodate the brokenness, it's still unacceptable that they should ever have to.
Sure, and with physical menus you can bring along a magnifying glass for when they are printed too small. But then, this sort of things are not considered acceptable in the real world, why should we accept them in restaurant websites?
My experience with QR-code menus has been nearly always terrible. Little to no thought goes into the format and presentation for a small screen device. Many restaurants just return a large PDF with microscopic fonts that you have to struggle to read on your small screen.
While some restaurants have a waiter taking orders, others enforce ordering via the same webapp. I've almost always run into problems where the order process hangs, or doesn't go through correctly.
There's a specially nasty surprise on iOS devices. Sure you can use the built-in QR code scanner and it pops up a webapp where you take 10 minutes to struggle through everything.... and now you just want to check that message from your friend to see if he's on the way, quickly switch to your favourite messaging app and then.... anger at not being able to find where the heck your menu and ordering process disappeared, because you didn't know that you should have explicitly ordered your phone to open the page in safari.
When presented with ordering via the web app, you often are just getting whatever the server sees on their tablet, filtered through a simple web interface.
And then you can have fun ordering the True Impossible orders, like using the McDonalds app to buy a cheeseburger with no cheese, no bun, no sauce, no onion, no pickle, and no meat.
Hopefully these restaurants will go extinct via natural selection. It takes so much longer to convince these broken portals to take your order. Which means the restaurant is losing money at peak times.
I'm CTO of a startup in this space so I thought I'd chime in.
Yea completely annoying when you run into a qr code and it opens a menu. we try to encourage our restaurants to offer physical menus as a choice. We want people to use our app based ordering system because we put a lot of effort to make it convenient.
1. its not jsut a menu, you can browse and add food to your bill in real time and the waiter gets a push notification about it. its integrated with teh ticketing system so it really cuts down on wrong orders. what you see in the app is what the chef sees in the kitchen.
2 ordering between friends. we make it so you can invite and see a giant list with who ordered what in realtime.
3 hail the waiter from the app. with our system, the waiter gets a push notification if you hail them from a button in the app or add an item. no more awkwardly trying to get the waiter's by looking in their direction and locking eyes awkwardly like two grindr matches in a small midwestern city.
4. pay through the app. so far customers love it. they can simply pay and go instead of waiting for the waiter to bring the machine.
5 registering nor required, we saw that a lot of users were avoiding using the app simply because they didn't wan to register so we made special "lite versions" of our apps that load via instant app (android) or app clips (ios). Thls it sucks that it means we don't get to have a history of what the orders over time, we decided it was better that the system be as convenient as possible. hopefully other nice features like having your payment method stored so you can pay at table without pulling out your card gives people a reason to try the full fat experience
we're in 163 restaurants and growing in London so hopefully you be using us soon!
The value to having something like this is pretty clear but I can't reconcile it with the fact that I don't want to be using my phone at all when socializing with friends and I prefer they didn't as well.
In my opinion there is no better interface for communication than human-to-human speech. This is why butlers, waiters, and personal assistants exist, and also why natural-language AI is promising.
In my opinion we should aim to get screens out of our lives except when necessary and intentionally focused on a task (i.e. work) and maintain presence in the real world whenever we're doing anything else. This means leaning more on human language and less on screens.
To be honest tapping my order on my phone seems much better than through a waiter or even something like a per table Alexa.
I really dislike how often communication gets cut off because multiple participants are trying to get the attention of a waiter or the topic is uncomfortable to talk about with an unknown person over your shoulder.
Yeah, but it's not like they are actively interacting with me or a friend. I assume everyone more or less automatically ignores the background noise of other tables.
My experience with paying through the app has been pretty subpar. Usually I'm required to type in my credit card by hand, on my phone. Yuck. If I have to use some app / website to order food at your restaurant it better support Apple/Google Pay.
Edit: the number one thing users want in a restaurant ordering system is ease. I'm in a restaurant to relax, eat, and enjoy good company. The last thing I want to do is register for get another app (because none of the restaurants use the same one) and type in my payment details. Some of the things you mention do sound more convenient than the traditional paper menu and human waiter, but if I have to type in a credit card number or sign up for an account, I'd prefer the human.
I've used the iPad/tablet systems at airports. They usually work great.
What I don't like, however, are:
• Full-screen ads that you need to scroll past, to get at the menu.
• Request/Requirement to sign up an account (even if less "in your face," it's still creepy as hell, because this crowd, especially, knows exactly what will happen to that data).
• Enticements to "download our app." I have stopped downloading these apps, because, in the best case, they are watered-down Web pages, and in the worst case, borderline malware (why does a menu app require all my contacts and pictures?).
• Awful information architecture, that makes it difficult to find what you need (with a paper menu, it's less than a second. With a phone menu, it can take ten seconds or more, and, on a couple of occasions, I never found something that I knew the restaurant had).
Phones aren't iPads. The systems frequently seem to have been designed for tablets, and often, the phone experience is a watered-down, "lesser" experience to a tablet.
I'm really big on end-user experience optimization (as opposed to app developer experience optimization), so I know that I'm a cranky customer.
None of those 5 things are about focusing dinner attention in an enjoyable meal. I came to eat and talk, not mess around in a computer doing the staff's work for them.
"no more awkwardly trying to get the waiter's by looking in their direction and locking eyes awkwardly like two grindr matches in a small midwestern city."
Hum, what? Since when is looking people in the eye to catch their attention awkward?
Pretending to solve made up problems is better PR than honesty.
A more honest take would be "This will grow our and our b2b customers bottom lines, at the expense of the consumer experience. Most consumers won't have a choice if we get enough of the market."
> This will grow our and our b2b customers bottom line
You're not wrong here. the reality is that staff costs are going up and restaurants are happy to jump on technologies that let them do more with less. With our product, staff can be more efficient. We consider the experience of the waitstaff using our product to be a high priority and it shows when they are enthusiastic about pushing our solution to operations.
> at the expense of the consumer experience.
We're not forcing our system on anyone. We're doin our best to make it a better experience overall for the customers. There's a few restaurants that choose to have a QR code only experience but thats not something we push on them. Not saying we're perfect (god knows getting instant apps working has been the cause of a few sleepless nights) but we take customer feedback seriously and are aggressively improving our product to encourage them to use it to order. I personally don't want people using our app because they HAVE to but because its a superior experience.
> Honesty doesn't sell when you're a parasite.
You're entitled to your opinion. We provide a product that helps restaurants be more efficient with their resources and make less mistakes when it comes to ordering. our customers, (both restaurants and users of our ordering app) like it and thats what ultimately matters.
Nah, it's an app trying to sneak in price increase you won't notice.
The only reason for computerized menus is to avoid the menu effect", to raise prices more quickly.
For outdoor picnic table style dining it's my new preference. The ability to easily leave a tab open and progressively order food and drinks on demand is amazing.
Not that it should replace all dining experiences but wait staff free dining when ordering from a bar + kitchen is superior for these instances.
The ability to just get up an walk off without synchronous negotiation is a more relaxed dining experience, the ability to have people progressively join and leave your party is also fantastic and can facilitate an old school community dining hall experience.
There are a few UIs I like for mobile, many are quite poor though.
I hate QR menu's. Younger me is absolutely appalled at that. Older me just wants a physical menu.
* I intentionally don't use my phone at restaurants. In fact, I often prefer to leave it in the car.
* In my area (rural America), a lot of businesses have really poor websites (noticeably worse than urban areas). Nearly all of the QR menus are down right terrible.
* There's a good chance some one thought it'd be great to have a bunch of collapsed sections and add a terrible animation. I need to manually expand each section and deal with the terrible animation repositioning the screen.
* For those less tech savvy businesses, they probably just uploaded a PDF of their menu. Bonus points if the menu is scanned in on their 15 year old printer/scanner combo.
* Finally, there's the group of restaurants that have changed menus but either (1) forget to update the website (2) accidentally have multiple, differing copies of the menu
Bonus points for the menu PDF file being hundreds of megabytes because it's their high res file for the printing company. Double bonus if their restaurant is a mobile service dead zone.
And needing a lot of panning and zooming due to being based on a full page format which is unsuitable for a phone.
It also feels awkward because you stimulate everyone to pick up their phone as soon as you come in. I'm still from the generation that considers that something too avoid :)
You've got it backwards. The big files are menus that have been scanned with no compression at high resolution. Most of that info is vector/font on a properly designed menu.
I was at a food court a couple of months ago (sorry... "food hall") and one of the stalls didn't have a printed menu at all. Not even one available on request. Just a QR code.
> they probably just uploaded a PDF of their menu.
Tbh, this is usually the least bad outcome with QR code menus since at least it's usually just the same as the physical one but on my screen (worse than physical, but not "badly designed JavaScript animation hell" worse) *
Website is easier to translate and likely quicker to load. Search is similar whether its pdf or website.
I like qr codes as an option.
It all varies by context of course, but I much prefer ordering uk/nz style - order at the bar, pay, grab drinks yourself, food gets delivered by waiter. Much faster, esp when you are getting a single cup of coffee.
That's common in Britain for cheaper places, especially ordinary pubs serving food. At most middle or fancy restaurants you order from the waiter who comes to the table.
Exactly the same sentiments. My family is zero phones when eating, whether home or out.
Luckily, most places would bring a physical menu when asked. One claimed they didn't have any, and seemingly made no effort to accommodate, so they just lost our business. At minimum, I don't think it's too much to ask for a single chalkboard or screen or something. Having nothing and demanding users scan QR codes is low effort.
I'm luckily in a rural area where we still have washable menus (literally printed on dishwasher-proof plastic) and I've not seen a QR code ... well, ever.
And the tide is turning, the waiter at a high-class joint we went to in another big city noticed some hesitation with the QR code and revealed normal menus.
There are many services that provide nice web menus for the restaurants to use with QR Codes. The terrible state of any restaurant menu would be only because the restaurant is not aware of the service and the service providers failed to market their product to them.
Do you hate all QR menus or only the dysfunctional ones?
Most are terrible , but occasionally it’s a light web application where I can order and pay directly from. Which I like very much. I do dread the scanned menu PDFs though, they’re crimes against humanity
I don't bring my phone with me everywhere I go. I don't want to. It's big, and awkward, and annoying.
When it works, it is mediocre at best. When it doesn't work, it's a pain in the ass. Plus it means you almost never see a server. Again, great if there are no hiccups, but awful when something goes wrong.
And the huge variety of UIs are awful. Maybe in 10 years when everyone lands on one UI that make sense, and there's an IPAD at the table, and servers come by to follow up... maybe then I'll be OK with it?
2010's? Dude, I'm still in the 80's. I'm not some GenZ tiktok child who can't be with a screen for 10 seconds and thinks everything needs to be gamified. This dependency on phones is stupid. So I refuse to participate. The more people that do so, the less this BS takes over life. We're responsible for the world we live in.
Where I live in Europe the phone is used to charge transport cards, to pay at stores, to interact with banks and government, etc. Because of two factor authentication it's basically a necessity to have one for banking and certain government transactions (some of which can only be done online). I could carry around a laptop for work and business but it's far more convenient to use a smaller device.
For a month I traveled from Seville to Munich in 2019 and didn't need my phone at all. I bought food, tickets, took transit, etc. What I did NOT do was open a bank account.
So do these banks issue you a phone if you don't have one? Does the government have a law that requires citizens to own a phone? What brand? What capabilities.
There are online-only banks in the US that are only accessed through a phone, but they are not the ONLY banks.
I think you are confusing a world that CAN be accessed vs. a world that MUST be accessed via phone.
My banking and bill paying is basically online only. It's not obligatory but it's far, far more convenient online.
Debit cards still exist but they are being phased out slowly in favor of NFC.
To board transport I can still use a card but recharging it is easier via an app than by standing in line at a machine where I'd have to pay with a card or cash.
At work we often communicate via group chats. It's quicker and less intrusive than phoning or emailing. I don't love it but I'm accustomed.
To pay taxes or fines to report to the city that a tree branch fell to consult my property tax info or medical records or to get an appointment for minor surgery - it's all easiest or only possible online.
Online means via app on phone generally. Most of us don't carry around anything more expensive than a 150 euro Chinese phone.
> My banking and bill paying is basically online only. It's not obligatory but it's far, far more convenient online.
So, not a necessity.
> Debit cards still exist but they are being phased out slowly in favor of NFC.
Not a necessity (and I expect by "phased out" you mean you see them less).
> To board transport I can still use a card but recharging it is easier via an app than by standing in line at a machine where I'd have to pay with a card or cash.
Not a necessity.
> At work we often communicate via group chats. It's quicker and less intrusive than phoning or emailing. I don't love it but I'm accustomed.
I assume you have a work device and this is during work hours? If so, not a necessity.
> To pay taxes or fines to report to the city that a tree branch fell to consult my property tax info or medical records or to get an appointment for minor surgery - it's all easiest or only possible online.
Easiest = not a necessity.
You've just detailed things that _you_ find more convenient to do on your phone and that you are able (and encouraged) to do. But not one of them appears to require a phone, or - outside of your specific job - even internet.
Honestly I am very surprised to see so much love for the QR code menus here. I have had nothing but bad experiences with them.
First of, on Android, the camera doesn't magically scan the QR code. You have to download a separate QR code scanner app for that. My wife and my parents all have Android phones and have no idea what to do when they see a QR code like that. The waiter usually just says "point your camera to it" because apparently everyone in the world assumes you have an iPhone and that's how it works there. When it doesn't work the waiter now has to do tech support on a random person's phone.
Second, as others have said, the social aspect of looking at it together is totally lost. Which is quite big IMHO.
Third, scrolling through a PDF or a page on a tiny screen makes it much harder to grasp the entire menu quickly. On a paper menu, I often just jump around and get inspired by the various dishes. Randomly scrolling up/down/left/right on a tiny screen feel awful compared to just letting your eyes drift.
My vote is for a QR code and paper menus. Let the people decide what they like without excluding elderly or non-tech savvy people.
This isn't an Android vs Apple thing. Both of them introduced native QR code scanning in the same year -- 2017. That's five years ago. So I don't know what version of Android you're using, or what camera app.
But honestly, in 2022 it's kind of up to you to know how to scan a QR code, the same way you're expected to know how to type a domain name into a web browser. If someone has to teach you the first time then that's fine, there's a first time for everything, but the idea that there are people who haven't done it before isn't a reason to hold us back. And if you have a phone with a pre-2017 operating system or that otherwise doesn't support it in its native camera app, you can install an app for it.
But yes, places generally always have a backup option, whether a paper menu or tablet. I mean, people's cell phones run out of battery all the time. It's not just the elderly or non-tech-savvy ;)
>But honestly, in 2022 it's kind of up to you to know how to scan a QR code, the same way you're expected to know how to type a domain name into a web browser.
Why? I've literally never been in a situation where I've had to scan a QR code. I do mean never.
What benefit does a system like this provide when it's always clunkier than just having a physical object?
On an unrelated note, isn't this why all the scan-this-QR-code ads fall flat? Because it takes a lot of extra effort to actually "check out more info"?
It is not required to pay bills by scanning the QR code. It is perfectly possible to enter the IBAN and reference number manually as long as your banking provider lets you do so.
What is required is that you, when creating an invoice, provide the QR code for doing so.
I’m not sure were I said that it was required? I was responding to the comment. I see a huge benefit from scanning the QR code as it saves me trouble having to manually enter all the info. Older barcode style bills also worked but somehow scanning was always wonky.
It is supreme when sharing links in a presentation, it is supreme on business cards (since you can quickly get all the details and add them to your contacts), and it is the best thing for wireless access (just point your phone, and you are in).
Menus in restaurants are an exception. Those are better as physical objects.
But why would I want wireless access to a network that you can join by just pointing something at it? That specifically sounds like a wireless network to avoid.
And how is a QR code the best for sharing links in a presentation? Why would people want to look at what you linked during your presentation? And if it's afterwards they would need access to your presentation anyway, no? At that point a regular URL would do too.
Why would it be a wireless network to avoid? I mean, the QR code has the SSID and Password in it. For guest networks, the information is usually put up inside the areas guests go to anyway.
The way it worked at my previous employer, you had the guest network SSID and password on the wall and then the QR code, so you didn't have to type them in. There was no difference in security, just convenience.
As for during the presentation: surprisingly often, if you are doing workshops.
Anecdote: Just this week I ended up at a restaurant in San Jose that was QR code menu/ordering only. I don't know what format QR code they were using, but my iPhone would not read it at all. I've scanned many many codes with it in the past, but that particular one was just not having it. Luckily I was with a friend whose phone cooperated and I just paid them back. In cash.
They are decent as app shortcuts it seems. In the last two weeks I’ve done it twice as a replacement for typing in the name in the App Store of some targeted one-off app that is for a particular piece of hardware. In the first case it was some LED lights for my nephew. In the second case it was some light up hardware for a KPop concert I went to with my wife.
I absolutely hate it when there is a QR code with text like "Scan here for more Information" or similar - and then there is no link written or no information on how to get there without having to scan the code.
The best use I saw was on some small electronics thing I was looking at in a shop. One brand had QR codes on their boxes, which led to a full specification and the user manual -- more than could possibly have fitted on the box, especially as a European box can have 10+ languages.
Another is joining a Wifi network. I saw this at a couple of small hotels recently -- as well as giving the network name and password, there was a QR code. Scanning it prompted me something like "Do you want to join NiceViewHotel Wifi network? Yes/No" and was much quicker than typing in the key.
If my phone has something like this I would have turned it off when first going over a new phones settings. It's one of the first things I do. Go through every single menu I can find and turn off stuff I don't want. Something constantly using my camera to scan for QR codes is definitely something I will turn off. Just like say "Face ID".
Who thinks those are good ideas?
For the record I have scanned exactly 0 QR codes in my life.
You are aware that this is happening locally on your phone, right?
I have no idea whatsoever what caused you to dislike QR codes, but I kinda want to hear the story. Face Id, I can kinda see as a pin might be more secure.
Technology and software are awesome! After all, I build this stuff myself.
I also see how these things are built. I see how the sausage is made. Sometimes, when you see how the sausage was made, it can sour you. Even if you maybe didn't see how that specific sausage was made. Also, always beware of what the sausage might get used for other than the "intended purpose".
I never understood the premise for QR codes. You're trying to send me to some URL, create an SMS w/ some pre-defined text, automatically follow someone on Twitter or whatever and a bunch of other things. Until I scan the code I have no idea what it will actually do. I don't generally trust something like that not to be used for nefarious purposes. We teach people to be careful what links they click on and such. Here we teach them the opposite. If someone sticks a QR code in front of your face, just scan it! Now you can say that no restaurant ever would send you to a URL that then exploits a flaw in your browser and that there are way easier ways to compromise a system. Fair enough. Doesn't mean I have to start using QR codes for things that worked perfectly well in a non-QR code world.
Now the GP also said that restaurant people tell you to "just point your camera to it". This would indicate that there's an always on camera scanning my surroundings constantly to figure out if there's a QR code there. Frankly if that was actually the case, that would be super creepy. That is why I would disable such a function right away. Even if it's "just happening locally". Sounds a bit like that whole "they only scan your device for inappropriate pictures locally, nothing to worry about". Now combine that w/ all the new rage in "e-health" where you don't have to go stand in line for hours to see a doctor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32560361 ("Google refuses to reinstate account after man took medical images of son’s groin").
This is exactly the kind of thing I am worried about w/ any of these "advances" in technology. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
I have a OnePlus8 and it does not do QR code scanning. I had to install Google Lens. It's not about version of Android. The cameras are all proprietary and so are the camera apps.
As such I hate QR code menus. I'm with the boomers on this one. QR code menus are no better than touch screen menus to open the glove box.
> First of, on Android, the camera doesn't magically scan the QR code.
Out of curiosity, what phones do you and your family use? Because my Android phone (a Pixel 4a) has never had any issues scanning QR codes by just pointing the camera at them.
Some OEM camera apps have built-in QR code detection (using Google Lens or something else) but not all do.
Starting in Android 13, a QR code scanner is accessible from Quick Settings on all GMS devices. This QR code scanner is built into Google Play Services though so it's not available on AOSP builds.
Right. I use F-Droid and have Google stuff turned off. I do have an app, Binary Eye, that can scan QR codes, UPC codes, Code 39, etc. But it doesn't have permission to launch a browser. I have to paste the code into Fennec. I need to do this maybe twice a year.
I've never seen QR codes in restaurants in Silicon Valley.
I have a (normal) pixel 3 and it does do it, but the UI is terrible and sometimes doesn't engage. And when it does the link shows up in what I found to be an awkward place.
I'm about 90% sure this used to work better on an older version of android.
I've certainly never tried to stop it from updating. It's on version 8.4.600.440402475.27. When I point mine at a QR code absolutely nothing at all happens
I don't know if this is the same experience for you, but for a while I would just open the camera app without realizing I had to swipe over to Google Lens mode to have it detect QR codes.
Anecdotally, between a Pixel 4a, Pixel 7 pro, OnePlus 6 and 7 Pro, none of them ever successfully scanned QR codes in photos. All required a separate app to correctly recognize QR codes.
It's even worse when you you don't have internet access, and have to use a restaurant WiFi that requires you to sign up.
Also, if you are dining with someone who has a food allergy, then all the "convenience" of online menusgoes away when a waiver has to bring their book of allergens to the table and manually take the order anyway.
> all the "convenience" of online menus goes away when a waiver has to bring their book of allergens to the table and manually take the order anyway.
Which is silly because an online menu is an amazing opportunity to do extensive dietary restriction support. In fact, it's so accomodative to have a filter to narrow/highlight menu choices that I'm surprised restaurants haven't done that and also made "Paleo" and other diets part of it. Plus every single menu entry could have expansions to show exact ingredients, etc., for extra research.
Honestly, a lot of it seems to boil down to that digital menus can be superior to the traditional options, but a lot of places are kind of awful at software and websites so you get a wide spread of quality, a lot of which is hilariously inferior to paper.
It's often the case in the UK that the mobile app/website in restaurants has full allergy information, including filters to only show items that match certain criteria.
Same. Not a fan of QR menus for plenty of reasons, but allergies isn't one of them.
Printed menus where I live (Seattle) tend to have the exact same info as the QR menus, which includes the allergen info. Which makes sense, because most of the time the QR menu is the exact same as the physical one (just printed out). And those that are not the same just have more info on the website, like full nutritional content and such.
It's so common in the EU and UK that I think it's probably law, or a good way of complying with the law. It's specific to the restaurant's menu.
Some places will list the allergens directly on the menu, with symbols or footnotes. Less common is a separate menu showing only e.g. lactose free options -- I've seen this at nicer places in the UK.
Places like cafés and fast food where the menu is a blackboard or screen should have a book/file or similar. It is often just printed Word documents in a ringbinder, presumably prepared by the chef.
Please let your server know of any allergies or food intolerances. Gluten-free options are available but our kitchen is not gluten-free. Delivery, tax, and document fees extra. Void where prohibited. All rights reserved.
Well that also assumes you live in a part of the world that's civilized and has an allergy book. Seen it plenty in Europe and almost never in the US. Most of the time, in the US, if you say you have an allergy to something the waiter says "I don't know" or "I'll tell the chef".
I went to a restaurant on Friday where the sit-down experience was identical to the online-ordering take-out experience but with a table in front of the pick-up counter. The food was fantastic but I hated the experience.
Some time ago I had coffee with someone in a cafe that did the same thing. I never went back to that cafe again. We spent a full ten minutes of our ~hour time not talking to each other because we were too busy futzing with an awkward online ordering system.
Sorry, I meant as far as how many years it took to release an OS that natively supported QR code scanning. However, I double-checked and it looks like Oreo was the first version of Android to offer it natively via built-in Google services, and iOS got it with iOS 11, and both OSes released in 2017.
> It's 2022 and I am using a Samsung A8 phone from 2018 which is pretty good
And if it can’t scan QR codes from the camera app, that’s purely because your carrier is withholding software updates from you. It’s built-in from Android 8.0 and Samsung supports the 2018 A8 up to Android 9.
I get the sentiment, but the ire is better directed at those preventing older/cheaper phones from doing what they’re capable of.
The iPhone 5s from 2013 (109 months ago) scans QR codes from the default camera app just fine. Still gets security updates too. This is unparalleled in the Android ecosystem.
I’m not going to get into yet another platform flame war and I’m sure you have plenty of reasons why you selected your device and they’re valid. But if your post is about longevity and economics iPhone wins hands down.
Indeed. My iPhone 6s (lovely big screen) has worked perfectly since 2015. I'm disappointed that IOS 16 won't be available for it, but I really can't complain after continuous, impeccable compatibility for almost eight years.
And, as the parent noted, my 6s is still getting security updates; current is 15.7.1. I'd swear Apple is sneaking in some UI polishing too.
I have a One Plus 7 Pro and it can scan QR codes, but you have to press a button in the camera app first. Not entirely intuitive up-front and a bit finnicky even once you know about it, but it's been good enough in practice.
I really would like to know how to scan QR codes without playing 3rd-party app roulette. Which button do you have to press?
I have the OnePlus 10 Pro. I've looked through all of the menus and settings, there's nothing that seems to be QR code related? Maybe they've removed the feature?
In 30 seconds, I found that you can do it by using the Google Lens feature, which is a button to the left of your zoom button in your camera app. If you don't want to use that, you can use google lens directly.
> First of, on Android, the camera doesn't magically scan the QR code.
Most Android phones do this automatically - and it's not too hard to write up a quick app for it to scan automatically when it detects a QR code.
> Second, as others have said, the social aspect of looking at it together is totally lost. Which is quite big IMHO.
My friends and I all browse together on our phones and we excitedly point out different menu items, that we can look at independently without having to cram together looking at a piece of paper. Otherwise I don't know how this is any different than having separate menus.
> Third, scrolling through a PDF or a page on a tiny screen makes it much harder to grasp the entire menu quickly. On a paper menu, I often just jump around and get inspired by the various dishes. Randomly scrolling up/down/left/right on a tiny screen feel awful compared to just letting your eyes drift.
Scrolling through a PDF / page has always been fine for my friends and I. I'm also not entirely sure why I would want my eyes to drift when actively looking for something to eat as well?
>and it's not too hard to write up a quick app for it to scan automatically when it detects a QR code.
You're joking, right? In case you forgot the context, "not too hard" is looking at a menu that's in front of you. Writing an app to make up for the absence of the menu is definitely too hard.
If you can't write up a full-featured QR code scanner from scratch in 15 seconds, can you really call yourself a programmer?
On a more serious note, though, I wouldn't be much impressed with QR code menus. I usually have my 4G off, I don't trust random wifi networks, and I don't like smartphones as a form factor for any text over 500 characters.
HN is so ironic, they complain and criticize everything but fail to understand QR code. Are they actually a programmer or only acting like it. India already have UPI implementation while in the USA they need apple to save their useless banking system and still fail to move on with tech.
It's weird that people hate QR codes so much. Perhaps is it phenomenon only in the US? It's just a information encoded as a square, not something like Skynet.
The security issue is forcing non-technical end users to troll through an app store to find "qr reader" and also not fall for the hundreds of scamware they'll encounter immediately in the search results.
Really surprised there hasn’t yet been a reckoning with QR code substitution attacks. Duplicate the menu, put up a “type your credit card details” form, and you could probably automate the actual order with the real menu site in the background. Boom—-skimmed.
There’s just no way for laypeople to evaluate the provenance of random QR codes. The restaurant industry often uses random third party sites for their menus, so even that is a poor signal.
EDIT: Adding second paragraph that was accidentally deleted before submission
QR code substitution does involve significant in-person risk for the perpetrator. Some patsy has to go around swapping the QR codes on restaurant tables, likely raising some awkward questions from the staff and ending up with their face on multiple security cameras. It's certainly doable, but the risk/reward ratio seems poor compared to ransomware, hacking PoS systems, etc.
Can you elaborate on the perp’s risk/reward analysis?
Imagine a vending machine in a remote area with no hardline data access, and it’s unreliable for the machine to access the phone network. If there’s a QR on the machine, and if the customer has a data signal, then payments can easily be processed by phone and return a code to complete the purchase.
A perp swaps the QR, sends customers to a plausible-looking payment site and steals their buck-and-a-quarter.
It’s fairly easily detected because that machine suddenly stops making money. The perp’s website and payment processing would be subject to subpoena. And this is wire fraud, so a federal crime in the US.
This is what came to mind immediately when a friend of mine was recalling a prank (purportedly) pulled on a Sydney restaurant. The QR code sticker on various tables was replaced with a legit-looking sticker which actually took users to a rather NSFW URL instead of an ordering page.
I hope it has caused people to start thinking about what could happen beyond the jokes.
I couldn't agree more. Though, just because we haven't heard of widespread cases doesn't mean it hasn't or isn't happening.
> There's just no way for laypeople to evaluate the provenance of random QR codes.
Arguably, even seasoned veterans may have difficulty confirming the validity. Too often, it's a patchwork of random third parties before the order is completed.
> The restaurant industry often uses random third-party sites for their menus, so even that is a poor signal.
Which makes this all that worse, as it's contrary to all of the "verify" messaging we've been preaching from the security world.
In the Indian UPI system the QR scan for payments involves an account holder name fetch from the recipient bank. This makes it very difficult to convincingly swap QRs
The menu doesn't ask for payment typically, the server still does that so a qr substitution attack would do nothing useful other than confuse the customers and staff for about 10 minutes before they decide to just rewrite the menu on some paper and deal with the problem after closing.
In Australia, QR code to website menu->order->pay has become the norm; restaurants without it are increasingly rare[1]. There are 2 or 3 major vendors of such systems, generally respectable (though a few dark patterns on some of them). I'm completely surprised there haven't been substitution attacks already.
[1] These emerged during/after lockdowns to minimise staff contact with diners, but have stuck around as there's an employment crisis whereby restaurants (and plenty of other businesses) can't find staff, so this reduces the need for staff to stand around waiting for you to place your order.
Sure, I haven’t described the universe of QR code usage at restaurants. The point still stands that a QR code at a table is an abusable trust boundary in some places where it’s used.
I'm actually surprised that this is an issue. I eat out several times a week and haven't seen a QR code menu in months. QR code menus were a short episode during the pandemic, but it looks like most restaurants in my city switched back to printed menus (I live in Germany).
Agreed, I'm very happy that a lot of things we just accepted would become norms post-pandemic have just been completely forgotten and life today is largely indistinguishable from 2019.
I went for sushi this week and of course there's a hundred things in twelve categories. I couldn't even figure out how to get back to the daily specials, once you move on, you can't see them again.
It's a fundamentally horrible experience and will definitely keep me from going back.
I love QR codes and used to put up QR code stickers around town. I hate them for menus though. I sometimes like to go on walks without my phone and stop in somewhere for a meal. Or my phone is dead. Or I just want to have a meal with someone without any phones distracting us. The only implementation I've seen of this that I thought was neat was at a restaurant where it opened up to a website where I could place the order and pay on my phone.
Huh, maybe that explains why living in Australia, I don't understand the hate for QR code menus. Basically everywhere that has a QR code menu over here these days also lets you order and pay via the same QR code.
Oh, that's a total gamechanger. If looking at the QR code menu allowed me to also order from it, it would have made it much superior to physical menus, no argument. Sadly, I've never encounteted it across many restaurants with QR code menus in a major city (Seattle). Every single time it was either a link to the pdf version of the printed menu or their website with the menu.
Order and pay is the standard these days in Australia. It's pretty rare to find somewhere that has the menu but nothing else as a qr code (why not just look up the restaurant's website in that case?).
Pardon my ignorance, as I haven’t been to a restaurant since the pandemic started. How does that work when you have 2 or more people you’re ordering for? Do you pass the phone around? Do they have to look at it and tell you what they want and you enter it? Do you ask them, “Do you want X? No? Y? What about Z?” Sounds like a huge pain to me.
Some places have the table number encoded in the QR code. Others you type it in. Everyone at the table could put in their own orders on their own phones if they wanted to, or one person could enter them all in. For the former it makes it very simple for everyone to only pay for their own things too.
Honestly, as someone with young kids it's been an absolute dream. We can scan or tap as soon as we get to the table, one of us can quickly fire off some order for food and drinks for the kids, and more often than not things have arrived before we've finished unpacking the coloring books and other things to keep them occupied. At which point the adults can sit down and chat, which is usually the main reason we're out, and order at our leisure.
They open the menu on their own phone and tell the person doing the ordering what they want. An upgrade over physical menus, of which you often get only one copy for your table. I don’t miss passing a physical menu around and wasting five minutes on each person.
It depends on the venue and provider. A lot of pub type settings will have a note saying that orders placed within 5 min of one another will come out together. In my experience the more upmarket the place, the less likely they are to have ordering via phone (or payment at the time of ordering).
But you can also get someone at the table to place the order for everyone. Or often go and order at the bar (also something that you don't see too much in North America), or if its a restaurant grab a member of staff and order in a more classic way.
This is a good list, and if I may add another one: I'm tired of everyone appropriating my phone for their own purposes. It's my device, stop telling me what code to scan or what app to download with it. My phone is exactly none of your business.
I have never, to the best of my knowledge, owned a telephone that can open QR codes, and I'm neither interested in finding out for sure, nor buying a different telephone. I've largely stopped going to restaurants anyways because of the outrageous unannounced and mysterious fees that many are now tacking on (I'm not opposed to paying what it costs to produce fine dining, but tell me the cost up-front), but I also will not go to a restaurant that won't just hand me a damn menu. I'm just a drop in the bucket, and no doubt nobody is missing my custom, but who knows, maybe there are more like me.
A quick google shows QR came out in 2002, had apps on all phone platforms in 2010, and was native to iOS in 2017. So at a minimum you are 5 years behind, although you could use an app fairly easily.
The average phone life before replacement is 2.5 years in North America [1] so you are somewhere between 2x and 4x outside the median: an outlier but not outrageously so.
I recently replaced my decade old Blackberry because it either did not support VoLTE or I just couldn't find the appropriate firmware upgrade for the modem, but either way the telecom refused to service it. If it had support for scanning QR codes, it was very well hidden, as I actually spent time trying to get it to do that. I now have a Nokia of some sort, pointing the camera at the QR code doesn't open a web page, and that's all the effort I'm interested in investing, since the entire notion of QR menus only serves to make cellular telephones more mandatory for participation in society, which I wholeheartedly reject. The day I can't walk out my front door without a telephone and accomplish my tasks, I'll move to the mountains and become a hermit.
It’s not just scanning a QR code. It’s that the sites almost always require you to verify your phone number so they can track you across orders. I mentally blacklist any store with online ordering and leave a negative review.
We're just talking about QR codes that open up a PDF or HTML page that shows the menu. It's not online ordering.
I mean I've seen online ordering as an option at a couple of places that I thought was cool, but you didn't have to. Literally everywhere else I've been (in NYC) it's just been a static menu. Not tracking you.
In the USA it's been 90% a redirect to some massive print-ready PDF stored on AWS, the other 10% it's a redirect to a hand-coded HTML file that is badly out of date.
But obviously no, I did the restaurant no favor. I financially deprived the restaurant of income, and the server unfortunately of a tip. And I tip big.
I don't owe the restaurant a visit. They do owe me an experience. If it begins with struggling with their QR menu system, I'm opting out for a variety of reasons.
And a struggle it is. First find the mode where QR results is something actionable (I have an older phone) Hopefully their WIFI is exceptional, and the password not onerous.
Then answer their marketing questions. Finally peer at a too-small menu you have to scroll through on a tiny screen with terrible pictures.
Find something interesting? How to share it with your dining partner(s). No, can't point to their menu or say "Page three on the bottom!". No, you have to give them your phone. Oops! They touched something or it scrolled or went into low-power.
It's a fairly miserable experience for some of us.
If I'm hungry, I ask the same thing as whoever is close by and whose dish looks remotely edible.
If I'm not really hungry, or if the food isn't easily visible, I do the same as you do: yes, I carry a computer, but refuse to use it in most restaurants.
If McDonalds can afford some wall poster with pictures + names and prices, I'm sure most restaurants can. So the question is more why don't they want to? Even a flier by the door would be enough for me!
However, on a site were most people love pushing tech even when the best solutions are not technological, I wouldn't be surprised if we were in the minority and people tried to rationalize using QR codes.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's kind of weird to hold up the largest restaurant chain in the world by revenue as a baseline for what most restaurants can afford.
In fact, in many parts of the world and even in the US the standard for listing food available for order is just that - a flyer on the counter or even better, some pictures of the various dishes.
(You know the food's going to be good when the picture is faded from 15 years of sunlight.)
In some countries this is often a menu + a ordering and payment app.
It's very popular to the point that servers actually ask you to use it vs asking them.
In America this wont happen because of the tipping culture, so we get the worst bit (reading a menu on your phone) without the useful bit (reliably entering your order and paying without the check/card/away/back/tip dance).
In some countries there might also be a menu on the table for easier browsing. It does away with the frustrating parts of the experience like needing your orders ready at the exact time the waiter asks for it and having to wait for a bill after you finish. So you can just focus on the company of the people you're with, the food and the atmosphere.
For a long time I thought QR Code menus were a great idea. But seeing user reactions like this made me re-evaluate a lot of my project ideas.
I get it, the convenience of having a simple menu in hand (0 steps) vs. a QR code menu (5-6 steps) trumps whatever interactivity the latter menu provides.
I guess the expectation of users sitting in a restaurant is to move away from their phones and technology and move towards socializing and a QR menu brings those back onto the table.
There's a lot of tech like this - it's flashy, it seems great, but it just doesn't work well enough to be a game changer.
To go to extra steps you need to get extra value (and not just "use our app and save 5$" type of value) - something like being able to save custom variations from previous visits, order before and have it nearly ready, etc.
Anyways, off to raise $50m for QR-menus-on-the-blockchain, wish me luck.
> I get it, the convenience of having a simple menu in hand (0 steps) vs. a QR code menu (5-6 steps) trumps whatever interactivity the latter menu provides.
Yes, but on the other hand the QR ordering I've done here in Singapore streamlines a lot of other steps from the rest of the ordering-food-and-paying process.
It's especially useful that you no longer have to synchronize with wait staff. You can just order and pay whenever.
You can ask for a paper menu. Nine times out of ten, they will have one. For that one time out of ten, ask the waiter for a menu recommendation, or ask if your preferred staple is on the menu. This has worked in NYC restaurants large and small for the past three years. Some of the better restaurants have since reverted to paper menus.
We have the choice to say no to blind redirects-in-the-middle for service transactions with a human server present.
9/10 my experience in UK is: the waiter is already walking away from you before you get a chance to ask, then they just repeat “oh you can just order with the QR code it’s super easy” while walking away again
The biggest gripe I have, is that I follow the code, and:
1) It asks me to register an account; and
2) Upon finally getting to the menu, my phone is immediately taken over by a full-screen ad, forcing me to scroll down, to see an almost incomprehensible ToC, that is based on whatever they are pushing, as opposed to what I want.
When I sit down, if there's no menus, and one of those gegaws is in the middle of the table, I ask "May I have a menu, please?"
If they point at the gegaw, I repeat: "May I have a menu, please?"
These are interesting reactions from the tech-savvy folks who are always wanting to “change the world.”
Well, you succeeded. Get over it.
QR code menus dominate here where I live in the US Midwest. Here’s the thing - they only replace the physical menu. Wait staff still takes your order, gets refills, etc. just as when we had physical menus. When it comes time to pay many restaurants now bring a device to your table so you can pay. The wait staff no longer disappears with your credit card. Nice.
The nice thing about this system is it gets rid of the germ-laden physical menu, eliminates the ability for wait staff to copy your credit card, yet retains the rest of the traditional restaurant experience. No app required.
Y’all might want to take a look at how we’re doing things here.
As for anyone looking to opening a restaurant, if I have to install an app to dine at your restaurant then I’m walking out. That’s definitely not the experience I’m looking for!
Menus are never cleaned. Ever. Dishwashers are regularly inspected as is the food preparation area and food handling practices. Menus? They’re cleanliness isn’t regulated, so guess what?
"Tell you what-" he said finally, "last guy that had this bed was a blacksmith- hell of a nice fella and as clean a guy as you want to meet. Used to wash his hands even after he ate." - (Of Mice & Men, John Steinbeck)
> When it comes time to pay many restaurants now bring a device to your table so you can pay. The wait staff no longer disappears with your credit card. Nice.
Personally, I prefer not to have a server hovering over me as I figure out how much to tip them.
The places I go just leave the device with you and say pay whenever you feel like it, no rush. They’re using devices that have a big red light and green light on top. When they bring it to you it’s red. It turns green after you pay. That way they can see at a glance whether you’re trying to skip out.
Some coffee shops/cafes make it central to the overall experience and I love it. You can order directly from the QR code and the code is tied to your table so they bring the food and coffee directly to you. Split the bill directly in the app when you close out to pay.
If a restaurant isn’t going to really invest in an experience like that then they absolutely should go back to paper menus.
Don't know about countries, but in Sweden it's never been a problem to split the bill when you're paying. The waiter will just input whatever's needed into the PoS they bring to the table.
Why the hell would I need to download and install the restaurant's app for that and trust it with my payment details? All while I'm trying to just have a meal
So much this! I want to enjoy a meal with my friends and/or family. I don’t want to play tech games. I’ve been to a few restaurants that have an iPad at the table where you can order additional items, refills, dessert, and pay. Those were fine (so long as you turn them around when eating because they have distracting animations on them). But having to download someone else’s code to my phone. Fuck that.
> Why the hell would I need to download and install the restaurant's app for that and trust it with my payment details?
This is why Apple’s “App Clips” functionality is so great. You get a small app-like piece of functionality that you’re not installing or keeping, it works while you’re at the restaurant, then you check out with Apple Pay (or equivalent) so you don’t have to input payment details and don’t have to worry about usable payment details being stored by a potentially-insecure website.
I've never been somewhere that won't let you fall back to some kind of manual method if something is wrong with the internet. But as long as it's up, it's nice to just pay on your own rather than flag down a server.
This is especially the case if you have kids. You don't have total control over when a meltdown is going to happen, so it's nice to be able to pay quick and bail. If you're just a couple adults, the extra time isn't as big a deal.
It helps because you don’t have to wait on another person who may or may not be busy doing something else. I can scan the code while my wife grabs the kid, and I can double tap to pay while walking out the door.
Its amazing how slow and inconvenient are America moving towards new technology. In Asia we typically browse using online system and no own fumbled it yet somehow on this tech website, everyone fumbled it.
Must be wonderful having everyone in the continent of asia having a charged phone and cell reception in every restaurant. Us Americans are not so lucky.
A good number of problems solved elsewhere are routinely proclaimed as unsolvable in the U.S. Solutions are categorically rejected in the U.S. because implementation is somehow uniquely crappified. The worst form of American exceptionalism.
A mobile app takes at least a full minute to authorize and download and install over a cell connection. And I sure don't want to install a new app every time I go to a restaurant.
A laminated paper menu often takes several minutes for the server to bring around, or worse.
What are these restaurants that don't have the hostess give you menus? The lowest class ones have menus printed on the little table placemats, middle ones always have a pile of menus the host grabs from when seating you (and calls you Party of X, always), and the highest ones either arrange for wine first, or you're getting a menu from the server right as you're seated by the hostess.
I suppose there's some middle-ground "seat yourself" style ones but I can't recall any recently.
Pretty common for restaurants not to have a host, you just ask a waiter nearby and they tell you to sit anywhere you like, and that someone will be by to serve you.
Hosts are expensive and NYC restaurants are often quite small so it's very common not to have them.
QR Code menus are the absolute worst. They're a serious pain to use on the phone, and they encourage people to take their phones out when they should be put away.
So far, every restaurant I've been to also has paper menus. I'm not sure what I'd do if online was the only way to look at the menu. I'd likely find another restaurant.
I hate QR codes for menus with a passion. Feels so awkward, need another app on Android, not easily read on dimly lit places. Usually I tell one of my friends to tell me the url.
On the other hand I love NFC for this. It blows my mind that it's not that common. Works perfectly and feels natural, just place your phone at the NFC tag.
I'm with you. NFC is awesome. I use NFC around the house for basic automation (Hue etc) -- and it definitely should be more common.
I was in a restaurant the other night that had QR codes printed on NFC tags, mounted on the wall for each table. The process of pulling up the menu was effortless.
Is the horrid UX of the Android operating system not the worst part about QR menus? You absent-mindedly hit the physical back button once instead of using the restaurant's ultra slow back button for navigation and you end up back at your home screen starting from scratch needing to ask the waiter for the QR code to be brought to your table again. Then another 30 seconds trying to get it to scan because it's scratched or on reflective glossy paper. Same experience in more than ten countries
This part of the experience is by itself so aggravating I haven't had time to think any deeper about other potential downsides honestly
I like QR code if the menu is responsive and allow ordering directly. No matter high end mid end or low end, I just want to get my food quick and check out quick. Always having to find and speak to a waiter is a big problem for me.
QR code menus are fine, if made well, for quick-service and casual restaurants where the customer's interest is primarily in a quick and efficient meal (even a quick-and-efficient delicious and high-quality meal).
But if you are operating a fine dining establishment(1), where the food is but one component of the experience, and you have a QR code printed on a piece of paper taped to the table ... you're really taking away from the experience you're supposed to be selling.
(1) There are some limited exceptions for places which make a quirky tech vibe part of the experience, which mostly comes up in certain types of sushi bars.
> (1) There are some limited exceptions for places which make a quirky tech vibe part of the experience, which mostly comes up in certain types of sushi bars.
What kind of sushi bars are you talking about here? When I think of fine-dining sushi bars, quirky tech vibe is sort of the furthest thing on my mind.
> (1) There are some limited exceptions for places which make a quirky tech vibe part of the experience, which mostly comes up in certain types of sushi bars.
Chinese hotpot, Korean BBQ, Japanese dining that isn't just sushi bars, Thai and Vietnamese places (among many others) quite often use digital menus as well as digital ordering. None of these exhibit a "quirky tech vibe", aside from some places which use robots to deliver small side dishes, or beverages. Many of these would also not be considered "quick and efficient", at least how you describe them.
It would be good to consider venturing outside your regular dining locales to see what the rest of the world is doing in terms of restaurant experience, and whether the American way is still even relevant.
I assume the reason they work so well in China is that they open into some nice UI everyone uses / is fairly standardized in WeChat or AliPay or something. Our internet model is very different from theirs with the Super Apps
This is it. I lived in China for a decade and only started seeing the WeChat menus for everything only in the last couple of years I was there. It was SO convenient and easy to use. Much nicer than trying to flip through a physical menu, flag down a waiter, have them write down my order, etc.
But I imagine it would suck if I had to open a different UI every single time. The UI I used was tried and true, efficient, and user-friendly, could depend on it working well no matter where I went.
The worst dining experience I’ve had was directly attributable to QR code menus.
I took a client out to lunch. The waitress came to the table, directed our attention to the qr code and left. I was wanting to connect with my guest but instead had to get out my phone, point it at the qr code then peer at a screen, which is the height of bad manners when you are in someone else’s company, choose what I wanted then hand my phone to my guest, which is a revolting and unhygienic thing to do, nowhere else in society is this expected, then he had to do the same, choose something to eat, then I’m damned if I didn’t have to pay for it there and then at the table, get out my credit card and complete the transaction, just such bad manners and embarrassing. Dealing with money has rules and expectations in our society. Are we meant to go through some sort of “I’ll pay/no please I’ll pay” ritual over a qr code menu at the beginning of the meal? Ugh. I hated every moment of that experience.
Instead of enjoying and exploring the menu, chatting lightly about the choices available, I couldn’t wait to get the awful experience over with.
The printed menu, and the human interaction with the waiter, are an integral and key part of the experience of eating out, and if a restaurant owner doesn’t understand that then they really don’t know what business they are in.
QR code menus are lazy, impersonal, offensively pushing me to use tech when I don’t want to, inconvenient, tasteless and generally the absolute opposite of the experience I want when dining out.
Makes no sense to me that restaurant owners think they are a good idea.
I can see why they’d be good at Macdonalds or fast food restaurants but that’s it.
When I book a restaurant I now ask if the use QR code menus and if they do then I cancel.
There's an excellent restaurant (or... it was) in Palo Alto named Nola that moved to this model recently. Been many times, but the last time I took some guests from out of town there and it was nothing short of awful and an embarrassing experience. They work in the restaurant industry so are typically lax about minor gaps in service but...this is just such an unforced error that it's hard not to feel ripped off.
After that I've learned to refuse patronizing any of these restaurants.
Yeah. Here in France the number of restaurants with QR code only menus is still small, but as annoying as you describe. And the only time I went to a restaurant where you also had to pay from your phone (by entering manually your CC number!), me and my party just laughed and left.
This is the opposite of the restaurant experience. I'd rather buy a sandwich in a supermarket and eat it on a public bench (which is a nice thing to do, weather permitting).
Hard disagree. I love Web menus like these, because it means I don't have wait staff constantly disturbing my conversation. In Australia, a lot of them are rigged up so that - even if I'm paying for the meal on my tab - the person I'm dining with can order from their phone instead of the "pass my phone around the table" dance that you describe.
No more "sir are you ready to order" when we haven't even glanced at the menu yet at restaurants. No more "can I get you another drink". No more desperately trying to attract the attention of waitstaff.
No more "oh whose round is it now" and trying to remember 8 different orders when you're out at a bar.
An entire suite of dining annoyances just... gone. I love it.
Edit: note that this assumes that they're using a system that allows you to order and pay through the web system as well. Others are talking about PDF menus and that's quite rare here now.
i want my sandwitch fast. i rarely order fast good, which means i don't know where things are in your app. the user interface on apps are terrible. with training they can be fast, but i don't wabt training on how to find things. train your own people
There are many applications that try to act as a shopping cart and a kind of cloud electronic cash register for the restaurant. Which sounds like a great idea. But in many places, especially during the (QR-code menu) pandemic, I came across to some QR codes, requiring you to download an application. Unfortunately, the application itself is just a PDF viewer with built-in ads. You still call the waiter to order, you still use POS to pay. Nothing has changed in the process of ordering food but I installed a really shitty PDF viewer with ads at the bottom and the top of the menu, also before and after every interaction. Immediately left the restaurant but still. Why all the hassle?
I’ll say there’s at least one extremely good version of this out there and I imagine it dramatically increases the restaurant’s sales: a service called OneDine that is in use by a small regional chain called Bartaco along the eastern US.
It’s so easy to keep ordering that I and everyone I eat with indeed just keeps ordering.
Every other implementation I’ve seen pretty much sucks though, to your point.
The times I've come across this I've been able to just go to the restaurant website and download the menu PDF normally from there.
Even when the QR code brings you directly to the website it feels like a clunky experience, so I've gotten in the habit of checking out menus before going to the restaurant if I can.
I love them when they let me pay at the end and there's still staff around to ask questions if needed. Waiting to flag down someone busy to ask to pay so I can leave if I'm not carrying exactly the right cash amount is not helpful for anyone.
QR menus was just the tip of the iceberg of a huge downgrade of service during Covid, which still prevails because they’re recovering costs and suffering from huge inflation.
There are less staff, worse trained staff, longer waits, reduced menus, increased prices etc in many places now.
I get it. It was hard to run a restaurant before the pandemic. I can’t imagine what it’s like now
As a lowly employee in a giant hotel that is part of a massive global company, I have to say I dislike QR codes (and the micros POS). We had an issue where menu changes were not updated automatically on the QR codes, allowing guests to order things they can no longer order. Further, when orders from QR codes went to printers in the kitchen, either parts of the order were missing, and/or the guest was able to write in certain requests, without being sure we even carried the product.
I'm sure QR codes work great in some circumstances, but they didn't in this instance.
I saw these during a holiday in Spain throughout the last week. I have no idea how to use them and didn't see anybody else use them either. It would probably be a different story if my phone had some kind of built-in support for this stuff (maybe it does?). I recall using the "Google Goggles" app for this kind of thing a _long_ time ago but it should be native - and obvious - by now.
I have a feeling that the industry has stopped depending on this stuff already... it's hard to tell without knowing how it works.
Restaurants are places where the regulars gather at predictable hours, and predictable days, and predictable tables, and don't see suspicious to give personal dietary info linked with credit cards.
Is really surprising that nobody has tried still to swap a chunk of paper or put a stick over the QR code at the table to substitute it with a different QR code hacked, so when you order, they redirect you to the official web and at the same time silently copy your personal info in a different web.
Or replaces he lamb dish of a notorius iman with a dish containing pork.
Or allows a paparazzi to change the impossible meat hamburguer of a famous vegan actress by something made of real meat. The paparazzi takes photos and sell some profitable outrage disguised as restaurant error.
Or change the dish of a CEO allergic to peanuts by one that contains a sauce made with spinach and peanut butter
Or spice the dish of a major league baseball or tennis player with a drug, so it fails the next anti doping test. It does not matter that he wear dark glasses, has grown a beard and is unrecognizable. Will be instantly caught by the personal data linked to him.
Or orders somebody in a kitchen to put a pinch of polony in that dish in the table 5. Don't need the complicity of the waiter anymore, and the dish will be served with a smile and no sweating by a waiter that will end in jail without even suspecting it.
The possibilities to abuse the system are endless. They are like the .exe dancing banana attachment of our time, except that you eat the banana now, so this time the target is your body instead your computer.
Most restaurants would not notice the replacement until later (or would never notice it if the next client in that table restores the original QR code). Specially in a world where people don't talk with the waiters anymore, or were replaced by robots.
As an investor in a QR code menu ordering company (StoreKit), I know firsthand that bar/restaurant owner sentiment is also mixed.
Some owners see clear value in increased labour efficiency and revenue generation (people order more when using their phones), while others don’t want their customers playing with phones because it cheapens the experience.
It’s really just a matter of product-market fit; some venues are naturally more receptive to QR codes than others. The jury is still out as to which venues they are.
It’s also a matter of technology catching up to the ordering experience. Who wouldn’t want to see an AR version of their dish and be able to interact with it? Imagine scrolling through every menu item as if it were right in front of you, clicking on it, zooming in, seeing the exact portions, having all dietary and ingredient information readily available and being able to tinker with your order at will, having interactive information about the source of ingredients.. The possibilities are truly endless and fully customizable by each venue.
Ordering is also a subtle signalling tool of social status, so taking that away will upset some people, like snobs at The Atlantic. Some people like showing off how much they know about an ingredient on the menu, displaying dominance over waiters/waitresses and even fellow guests, etc.
The only way to have mass adoption is to please everyone, which you can’t at the early stages. That’s why it‘s currently being used by venues that are getting a lot of value from it. (Labour efficiency)
Journalists are not hired for their imagination, particularly at The Atlantic (establishment conformists). Using tech to order from a menu will only get better over time because, at the end of the day, the paying customer will enjoy the experience. But we’re not there yet for most venues.
Bit harsh on the Atlantic - they clearly found a relevant topic where there is contrasting opinions and people want to discuss it, wasnt that their objective in the first place?
Reading this thread I see yet again why the super-app approach is probably the best one when adopted front to back in this context - selection,ordering,payment.
You’re right, that was their objective and I was harsh. And to your point about the super-app, that’s exactly what we’re hearing from venues. They want a one-stop shop that will take care of all aspects of the customer experience.
Reminds me of those messenger restaurants in Sweden. You have to have messenger installed and then you roder, the server comes out with the food and that's the only connection you will have with them.
Swedish servers and bartenders and taxi drivers want tips. And they get super pissed if you don't tip them.
The espresso house barista never asks for tips, the bartender does and gets mad if you don't tip.
All they have done is bring me a plate of food , zero interaction.
Why why why should I tip them?
Still pisses me off.
I actively avoid restaurants that use this system.
Takeouts however I am fine with in this way.
I'm surprised when I see QR menus at upper-mid and high end restaurants. (Though that's mostly going away now.) For lower-mid and fast food, it's a clear cost reduction and turnover-boosting channel.
- I couldn’t get a coffee recently because there was a couple complaining that their coffee hadn’t arrived. (They took ages) it turned out they had ordered coffee at the wrong location (it’s a chain).
- went for pizza. And had to enable location services to make sure I was in the restaurant. Presumably to prevent the above issue.
- allergies - went to a restaurant where a member of staff has to come out and talk about allergies even though they’re on the digital menu. So you end up ordering twice.
QR Code menus work well in China because you're also ordering from the menus too. You don't have to flag down a waiter and place an order unless you want to.
99% of the restaurants I’ve been to in the US (and I live in California ) absolutely do not work that way. I’ve been to a grand total of one that does, and it was so annoying to everyone that they eventually stopped.
So now in the USA the waiter doesn't even bring you the menu and tell you order recommendations or the day's special? Are they still expecting you to give them 20% of tip/alms ?
This depends on the restaurant or maybe the area. In Portland the restaurants with QR menus (using Toast) always seem to have a server that brings out water and periodically refills.
I've only seen that a handful of times. Most of the time I feel lucky just to get a responsive website instead of a PDF that I have to zoom in to read.
When they became widespread during the covid lockdowns they were a good solution when we wanted to avoid spreading things by touch. Even how, as long as you can still ask for a printed menu, I think the QR code menu is a reasonable default as long as the menu is relatively simple. If there are a lot of options it becomes cumbersome.
Now, I f you have to order through their menu site, that almost never works well. Those sites are just not well run enough to pull off ordering well.
Bad guy idea: Stick your man-in-the-middle QR code over the restaurant's QR code sticker on the table. Use the same design. Pay thru the app. Mine credit cards! It'll probably only work once, though, because someone will say like "Hey where's my salted milksteak?" and the server will say it wasn't ordered. A fight will ensue and all moneys will be lost.
No, you're thinking too small - do it on companies that HAVE online ordering via the QR code, and tack on "fees" and still place the order through - could even hire contractors to do the actual orders.
People might not even notice, just like they don't notice the "18% gratuity included on all orders" that are appearing here and there (and still tip on top of that).
Friends, if we were all evil, this would work seamlessly.
The only outstanding item: what do we name the fee? Keep in mind names already taken are service fee, small order fee, heavy order fee, pickup fee + dropoff fee, Chicago fee (regardless of city), and the anti-fee "customer happiness refund".
You know what I love? Ordering fast food in advance through Google Maps.
I simply locate my target on the Maps App, then I click through to order online, and I pay with my favorite wallet, and when I hop off the bus and waltz in the door, my order is waiting for me.
Then I have to explain how it's "for here" and I open it up and beg for plasticware and napkins....
More and more fast food places let you order ahead all you want, but don't actually start cooking it until you "arrive". It's kinda pointless, even though I understand why they do it.
(Taco Bell and McDonald's at least don't start your order until you "arrive" at the drive-thru or pickup area; but if you order Taco Bell for "inside pickup" they seem to start cooking it right away ... sometimes?)
I’m seeing more of this post-pandemic. I like it. It’s more evolved than just view-only PDF. Now it’s scan QR to access menu listing, add
items to cart and then checkout to payment. Some even with robot server bringing the food to you. Seamless and easier than waiting for a waiter to take my order, especially in a busy restaurant.
My problem with them is that the menu is always some small pdf like thing that you then need to zoom in on and move around. Not a huge issue though.
The much bigger problem at some places is it drop you on the homepage for the restaurant then you have to hunt for the menu on it. Also some of them make you sign up for an account which is super annoying.
I see their point but it still reads as the age old "these kids with their x, y, z" which is the story of the ages.
As a millennial I don't mind QR code menus at all if they take me to a website for it. If they require me to install an app that's where I draw the line; too much faff - it should be a single step. Requiring an account is a nono as well.
However most QR menus I've used so far have been like this, carefree guest checkout. Easy as. I think the sort of thinking in the article is the age old "these kids & their phones" uttered by people who had their heads in newspapers & TV channels their whole lives. Technology is here.
PDF menus, as well. In 2006, I built some hardware to scan Bluetooth IDs and published a little appliance to record them at the front of one of our restaurants and push a menu with a coupon to uniques.
Customers were ambivalent at best. I ended up hating it, though. It was a cool idea at the time, people were still wearing Bluetooth earpieces and IR beaming each other their contact cards after all, but it was easy to decide that as non-opt-in data collection, it violated volition.
QR code menus don't all suck, but if you're going to do it, have house wifi, make the codes unique to the tables, and just throw up a captive portal patrons can go ahead and order from. Go "serverless" or not at all.
I have a really hard time ordering. After spending time doing security I do not trust QR codes. They make me really, really uncomfortable. To the point I wont eat at a restaurant with them unless someone who is not as paranoid will get the menu.
They can be used to start an exploit chain on a phone. I’ve seen 0-days personally that root a phone by triggering a drive by download. The other issue is they are unauditable. You have to almost go to the link to discover what is there. This is a problem, for example, when shell code can own the camera itself.
No thanks, just give me the physical menu. If the staff refuses to provide with such "ancient" method, it's probably a shit restaurant anyways.
The "it's not implemented correctly" argument is irrelevant. I won't take convenience over the risk of being phished, data-mined or straight out surveilled(see china & not only). I'm there to eat, not to discover the 'amazing' power of their technical staff when it comes to software development.
This is not luddism or being anti-tech, it's being anti-stupid-tech. I have no problem ordering food from a tablet or another revolutionary piece of technology that I don't have to carry with me back home or invade my personal space after leaving.
I'm a little split on this one. I'm at Disneyland reading this, and (for some places) they do a decent job of it, having a QR code on the outside so you can look at the menu while you queue or wait for your reservation (sometimes even pre-order, I think... I didn't mess with that bit). This was great, it was something to do to kill the time.
Inside of the restaurant though, I get my snob on and hate phones at the table. Once the phones come out, the dining experience tends to die quite a bit. You're taking pictures of your food instead of enjoying it, you're interacting with your phone and social media instead of each other. It's horrible. QR codes just facilitate that transition.
I hate the writer's terminology of calling them "QR Code Menus". I would call them web page menus.
The QR Code is only used to encode the URL, not the full menu content. The menu is simply a web page, whose address can be obtained by many methods - QR Code, Data Matrix code, Aztec code, PDF417 code, Google search, manually typing text, etc.
Furthermore, I don't like how many QR Codes do not have human-readable text. For example, if I wanted to access a restaurant menu on a laptop computer, it makes more sense to type a URL than to awkwardly position its webcam (if it even has one) to scan a barcode.
I very much agree with the author's sentiment that requiring a digital device with power and Internet to simply read a menu is user-hostile.
“Web page menu” does not distinguish it from the existing practice of a restaurant putting its menu on its website, so that you can read the menu before you visit. Nobody has any problem with that.
The problem is most certainly the QR code. The QR code is what is requiring me to have a charged phone (= phone+power bank+charging cable) to read the damn menu. If they gave people devices to read the menu on (e.g. how McDonalds does it) then it would be less problematic.
Fine, how about calling the practice as "web-only menus on customer's device"? Even if the restaurant didn't use QR Codes, if the table said "Visit restaurant.com/menu", then you would still be forced to pull out your phone. The QR Code is just a way to convey a URL, and there are definitely alternatives like manually typing one.
Instead of QR menus, can't restaurants have landing pages after you connect to wifi that let you view the menu and order. For those that want a waiter you can put a big button on the top to request for physical service. For those know what they want, just select the dishes like you do on a food ordering app and the instructions are relayed to the kitchen.
This by no means solves the issues in the article, it might actually expound the privacy related issues and it deepens our reliance on mobile phones. But it does allow the best of both worlds; letting people choose the sort of service they get. The other choice is to have a physical tablet on each table for people to order from (although that sounds very gross).
The restaurants are trying to maximize profits by not having to pay some meager salaries.
But by doing so they are comiting a capital mistake and that is not delivering what the customer demands, which is not only food but services and potential for human interaction.
I feel a bit conflicted here. On the one hand I absolutely love having positive interactions with waiters and I will judge my dinner companions on how graciously they treat service staff. Good service can make a great meal even better.
But also sometimes you’re at a busy chain restaurant and you don’t want faff. I still hate QR codes that just open PDFs. I hate the default iOS implementation that doesn’t open a Safari tab by default and so disappears if your phone goes to sleep. But if I can do my whole order (including three indecisive kids) from my phone, and then pay, it’s a lot of pressure off.
In a very abstract sense, QR codes in restaurants are same conceptually to me as digitization of things that need not be: IoT gadgets in the home - doors, cars, fridges, TV's and a whole bunch of technology non-sense that society is hooked up on.
If I were an artist, I would make art that uses QR codes to exemplify a deteriorating society into technological authoritarianism. Always connected, always watching. See China: https://twitter.com/bfm_jose/status/1556544301743702016
I love QR menus. I live in Singapore though were things are well designed and efficient. Pretty much all menus are web applications, some restaurants allow to pay directly from the menu web page.
I had some friends come visit me here in Nashville for a week earlier this month. We went out to eat almost every day, and I did not encounter a single one of these. Where have these things taken off?
Interesting. I spent a month in San Diego earlier this year, but maybe I didn't go to the right places, or maybe it's because San Diego is conservative relative to some other parts of California.
Some restaurants paid a lot of money for QR-code things, and those push it from some kind of "sunk cost" fallacy I feel.
Out of 5 restaurants in Miami only two had QR codes, and one revealed menus instantly at the slightest hint that someone at the table couldn't read the code.
Went out for a meal with my 77-year old father last week and as always he brings a magnifying glass and flashlight as the restaurant lighting is too dim and menus too small almost universally for people with poor eyesight. He’s pretty tech capable and has a big bright phone with large text though so seems to me there’s a potentially huge accessibility opportunity here if they were done well.
(Sounds like they’re not well done in practice although don’t have much personal experience- maybe haven’t hit the UK as much yet)
I’ve experienced it once in the UK and either the phone network reception was really bad or the restaurant’s website was ultra slow so it didn’t work.
While we are on the subject… The worst app crime is the effing calmac ferry app. All the timetables would amount to about 100kb of data which is updated usually once a year months in advance. Phone reception is non existent or spotty in a lot of the Highlands and Islands, but when you go to the app to check a timetable it tries to download a PDF file! every time you open a timetable page!! It’s a reasonably rare situation where it makes sense to have an app not a website.
>With Toast Mobile Order & Pay™, guests can easily scan a QR code to browse the menu, order, and pay, all from their mobile device. Plus with Apple Pay, guests can pay in less than 10 seconds.
Digital menus aren't bad, but very few can implement them effectively. I do like having access to the menu for the whole dinner though and not have to wait for the waiter, ever.
In general, yeah, give me a piece of paper, there are far more people who can print some text than developers who can make a decent menu page — and it's quite sad, given it should just be a single, flat HTML page with an "index"
I hate how 1/3rd of this article is just the author describing his or her experience from using the traditional menu in the past and what a QR code is.
Maybe it’s just me but I would really like author to get to the point. Also QR code menus are great.
Edit: One thing to add is that the QR code restaurants I have went to have the physical menu as well so if you forget your phone you can still order.
Have a menu where you have to scroll horizontally to see the prices and then set them higher based on how indifferent the customer seems to be to look at them.
Have each table have a different qr code and then raise the prices if it's a large group on the premise that auditing will be more challenging.
There's a bunch of clever executions without even basic profiling.
I love QR code menus. My husband (who has terrible vision) also loves it, because he can zoom in and actually read them himself.
If you're lucky any specials of the day will also be on it, instead of having to scan the entire restaurant for hastily written signs. And in some restaurants things that are out of stock will be marked so on the website.
In theory, it's a good idea. Unfortunately it fails when the restaurant has no Web design skills.
I was at a small but prominent Montreal hamburger restaurant recently. I scanned the QR, and was confronted with page after page of whisky, wine and beer, when all I wanted was a hamburger. Six pages down, I finally found the burgers. Irritating.
I'm in Singapore and eat out every meal. Lots of places started having QR menus after Covid and I hate it. I never knowingly go to a QR place, but sometimes I go somewhere new and forget to check.
Luckily there's a strong correlation between having QR menus and having poor service, so I could continue going to most of my favorite places.
I hate fast foods and big restaurant chains. I like small family owned restaurants where I know I am welcomed, where I can chat with staff and the owners, where people are friendly and have a good disposition.
If I would not afford to pay, I would rather cook at home then settle with subpar food and subpar experience.
I like the idea. I think some do a terrible job with it, doing little more than digitizing the print menu, with all of the tiny print. An easily scrolled list, with a fast loading modal with more details when tapped, would be far better. Take it one step further, let me create my order, and then show the server a QR code. As they go to each person on the table, they can still answer questions and take the order on the fly if they need to.
tldr; It's a UI/UX problem that can be fixed. The idea itself is sound.
The worst thing about QR code menus is that smart phones are fucking terrible, and society should not be allowed to insist that I carry one. Does anyone actually like using these ad infested anticomputers? They're actually just pieces of trash.
Finally someone had to say this!! For me an allure of eating out is not just the food but the whole experience of it and ogling over the menu card is a big part of that.
I don’t have anything else to add except that I vehemently agree with this article.
Though I'm not a fan, I suspect this will be the new standard, kinda like self-checkout at the grocery store. Hated it at first, but now the idea that somebody is going to scan my groceries just seems annoying and antiquated.
I hate the self scan groceries. It takes me way more time than a fast cashier. It's just a way for extremely profitable businesses that have a semi-monopoly positions on good placement for stores to become even more profitable at expense of my ease of living.
To me as a 29 year old, this feels like the same "progress" as that of companies with a customer service without telephone number. If you have a real problem and you need a person on the other side, they don't provide it. It's just cheapskating.
>I hate the self scan groceries. It takes me way more time than a fast cashier. It's just a way for extremely profitable businesses that have a semi-monopoly positions on good placement for stores to become even more profitable at expense of my ease of living.
I'm not sure how you could call grocery stores as having "semi-monopoly positions" and being "extremely profitable", when they have razor thin profit margins.
I'm tired of hearing this "we have no margins". You still hold a monopoly-like position in many areas simply because... people have to eat. I can buy a car once every few years. I can rent or buy a house. I can't rent food. I have to buy. In most places it's going to be from one of the major grocery chains. They have economies of scale. They have a captive audience (or whatever it's called when people can't live without what you're selling).
> You still hold a monopoly-like position in many areas simply because... people have to eat.
That's not what "monopoly" means. Whether you "have to eat" is irrelevant. Most states have monopolies on gambling, but even though nobody has to buy lottery tickets, it's still a monopoly.
> I can rent or buy a house.
But you still need to get shelter somehow, right? ;)
A few grocery chains in Tokyo have clerks that take items from your basket, scan them, place them neatly in a 2nd basket. On completion, they take 2nd basket and place it at one of two payment machines where you can pay with cash, card, or smartphone. Two payment machines are necessary to prevent congestion. If you have problems with payment they're quick to assist.
After payment, the customer takes the basket to a 3rd location to bag their groceries and leave. There are clerks available to assist.
It is amazingly fast, I had the misfortune of shopping at 6:00 pm. I looked at the lines and estimated twenty minute checkout, actually got finished in about five minutes. The basket size limits the amount of groceries which is a minus, but helps move around the store quickly vs a huge cart and checks out faster.
Only if you don't count the time waiting in line before it's your turn. Consider this analogy: you have a single-threaded task that takes 30 seconds to complete on CPU X, which has 4 cores, or 1 minute to complete on CPU Y, which has 24 cores. If your task is the only one running, then CPU X will finish it faster, but if there are 20 other tasks that also need to run, then CPU Y will finish yours faster.
It’s funny because I am usually frustrated by how slowly many cashiers are at scanning the items and how bad many are at packing the grocery bag. It doesn’t mean that I don’t go to a cashier when I have a bunch of items, though. The worst is when people go through self checkout with a full cart and don’t have any idea how to do it making the rest of us wait.
If I have, say, 5 items or fewer I prefer the self checkout. There's usually no queue (as there are 8 or so machines) and scanning the items is only slightly less convenient than putting them on the belt at the human checkout anyway.
It's not hard to get fast at using self-scan, especially if you've worked retail. If many others can be efficient, perhaps consider whether you are part of why it's so slow?
Some of them are quite forgiving and let you go fast, others insist on you placing every item on the scale carefully and still freak out half the time. Depends on the quality of the area, perhaps.
Agree! It sucks. this is the tech equiv of what one Italian NYC restaurant owner pointed out about abstract/modern ambiance: in many cases it's just cheap. not high end
Payment without the waiters is much better for the customer.
You'd think that waiting staff would take care with the part where they collect the money to pay their wages but it's incredible how often they go AWOL at that point in proceedings or double down on the "actively not looking towards the customers". In principle I'd like to be on reasonable terms with them but when that happens I'd take automation any day.
Restaurants are an ultra low margin business. If that’s where they’re cutting a corner and it gets them more time in business or prevents a corner cut elsewhere, I’m for it!
QR codes work fine - as ever it is the local implementation which makes the difference. Experience I've had in Australia, UK, Spain, Portugal all pretty smooth - scan code with camera, click link menu displays, make order, pay bill. Saves on wait staff, which restaurants cannot hire anyway, so this will help keep restaurants in business
the only problem is the mobile UI many have..show me a pdf of the actual menu so I can see everything at once or on a few pages snd zoom in and out..it helps me make a choice about what I want when I can compare it more easily with navigation
A pdf is the only version I've seen. I don't understand these strange complaints about places that need you to sign up for wifi AND have poor reception which sounds so unlikely (and pointless, since they just hurt themselves) or how it's hard to see or whatever. It's easier for the establishments to maintain and safer and conveniently dovetails into online ordering.
There are certainly bad QR Code menus, but good ones are just menus. They're fine. Everything in Conor's piece points to an almost incredible lack of self control--he is incapable of not being distracted by his phone--which to me is a bigger problem than the format in which your menu is presented. Besides, give restaurant workers a break: it's one less thing they have to do to serve you, so they can focus more on providing good service.
Having said that, I hope we can all agree that paying directly by phone is one of the unambiguously great COVID-era innovations.
> Besides, give restaurant workers a break: it's one less thing they have to do to serve you, so they can focus more on providing good service.
In that case, they could just hand out menus at the entrance. Or if they don't greet you and instead just let you sit wherever, they can just put the menus in an obvious place. Restaurants have done this forever in similar situations. Online menus aren't necessary to solve this problem.
> Having said that, I hope we can all agree that paying directly by phone is one of the unambiguously great COVID-era innovations.
I don't really agree. At least I don't think it's an unambiguously great innovation. Personally I find the requirement to have a phone much more irritating than to the requirement to have cash or credit cards. That said, I've never seen a place accept payments by phone not accept either cash or credit cards so I guess it's mostly just irrelevant to me.
> Besides, give restaurant workers a break: it's one less thing they have to do to serve you
Yes, I also found this sentence to be very naive. No, they don't have the 2-second task of handing you a menu, instead they have the 2-minute task of explaining why there's no menu, trying to find the QR code reader on your phone, waiting for it to actually show up, then handing the phone back to you and demonstrating how to navigate between pages.
I could probably have phrased it differently and said having the OPTION to pay by phone is great. If I can avoid having to flag down someone who is working 5 extra tables because someone didn't show, just so she can hand me a paper slip ... I mean, it's a plus from my perspective. But I'm at the age that it catches me off guard every time I can do it.
> I could probably have phrased it differently and said having the OPTION to pay by phone is great.
This article and the comments here are complaining about restaurants who _only_ use QR codes for menus. I'd presume there is basically no one against having the _option_ of seeing the menu with a QR code. While I personally find QR codes much inferior to many other simpler approaches (paper slips, menus at the door, menu on the wall, etc.), I don't care if they offer them in addition to traditional methods.
I've only seen the ability to pay (which was also kind of confusing) once or twice. Everywhere else was either hard to navigate weird websites, or a PDF that takes forever to download and is very hard to read on mobile, let alone discuss with people you are dining with, who are also buried in their phone trying to figure out yet another maze of clicks and downloads.
In many places physical menus are handed out by a hostess whose whole job is to seat you and do that. If I want to "give them a break", I often just cook or get takeout. Physical menus are not hard to do and are much more friendly than reading from the palm of your hand.
Most places I go to now have the ability to pay on the phone, and it's much easier than trying to flag down a waiter. There's also no pressure for tipping, and I save precious time than having to wait for people to get back to me.
I have never experienced a weird website as is described in this thread. Discussing with people I'm dining with is also... the same? I have no clue how you are experiencing something different here.
Digital menus are not hard to do and are much more friendly. That said, this could all depend on how modern the area you regularly dine at - I'd expect less tech-savvy regions to fumble at this, which may indeed be your experience!
Even if they're just menus, it's nice to be able to see every option at once, and scan back and forth between disparate item categories with one's eyes, without taking 5-30 seconds to navigate between them on a tiny screen.
I do it as often as I can, which is sadly not often because I rarely carry cash. We do, for a variety of reasons, tend to frequent places that are ethically run though, and often know everyone involved fairly well. But, yes, as long as we have tipping as a significant basis for restaurant workers' income, cash tips.
Reading the comments here it’s clear to me that there are two kinds of people:
1) Those that like QR code menus. Going to a restaurant is not pleasure, it’s just an annoying means of getting food and the aim is to make it as efficient as a factory. No talking, no waiting, no eye contact at all if possible, ideally they would have a robot by the table that could spoon feed them so they never have to put their phone down and use their time to be mega efficient by looking at some spreadsheets.
2) people who see the act of going to a restaurant as a way of enjoying life. They don’t mind waiting a little bit for the waiter. They have great company and already enjoy a nice conversation. They probably already have a nice cocktail in their hands which they got from the bar whilst waiting for the table. They love looking around at other people, love looking at other peoples plates to get inspired for what they might want to eat themselves. Those people are in no rush. They don’t need to be anywhere else, they enjoy spending time together so it doesn’t matter where. They love talking to the waiter and ask which items on the menu are customer’s favourites or if the chef has a special recommendation today based on the seasonal produce they managed to source on that day. They love to discover new wines based on recommendations instead of always picking the same drink off the menu. These people take pleasure in the process and the experience and therefore hate QR codes and everything that comes with it. They hate paying via the app before being able to ask the waiter if the tips get fairly shared. These people take pride in whatever they do and enjoy light hearted banter with the staff and can leave a bar man or waiter with a smile even on a long day.
Personally I am category two. Life is to be lived. There is a time and place for a quick and efficient meal, but that is takeout and not going to a restaurant for me.
I don't like QR code menus, and I don't fit in either of the categories you describe.
I am in no rush, don't need to be anywhere else, and enjoy the time I spend with those accompanying me. And yet, if there was a way to just push a button somewhere and have the food I ordered delivered to my table, I'd love that.
I don't like being asked if the food is to my liking while I'm eating, and I'd like to just push yet another button to pay, without having to deal with waiting for waiters to come to my table.
No, I don't want to look at spreadsheets, but I also don't want to spend any more energy than I have to by making banter with the staff, light hearted or not.
Life is to be lived, but there's more than one way to live it.
> Life is to be lived, but there's more than one way to live it.
Touché. That's a great comment and I've upvoted you for it!
(I know I over exaggerated in my description to make a point. I didn't expect people to take it serious down to every word. I merely wanted to convey a sentiment and how people approach dining so differently)
I'm surprised at all the hate for QR code menus, and QR codes in general, here of all places. Most of the complaints seem to reduce to "QR codes don't work well enough" or "I'm not used to them, therefore they're bad."
Sure, QR codes aren't perfect. They'll either get better or they'll die/get replaced. That's the way technology works: we try a lot of things, and some of them work.
OTOH you could just whatever they have advertised as a special -- I liked in Paris last I went how for a ten euro note you could get a really well designed lunch.
What happened to the good old days in America, when people were scared if they so much as connected to my Wifi without permission they'd disappear for a decade? Nowadays it's like any given morning, for all I know those dastardly Distributed Denial of Secrets hackers will be sitting on the corner uploading their latest ill gotten gains.
(You don't have to use a computer at all in the restaurant.)
It varies through regions. It is completely the opposite in China because:
- No extra app. People scan the QR in WeChat (everybody has it) on the table, it will call a mini-app dynamically (somewhat similar to React Native but interpreted in WeChat).
- You are putting orders directly.
- You are paying within WeChat as well so it's seamless.
- The app is smooth because almost every restaurant is using the takeout giant Meituan's mini-app.
- Almost every single restaurants in China is tech savvy enough to use those systems because it's already a take-out centered society. Restaurants not leveraging these systems have virtually zero chance to survive the competition.
- You don't have to wait for anything or talk to anybody in the whole process.
The problems people mentioned in this thread:
- Minorities, people without smart phone or those are less tech savvy, are left behind.
- The walled garden and monopolies and such.
These problems are real, but it's probably not the QR menu to blame, because it's a far greater problem - in China, you are not allow to go anywhere without WeChat and scanning QR code due to those draconian regulations.
I lived in China and I thought it sucked there too. I always found it an epic cop-out by the restaurants and cafés who refused to answer questions about their dishes or allow a simple additional request like adding more spicy. Invariably the restaurants with QR code menus were also the ones that featured pretentiously-named menu items so you had very little idea what it was going to be until after you ordered it. Fortunately while I lived in China (up through the early months of COVID) the vast majority of small restaurants still kept their classic red-and-yellow menu board that literally just says in the name of the dish exactly what you are going to get. And it was no problem to ask a question to clarify an ingredient or ask for something special.
What I don't understand is if you're just going to order off an app, what's the point of even going to the restaurant in the first place? That no-human-contact experience already exists in delivery apps, so why bother leaving your home or office if when you go out you just end up with the exact same experience? It's not like most of these restaurants are snazzy KTVs or tea houses where you get a private room and bottle service, they're just bog-standard food court style restaurants with hard chairs and dirty floors. You could just as easily order online and eat the food on a park bench. To me the whole thing just came across as inconvenient at best and actively destructive of local communities and their social restaurant culture at worst.
We go to restaurant with friends, not for social interaction with waiters, I don't miss the human-contact experience at all. I don't know why it is part of experience of restaurant, I am interested in food, and chatting with friends. I don't care about the service, except the speed of the service. Additional bonus of the app is that it has pictures of everything you order, and also you can order at your own pace. The restaurant owner don't have time to entertain you, they are selling at a reasonable price which doesn't including entertaining you, and you don't tip them in China as well.
In my experience going to a QR code restaurant with friends means everyone spends their time fiddling with their phones instead of discussing with one another the food that they are actually at the restaurant to eat. The pictures are useless, since in China the vast majority of them are stock photos that don't depict the reality of what you get. It is much easier to choose from a menu board which just says "dry fried green beans", "red cooked eggplant", "celery and dry tofu" etc than get the (much more common on QR code menus) "house special secret recipe greens" plus a random blurry photo that doesn't even make clear what green it is.
I don't expect a restaurant owner to entertain me, but I do expect them to be able to tell me what is in a dish, suggest a suitable equivalent if the restaurant doesn't have exactly what I'm looking for, tell me what's good or fresh that day or bring me something with more or less spicy depending on my preference. Any of these very short and simple interactions about exactly the product they are selling are much easier to have in person than trying to express every possible branch of a back-and-forth conversation in a tiny text box on your phone - and that's assuming there even is a text box.
I've walked out of several restaurants where they had real humans "serving" who either were completely ignorant about the food they had on offer or too lazy to bother engaging with a potential customer. "Just check the app." (Which doesn't have the answers.) What's the point, then? If all you care about is talking to your friends and not getting restaurant service, then just order online from a delivery service and enjoy your meal with friends in the park, in a square, in your office kitchen, in a hotel room, at home, wherever.
And please don't think I'm asking for American style "service" where you practically have servers begging you for tips every 2 seconds. There is a comfortable middle ground, and pretty much every small restaurant and da pai dang in China does it perfectly fine without a QR code menu.
> And please don't think I'm asking for American style "service" where you practically have servers begging you for tips every 2 seconds
It’s not like this at all. Servers don’t talk about tips or beg for them. You just tip at the end of the meal, whatever amount you want.
No but they do introduce themselves by name, ask you how your meal is going and check in every now and again. That’s not a bad thing, but it is different, and seems in my mind related to tipping culture.
Generally they check in only once a meal and in the better restaurants, they are better about when to approach your table. There is a way that the tipping system helps - my boss tips massive amounts every time we have lunch (once a week or so). Like close to 15-25%. Especially in Indian restaurants (we are both Indians in the US). But in return, he hates waiting and expects top service. At least since I joined his team, we have gone to one new restaurant that opened up where he got pissed at the service and made them hurry up and serve our table better, then tipped them 22% or something cos he was like the food isn't bad so I'm coming back here and I want good service.
I, on the other hand, am content with waiting for the food if it takes too long and don't need any special service and would prefer to leave the (societally required) minimum tip of 10%.
15% is the socially required minimum tip in the USA. The signal sent by 10% is “I want to insult you by implying that I know tipping is required, but I’m going to make the tip so small you will know I didn’t like you”.
Tipping is a terrible system I would prefer we dispensed with, but abusing the very poorly paid people enmeshed in the system is unkind, if you can afford to eat in US restaurants.
May be true elsewhere but not in New York. I can play off the uninitiated immigrant card. The system is bad but that doesn't mean I comply with it. I know one of the consequences of my action is a poorly paid wait staff. But it is the right game theoretic move at scale. If everyone did it, we could shame restaurants into charging higher food prices and paying their staff more money in a fixed amount.
All this is beside the point that I don't eat outside in general. I prefer take out so I tip only rarely.
I hate having waiters keep pestering me every 5 minutes while I'm having a conversation with my friends but I wonder if it's as much due to the tip culture as due to the fact that it's considered impolite to wave a waiter over when you need them.
At high end restaurants with better trained wait staff- they are looking for visual cues on when to approach your table. Empty glasses, napkin on plate, menu down on table when you're ready to order, one customary check on the food shortly after it arrives, not so early that you haven't tried it though. But this is learned behavior on the part of the customer as well.
I hate that it's impolite to wave waiters over as well though. That would make the whole process a lot easier.
>I hate that it's impolite to wave waiters over as well though.
Depends where you are. In a lot of restaurants in Singapore, not only do you have to wave at waiters, you have to go to extremes to get their attention.
Yes, waiters wait on you.
And they run you down the street when you forgot to tip. This was such a bad experience when I went to NYC.
American restaurant servers definitely have a habit of interrupting your meal, compared to France at least
Guests fiddling with their phones is not QR-dependent from what I experienced.
Also, waiters can be helpful, and friendly even when there's no paper menus. In my current city most restaurants are QR-enabled, and they serve food as nicely (or not) as paper-based. Absolutely the same experience except how you looking into menu. I just stopped noticing the difference.
EDIT: Maybe important note that I'm neither in US, nor an EU country.
I have to say, you are not the typical customer of a Chinese restaurant. A good restaurant is busy, the chef will not change the recipe for your taste bud, you go there for exactly what they are famous for :)
America is weird because you can actually make a lot of money waiting tables.
But in the Netherlands nobody tips so it is not exactly a very desirable job. Restaurants have to literally close because they can't find staff. Automation is the only possible future for the industry whether people want it or not.
I was in Amsterdam a few years ago and said a few words in Dutch to the waiter, who was really amused by it. He asked where we were from and ended up sitting down and chatting with us for like half and hour, and drew us a map of his favorite spots nearby. We also met a few really chatty bartenders, including a guy how ducked behind the bar and came back up holding kittens. I’m not sure why we had such good experiences, but it was great.
Restaurants are hardly the only industry in the Netherlands having trouble finding staff at the moment. There are quite literally less trains because the train operators can't find enough staff.
Thanks for this comment. I love experiences like this and this makes me want to go to Amsterdam even more at some point. I've experienced this in random small towns in the US, but they are few and far between.
Last time I was in Amsterdam I couldn’t even speak Dutch to the waiters. Pretty ridiculous. I don’t think that happens in U.K. or US unable to speak English to the waiter of a chain restaurant
It's not true that nobody tips in NL, but it's not mandatory; I still tip if the quality of the experience merits it. That goes beyond the responsiveness of the waiting staff, but also the ambience. If I'm eating in a glorified mess hall, which most restaurants devolve to if they optimize for number of seats, I don't tip. To me, a real restaurant also takes care of acoustics and privacy: you shouldn't have to raise your voice to be heard over the noise of the tables around you (or worse, the muzak).
It's also why the whole concept of QR-code menus is antithetical to my idea of a good restaurant: if you're dining out, you're doing it to enjoy the company you're in. Having everyone at the table space out into their private phone world is not my idea of a nice evening.
Most of the time a service charge is included anyways
> America is weird because you can actually make a lot of money waiting tables.
Most do not.
Yeah, it's relative. Bartenders can make decent money in America, but I'm guessing it's a modest salary in most of the EU.
I just moved to the Netherlands and have no qualms with the service in most restaurants. At least in my region (Brabant/Limburg) everyone is very nice. If I had to complain about anything, it would be sitting for 20 minutes after the party is finished eating, waiting for someone to clear the table. The service has been excellent and I enjoy paying the price on the receipt with zero surprises!
There’s plenty of people going to the restaurant alone and I bet the human experience is a big part of their motivation. They may not be as noisy and visible as groups of cheering young folks but you’ll notice them for sure if you take time to scan around with your eyes and not your phone (pun intended, not disdain over techies). Think of old widows, singles, workers away from family/friends, peoples with difficulties to have social interactions.
> and I bet the human experience is a big part of their motivation.
Restaurant business is one of the rare where "free market" is really fully functional, and market will quickly self-regulate and award the good ideas, and punish the bad ones.
If your guess was right then the restaurants without it would loose the customers, and niche restaurants with the "human experience" would start popping out attracting those unsatisfied customers. Since this is not happening in China (yet?), then perhaps it's about the difference in the culture and your bet is wrong?
This is very culture dependent. In Spain almost no one eats alone in a restaurant or bar.
Then go to a fast food place, not a restaurant.
Yes? in Singapore they have Michelin stars.
While I actually like the food, I've found myself on several occasions just deciding that I don't want to go eat at Nandos because they've managed to make entire process so entirely hostile to basic human interaction. Just let me order my food from a real person please. It's so much easier that opening a digital menu and then needing to input my card info. It just makes me feel like I'm eating at a fancy McDonald's.
OTOH I have gone to McD's instead of getting real food just because I can order there without interacting with any people.
That hasn’t been my experience. (Living in a tier ome city since mid 2019.) Maybe it’s different now that QR menus are more the norm, or maybe we just go to different restaurants. If anything it’s easier to talk to a server, because they’re not handling the mechanics of order collection and bill payment for everyone else. I don’t miss having to get the server’s attention to try to settle the bill.
So if you lose your phone, forget your phone, if you don't have any battery, or if you have any internet issue, you can't order.
You cannot have the whole menu in front of you, you have to scroll and change sections. If it's cold, you can't order without talking your gloves off, if it's sunny, you better have a very bright phone or the menu will be unreadable.
As everything in China, you cannot pay without being electronically tracked, and you can't give a tip without going through a system that will likely take a cut. I will refrain to reach the Godwin point here since I assume it's been debated ad nausaum.
And of course, if something is not on the menu, you can't order it.
As usually with systems that are 100% digital, it gives you zero margin of maneuver outside of the happy path.
I don't want every restaurant to turn into a Mac Donald. If I want Mac Donald's, I go there.
McDonalds (and most of their competitors) are actually pretty good/ok for customizations. Usually what's missing is some edge cases like "no ice" or fully exhaustive lists.
This is not entirely correct, many places still do accept cash and allow you to order without your phone. It just so happens that most people prefer to order and pay by phone.
Just like they prefer having the great firewall protecting their internet connexion ?
We had a sushi restaurant (in Canada) that belonged to Chinese expat that worked with the whole QR code + order + pay on your phone and I did find it pleasant. I would go as far as saying that I prefer it.
It might be cultural, but I can count on a single hand the number of times I went to a restaurant and the interaction with the waiter/waitress improved the overall experience.
> It might be cultural,
Or it might be personal.
> And of course, if something is not on the menu, you can't order it.
... That's how it works right? The menu shows what they are offering and then you pay them. Why would you expect things not in the menu?
While it is not something common, it just happens.
In Australia the food culture is you can customize almost anything on the menu and customers expect to be able to pretty much choose whatever combination they want as long as you have the ingredient and they can pay for it.
In France, a menu may not contain something you can eat, but some restaurants will create a full dish for you on the spot. It's very common restaurants with a Michelin star for example: as a veggie and foodie, I get regularly this treatment since french cuisine is very centered on meat. Some restaurants have the menu changing every day (I ate in one this week) depending of the farmer's market. The waiter just let you what's available. I know of at least one restaurant with no menu: you express a theme, and the chief will try to invent something matching it.
In Thailand, there was a restaurant were I used to go that had a regular menu for tourists with high margin meals, and a secret menu for regular customers that was actually good.
In Mali and Argentina, some restaurant menus are fake. You can't order most items, while there are items that you can get pretty much everywhere (riz au gras, pollo a la milanesca) even if it's not in there.
Now, it's tempting to decide that one path is optimum and shape society to only provide it. However, you kill diversity, margin of security, innovation, charm, and so on.
Don't get me wrong. Making the happy path the easiest and proffered way is OK. Offering a digital menu and payment system as a main option is great.
But making alternatives close to impossible is, at best, a good way to end up with with a bland life, and at worse, will create a dangerously inflexible and intolerant system.
It's why we should keep cash, paper forms and phone support despite the automated main experience been more efficient when all goes well.
> In Mali and Argentina, some restaurant menus are fake. You can't order most items
How's that work?
They give you a beautiful piece of paper, and when you order something on it, the waiter tells you it's not available.
After the 10th item on the menu not being available, you start to understand that the menu is more like a checkbox a restaurant must have to appear worthy of the name, rather than an actual useful object.
Not all restaurants are like that in Bamako of course.
But it's a great fun to take new comers to diner, and let them be puzzled for a while until reality sink in. I still remember my first time, my colleague looking at me ordering ice cream with eyes saying "oh, sweety...".
I'll let you in on a little secret: you can order anything they can reasonably make without inconvenience. E.g. "Can I have a vegetarian version of this?" often yes, sometimes no, but you can ask.
I’ve never had trouble ordering a custom dish or special options. If there’s a price difference, the server tells us what to order on the menu, and tells the kitchen what to actually make. If it’s a family shop, sometimes they update the menu for next time.
I’m sure there’s places that won’t let you order off menu. I wonder whether QR menus increases the number of them, though.
I have similar experiences in Singapore. The QR code menus work just fine here.
And if you don't have a smartphone, you can still just talk to the staff and order with them.
I like that this lets restaurants improve their labour productivity and lower their labour costs. It's hard to run a profitable restaurant.
I agree it's hard to run a profitable restaurant, but I disagree it works fine in Singapore. I just had lunch at a QR based restaurant here and it was a bit painful. Staff shortages are a real problem though in F&B so something has to give. Thankfully printed menus are making a comeback. Even when the apps work fine I still prefer a printed menu.
I have a slight preference for having a printed menu available for browsing, _and_ also having optional electronic ordering.
> I just had lunch at a QR based restaurant here and it was a bit painful.
Interesting, which one? So far I didn't have too much trouble. But I can easily believe that there are many that don't work so well.
I hate them. It's 100x easier to browse a paper menu than the scroll through 2-5 dishes per screen, and often have to navigate sub menus trying to find what's available.
I didn't come to a restaurant to fiddle with my phone for 5 to 10 minutes
> You don't have talk to anybody in the whole process.
That's a negative not a positive.
It is a subjective matter anyway. I love menu with pictures, digital menu is very good, you can see what you are getting, even some descriptions if the menu is designed very well. Much better than the one page menu small restaurant offers. And you don't have to talk to anyone, meaning you don't have to rush because people are waiting, no need to hold your hand in air for very long, trying to catch the eyes of a waiter.
If there was no obsession with registrations, it wouldn't have been a problem at all.
For the menu no app is needed, the places I go always open a web page menu(provided by a service specialising in this particular niche).
The payment could be completed through things like Apple Pay, per table basis. So you scan a QR code, it instantly opens a session for you and you can start ordering things and once you are done you close the session by paying through some payment processor.
Also, the technology to open apps with temporary sessions without installing the app exist both on iOS and Android but for some reason it never got popular.
> and once you are done you close the session by paying through some payment processor.
It is my custom to withold payment for a restaurant meal until I've finished eating it and am ready to leave.
Simply close the session when you are about to leave the restaurant. I don't see why you have to be paying each time you add something to your order.
I think that's the custom in the vast majority of restaurants, but I don't think it's incompatible with the system described. It doesn't stream payments in real time, does it?
Weird custom.
Same experience in Norway. Most day-to-day operations are handled using apps. Ordering at restaurants using QR codes, finding out bus routes and paying for a (digital) bus tickets, paying for a parking spot, using EV charging stations, etc. It is all done using an app. Apple Pay is a blessing. It takes a bit of getting used to. Especially as a tourist. But it works great. But I hate think what would happen if a loose my phone…
Was in Norway 2 weeks ago.
Went to several restaurants, took the train, stayed at a hotel. I didn't have to use my phone even once for anything.
As a tourist, the only adjustment I had to make was how comfortable things were and polite people were.
Interesting. As a counterpoint, I was in Norway a month ago on business and as a tourist. Did the Norway in a nutshell thing from Bergen to Oslo with time in Bergen, Flam, and Oslo. I used the Bergen and Oslo day passes for unlimited public transport in those cities. The later was especially handy, as it generates QR codes for both public transport and entry to most museums. My travel passes were handled via barcode docs on my phone. My tickets to a concert in Oslo was via an app on my phone. Route planning for site-seeing (which bus, tram, ferry, or rail) was via an app on my phone.
I paid for restaurants using credit cards directly to payment terminals.
I found the whole experience very easy and enjoyed how much I could handle on my phone.
The infrastructure and services are awesome. Everything is easy and simple, quality is top noch and communication is easy if you know English.
It was the most comfortable Python training I ever gave.
One app, or different apps for each task? I can see the latter getting annoying.
I don't know about Norway, but here in Sweden you'd have one app per task, but since they integrate with each other it really isn't a problem. For example, I have an app for my region's public transportation and when I'm buying a ticket it uses the Swish (peer-to-peer payment system everyone uses) app for payment, which in turn may use BankID (national identification service) for identity verification, which uses my phone's biometrics. It sounds like a lot, but since every part is well integrated the full flow is just: tap ticket, tap buy button, fingerprint/face id, done.
As for the first point, Apple has a solution called App Clips (https://developer.apple.com/app-clips/) however I have never seen it in the wild even here in the Bay Area. Some commenters last time it was mentioned said they’ve used it at gas stations? I’m not sure if Android has anything conceptually similar.
I think "Instant Apps"[1] are/were meant to be the Android analog, but I haven't seen them used anywhere.
Also can't find any proof that they are still a thing... except for this[2] sketchy looking app that has 1 billion+ downloads, offered by "Google Play Store"
[1] https://support.google.com/googleplay/answer/7683278
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
I think this is the current developer page:
https://developer.android.com/topic/google-play-instant/over...
Now renamed to Google Play Instant, but still ok for apps (I think?)
I think Vimeo has one, whenever I click a link it always loads in a small app.
https://vimeo.com/761107839
that's because wether instant apps works is wildly inconsistent across phones. we learned that the hard way.
Ah, thanks for that. I had no idea how the following worked, but it was quite heavenly. Was at a restaurant who dropped the bill on my table after dining. It had a standard receipt on a black tray like you'd see anywhere in the US. But the receipt had a QR code along with a note about Apple Pay. I thought, "Hey I'd rather do Apple Pay than give them a CC so I scanned it.
I was prompted with one of those App Clip interfaces, double-clicked to approve the Apple Pay, and done.
It was such a nice experience, no nagging prompts forcing me to download some crappy App. Just a simple clean, Apple Pay checkout.
Note I agree with TFA about QR menus. But this level of phone integration was the perfect amount on top of a traditional dining experience.
The only time I’ve ever used this was trying to buy something in person at an Apple Store. Scan a QR code, something like the store app pops up, payment doesn’t work, staff can’t figure out what’s wrong. Waste 10 minutes and finally realize I’d deleted the full app because I never use it.
Not a great experience.
They’re extraordinarily convenient; a cafe I enjoy uses it for the total bill. Instead of handing off your physical card, the QR code presents your bill within the app clip, complete with apple pay (or enter your card details), done.
presents your bill for you, with the waiter splitting the tab for you.
I usually go solo, unless you’d like to join me sometime :)
I live in China and here's an anti-anecdote. I had a terrible QR code menu the other day where you'd sit down, order, but there was no pay button. This set of my alarm bells immediately. And indeed, for a dinner that was supposed to be around 200-300, we wound up paying nearly 100 in additional fees that were mystically added to our apparently open bill without declaration. I complained about this at the counter when leaving and they refused to engage. The food was bad too, it was clearly a scam. I left them a terrible review and immediately decided never to dine at a QR code menu only restaurant again, and have so far stuck to my guns. Incidentally, I also work in foodtech.
I built a web-app MVP which is basically a QR menu app, as a web-app with URLs for each menu in the format webappDomain/RestaurantName, for example my demo is at tearounder.app/TheLoremIpsum
My MVP solves quite a few of the grumbles people mention, and other grumbles either dictate the sort of venues that shouldn't adopt this tech, or show why this tech should always be as well as traditional service not "instead of". (There are also some grumbles that require more development to iron out)
Stuff my MVP does that solve grumbles mentioned in this thread: - simple URL format means you can use the URL rather than scan a QR code. If the restaurant name is long, a shorter version of the name should be used for good UX. I see QR codes that point to those URLs, as a good and easy option to provide for those people who now expect a QR code, but not the main way to access the menu. - web based means no need to install an app (I have also met some of the basic requirements for a "Progressive Web App" so some browsers will let you save it to your device once you are on the website if you want) - I keep file-sizes low, and put thought and effort into making it load and continue functioning smoothly even over slow and patchy internet connections. There are some things I could do to improve performance and smoothness on poor connections, particularly during building up your order, but it was easy to make it so that you can browse a menu to your hearts content even if your connection drops completely right after page load. Right now data for entire menu comes over at page load as JSON (that was created when restaurant last changed their menu), all UI up to placing order is handled in one page via client side JS, then as you add items to your order ajax calls add those items to a WooCommerce cart and tapping order sends you to a WordPress/WooCommerce checkout screen. Extra dev time to make a buffered version of that system, would get the connection need down to just the pageload and checkout/pay, but with the basic setup I have right now there is also need for a connection each time you add an item. The MVP setup would also require restaurants to have their woocommerce orders page up on some device behind the bar, which is not a great UI for their needs - so a "full" version of the web-app would need a custom page, and only use WooCommerce as a back-end if that made sense for that restaurant.
Another problem - you can't order a coffee without your data being harvested
> The problems people mentioned in this thread:
> - Minorities, people without smart phone or those are less tech savvy, are left behind.
I really do not understand how this isn't racist. Do they literally block you from using it if you aren't the major ethnic group?
The problem with QR menus is not that they are inefficient, often they're very efficient. It's that it's impersonal and demeaning, the waiters are reduced to food carriers.
I like it. It's annoying to wait for the waiter to come over with menus, it's annoying to wait to ask them to bring a menu back because you want to order more, and it's gross when you get a menu that hasn't been wiped down properly and is sticky with god knows what, and it's wasteful when they're printing hundreds of fresh menus a day for the places that give everyone a fresh one.
Keep a few backup printouts for those who need them (like your phone gets no signal), but otherwise it's a fantastic step forwards. Goodbye to grimy wasteful printouts.
Plus the bonus of never having to experience "oh sorry we're out of that" if they update the menus dynamically is fantastic.
The only annoying thing is that the menu it opens is a pdf that was designed to be printed on A0 apparently, with times new Roman 10 point font, food on extreme left and price on extreme right.
And then you keep scrolling back and forth on your iPhone trying to read them.
Bonus points if you put the pdf in an iFrame in a site that’s off the bootstrap template but they forgot to include the js file so it zooms the hamburger button instead of the pdf when you pinch and refreshes the page when you jerk it too much.
If so many of the menus weren’t PDFs, I think the overall idea wouldn’t get such a bad rap. But yeah around half of all restaurants still do it in my experience.
It’s remarkable how particular non-IT industries attract personalities that are more or less technically averse than others. Arts and media, retail, building contractors: generally quite competent. Lawyers, medical: usually pretty bad.
Restauranteurs: the most technically inept grandparent you’ve ever encountered, the one who insists that if they ever touch a mouse it will catch on fire, and then somehow proves it
Go look at hobby sites for hobbies that are heavily weighted towards the elderly. OMG.
It's way better now, but for a long time I would go to woodworking sites (before it was trendy), and if you got much past GeoCities level sites it was almost a miracle.
>and then somehow proves it
lol, somehow so true.
I remember helping an older relative. They said they needed my help ASAP because Dish network was coming because they deleted their account. Couldn't get any details. Eventually saw they simply deleted an email about their bill.
Only sorta related but I wonder why it seems so hard for some to adjust while others do just fine. It seems like it would make sense that "email is just like real mail, its just on a screen." Maybe the "infinite options" scare them a bit?
Honestly, I think it’s the “mysterious beige box.”
When I was a teen in the nineties, I was the go-to guy in the neighborhood for fixing computers (beats mowing lawns). One trick I figured out was, I could demonstrate something like plug in a RAM chip or CD-ROM drive, take the parts back out, and then tell them to do it.
Even though their problems were invariably software-driven (fcking windows), just having that hands-on experience — not much different from changing your oil — would usually be all it took. The fear would be gone.
Makes sense. Hands on experience is the greatest teacher across all domains, imo.
I've literally never seen that. It's almost always some web app type thing where you can select what you want, order it, and pay using apple pay/Vipps (my country's main electronic money transfer thing)/card. The UX isn't always perfect, but it has always worked too.
Edit: Downvotes? For simply sharing my conflicting experience? Okay.
Their point is that it is done badly 99% of the time, so they count the experience as inferior to physical menus. Which I totally agree with.
If it can be done right, but not done right heavy majority of the time, then it is fair to declare that approach as worse.
Reading all the comments it looks like there’s a market for a good implementation of online menu that:
* fits screen well
* has great filter/sort/search option
* loads quick
* can be updated live
All you need to sell this is go out to eat and find shitty implementations!
This product 100% exists and is nearing ubiquity here in Melbourne, AU: https://www.mryum.com/. Order + pay through this is also fantastic.
You forgot "customized", and order drinks before food too - separately. The other part is: I dislike touching a phone screen while eating, so it needs to accommodate that too.
Edit: on a 2nd thought - how would family order look like - the kids need some way to link their orders (albeit having phones) to the payment. You'd need a temp password/pin for everyone to link to?
> How would family order look like
This seems like a complete non-issue.
The ones paying the check are the ones making the orders. Makes splitting the check a solved problem by default. If it is a family with kids making the order, the kids simply pick what they want (no linking required for just browsing the menu), tell the parent what they want, and the parents order from their device. I don't think it is a hard necessity for everyone ordering stuff by themselves. Whoever pays the final bill can handle actually ordering the food.
At some point kids like independence... at least to choose/read the menu - around 5-6y of age. It'd mean sharing the phone with them one by one, instead of having a menu each.
Normally I'd pay the bill entirely (split whatever is non-issue at all) - however picking items for everyone is just bizarre, e.g. everyone would have to tell what to order, I would have to find and not mess up - in short not fun at all, cosplaying the waiting staff
Probably for US there is a market, but here in Europe restaurants mostly have a facebook page and that's it. They mostly don't really have an online presence and they don't really care either. That's what high taxes do, penalizing high achievers so ultimately every service 'stops' at a good-enough level.
That comment took a turn.
You never know what degree of garbage design it will be. That’s deterrent enough to steer away.
A menu that is limited to A4 size is hard to truly fuck up.
Yes I think the point is that no physical menu can match the uselessness of a poorly scanned PDF on a small screen.
It's also annoying to have to bring a phone to a restaurant. Not everyone carries them everywhere. I resent having to have one with me to participate fully in modern society, always listening and collecting data for its corporate masters. I occasionally wish I could throw mine into a large body of water; who knows, maybe some day I will.
You don’t have to bring a phone. You can ask the server to bring one, or ask them what is on the menu, if they don’t have one.
Asking the server to bring a phone instead of a menu could be actual satire.
Now I'm imagining a restaurant handing out iPads instead of menus to keep you "safe".
If I recall correctly before Covid Applebees had some weird off-brand tablet thing on the table that looked like you could badly order via it, but mainly what it did was not work for playing some horrible Android game.
I suppose it could be used as a projectile.
I've been in several restaurants which use tablets. Nothing wrong with it. They're not handing them out, each table has them. E.g. Yard House does it.
Happened to me pretty recently in Bogotá, Colombia. At the table waiter handed us two very old iPads with broken screens to read a PDF of the menu.
In Santiago, Chile I was handed waiter’s phone with a menu from some local takeout when I informed them that I can’t read their menu hosted via QR since i don’t have data.
In South America it’s unfortunately popular to just have QR leading you to a huge PDF hosted somewhere in US to read a menu. Even in places that barely have internet like in the mountains… And more often than not they don’t have paper backups.
I was at a restaurant in LA that had a tablet-like gizmo on the tables. You could order through it, call the waiter, and pay at the end. It wasn't presented as for keeping us safe, though.
The fun fact was that the waiter actually gave us paper menus when sitting us, without even asking, though they also introduced the gizmo.
I actually found that quite nice, since they had a wide selection of beers and there was a beer-selection app that would go in the details of each beer and allowed us to easily choose the kind we wanted.
Tablet ordering has been common in Japan for years. Usually they're bolted to the table with a locked charging cable.
Or you can ask them to bring you a real menu I guess.
That’s actually what I meant, but my comment didn’t describe very well.
This is a bizarre take. I dine/eat out fairly often to a point I know the staff names in quite a few places (it's Europe, no tipping culture, either). I don't quite see how I could customize any order with a web interface, realistically (food intolerances).
>when they're printing hundreds of fresh menus a day
They change the menu every day? Around here the menus are commonly placed in a book alike folder or the least they will have a plastic slip. As for waste the online part (with datacenters and all) would be more wasteful/less green.
>Plus the bonus of never having to experience "oh sorry we're out of that" if they update the menus dynamically is fantastic.
So they need to link the kitchen to the menu system in real time. That feels unliklely - most of the menus would mostly static web (or worse pdf) interfaces, and an order button.
> That feels unliklely - most of the menus would mostly static web (or worse pdf) interfaces, and an order button.
You say that like it's a given, but why? Products that can dynamically update the menu when something is out of stock with a couple of touches from FOH staff already exist. It's not exactly complex.
> I don't quite see how I could customize any order with a web interface, realistically (food intolerances).
This is harder, but that's why I don't think you can replace all your staff with a web interface - you still need a human in the loop to ask about important things like this.
> it's gross when you get a menu that hasn't been wiped down properly and is sticky with god knows what
And yet it's almost guaranteed that your phone has far more germs and bacteria on it than those menus
Largely the ones I’m regularly already exposed to, though.
My phone doesn't have a smudge of ketchup and a spot of sticky dried Coca-Cola on it that get on my thumb.
Also... I can imagine why it could be reasonable to assume my phone might have the same number of germs as the menu... but how on earth do you guarantee it has far more?
> My phone doesn't have a smudge of ketchup
No, more likely it has particles of feces. Bon appetit!
Sure, but so does your toothbrush. Chill out.
Leave the restaurant if it looks unclean ? I’d prefer to see a dirty menu and leave rather than order from my phone feeling like it a a huge if place
Dude, what gross places are you eating at, and why?
To be fair there are probably some good bacteria-static agents inside of the ketchup and coca-cola :) These smudges are probably a tad healthier than random smudges on your phone. At least for a day or two :)
Because people use their phones on the shitter, always.
Maybe, but they're my germs rather than someone else's.
> if they update the menus dynamically is fantastic
Until it's the prices that are dynamically updated.
Soon enough they'll use the information collected from your device to look up your income level, how often you've visited in the past, what kinds of things you're most likely to order, etc and use that data to set a price for your menu alone and suddenly you're paying more than the person next to you who is ordering the same thing.
> if they update the menus dynamically
Does that ever happen in the US? 90% of the menus I've seen via QR codes, and more generally online, are out of date. Often by months. I've gotten "sorry we're out ofthat" just as often with the new tech as with the old. I guess it's great that restaurateurs elsewhere get this right - most of the positive comments seem to be from Europe - but for the OP and a significant percentage of HN readers that's clearly not the case.
Same. Depends a lot on how it's done though. Toast is the best that I see regularly. Menus designed for phones, easy to customize orders and pay. Hard to mess up.
>It's annoying to wait for the waiter to come over with menus
The hostess is supposed to seat you with them
I hate QR code menus as they are often poorly implemented.
However, I just experienced a QR code check for the first time. That was really nice .. I scanned the QR code with my iPhone, it downloaded the Toast "app clip", which allowed me to pay the bill with Apple Pay. It was totally seamless and far better than handing my credit card to a server to get lost or cloned.
> It was totally seamless and far better than handing my credit card to a server to get lost or cloned.
In the civilised world, we don’t do that. Instead, the waiter brings a terminal to the table, or if they don’t have any, we go pay at the desk. Nobody gives their card to anyone. That is a problem with much better solutions than online-only menus.
In fairness, that civilised solution is extremely slow. If you have a meal with 10 people want to pay separately... that's a lot of wasted time just waiting for a card machine.
I was pretty shocked when I first went to America and they just took all of our cards into the back. Hilariously insecure but you can't say it wasn't more efficient.
App payment seems like a good solution.
Currently the only reasonable option seems to be for one person to pay and then split the bill on Monzo - that does work well but some people don't have Monzo still.
Historically the laws around credit card fraud in the US was more consumer friendly, and so the risk to letting your card out of sight was low enough people didn't care.
Laws have changed over the past 20 years, but the culture around how we treat cards has not.
Anecdotally, I've never heard of anyone having a problem getting the charges refunded on a card that's been used fraudulently, regardless of the state of the law. If people were actually losing a lot of money to this type of fraud, I am sure the culture would change, but right now it doesn't seem to be a major problem.
Where does that refund money come from though?
Credit card companies or their insurers I suppose. They must figure it's worth it to pay out in order to maintain their reputation as a secure payment method.
In the United States they never bring the terminal to the table. I remember the first time I went to Canada being surprised when the waitress did that.
Because they have that tipping ceremony - they take your card to the back office, swipe it there and return to you with a paper check and a pen to scribe the tip amount. Also they only very recently introduced paywave cards.
Tipping is part of the terminal flow. You touch your card or mobile device, choose the tip, then choose how you want your receipt. (This is in southern California, where terminals exist but are still rare.)
As a Canadian travelling to the US for the first time in 2+ years due to COVID, I had a very odd experience in the Minneapolis airport. My meal was clearly done, I'd said I was ready for the bill, but 10 minutes later... nothing. I flagged down the waitress, and she was equally confused that I was still at my table!
I was expecting a wireless terminal, or at least a "come to the cash when you're ready". Wireless units were probably at 75% adoption in early 2020, and went to 100% when things started to reopen as a (perceived at least) way to minimize intermingling among patrons. When I mentioned I was surprised the credit card wasn't wireless (and also did tipping on paper, not in the terminal), the waitress said she'd never even seen a wireless terminal before!
Growing up, tech in Canada always seemed to lag behind the US, and it's weird to see it the other way around.
Not never, but definitely its the default. I certainly prefer the terminal wherever its offered.
If there was a way to avoid that last step, it would probably save restaurants a lot of time. Guests could leave sooner as they wouldn’t have to wait around for payment.
The alternative is to pay on the way out. Requires a single terminal at the exit (or just anywhere, s.g. at the bar). It works perfectly fine. Cafes and restaurants across Europe do this more or less as the standard, the more fancy ones bring the terminal to the table.
I don't know about "Europe", but in France it's pretty common to get the terminal at the table, even at "non-fancy" random eateries.
Sure, you could pay on the way out, but that's often painful. Many others are having the same idea, so now you have to wait around, lining up in a place that wasn't designed for people to wait around, bothering waiters who need to run around serving clients. It's usually less of a hassle to just wait around at the table for the waiter to bring the terminal to you.
My pet peeve with the terminal at the table thing is that, despite card payment being extremely common in my area, the waiter will not bring a terminal over when you ask for the check, you'll have to wait some more.
OK but being able to just pay and not waste a waiters time is basically only upside? Sure, if you have a special case you can still ask, but for most people it's just like "OK going to give the money now". No needing a waiter to come run over to the cashier to deal with you on top of everyhting else
> OK but being able to just pay and not waste a waiters time is basically only upside?
Yeah, that’s a nice positive aspect. Personally, I don’t think it out-weights the negative ones. Too many bad experiences with badly designed digital menus.
> Sure, if you have a special case you can still ask, but for most people it's just like "OK going to give the money now".
My experience (around here, so obviously YMMV) is that waiters don’t know how to handle exceptions in these restaurants. When you have to escalate to the manager just because you have issues with the menu and the waiter hasn’t been trained properly (of course they haven’t: training costs money), it removes any positive aspect.
> No needing a waiter to come run over to the cashier to deal with you on top of everyhting else
In these cases I just walk to the bar to pay and everything is fine. It is considered rude in some settings, but then these settings are also when waiting for the bill is not acceptable.
This is easily solved by requesting customers to pay at the bar. I don't know why many restaurants still have waiters running back and forth with a payment device or the card.
In civilised world you pay when you order at the bar (unless it’s real fancy place)
Around here it’s the contrary. Paying when ordering is only on the low-end or when speed is a selling point. In any other setting you pay when leaving.
Making customers pay upfront is a huge “we’re too cheap to pay for waiters so the customers have to do their jobs” warning sign. They are the kind of places where you’re expected to clean the table when you leave. Ok when all you need are calories quickly, but definitely not pleasant places.
I’m so used to it it’s now bizarre I need to have waiter walk to my table 5 times for a 1 euro coffee. It’s also supremely slow and I keep forgetting to pay.
Pay up front is a sign that either crime is so high in the area that they don't trust you to eat and then pay (as opposed to walking out the door); or a sign that inflation is so bad the price will change by the time you are done eating. Either way not the type of place you want to live.
Or it's a sign that they want you to be able to eat there on your lunch break. I've certainly written off restaurants that made me wait a long time to pay.
Sure, Melbourne and Auckland used to be number 1 and 2 cities in the world. Now the cost of living might have pushed them down the drain!
Fully agreed on both points.
QR code menus 99% of the time just link to the website menu (which existed before the QR code for menus became popular, and is still wack). And it usually sucks just as much as it did before.
QR for a check is a beauty. Exact same experience as yours, there is a local restaurant that did it, and I was prepared for the worst. But I scanned the code, it did the Toast app clip, and the entire process was extremely smooth. I went to that restaurant multiple times since then, and I would be lying if I said that the "qr to pay the check using the app clip" didn't at least partially contribute to that.
I find these extremely annoying:
- You need good signal or connect to wi-fi to pay (not a given in many restaurants)
- The restaurant can get your email address by default when paying with Apple Pay
- Much slower than just tapping my card or phone on the POS
Compared to the waiter walking away with my card, handing me a receipt to sign and top to fill in, I kind of understand the trad-off – but at-the-table POS solutions have existed for many years now.
It isn't "much slower" when you actually account for the time spent waiting for the server to come around, getting their attention to ask for the check, waiting for them to come back with it, waiting for them to do their lap and come back to collect the card, waiting for them to go run it, and finally waiting for the card to come back.
This weird system is one thing I don't enjoy about visiting North America. Where I live, you never deal with the servers for payment. When you're ready to leave, you just leave. Every restaurant has a payment desk near the door where they show you your bill, you tap your card and you're on your way.
No need for the waiter to walk away with my card if they have a mobile POS, as I mentioned above. Tapping my card and selecting a tipping option takes less time than even opening my camera app.
Ironically, many of the QR payment places I‘ve been to actually have these as well.
I get that jumping from a central POS to a device per waiter is an investment – but why switch to QR codes if all your staff is already equipped with a strictly superior solution?
> if they have a mobile POS
That’s a big if in the US.
In my experience, US restaurants either have something very new (i.e. combined POS/ordering handhelds), or very old (i.e. centralized/non-mobile, sometimes even magstripe only POS, no PIN or contactless capability).
The ones I‘ve seen that have switched to QR payments had mobile POSes before.
This is pretty standard in many parts of the world. I just can't understand why wireless credit card payment and mobile pos ain't available in US.
They have started appearing very quickly. There is definitely a long tail, but these days I would say I see one at least ever other time I go to a restaurant or bar.
> The restaurant can get your email address by default when paying with Apple Pay
Can you provide any evidence of this?
You can pick what information you want to collect as an Apple Pay web merchant:
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_w...
Customers can ultimately set whatever they want as an email address there, and it's not verified in any way by Apple before completing the payment, but defaults matter: The default on my phone was my real email address from my contact card, and I did not even notice that it was preselected in the payment sheet until I got a confirmation email by the checkout system.
In an online payment context, this makes total sense to me: The merchant needs some way to identify the buyer even just for digital goods, after all. But it came very unexpected for me in a restaurant context, where I know that Apple Pay (via tap and pay) normally does not even reveal my name.
I really hope that Apple realizes the pretty big privacy gap here and starts integrating their email relay service into Apple Pay sooner rather than later, as well as making it possible to override required fields in some way.
> It was totally seamless and far better than handing my credit card to a server to get lost or cloned.
In most countries I've been the waiter brings the PoS terminal to you and you pay at the table.
I've only seen this madness in the US. The first time they took my card away from my sight I went with them to see what the heck they were doing. Crazy system, unsafe for no reason, they can bring terminal to you in the same amount of time, no signatures needed either. All of Europe works as you described, few countries in Africa I've been in the same, I wonder how it came to be like this in the US.
Besides being historically grown like that, I see two major differences to the rest of the world:
Credit cards have no PIN in the US (and debit cards can usually be used without one as well), which makes this approach possible in the first place, and the tipping culture that can make it desirable to get a quiet moment with the check to figure out amounts.
Practically, it also means that even larger restaurants usually only need very few POS terminals at a central location, rather than one per waiter, requiring wireless infrastructure in larger restaurants etc.
This is changing very fast, though – I‘m seeing both combined order and payment handheld devices (that support tap-to-pay, i.e. also Apple Pay) as well as the QR payment solution in more and more places.
> rather than one per waiter
Just want to correct this idea which has been repeated several times on this topic: You only need 3 or 4 for a larger restaurant. The entire restaurant does not pay simultaneously.
When you (the server) are done with them you just put them back in a charging dock or some other communal space.
Sure, that is possible too, but what I‘m seeing frequently in the US is a new type of combined order management and payment handheld.
It makes a lot of sense, in my view: Handling orders tickets digitally is probably incredibl useful for the kitchen (especially considering a mix of dine-in and takeout orders).
From there, it‘s only a small (ok, not really small because PCI-DSS, but at least possible) step to also having these things do payments.
Speaking for Sweden: all cards support contactless payments now, and you don't need to input PIN for amounts that comfortably cover restaurant bills.
It's like that everywhere in the EU (UK/Europe overall) - the card providers are the same, either way - Visa and MasterCard. However, each country has a max amount to use without PIN (usually around ~50euro[0]), and PIN can be requested regardless. While 50euro is on the low side of a dinner bill, it's likely okay when paying for a single person only.
[0]: The European Banking Authority (EBA) calls on traders to make use of the exemption for strong customer authentication up to 50 € as allowed under Commission Delegated Regulation (EU) 2018/389.
EU regulations require PIN entry every couple of transactions, though, even if each individual amount is below the per-country PIN limit.
For this reason alone, you do need a PIN pad at every terminal.
> I wonder how it came to be like this in the US.
Before credit cards were handled electronically the server used to have to use one of these to make a carbon paper imprint of your card: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credit_card_imprinter
While they a weren’t _huge_ they weren’t very easy to bring to the table and use, so I imagine we just got used to the experience of the server running off with our card. In wasn’t until the pandemic that I noticed most restaurants using handheld terminals.
I actually used one of these at an Apple Store a several years ago because their payment processing was down. I didn’t have a iPhone at the time, so the alternative was the least-elegant, non-Apple-ish solution ever.
Even that solution wouldn't work today. My cards are all moving to a smooth surface with the card number printed on the backside. I still have a few cards with the raised numbering but each new replacement card I get, as the old ones expire, is the flat style.
In 2005 we were still using knuckle busters with airport shuttle customers who didn’t prepay. Also alpha pagers, VHF radios, and Thomas Guide paper maps. I have to admit they were all reliable out in the middle of nowhere.
A few reasons:
1. We adopted chip cards quite late, so a lot of legacy hardware still exists - including payment terminals built into restaurant point of sale machines with a magnetic strip reader, instead of a separate card terminal.
2. Wireless card terminals are not common in the US, outside of things like Square or Toast readers. Readers are usually hardwired to the POS and aren't able to be "undocked" and carried around.
3. Outside of contactless, signatures are still usually required, and people are still used to having the receipt printer at the host stand alongside the terminal, instead of built into the card reader.
This is all slowly changing, and I honestly chock a lot of it up to stuff like smartphone payments (remember, we got Apple Pay before having contactless embedded in the majority of cards!) and smartphone-based POS systems like Square.
Contactless cards did appear in the US before Apple pay. I had one issued in 2006. It was just rarely supported by vendors and disappeared as the banks lost interest.
And, from a US perspective, that sounds absurdly overly dramatic and worrisome. The server is there to serve you, and the amount of money on the line is so comically small as to be hardly of concern. Sending them off with your card in hand is a semi-logical extension of sending them off with cash and expecting them to return with change.
I've never expected change when I pay with cash at a restaurant. Admittedly, this is mostly because of our crazy tip culture; but I just round the charge+tip to a convenient amount.
The money on the line with handing your card to the server is not comically small. They can max out your credit card with whatever charges they want. They don't even need to go through their POS system, as they can charge your card with any online retailer.
Fraud on credit cards from theft or merchants incorrectly billing is also far more protected in the US than in most any European country, and probably most other countries as well. It’s far less of a consideration in one’s mind when every bank I’ve had in the US defaults to believing the card owner over the merchant unless proven otherwise. These protections are more “balanced” between both sides in a place like Switzerland, for instance.
> Fraud on credit cards from theft or merchants incorrectly billing is also far more protected in the US than in most any European country, and probably most other countries as well.
It’s a common comment from Americans, but is misleading at the very least.
I have never even heard of a fraudulent transaction that was not reversed almost immediately, and I have been living in 3 EU countries (well, one of them ex-EU now). The procedure is: call the bank, notify them, they suspend the card and send you a new one (usually for free once a year or so, for about €20 after that). Usually they call you before you notice it; they are very good at spotting this.
It’s the same thing for card-present fraud: you have some time to declare your card lost or stolen, and all the transactions after the time you lost it are reversed. Your liability is €50 for the transactions that happened before you called them, and nothing afterwards.
I am willing to believe that consumer protection is better in the US for some specific aspects, but I am yet to see relevant examples.
When were you living in the EU? Credit cards have been around for a while, laws have changed over that time. Also credit cards have realized making it easier to reverse charges for fraud makes consumers more likely to use a card. Both are factors, and thus both of you are completely correct.
I have been continuously living in the EU or the UK for ~20 years. I have never had a credit card.
My first experience was with a bog standard Visa debit card at a French bank 10 years ago (card not present; someone apparently used my card at an ATM in Singapore to withdraw €1200 total; the bank notified me and refunded the first €500 withdrawal that went through).
My second experience was at a British bank just before Brexit (standard Visa debit card as well). I had lost my card without realising it. I called my bank when I found out and they went through the recent history to check every transaction. It turned out someone bought something with the card (can’t remember whether it was online or contactless; a small sum regardless) and that was refunded.
The regulations are very consumer friendly, even for debit cards, which everybody uses. And while they do indeed change with time, so far it has been in the direction of better consumers protections.
I don’t claim that Europe is better or anything like that, just that “the consumer is liable for frauds with their card” is wrong. IIRC, their liability is €50 maximum (and €0 in some countries) for transactions that happened before the bank was notified, and €0 after. Beyond that, the onus is on the bank to demonstrate negligence or fraud on the consumer’s part. In that case of course the consumers is liable and gets a fine at the very least.
> just that “the consumer is liable for frauds with their card” is wrong
To be clear, I neither said that not intended to imply that, so I find it a little questionable that you placed it in quotes. I think the protections are more or less fine, but seem to vary more and aren't as clear-cut for zero liability as I've found in the US, but I'm sure this varies a lot by country anyway. In any case, I've lived in multiple European countries for years now, so my experience is not solely from the US.
No, giving a card looks like you are giving your wallet to the waiter and hope that they are honest.
not if you have good fraud protection
Chip and pin cards are uncommon in Central America, it’s mostly tourists that use them.
I’ve seen here waiters asking for the pin, writing it down on a piece of paper, and taking the card back to the POS terminal.
Because it used to have to be like this and Americans are incredibly stubborn and refuse change, especially in rituals like paying.
I think one reason we don’t use those PoS terminals too often in the US is because of tipping culture. There is this insane expectation to tip at least 18%, and in fact most receipts have suggestions for 18, 20, and 22%. Any time a server has brought me one of those portable PoS terminals, it felt really awkward, as they stare at me thinking about how much tip I should give for the half-ass snooty service. I imagine many others feel this way, which is probably why it’s not popular. I spend quite a bit of time in Europe and have seen more of the PoS terminals used there, but it makes way more sense because there’s no expectation of a tip.
Flipping that iPad with 20, 22, and 25% tip presets for a takeout really grinds my gears. But even for non-tip services, people tend to use iPhone attachements to scan the card rather than using a POS machine in the US.
Canada has the same tipping culture as the US and we've had portable PoS systems in restaurants for like 10-15 years now (and I feel like I'm being conservative there).
The machine just asks for a tip and lets you put a % or $ amount in, usually with a suggested amount. I'm not sure what difference you perceive here between writing it on a piece of paper and entering it on a terminal.
The most significant difference is the waiter finding out how much you've tipped while you're still in your seat vs. once you've left the restaurant.
That was my point - the etiquette is lost when the server is in your presence.
This just seems really paranoid to me? They can't see what you're entering and sure they can scan the receipt for what you put in after if they want but I've almost never seen them do more than shove the receipt in their pocket and quickly move on. If it's not busy half the time they just leave the machine and come back to get it after taking someone else's order or something.
Here we both tip, and use the portable POS. First the check arrives (on paper) and you can check that. At that point you write in the tip amount. 10% is normal.
Then the waiter returns with the machine, enters the total (including tip) - you touch your card to the machine (and if the amount is high enough enter a pin.)
The waiter does not handle the card.
There is no awkwardness at all.
I recently joined a newly-arrived US friend at a restaurant, and he paid, but clearly didn't understand the edit-the-bill process, so we tipped in cash then gave quick education.
It's a system that works well, is effecient and secure. Overall you stay in control of your card and your card is only processed once.
You can tip with PoS terminals, too.
I've seen systems where you input the final sum you want to pay, and systems where you can input the tip separately.
I hugely dislike the POS terminal for exactly this reason: "The waiter brings the POS terminal and you pay at the table."
The experience I dislike goes like this: The server gives you the hand-held terminal and then stands watching you, tapping his/her foot impatiently, while you hurriedly verify the check, then calculate a tip amount under the server's scrutiny. I guess I'm a wimp. With the server's eyes on me, I feel the pressure to tip generously, no matter how poor the service or the overall experience.
By contrast, I find the traditional system, where the server would drop off the paper check for you to examine on your own time, to be private, un-rushed, and less prone to error.
After three decades of paying my restaurant checks without a POS terminal, I've never encountered any monkey business during the brief time the server is in possession of my credit card. Is "restaurant credit-card fraud" really a thing?
In my country they bring in the receipt first, and let you take a look at it. Perhaps negotiate with your peers who pays what amount and so one.
And than in 10 minutes waiter arrive with hand held POS.
It does happen, but thanks to the chip rollout, the value of a skimmed magnetic stripe read is falling drastically.
No idea if there is non-negligible fraud in the form of staff copying down the card number and security code for online payments fraud, though.
Some places, the waiter leaves the POS with you and collects it after a minute. Those are good places.
In most countries I've been the waiter brings the PoS terminal to you and you pay at the table.
We've had this in America for over a decade at big chain suburban restaurants like Ruby Tuesday's and Applebees.
He means most countries that are not the USA. Haven't been to Applebees in ~5 years or so but they didn't do it then either. USA doesn't bring you a terminal on average. I travel around the world for work and my experience is that most countries outside the USA do.
Ah, you edited your response. Mine still is valid I guess.
Haven't been to Applebees in ~5 years or so but they didn't do it then either.
Must have been the Applebees that you went to. I went to one in 2014 that brought the POS to the table. I remember the year because it was in a state that I've only been to once, for a business trip.
Beat middle class restaurants tend to use tableside POS systems. Applebees, Chili’s, Rock Lobster, Outback, etc etc. I understand them and love them for what they are, but it always feels jank to have to deal with a computer when I’m out for dinner. I’d pay more to not have to do that, which is the experience higher end restaurants provide.
I don’t have a computer screen in my car for the same reason. Software engineers tend to produce shit tier user experiences. (Speaking as one)
> It was totally seamless and far better than handing my credit card to a server to get lost or cloned
In Poland we have Blik[1] for that, it's a national, standard payment process. Works with any bank, in any restaurant, no need to download an app.
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blik
> and far better than handing my credit card to a server to get lost or cloned.
Holy heck! People do still give their credit cards to strangers to dissapear with? I last saw that in the 90's (Europe).
Young people now never pay with their cards, they are using phones with NFC function. So the POS terminal is brought to the table, because no one will give their unlocked phone to someone to take away)
Agreed, these are great and especially useful at reducing the friction of splitting bills
Or if the staff lose interest and you want to leave and keep asking for the bill (seems to happen if you don't order alcohol)
Coincidentally I encountered this system for the first time last night. Unfortunately it never finished loading and I embarrassingly had to switch to a physical card after stalling for 30 seconds.
I like the Binary Eye app. It's open source and comes with a Quick Settings toggle.
I wish it was built into the AOSP camera app, but it's not.
But how does it even work if there are more than one person? Does each person pay for what they order? What if you're inviting someone? Do you have to order in their stead so that their plates show up on your bill? Or can they somehow transfer their orders to your phone?
It seems this is a "solution" to a problem that never existed in the first place.
Here's how it's implemented on the one that's used pretty much everywhere where I live.
Option 1: Everyone orders and pays independently. Website takes payment through all the usual options + Apple/Google pay. So long as the whole table orders within 5 minutes, all the orders come through at once.
Option 2: One person sets up a tab, which generates a QR code. The other guests scan that code instead of the one at the table. People can order their own food/drinks as above until the tab owner closes the tab. If you forget to close the tab it closes itself at the close of business.
You peeps don't have easy "hey could you pay this amount" apps? Even if the app doesn't have split billing you can still transfer money afterwards
In Spain it is normal for the terminal to come to the table and the payment gets split up however those at the table like.
For anyone playing along at home, a "check" is the bill.
It took me quite a while to work out who was checking on the QR code.
This should instead be labeled "the restaurant industry's worst implementation".
Just last night we were trying to order from a restaurant that uses a service called qrfy.com for their menu.
I assume from the URL that this service specializes in this. Despite that the UI is... poor.
The font is too small (probably fine for the 20 something designer that built it). That's not a biggy, but then someone decided to disable pinch zoom.
Being techy, I can show the others how to work around that by doing a screen shot, then looking at the result in the gallery, where zooming does work. That's a crap experience though, because I can only see one page at a time. I just want to browse a menu! And I need to do tech support to show others how to do Android screen grab (gorilla swipe from right to left).
All so very fucking ridiculous for something that could do easily be so much better.
You should change your browser settings to force-enable zooming on all sites.
Browsers shouldn't need a setting for this. Whoever decided to allow websites to disable zooming should be shot, along with whoever decided to allow them to disable copy/paste or hijack ctrl-f.
It's so weird to me that this initially became common with websites that were "optimized for iphones". Boggled my mind, since pinch-zooming was what made iPhones so cool initially
I think it's because pinch-to-zoom is actually terrible, although it has a cool name and looks cool. The problem is that it requires two points of contact to move apart, and you also have to hold the phone at the same time.
The best way to do it was screw-to-zoom, where you draw a spiral to zoom in or out; righty-tighty to zoom in, lefty-loosey to zoom out. "Screw-to-zoom" is a bit gross for marketing, though. Maybe "spiral-in, spiral-out"?
Requiring it to be usable is terrible. That said if images are important to the content, it's almost impossible without zoom to get a decent experience on a tiny screen.
So true. Funny seeing people complain about sites that are not mobile friendly because they require pinch zooming. Pinch zoom is what makes sites like HN so much more mobile friendly than others!
Sites that disable zoom < sites that require zoom < all other sites
(I'm not really calling out HN here - its mobile experience is still better than most, although voting pretty much requires zoom)
I can't count the number of times I've accidentally flagged something and gone "aw hell" and had to track it back down to unflag it.
I genuinely think that there is no legitimate use case for disabled copy paste. It's just nonsense security theatre (which banks absolutely love)
https://play.typeracer.com/ Here's your legitimate use case. Very fun, and also impossible without disabling copy-paste.
The site doesn't loads for me, but there is no need to disable copy/paste for such things.
Just track the paste operation and place a big red CHEATER banner on the username.
Also what can be disabled with javascript - can be enabled with javascript.
There could be a modicum of use for it in some rare, rare cases, but the value provided in those cases is far outweighed by the value lost when it is prohibited.
You cannot prevent copy and paste. Particularly with things like reliable OCR in the photo app, like all iPhones have had for 2 or 3 years.
user-scalable=no must be criminal!
You can try that, but then you get sites where stuff goes flying off the screen when you zoom. Honestly, it’s hard to believe that websites can be so poorly designed, but they are!
Is this possible on iOS? The only way I’ve seen is with a Javascript bookmarklet.
Honest question - does the browser in your phone. It have a simple UI for changing the font size?
On an iPhone you just tap an aA font icon in the URL bar and change the font size up or down from 100%.
If a restaurant wants you to use your phone and proceeds to serve a website that doesn't work on people's phones, that's on them, full stop. Even if the user can accommodate the brokenness, it's still unacceptable that they should ever have to.
Sure, and with physical menus you can bring along a magnifying glass for when they are printed too small. But then, this sort of things are not considered acceptable in the real world, why should we accept them in restaurant websites?
Often the menu is an embedded PDF of uncertain origin that you can't really zoom in on, and font size increases does nothing.
Does that actually change the font size or does it just zoom?
My experience with QR-code menus has been nearly always terrible. Little to no thought goes into the format and presentation for a small screen device. Many restaurants just return a large PDF with microscopic fonts that you have to struggle to read on your small screen.
While some restaurants have a waiter taking orders, others enforce ordering via the same webapp. I've almost always run into problems where the order process hangs, or doesn't go through correctly.
There's a specially nasty surprise on iOS devices. Sure you can use the built-in QR code scanner and it pops up a webapp where you take 10 minutes to struggle through everything.... and now you just want to check that message from your friend to see if he's on the way, quickly switch to your favourite messaging app and then.... anger at not being able to find where the heck your menu and ordering process disappeared, because you didn't know that you should have explicitly ordered your phone to open the page in safari.
When presented with ordering via the web app, you often are just getting whatever the server sees on their tablet, filtered through a simple web interface.
And then you can have fun ordering the True Impossible orders, like using the McDonalds app to buy a cheeseburger with no cheese, no bun, no sauce, no onion, no pickle, and no meat.
> others enforce ordering via the same webapp
Hopefully these restaurants will go extinct via natural selection. It takes so much longer to convince these broken portals to take your order. Which means the restaurant is losing money at peak times.
I'm CTO of a startup in this space so I thought I'd chime in.
Yea completely annoying when you run into a qr code and it opens a menu. we try to encourage our restaurants to offer physical menus as a choice. We want people to use our app based ordering system because we put a lot of effort to make it convenient.
1. its not jsut a menu, you can browse and add food to your bill in real time and the waiter gets a push notification about it. its integrated with teh ticketing system so it really cuts down on wrong orders. what you see in the app is what the chef sees in the kitchen.
2 ordering between friends. we make it so you can invite and see a giant list with who ordered what in realtime.
3 hail the waiter from the app. with our system, the waiter gets a push notification if you hail them from a button in the app or add an item. no more awkwardly trying to get the waiter's by looking in their direction and locking eyes awkwardly like two grindr matches in a small midwestern city.
4. pay through the app. so far customers love it. they can simply pay and go instead of waiting for the waiter to bring the machine.
5 registering nor required, we saw that a lot of users were avoiding using the app simply because they didn't wan to register so we made special "lite versions" of our apps that load via instant app (android) or app clips (ios). Thls it sucks that it means we don't get to have a history of what the orders over time, we decided it was better that the system be as convenient as possible. hopefully other nice features like having your payment method stored so you can pay at table without pulling out your card gives people a reason to try the full fat experience
we're in 163 restaurants and growing in London so hopefully you be using us soon!
The value to having something like this is pretty clear but I can't reconcile it with the fact that I don't want to be using my phone at all when socializing with friends and I prefer they didn't as well.
In my opinion there is no better interface for communication than human-to-human speech. This is why butlers, waiters, and personal assistants exist, and also why natural-language AI is promising.
In my opinion we should aim to get screens out of our lives except when necessary and intentionally focused on a task (i.e. work) and maintain presence in the real world whenever we're doing anything else. This means leaning more on human language and less on screens.
To be honest tapping my order on my phone seems much better than through a waiter or even something like a per table Alexa.
I really dislike how often communication gets cut off because multiple participants are trying to get the attention of a waiter or the topic is uncomfortable to talk about with an unknown person over your shoulder.
You know people at nearby tables can hear you talking at a restaurant, right?
Yeah, but it's not like they are actively interacting with me or a friend. I assume everyone more or less automatically ignores the background noise of other tables.
My experience with paying through the app has been pretty subpar. Usually I'm required to type in my credit card by hand, on my phone. Yuck. If I have to use some app / website to order food at your restaurant it better support Apple/Google Pay.
Edit: the number one thing users want in a restaurant ordering system is ease. I'm in a restaurant to relax, eat, and enjoy good company. The last thing I want to do is register for get another app (because none of the restaurants use the same one) and type in my payment details. Some of the things you mention do sound more convenient than the traditional paper menu and human waiter, but if I have to type in a credit card number or sign up for an account, I'd prefer the human.
we do support apple pay and google pay for that very reason
I've used the iPad/tablet systems at airports. They usually work great.
What I don't like, however, are:
• Full-screen ads that you need to scroll past, to get at the menu.
• Request/Requirement to sign up an account (even if less "in your face," it's still creepy as hell, because this crowd, especially, knows exactly what will happen to that data).
• Enticements to "download our app." I have stopped downloading these apps, because, in the best case, they are watered-down Web pages, and in the worst case, borderline malware (why does a menu app require all my contacts and pictures?).
• Awful information architecture, that makes it difficult to find what you need (with a paper menu, it's less than a second. With a phone menu, it can take ten seconds or more, and, on a couple of occasions, I never found something that I knew the restaurant had).
Phones aren't iPads. The systems frequently seem to have been designed for tablets, and often, the phone experience is a watered-down, "lesser" experience to a tablet.
I'm really big on end-user experience optimization (as opposed to app developer experience optimization), so I know that I'm a cranky customer.
None of those 5 things are about focusing dinner attention in an enjoyable meal. I came to eat and talk, not mess around in a computer doing the staff's work for them.
"no more awkwardly trying to get the waiter's by looking in their direction and locking eyes awkwardly like two grindr matches in a small midwestern city."
Hum, what? Since when is looking people in the eye to catch their attention awkward?
Pretending to solve made up problems is better PR than honesty.
A more honest take would be "This will grow our and our b2b customers bottom lines, at the expense of the consumer experience. Most consumers won't have a choice if we get enough of the market."
Honesty doesn't sell when you're a parasite.
> This will grow our and our b2b customers bottom line
You're not wrong here. the reality is that staff costs are going up and restaurants are happy to jump on technologies that let them do more with less. With our product, staff can be more efficient. We consider the experience of the waitstaff using our product to be a high priority and it shows when they are enthusiastic about pushing our solution to operations.
> at the expense of the consumer experience.
We're not forcing our system on anyone. We're doin our best to make it a better experience overall for the customers. There's a few restaurants that choose to have a QR code only experience but thats not something we push on them. Not saying we're perfect (god knows getting instant apps working has been the cause of a few sleepless nights) but we take customer feedback seriously and are aggressively improving our product to encourage them to use it to order. I personally don't want people using our app because they HAVE to but because its a superior experience.
> Honesty doesn't sell when you're a parasite.
You're entitled to your opinion. We provide a product that helps restaurants be more efficient with their resources and make less mistakes when it comes to ordering. our customers, (both restaurants and users of our ordering app) like it and thats what ultimately matters.
US its not typically an issue but try getting a waiter's attention in Latin America or Europe and you'll start to understand
>Yea completely annoying when you run into a qr code and it opens a menu.
Usually a pdf, and one that hasn't been updated in a couple of years.
Nah, it's an app trying to sneak in price increase you won't notice. The only reason for computerized menus is to avoid the menu effect", to raise prices more quickly.
For outdoor picnic table style dining it's my new preference. The ability to easily leave a tab open and progressively order food and drinks on demand is amazing.
Not that it should replace all dining experiences but wait staff free dining when ordering from a bar + kitchen is superior for these instances.
The ability to just get up an walk off without synchronous negotiation is a more relaxed dining experience, the ability to have people progressively join and leave your party is also fantastic and can facilitate an old school community dining hall experience.
There are a few UIs I like for mobile, many are quite poor though.
could you point out this UIs?
I hate QR menu's. Younger me is absolutely appalled at that. Older me just wants a physical menu.
* I intentionally don't use my phone at restaurants. In fact, I often prefer to leave it in the car.
* In my area (rural America), a lot of businesses have really poor websites (noticeably worse than urban areas). Nearly all of the QR menus are down right terrible.
* There's a good chance some one thought it'd be great to have a bunch of collapsed sections and add a terrible animation. I need to manually expand each section and deal with the terrible animation repositioning the screen.
* For those less tech savvy businesses, they probably just uploaded a PDF of their menu. Bonus points if the menu is scanned in on their 15 year old printer/scanner combo.
* Finally, there's the group of restaurants that have changed menus but either (1) forget to update the website (2) accidentally have multiple, differing copies of the menu
Bonus points for the menu PDF file being hundreds of megabytes because it's their high res file for the printing company. Double bonus if their restaurant is a mobile service dead zone.
And needing a lot of panning and zooming due to being based on a full page format which is unsuitable for a phone.
It also feels awkward because you stimulate everyone to pick up their phone as soon as you come in. I'm still from the generation that considers that something too avoid :)
One restaurant had this - but the menu was in FOUR separate PDFs that you had to zoom and squint at; basically unusable.
Always amusing when the menu is on QR but the wine list is a normal printed paper.
You've got it backwards. The big files are menus that have been scanned with no compression at high resolution. Most of that info is vector/font on a properly designed menu.
Trust me, the majority of sites are not much better even in the most high-tech of areas. Even large chains can have terrible sites and experiences.
Just print a few hundred pieces of paper, and your customers will tell your employees which listed items they want.
I was at a food court a couple of months ago (sorry... "food hall") and one of the stalls didn't have a printed menu at all. Not even one available on request. Just a QR code.
I went to another stall.
> they probably just uploaded a PDF of their menu.
Tbh, this is usually the least bad outcome with QR code menus since at least it's usually just the same as the physical one but on my screen (worse than physical, but not "badly designed JavaScript animation hell" worse) *
Honestly the scanned pdf sounds amazing compared to the website they usually have or the forced app install
Website is easier to translate and likely quicker to load. Search is similar whether its pdf or website.
I like qr codes as an option.
It all varies by context of course, but I much prefer ordering uk/nz style - order at the bar, pay, grab drinks yourself, food gets delivered by waiter. Much faster, esp when you are getting a single cup of coffee.
That's common in Britain for cheaper places, especially ordinary pubs serving food. At most middle or fancy restaurants you order from the waiter who comes to the table.
Exactly the same sentiments. My family is zero phones when eating, whether home or out.
Luckily, most places would bring a physical menu when asked. One claimed they didn't have any, and seemingly made no effort to accommodate, so they just lost our business. At minimum, I don't think it's too much to ask for a single chalkboard or screen or something. Having nothing and demanding users scan QR codes is low effort.
I'm luckily in a rural area where we still have washable menus (literally printed on dishwasher-proof plastic) and I've not seen a QR code ... well, ever.
And the tide is turning, the waiter at a high-class joint we went to in another big city noticed some hesitation with the QR code and revealed normal menus.
There are many services that provide nice web menus for the restaurants to use with QR Codes. The terrible state of any restaurant menu would be only because the restaurant is not aware of the service and the service providers failed to market their product to them.
Do you hate all QR menus or only the dysfunctional ones? Most are terrible , but occasionally it’s a light web application where I can order and pay directly from. Which I like very much. I do dread the scanned menu PDFs though, they’re crimes against humanity
I dislike most of them.
It's compounded by the fact that I currently use a Unihertz Titan Pocket. Physical keyboard, but only a 3" screen.
+1 for hate it.
I don't bring my phone with me everywhere I go. I don't want to. It's big, and awkward, and annoying.
When it works, it is mediocre at best. When it doesn't work, it's a pain in the ass. Plus it means you almost never see a server. Again, great if there are no hiccups, but awful when something goes wrong.
And the huge variety of UIs are awful. Maybe in 10 years when everyone lands on one UI that make sense, and there's an IPAD at the table, and servers come by to follow up... maybe then I'll be OK with it?
You're living in the 2010s. In most of the world a phone is a necessity everywhere one goes. To access bus or metro, to communicate to work, etc.
2010's? Dude, I'm still in the 80's. I'm not some GenZ tiktok child who can't be with a screen for 10 seconds and thinks everything needs to be gamified. This dependency on phones is stupid. So I refuse to participate. The more people that do so, the less this BS takes over life. We're responsible for the world we live in.
Where I live in Europe the phone is used to charge transport cards, to pay at stores, to interact with banks and government, etc. Because of two factor authentication it's basically a necessity to have one for banking and certain government transactions (some of which can only be done online). I could carry around a laptop for work and business but it's far more convenient to use a smaller device.
For a month I traveled from Seville to Munich in 2019 and didn't need my phone at all. I bought food, tickets, took transit, etc. What I did NOT do was open a bank account.
So do these banks issue you a phone if you don't have one? Does the government have a law that requires citizens to own a phone? What brand? What capabilities.
There are online-only banks in the US that are only accessed through a phone, but they are not the ONLY banks.
I think you are confusing a world that CAN be accessed vs. a world that MUST be accessed via phone.
With 2FA it is practically quite difficult to engage in basis day to day banking without a phone in many countries.
me: here's some facts; can you give me examples to support your claims?
you: (moves goalposts)
A phone is not a necessity for any of those things
In many countries it is.
My banking and bill paying is basically online only. It's not obligatory but it's far, far more convenient online.
Debit cards still exist but they are being phased out slowly in favor of NFC.
To board transport I can still use a card but recharging it is easier via an app than by standing in line at a machine where I'd have to pay with a card or cash.
At work we often communicate via group chats. It's quicker and less intrusive than phoning or emailing. I don't love it but I'm accustomed.
To pay taxes or fines to report to the city that a tree branch fell to consult my property tax info or medical records or to get an appointment for minor surgery - it's all easiest or only possible online.
Online means via app on phone generally. Most of us don't carry around anything more expensive than a 150 euro Chinese phone.
You're disputing a phone being a necessity.
> My banking and bill paying is basically online only. It's not obligatory but it's far, far more convenient online.
So, not a necessity.
> Debit cards still exist but they are being phased out slowly in favor of NFC.
Not a necessity (and I expect by "phased out" you mean you see them less).
> To board transport I can still use a card but recharging it is easier via an app than by standing in line at a machine where I'd have to pay with a card or cash.
Not a necessity.
> At work we often communicate via group chats. It's quicker and less intrusive than phoning or emailing. I don't love it but I'm accustomed.
I assume you have a work device and this is during work hours? If so, not a necessity.
> To pay taxes or fines to report to the city that a tree branch fell to consult my property tax info or medical records or to get an appointment for minor surgery - it's all easiest or only possible online.
Easiest = not a necessity.
You've just detailed things that _you_ find more convenient to do on your phone and that you are able (and encouraged) to do. But not one of them appears to require a phone, or - outside of your specific job - even internet.
Honestly I am very surprised to see so much love for the QR code menus here. I have had nothing but bad experiences with them.
First of, on Android, the camera doesn't magically scan the QR code. You have to download a separate QR code scanner app for that. My wife and my parents all have Android phones and have no idea what to do when they see a QR code like that. The waiter usually just says "point your camera to it" because apparently everyone in the world assumes you have an iPhone and that's how it works there. When it doesn't work the waiter now has to do tech support on a random person's phone.
Second, as others have said, the social aspect of looking at it together is totally lost. Which is quite big IMHO.
Third, scrolling through a PDF or a page on a tiny screen makes it much harder to grasp the entire menu quickly. On a paper menu, I often just jump around and get inspired by the various dishes. Randomly scrolling up/down/left/right on a tiny screen feel awful compared to just letting your eyes drift.
My vote is for a QR code and paper menus. Let the people decide what they like without excluding elderly or non-tech savvy people.
This isn't an Android vs Apple thing. Both of them introduced native QR code scanning in the same year -- 2017. That's five years ago. So I don't know what version of Android you're using, or what camera app.
But honestly, in 2022 it's kind of up to you to know how to scan a QR code, the same way you're expected to know how to type a domain name into a web browser. If someone has to teach you the first time then that's fine, there's a first time for everything, but the idea that there are people who haven't done it before isn't a reason to hold us back. And if you have a phone with a pre-2017 operating system or that otherwise doesn't support it in its native camera app, you can install an app for it.
But yes, places generally always have a backup option, whether a paper menu or tablet. I mean, people's cell phones run out of battery all the time. It's not just the elderly or non-tech-savvy ;)
>But honestly, in 2022 it's kind of up to you to know how to scan a QR code, the same way you're expected to know how to type a domain name into a web browser.
Why? I've literally never been in a situation where I've had to scan a QR code. I do mean never.
What benefit does a system like this provide when it's always clunkier than just having a physical object?
On an unrelated note, isn't this why all the scan-this-QR-code ads fall flat? Because it takes a lot of extra effort to actually "check out more info"?
One recent example: paying bills in Switzerland [1]. Although those have to be scanned by a banking app.
[1] https://www.six-group.com/en/newsroom/media-releases/2020/20...
It is not required to pay bills by scanning the QR code. It is perfectly possible to enter the IBAN and reference number manually as long as your banking provider lets you do so.
What is required is that you, when creating an invoice, provide the QR code for doing so.
I’m not sure were I said that it was required? I was responding to the comment. I see a huge benefit from scanning the QR code as it saves me trouble having to manually enter all the info. Older barcode style bills also worked but somehow scanning was always wonky.
Unlike a physical menu, items that aren't available can just be dynamically removed.
With a physical menu they just cross it out or tell you
But is this actually done in practice?
It is supreme when sharing links in a presentation, it is supreme on business cards (since you can quickly get all the details and add them to your contacts), and it is the best thing for wireless access (just point your phone, and you are in).
Menus in restaurants are an exception. Those are better as physical objects.
But why would I want wireless access to a network that you can join by just pointing something at it? That specifically sounds like a wireless network to avoid.
And how is a QR code the best for sharing links in a presentation? Why would people want to look at what you linked during your presentation? And if it's afterwards they would need access to your presentation anyway, no? At that point a regular URL would do too.
Why would it be a wireless network to avoid? I mean, the QR code has the SSID and Password in it. For guest networks, the information is usually put up inside the areas guests go to anyway.
The way it worked at my previous employer, you had the guest network SSID and password on the wall and then the QR code, so you didn't have to type them in. There was no difference in security, just convenience.
As for during the presentation: surprisingly often, if you are doing workshops.
Anecdote: Just this week I ended up at a restaurant in San Jose that was QR code menu/ordering only. I don't know what format QR code they were using, but my iPhone would not read it at all. I've scanned many many codes with it in the past, but that particular one was just not having it. Luckily I was with a friend whose phone cooperated and I just paid them back. In cash.
You know, if you mention the restaurant name maybe an Apple engineer can expense a lunch to file some bugs on your behalf ^_^
http://www.demi-ya.com/ :)
My favorite! Admittedly I order ahead because the wait is long otherwise
I’ve scanned QR codes just a handful of times in the last decade, and I can’t remember any of them being useful.
They are decent as app shortcuts it seems. In the last two weeks I’ve done it twice as a replacement for typing in the name in the App Store of some targeted one-off app that is for a particular piece of hardware. In the first case it was some LED lights for my nephew. In the second case it was some light up hardware for a KPop concert I went to with my wife.
We were using them to "check in" during covid. They were mmmm... moderately useful I guess but of course the whole idea got mired in controversy
And then all that "definitely going to be used for contact tracing only" data got shared around with the police.
I absolutely hate it when there is a QR code with text like "Scan here for more Information" or similar - and then there is no link written or no information on how to get there without having to scan the code.
The best use I saw was on some small electronics thing I was looking at in a shop. One brand had QR codes on their boxes, which led to a full specification and the user manual -- more than could possibly have fitted on the box, especially as a European box can have 10+ languages.
Another is joining a Wifi network. I saw this at a couple of small hotels recently -- as well as giving the network name and password, there was a QR code. Scanning it prompted me something like "Do you want to join NiceViewHotel Wifi network? Yes/No" and was much quicker than typing in the key.
If my phone has something like this I would have turned it off when first going over a new phones settings. It's one of the first things I do. Go through every single menu I can find and turn off stuff I don't want. Something constantly using my camera to scan for QR codes is definitely something I will turn off. Just like say "Face ID".
Who thinks those are good ideas?
For the record I have scanned exactly 0 QR codes in my life.
You are aware that this is happening locally on your phone, right?
I have no idea whatsoever what caused you to dislike QR codes, but I kinda want to hear the story. Face Id, I can kinda see as a pin might be more secure.
Technology and software are awesome! After all, I build this stuff myself.
I also see how these things are built. I see how the sausage is made. Sometimes, when you see how the sausage was made, it can sour you. Even if you maybe didn't see how that specific sausage was made. Also, always beware of what the sausage might get used for other than the "intended purpose".
I never understood the premise for QR codes. You're trying to send me to some URL, create an SMS w/ some pre-defined text, automatically follow someone on Twitter or whatever and a bunch of other things. Until I scan the code I have no idea what it will actually do. I don't generally trust something like that not to be used for nefarious purposes. We teach people to be careful what links they click on and such. Here we teach them the opposite. If someone sticks a QR code in front of your face, just scan it! Now you can say that no restaurant ever would send you to a URL that then exploits a flaw in your browser and that there are way easier ways to compromise a system. Fair enough. Doesn't mean I have to start using QR codes for things that worked perfectly well in a non-QR code world.
Now the GP also said that restaurant people tell you to "just point your camera to it". This would indicate that there's an always on camera scanning my surroundings constantly to figure out if there's a QR code there. Frankly if that was actually the case, that would be super creepy. That is why I would disable such a function right away. Even if it's "just happening locally". Sounds a bit like that whole "they only scan your device for inappropriate pictures locally, nothing to worry about". Now combine that w/ all the new rage in "e-health" where you don't have to go stand in line for hours to see a doctor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32560361 ("Google refuses to reinstate account after man took medical images of son’s groin").
This is exactly the kind of thing I am worried about w/ any of these "advances" in technology. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions".
seen how the sausage is made, etc.
I have a OnePlus8 and it does not do QR code scanning. I had to install Google Lens. It's not about version of Android. The cameras are all proprietary and so are the camera apps.
As such I hate QR code menus. I'm with the boomers on this one. QR code menus are no better than touch screen menus to open the glove box.
It took me a year to figure out how to scan a qr code natively in android without downloading a sketchy app
> First of, on Android, the camera doesn't magically scan the QR code.
Out of curiosity, what phones do you and your family use? Because my Android phone (a Pixel 4a) has never had any issues scanning QR codes by just pointing the camera at them.
Some OEM camera apps have built-in QR code detection (using Google Lens or something else) but not all do.
Starting in Android 13, a QR code scanner is accessible from Quick Settings on all GMS devices. This QR code scanner is built into Google Play Services though so it's not available on AOSP builds.
Right. I use F-Droid and have Google stuff turned off. I do have an app, Binary Eye, that can scan QR codes, UPC codes, Code 39, etc. But it doesn't have permission to launch a browser. I have to paste the code into Fennec. I need to do this maybe twice a year.
I've never seen QR codes in restaurants in Silicon Valley.
It's vendor specific. Some have camera apps that do have scanners integrated, some don't.
Older Androids definitely needed an app but I’m talking like the Google G1 and G2 etc..
My pixel3 doesn't do this
I have a (normal) pixel 3 and it does do it, but the UI is terrible and sometimes doesn't engage. And when it does the link shows up in what I found to be an awkward place.
I'm about 90% sure this used to work better on an older version of android.
The most awkward thing is that the link is like a tooltip: it fades away very quickly, so you often have to rescan the QR code.
My Pixel 3A does, interesting to see the difference
My Pixel 3a also scans QR codes.
Have you updated your camera app? When I point mine at a QR code of a URL a little bubble appears below it, which you can click on.
I've certainly never tried to stop it from updating. It's on version 8.4.600.440402475.27. When I point mine at a QR code absolutely nothing at all happens
I don't know if this is the same experience for you, but for a while I would just open the camera app without realizing I had to swipe over to Google Lens mode to have it detect QR codes.
Anecdotally, between a Pixel 4a, Pixel 7 pro, OnePlus 6 and 7 Pro, none of them ever successfully scanned QR codes in photos. All required a separate app to correctly recognize QR codes.
Weird - I was using a Pixel 1 until recently and the camera app dealt with QR codes just fine.
It's even worse when you you don't have internet access, and have to use a restaurant WiFi that requires you to sign up.
Also, if you are dining with someone who has a food allergy, then all the "convenience" of online menusgoes away when a waiver has to bring their book of allergens to the table and manually take the order anyway.
> all the "convenience" of online menus goes away when a waiver has to bring their book of allergens to the table and manually take the order anyway.
Which is silly because an online menu is an amazing opportunity to do extensive dietary restriction support. In fact, it's so accomodative to have a filter to narrow/highlight menu choices that I'm surprised restaurants haven't done that and also made "Paleo" and other diets part of it. Plus every single menu entry could have expansions to show exact ingredients, etc., for extra research.
Honestly, a lot of it seems to boil down to that digital menus can be superior to the traditional options, but a lot of places are kind of awful at software and websites so you get a wide spread of quality, a lot of which is hilariously inferior to paper.
That costs money, and some restaurants already struggle with higher costs and fewer customers.
That's a bit weird to me.
It's often the case in the UK that the mobile app/website in restaurants has full allergy information, including filters to only show items that match certain criteria.
Same. Not a fan of QR menus for plenty of reasons, but allergies isn't one of them.
Printed menus where I live (Seattle) tend to have the exact same info as the QR menus, which includes the allergen info. Which makes sense, because most of the time the QR menu is the exact same as the physical one (just printed out). And those that are not the same just have more info on the website, like full nutritional content and such.
My experience with some restaurants is that they don't.
The QR menu is just a PDF of the printed menu.
> their book of allergens to the table
Wow, they have book of allergens?
Is that with list of dushes from specific restoraunt? Or ith general reference book?
Never saw that in my country. I guess we don't use these. If you have allergy you are just screwed.
It's so common in the EU and UK that I think it's probably law, or a good way of complying with the law. It's specific to the restaurant's menu.
Some places will list the allergens directly on the menu, with symbols or footnotes. Less common is a separate menu showing only e.g. lactose free options -- I've seen this at nicer places in the UK.
Places like cafés and fast food where the menu is a blackboard or screen should have a book/file or similar. It is often just printed Word documents in a ringbinder, presumably prepared by the chef.
McDonald's example: https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g18704... (just see the picture)
Ryanair in-flight menu example with symbols: https://www.foodsmatter.com/allergy_intolerance/management_t...
(Might _ua mean Ukraine? Then FWIW, I've seen this system in Romania, Bulgaria and Poland.)
Please let your server know of any allergies or food intolerances. Gluten-free options are available but our kitchen is not gluten-free. Delivery, tax, and document fees extra. Void where prohibited. All rights reserved.
That's as American as Uncle Sam himself.
right, dining with someone with allergies remains as inconvenient as usual.
And dining as someone with allergies is more inconvenient.
Well that also assumes you live in a part of the world that's civilized and has an allergy book. Seen it plenty in Europe and almost never in the US. Most of the time, in the US, if you say you have an allergy to something the waiter says "I don't know" or "I'll tell the chef".
I went to a restaurant on Friday where the sit-down experience was identical to the online-ordering take-out experience but with a table in front of the pick-up counter. The food was fantastic but I hated the experience.
Some time ago I had coffee with someone in a cafe that did the same thing. I never went back to that cafe again. We spent a full ten minutes of our ~hour time not talking to each other because we were too busy futzing with an awkward online ordering system.
On my android phone, the feature has to be turned on. Fortunately someone showed me how to do that as I fumbled at a restaurant.
I've android and don't need an app
I had thought that iPhones were the weird ones for taking so long to natively scan QR codes.
Too long? It shows up immediately for me as soon as i point the camera at a QR code. Like, with a sub-second delay at most, but it feels instant.
Sorry, I meant as far as how many years it took to release an OS that natively supported QR code scanning. However, I double-checked and it looks like Oreo was the first version of Android to offer it natively via built-in Google services, and iOS got it with iOS 11, and both OSes released in 2017.
What?? Android had it years before iOS.
Not quite. They both got it at around the same time, in 2017. Both OSes had several apps doing it for quite a while at that point, though.
Most Android OEMs don't use stock camera app but use their own app, and most manufacturers are in Asia, so they support scan QR earlier by default.
It’s 2022, if your phone doesn’t natively scan a QR code from the camera app you need to switch phones.
This post is so entitled. It's 2022 and I am using a Samsung A8 phone from 2018 which is pretty good and perfect size for me, thank you very much.
Not everyone makes $450,000 USD a year and can change phone every month, I am sorry.
> It's 2022 and I am using a Samsung A8 phone from 2018 which is pretty good
And if it can’t scan QR codes from the camera app, that’s purely because your carrier is withholding software updates from you. It’s built-in from Android 8.0 and Samsung supports the 2018 A8 up to Android 9.
I get the sentiment, but the ire is better directed at those preventing older/cheaper phones from doing what they’re capable of.
Only in the US does one's "carrier" have anything to do with what is on one's phone ...
Only in the US on Android…
Amen.
You want to come in to my business and give me money? Upgrade your phone!
Then scroll through a 4" version of the 18" menu we scanned in and then threw away.
The iPhone 5s from 2013 (109 months ago) scans QR codes from the default camera app just fine. Still gets security updates too. This is unparalleled in the Android ecosystem.
I’m not going to get into yet another platform flame war and I’m sure you have plenty of reasons why you selected your device and they’re valid. But if your post is about longevity and economics iPhone wins hands down.
Indeed. My iPhone 6s (lovely big screen) has worked perfectly since 2015. I'm disappointed that IOS 16 won't be available for it, but I really can't complain after continuous, impeccable compatibility for almost eight years.
And, as the parent noted, my 6s is still getting security updates; current is 15.7.1. I'd swear Apple is sneaking in some UI polishing too.
I don't want to scan QR codes. I want to talk to people.
I have a brand new phone from OnePlus, it does not do this.
I have a One Plus 7 Pro and it can scan QR codes, but you have to press a button in the camera app first. Not entirely intuitive up-front and a bit finnicky even once you know about it, but it's been good enough in practice.
I really would like to know how to scan QR codes without playing 3rd-party app roulette. Which button do you have to press?
I have the OnePlus 10 Pro. I've looked through all of the menus and settings, there's nothing that seems to be QR code related? Maybe they've removed the feature?
If you google your question, you literally get a set of videos showing you how to do it.
"oneplus 10 pro qr": https://www.google.com/search?q=OnePlus+10+Pro+qr
In 30 seconds, I found that you can do it by using the Google Lens feature, which is a button to the left of your zoom button in your camera app. If you don't want to use that, you can use google lens directly.
Ah, the trick is not to have disabled the Google Lens app. I'd seen that video before, but in never clicked that Lens was required. Thanks.
Agreed, why don't poor people just buy more money.
> First of, on Android, the camera doesn't magically scan the QR code.
Most Android phones do this automatically - and it's not too hard to write up a quick app for it to scan automatically when it detects a QR code.
> Second, as others have said, the social aspect of looking at it together is totally lost. Which is quite big IMHO.
My friends and I all browse together on our phones and we excitedly point out different menu items, that we can look at independently without having to cram together looking at a piece of paper. Otherwise I don't know how this is any different than having separate menus.
> Third, scrolling through a PDF or a page on a tiny screen makes it much harder to grasp the entire menu quickly. On a paper menu, I often just jump around and get inspired by the various dishes. Randomly scrolling up/down/left/right on a tiny screen feel awful compared to just letting your eyes drift.
Scrolling through a PDF / page has always been fine for my friends and I. I'm also not entirely sure why I would want my eyes to drift when actively looking for something to eat as well?
>and it's not too hard to write up a quick app for it to scan automatically when it detects a QR code.
You're joking, right? In case you forgot the context, "not too hard" is looking at a menu that's in front of you. Writing an app to make up for the absence of the menu is definitely too hard.
> Most Android phones do this automatically - and it's not too hard to write up a quick app for it to scan automatically when it detects a QR code
You just 'write up a quick app' in the middle of a restaurant?
If you're a junior dev, sure. Senior engineers just decode the QR mentally.
If you can't write up a full-featured QR code scanner from scratch in 15 seconds, can you really call yourself a programmer?
On a more serious note, though, I wouldn't be much impressed with QR code menus. I usually have my 4G off, I don't trust random wifi networks, and I don't like smartphones as a form factor for any text over 500 characters.
HN is so ironic, they complain and criticize everything but fail to understand QR code. Are they actually a programmer or only acting like it. India already have UPI implementation while in the USA they need apple to save their useless banking system and still fail to move on with tech.
It's weird that people hate QR codes so much. Perhaps is it phenomenon only in the US? It's just a information encoded as a square, not something like Skynet.
The security issue is forcing non-technical end users to troll through an app store to find "qr reader" and also not fall for the hundreds of scamware they'll encounter immediately in the search results.
Really surprised there hasn’t yet been a reckoning with QR code substitution attacks. Duplicate the menu, put up a “type your credit card details” form, and you could probably automate the actual order with the real menu site in the background. Boom—-skimmed.
There’s just no way for laypeople to evaluate the provenance of random QR codes. The restaurant industry often uses random third party sites for their menus, so even that is a poor signal.
EDIT: Adding second paragraph that was accidentally deleted before submission
QR code substitution does involve significant in-person risk for the perpetrator. Some patsy has to go around swapping the QR codes on restaurant tables, likely raising some awkward questions from the staff and ending up with their face on multiple security cameras. It's certainly doable, but the risk/reward ratio seems poor compared to ransomware, hacking PoS systems, etc.
Can you elaborate on the perp’s risk/reward analysis?
Imagine a vending machine in a remote area with no hardline data access, and it’s unreliable for the machine to access the phone network. If there’s a QR on the machine, and if the customer has a data signal, then payments can easily be processed by phone and return a code to complete the purchase.
A perp swaps the QR, sends customers to a plausible-looking payment site and steals their buck-and-a-quarter.
It’s fairly easily detected because that machine suddenly stops making money. The perp’s website and payment processing would be subject to subpoena. And this is wire fraud, so a federal crime in the US.
Sufficient risk / insufficient reward?
This is what came to mind immediately when a friend of mine was recalling a prank (purportedly) pulled on a Sydney restaurant. The QR code sticker on various tables was replaced with a legit-looking sticker which actually took users to a rather NSFW URL instead of an ordering page.
I hope it has caused people to start thinking about what could happen beyond the jokes.
I couldn't agree more. Though, just because we haven't heard of widespread cases doesn't mean it hasn't or isn't happening.
> There's just no way for laypeople to evaluate the provenance of random QR codes.
Arguably, even seasoned veterans may have difficulty confirming the validity. Too often, it's a patchwork of random third parties before the order is completed.
> The restaurant industry often uses random third-party sites for their menus, so even that is a poor signal.
Which makes this all that worse, as it's contrary to all of the "verify" messaging we've been preaching from the security world.
In the Indian UPI system the QR scan for payments involves an account holder name fetch from the recipient bank. This makes it very difficult to convincingly swap QRs
Not really an 'attack' so much as a proof of concept, stuff like this exists...
https://youtu.be/q2ie1UczPNo
QR codes should, generally, DIAF.
* Die In A Fire
The menu doesn't ask for payment typically, the server still does that so a qr substitution attack would do nothing useful other than confuse the customers and staff for about 10 minutes before they decide to just rewrite the menu on some paper and deal with the problem after closing.
In Australia, QR code to website menu->order->pay has become the norm; restaurants without it are increasingly rare[1]. There are 2 or 3 major vendors of such systems, generally respectable (though a few dark patterns on some of them). I'm completely surprised there haven't been substitution attacks already.
[1] These emerged during/after lockdowns to minimise staff contact with diners, but have stuck around as there's an employment crisis whereby restaurants (and plenty of other businesses) can't find staff, so this reduces the need for staff to stand around waiting for you to place your order.
Sure, I haven’t described the universe of QR code usage at restaurants. The point still stands that a QR code at a table is an abusable trust boundary in some places where it’s used.
It probably depends on where you live/how tech-savvy your area is, but where I am, it's fairly common to order and pay through the qr menu as well.
In Sydney Australia it is common for the payment to happen through the QR code flow. It’s backed by well-known apps though, not unknown 3rd parties.
I'm actually surprised that this is an issue. I eat out several times a week and haven't seen a QR code menu in months. QR code menus were a short episode during the pandemic, but it looks like most restaurants in my city switched back to printed menus (I live in Germany).
Agreed, I'm very happy that a lot of things we just accepted would become norms post-pandemic have just been completely forgotten and life today is largely indistinguishable from 2019.
I still see acrylic barriers between customer service reps and customers.
As far as I know, that's still mandatory in some situations.
And taking cash, to be better able to evade taxes.
I went for sushi this week and of course there's a hundred things in twelve categories. I couldn't even figure out how to get back to the daily specials, once you move on, you can't see them again.
It's a fundamentally horrible experience and will definitely keep me from going back.
For a counter-anecdote: I've ordered sushi electronically in a restaurant just fine.
However, I would probably not go back to a place that had a terrifyingly horrible UI for ordering, either.
I love QR codes and used to put up QR code stickers around town. I hate them for menus though. I sometimes like to go on walks without my phone and stop in somewhere for a meal. Or my phone is dead. Or I just want to have a meal with someone without any phones distracting us. The only implementation I've seen of this that I thought was neat was at a restaurant where it opened up to a website where I could place the order and pay on my phone.
Huh, maybe that explains why living in Australia, I don't understand the hate for QR code menus. Basically everywhere that has a QR code menu over here these days also lets you order and pay via the same QR code.
Oh, that's a total gamechanger. If looking at the QR code menu allowed me to also order from it, it would have made it much superior to physical menus, no argument. Sadly, I've never encounteted it across many restaurants with QR code menus in a major city (Seattle). Every single time it was either a link to the pdf version of the printed menu or their website with the menu.
Order and pay is the standard these days in Australia. It's pretty rare to find somewhere that has the menu but nothing else as a qr code (why not just look up the restaurant's website in that case?).
Pardon my ignorance, as I haven’t been to a restaurant since the pandemic started. How does that work when you have 2 or more people you’re ordering for? Do you pass the phone around? Do they have to look at it and tell you what they want and you enter it? Do you ask them, “Do you want X? No? Y? What about Z?” Sounds like a huge pain to me.
Some places have the table number encoded in the QR code. Others you type it in. Everyone at the table could put in their own orders on their own phones if they wanted to, or one person could enter them all in. For the former it makes it very simple for everyone to only pay for their own things too.
Honestly, as someone with young kids it's been an absolute dream. We can scan or tap as soon as we get to the table, one of us can quickly fire off some order for food and drinks for the kids, and more often than not things have arrived before we've finished unpacking the coloring books and other things to keep them occupied. At which point the adults can sit down and chat, which is usually the main reason we're out, and order at our leisure.
They open the menu on their own phone and tell the person doing the ordering what they want. An upgrade over physical menus, of which you often get only one copy for your table. I don’t miss passing a physical menu around and wasting five minutes on each person.
I haven't seen one menu per table, in well, I don't know if I've ever seen that except at a bar late at night.
It depends on the venue and provider. A lot of pub type settings will have a note saying that orders placed within 5 min of one another will come out together. In my experience the more upmarket the place, the less likely they are to have ordering via phone (or payment at the time of ordering).
But you can also get someone at the table to place the order for everyone. Or often go and order at the bar (also something that you don't see too much in North America), or if its a restaurant grab a member of staff and order in a more classic way.
They use their own phone to order.
I was largely thinking about being there with kids who wouldn’t have their own phone.
Here in the Upper Midwest of the United States, it's almost all just links to websites that aren't mobile friendly and PDFs
I live in rural Australia and have never seen a QR code in a restaurant.
This is a good list, and if I may add another one: I'm tired of everyone appropriating my phone for their own purposes. It's my device, stop telling me what code to scan or what app to download with it. My phone is exactly none of your business.
I have never, to the best of my knowledge, owned a telephone that can open QR codes, and I'm neither interested in finding out for sure, nor buying a different telephone. I've largely stopped going to restaurants anyways because of the outrageous unannounced and mysterious fees that many are now tacking on (I'm not opposed to paying what it costs to produce fine dining, but tell me the cost up-front), but I also will not go to a restaurant that won't just hand me a damn menu. I'm just a drop in the bucket, and no doubt nobody is missing my custom, but who knows, maybe there are more like me.
A quick google shows QR came out in 2002, had apps on all phone platforms in 2010, and was native to iOS in 2017. So at a minimum you are 5 years behind, although you could use an app fairly easily.
The average phone life before replacement is 2.5 years in North America [1] so you are somewhere between 2x and 4x outside the median: an outlier but not outrageously so.
1. https://www.statista.com/statistics/619788/average-smartphon...
I recently replaced my decade old Blackberry because it either did not support VoLTE or I just couldn't find the appropriate firmware upgrade for the modem, but either way the telecom refused to service it. If it had support for scanning QR codes, it was very well hidden, as I actually spent time trying to get it to do that. I now have a Nokia of some sort, pointing the camera at the QR code doesn't open a web page, and that's all the effort I'm interested in investing, since the entire notion of QR menus only serves to make cellular telephones more mandatory for participation in society, which I wholeheartedly reject. The day I can't walk out my front door without a telephone and accomplish my tasks, I'll move to the mountains and become a hermit.
But what is the actual reason you hate smartphones, if I can ask?
Was definitely in use in Japan late 2001, I was curious at the time to work out wtf all the weird images were on the back of taxi seats.
If the restaurant didn't have a printed menu and asked me to scan something, I always got up and left.
If having to scan a QR code to access a menu is enough to get you to walk out, you did the staff a favor.
So be it. I’ll join the resistance. I don’t want phones involved in a restaurant.
It’s the same as loud music or other bad aspects of restaurants. Just because vast number of people like it doesn’t mean I have to as well.
It’s not just scanning a QR code. It’s that the sites almost always require you to verify your phone number so they can track you across orders. I mentally blacklist any store with online ordering and leave a negative review.
Almost always...? Across orders?
We're just talking about QR codes that open up a PDF or HTML page that shows the menu. It's not online ordering.
I mean I've seen online ordering as an option at a couple of places that I thought was cool, but you didn't have to. Literally everywhere else I've been (in NYC) it's just been a static menu. Not tracking you.
In Australia I have very rarely seen QR menus used where it wasn't also the method to order and pay.
In the USA it's been 90% a redirect to some massive print-ready PDF stored on AWS, the other 10% it's a redirect to a hand-coded HTML file that is badly out of date.
sure jump straight to the ad-hominem. Classy.
But obviously no, I did the restaurant no favor. I financially deprived the restaurant of income, and the server unfortunately of a tip. And I tip big.
I don't owe the restaurant a visit. They do owe me an experience. If it begins with struggling with their QR menu system, I'm opting out for a variety of reasons.
And a struggle it is. First find the mode where QR results is something actionable (I have an older phone) Hopefully their WIFI is exceptional, and the password not onerous.
Then answer their marketing questions. Finally peer at a too-small menu you have to scroll through on a tiny screen with terrible pictures.
Find something interesting? How to share it with your dining partner(s). No, can't point to their menu or say "Page three on the bottom!". No, you have to give them your phone. Oops! They touched something or it scrolled or went into low-power.
It's a fairly miserable experience for some of us.
Yes, nothing the staff like more than losing sales over a minor issue.
If I'm hungry, I ask the same thing as whoever is close by and whose dish looks remotely edible.
If I'm not really hungry, or if the food isn't easily visible, I do the same as you do: yes, I carry a computer, but refuse to use it in most restaurants.
If McDonalds can afford some wall poster with pictures + names and prices, I'm sure most restaurants can. So the question is more why don't they want to? Even a flier by the door would be enough for me!
However, on a site were most people love pushing tech even when the best solutions are not technological, I wouldn't be surprised if we were in the minority and people tried to rationalize using QR codes.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but it's kind of weird to hold up the largest restaurant chain in the world by revenue as a baseline for what most restaurants can afford.
You're replying to someone who said:
> Even a flier by the door would be enough for me!
I wonder how many restaurants there are who can't afford paper flyers. They might even be faster/easier than maintaining an online menu.
In fact, in many parts of the world and even in the US the standard for listing food available for order is just that - a flyer on the counter or even better, some pictures of the various dishes.
(You know the food's going to be good when the picture is faded from 15 years of sunlight.)
I personally like the QR code menus. To each their own.
Same. But in my case it’s because I usually don’t carry my phone with me.
In some countries this is often a menu + a ordering and payment app.
It's very popular to the point that servers actually ask you to use it vs asking them.
In America this wont happen because of the tipping culture, so we get the worst bit (reading a menu on your phone) without the useful bit (reliably entering your order and paying without the check/card/away/back/tip dance).
In some countries there might also be a menu on the table for easier browsing. It does away with the frustrating parts of the experience like needing your orders ready at the exact time the waiter asks for it and having to wait for a bill after you finish. So you can just focus on the company of the people you're with, the food and the atmosphere.
Some restaurants here also provide a tablet at the table for your orders. That started before QR codes became widespread.
Very convenient!
For a long time I thought QR Code menus were a great idea. But seeing user reactions like this made me re-evaluate a lot of my project ideas.
I get it, the convenience of having a simple menu in hand (0 steps) vs. a QR code menu (5-6 steps) trumps whatever interactivity the latter menu provides.
I guess the expectation of users sitting in a restaurant is to move away from their phones and technology and move towards socializing and a QR menu brings those back onto the table.
There's a lot of tech like this - it's flashy, it seems great, but it just doesn't work well enough to be a game changer.
To go to extra steps you need to get extra value (and not just "use our app and save 5$" type of value) - something like being able to save custom variations from previous visits, order before and have it nearly ready, etc.
Anyways, off to raise $50m for QR-menus-on-the-blockchain, wish me luck.
> I get it, the convenience of having a simple menu in hand (0 steps) vs. a QR code menu (5-6 steps) trumps whatever interactivity the latter menu provides.
Yes, but on the other hand the QR ordering I've done here in Singapore streamlines a lot of other steps from the rest of the ordering-food-and-paying process.
It's especially useful that you no longer have to synchronize with wait staff. You can just order and pay whenever.
You can ask for a paper menu. Nine times out of ten, they will have one. For that one time out of ten, ask the waiter for a menu recommendation, or ask if your preferred staple is on the menu. This has worked in NYC restaurants large and small for the past three years. Some of the better restaurants have since reverted to paper menus.
We have the choice to say no to blind redirects-in-the-middle for service transactions with a human server present.
9/10 my experience in UK is: the waiter is already walking away from you before you get a chance to ask, then they just repeat “oh you can just order with the QR code it’s super easy” while walking away again
That's happened a few times. I thank them for the offer and likewise repeat my request for a paper menu, which usually appears, reluctantly.
Oh, Gods, I hate those things.
The biggest gripe I have, is that I follow the code, and:
1) It asks me to register an account; and
2) Upon finally getting to the menu, my phone is immediately taken over by a full-screen ad, forcing me to scroll down, to see an almost incomprehensible ToC, that is based on whatever they are pushing, as opposed to what I want.
When I sit down, if there's no menus, and one of those gegaws is in the middle of the table, I ask "May I have a menu, please?"
If they point at the gegaw, I repeat: "May I have a menu, please?"
The point generally sinks in.
These are interesting reactions from the tech-savvy folks who are always wanting to “change the world.”
Well, you succeeded. Get over it.
QR code menus dominate here where I live in the US Midwest. Here’s the thing - they only replace the physical menu. Wait staff still takes your order, gets refills, etc. just as when we had physical menus. When it comes time to pay many restaurants now bring a device to your table so you can pay. The wait staff no longer disappears with your credit card. Nice.
The nice thing about this system is it gets rid of the germ-laden physical menu, eliminates the ability for wait staff to copy your credit card, yet retains the rest of the traditional restaurant experience. No app required.
Y’all might want to take a look at how we’re doing things here.
As for anyone looking to opening a restaurant, if I have to install an app to dine at your restaurant then I’m walking out. That’s definitely not the experience I’m looking for!
You are still eating from germ laden plates handled by germ laden people by germ laden table, and handling your germ laden phone before you eat.
Menus are never cleaned. Ever. Dishwashers are regularly inspected as is the food preparation area and food handling practices. Menus? They’re cleanliness isn’t regulated, so guess what?
If they are truly dirty they wouldnt put them out without a wipe
The plates get washed, and waiters are supposed to be washing their hands on the reg. I expect the plates are a lot cleaner than paper menus.
"Tell you what-" he said finally, "last guy that had this bed was a blacksmith- hell of a nice fella and as clean a guy as you want to meet. Used to wash his hands even after he ate." - (Of Mice & Men, John Steinbeck)
Menus are usually plastic.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Makes no difference if you don’t clean them.
How dirty are you expecting a menu to be? Its probably cleaner than the front door to the restaurant you opened.
> When it comes time to pay many restaurants now bring a device to your table so you can pay. The wait staff no longer disappears with your credit card. Nice.
Personally, I prefer not to have a server hovering over me as I figure out how much to tip them.
The places I go just leave the device with you and say pay whenever you feel like it, no rush. They’re using devices that have a big red light and green light on top. When they bring it to you it’s red. It turns green after you pay. That way they can see at a glance whether you’re trying to skip out.
Some coffee shops/cafes make it central to the overall experience and I love it. You can order directly from the QR code and the code is tied to your table so they bring the food and coffee directly to you. Split the bill directly in the app when you close out to pay.
If a restaurant isn’t going to really invest in an experience like that then they absolutely should go back to paper menus.
It's... Not an experience.
Don't know about countries, but in Sweden it's never been a problem to split the bill when you're paying. The waiter will just input whatever's needed into the PoS they bring to the table.
Why the hell would I need to download and install the restaurant's app for that and trust it with my payment details? All while I'm trying to just have a meal
So much this! I want to enjoy a meal with my friends and/or family. I don’t want to play tech games. I’ve been to a few restaurants that have an iPad at the table where you can order additional items, refills, dessert, and pay. Those were fine (so long as you turn them around when eating because they have distracting animations on them). But having to download someone else’s code to my phone. Fuck that.
> Why the hell would I need to download and install the restaurant's app for that and trust it with my payment details?
This is why Apple’s “App Clips” functionality is so great. You get a small app-like piece of functionality that you’re not installing or keeping, it works while you’re at the restaurant, then you check out with Apple Pay (or equivalent) so you don’t have to input payment details and don’t have to worry about usable payment details being stored by a potentially-insecure website.
This assumes:
- there's internet
- internet is good and unmetered
- the phone is readily available
- ...
vs.
You pay with card/cash at the end of the meal
I've never been somewhere that won't let you fall back to some kind of manual method if something is wrong with the internet. But as long as it's up, it's nice to just pay on your own rather than flag down a server.
This is especially the case if you have kids. You don't have total control over when a meltdown is going to happen, so it's nice to be able to pay quick and bail. If you're just a couple adults, the extra time isn't as big a deal.
> I've never been somewhere that won't let you fall back to some kind of manual method if something is wrong with the internet.
So why go through all the extra steps with internet?
> This is especially the case if you have kids. You don't have total control over when a meltdown is going to happen
Ah yes. And having to deal with QR codes, the restaurant app etc. is helping how exactly?
It helps because you don’t have to wait on another person who may or may not be busy doing something else. I can scan the code while my wife grabs the kid, and I can double tap to pay while walking out the door.
If the kid is having a meltdown in the restaurant just leave bills on the table and get out of there
It's amazing how slow and inconvenient QR code menus are compared to a proper mobile app or even better, a laminated paper menu.
Its amazing how slow and inconvenient are America moving towards new technology. In Asia we typically browse using online system and no own fumbled it yet somehow on this tech website, everyone fumbled it.
Must be wonderful having everyone in the continent of asia having a charged phone and cell reception in every restaurant. Us Americans are not so lucky.
A good number of problems solved elsewhere are routinely proclaimed as unsolvable in the U.S. Solutions are categorically rejected in the U.S. because implementation is somehow uniquely crappified. The worst form of American exceptionalism.
A lot of this is because things like Line and WeChat haven't take off here.
A QR code opens a link for me in about 5 seconds.
A mobile app takes at least a full minute to authorize and download and install over a cell connection. And I sure don't want to install a new app every time I go to a restaurant.
A laminated paper menu often takes several minutes for the server to bring around, or worse.
QR codes are literally the fastest thing around.
What are these restaurants that don't have the hostess give you menus? The lowest class ones have menus printed on the little table placemats, middle ones always have a pile of menus the host grabs from when seating you (and calls you Party of X, always), and the highest ones either arrange for wine first, or you're getting a menu from the server right as you're seated by the hostess.
I suppose there's some middle-ground "seat yourself" style ones but I can't recall any recently.
Like everywhere I go in NYC?
Pretty common for restaurants not to have a host, you just ask a waiter nearby and they tell you to sit anywhere you like, and that someone will be by to serve you.
Hosts are expensive and NYC restaurants are often quite small so it's very common not to have them.
QR Code menus are the absolute worst. They're a serious pain to use on the phone, and they encourage people to take their phones out when they should be put away.
So far, every restaurant I've been to also has paper menus. I'm not sure what I'd do if online was the only way to look at the menu. I'd likely find another restaurant.
I hate QR codes for menus with a passion. Feels so awkward, need another app on Android, not easily read on dimly lit places. Usually I tell one of my friends to tell me the url.
On the other hand I love NFC for this. It blows my mind that it's not that common. Works perfectly and feels natural, just place your phone at the NFC tag.
At least the Pixel camera app does native QR code scanning.
My Pixel 4a definitely did not the last time I ran into one of these.
Yeah it's just buggy (same phone here). Works 90% of the time for me (but 100% of the time for my wife, who uses a Pixel 5a).
I'm with you. NFC is awesome. I use NFC around the house for basic automation (Hue etc) -- and it definitely should be more common.
I was in a restaurant the other night that had QR codes printed on NFC tags, mounted on the wall for each table. The process of pulling up the menu was effortless.
NFC = Near-field communication
Is the horrid UX of the Android operating system not the worst part about QR menus? You absent-mindedly hit the physical back button once instead of using the restaurant's ultra slow back button for navigation and you end up back at your home screen starting from scratch needing to ask the waiter for the QR code to be brought to your table again. Then another 30 seconds trying to get it to scan because it's scratched or on reflective glossy paper. Same experience in more than ten countries
This part of the experience is by itself so aggravating I haven't had time to think any deeper about other potential downsides honestly
I use an iPhone and find them extremely annoying as well.
I like QR code if the menu is responsive and allow ordering directly. No matter high end mid end or low end, I just want to get my food quick and check out quick. Always having to find and speak to a waiter is a big problem for me.
why not just order takeout at that point
...because you don't want to eat outside or at home?
QR code menus are fine, if made well, for quick-service and casual restaurants where the customer's interest is primarily in a quick and efficient meal (even a quick-and-efficient delicious and high-quality meal).
But if you are operating a fine dining establishment(1), where the food is but one component of the experience, and you have a QR code printed on a piece of paper taped to the table ... you're really taking away from the experience you're supposed to be selling.
(1) There are some limited exceptions for places which make a quirky tech vibe part of the experience, which mostly comes up in certain types of sushi bars.
> (1) There are some limited exceptions for places which make a quirky tech vibe part of the experience, which mostly comes up in certain types of sushi bars.
What kind of sushi bars are you talking about here? When I think of fine-dining sushi bars, quirky tech vibe is sort of the furthest thing on my mind.
Maybe conveyer belt sushi places, or places where robots bring out dishes to the tables.
Tables and conveyer belts are hardly something I’d associate with high end sushi, which is usually eaten immediately after preparation.
> (1) There are some limited exceptions for places which make a quirky tech vibe part of the experience, which mostly comes up in certain types of sushi bars.
Chinese hotpot, Korean BBQ, Japanese dining that isn't just sushi bars, Thai and Vietnamese places (among many others) quite often use digital menus as well as digital ordering. None of these exhibit a "quirky tech vibe", aside from some places which use robots to deliver small side dishes, or beverages. Many of these would also not be considered "quick and efficient", at least how you describe them.
It would be good to consider venturing outside your regular dining locales to see what the rest of the world is doing in terms of restaurant experience, and whether the American way is still even relevant.
I assume the reason they work so well in China is that they open into some nice UI everyone uses / is fairly standardized in WeChat or AliPay or something. Our internet model is very different from theirs with the Super Apps
This is it. I lived in China for a decade and only started seeing the WeChat menus for everything only in the last couple of years I was there. It was SO convenient and easy to use. Much nicer than trying to flip through a physical menu, flag down a waiter, have them write down my order, etc.
But I imagine it would suck if I had to open a different UI every single time. The UI I used was tried and true, efficient, and user-friendly, could depend on it working well no matter where I went.
They work well in Singapore too, but typically don't open in an super app. It's typically just a website.
(The restaurants don't really like dealing with the super apps like Grab, because they take a 30% cut.)
The worst dining experience I’ve had was directly attributable to QR code menus.
I took a client out to lunch. The waitress came to the table, directed our attention to the qr code and left. I was wanting to connect with my guest but instead had to get out my phone, point it at the qr code then peer at a screen, which is the height of bad manners when you are in someone else’s company, choose what I wanted then hand my phone to my guest, which is a revolting and unhygienic thing to do, nowhere else in society is this expected, then he had to do the same, choose something to eat, then I’m damned if I didn’t have to pay for it there and then at the table, get out my credit card and complete the transaction, just such bad manners and embarrassing. Dealing with money has rules and expectations in our society. Are we meant to go through some sort of “I’ll pay/no please I’ll pay” ritual over a qr code menu at the beginning of the meal? Ugh. I hated every moment of that experience.
Instead of enjoying and exploring the menu, chatting lightly about the choices available, I couldn’t wait to get the awful experience over with.
The printed menu, and the human interaction with the waiter, are an integral and key part of the experience of eating out, and if a restaurant owner doesn’t understand that then they really don’t know what business they are in.
QR code menus are lazy, impersonal, offensively pushing me to use tech when I don’t want to, inconvenient, tasteless and generally the absolute opposite of the experience I want when dining out.
Makes no sense to me that restaurant owners think they are a good idea.
I can see why they’d be good at Macdonalds or fast food restaurants but that’s it.
When I book a restaurant I now ask if the use QR code menus and if they do then I cancel.
There's an excellent restaurant (or... it was) in Palo Alto named Nola that moved to this model recently. Been many times, but the last time I took some guests from out of town there and it was nothing short of awful and an embarrassing experience. They work in the restaurant industry so are typically lax about minor gaps in service but...this is just such an unforced error that it's hard not to feel ripped off.
After that I've learned to refuse patronizing any of these restaurants.
Be sure to tell the owner.
Yeah. Here in France the number of restaurants with QR code only menus is still small, but as annoying as you describe. And the only time I went to a restaurant where you also had to pay from your phone (by entering manually your CC number!), me and my party just laughed and left.
This is the opposite of the restaurant experience. I'd rather buy a sandwich in a supermarket and eat it on a public bench (which is a nice thing to do, weather permitting).
Hard disagree. I love Web menus like these, because it means I don't have wait staff constantly disturbing my conversation. In Australia, a lot of them are rigged up so that - even if I'm paying for the meal on my tab - the person I'm dining with can order from their phone instead of the "pass my phone around the table" dance that you describe.
No more "sir are you ready to order" when we haven't even glanced at the menu yet at restaurants. No more "can I get you another drink". No more desperately trying to attract the attention of waitstaff. No more "oh whose round is it now" and trying to remember 8 different orders when you're out at a bar.
An entire suite of dining annoyances just... gone. I love it.
Edit: note that this assumes that they're using a system that allows you to order and pay through the web system as well. Others are talking about PDF menus and that's quite rare here now.
Geez relax I’m ordering coffee and sandwich not an escort
i want my sandwitch fast. i rarely order fast good, which means i don't know where things are in your app. the user interface on apps are terrible. with training they can be fast, but i don't wabt training on how to find things. train your own people
I don’t go out to a restaurant to stare at my screen, and screen menus aren’t great.
I don’t mind using an app to pay when I’m done though. Especially if I don’t have to wait for the server.
There are many applications that try to act as a shopping cart and a kind of cloud electronic cash register for the restaurant. Which sounds like a great idea. But in many places, especially during the (QR-code menu) pandemic, I came across to some QR codes, requiring you to download an application. Unfortunately, the application itself is just a PDF viewer with built-in ads. You still call the waiter to order, you still use POS to pay. Nothing has changed in the process of ordering food but I installed a really shitty PDF viewer with ads at the bottom and the top of the menu, also before and after every interaction. Immediately left the restaurant but still. Why all the hassle?
I’ll say there’s at least one extremely good version of this out there and I imagine it dramatically increases the restaurant’s sales: a service called OneDine that is in use by a small regional chain called Bartaco along the eastern US.
It’s so easy to keep ordering that I and everyone I eat with indeed just keeps ordering.
Every other implementation I’ve seen pretty much sucks though, to your point.
The times I've come across this I've been able to just go to the restaurant website and download the menu PDF normally from there.
Even when the QR code brings you directly to the website it feels like a clunky experience, so I've gotten in the habit of checking out menus before going to the restaurant if I can.
I love them when they let me pay at the end and there's still staff around to ask questions if needed. Waiting to flag down someone busy to ask to pay so I can leave if I'm not carrying exactly the right cash amount is not helpful for anyone.
Except you have to tip before you get any service
What country are you in where you tip first? That’s literally nuts.
USA. Many of the places that you now have to pay on a kiosk or electronically with the QR code ask you to pay and tip upfront.
Sounds like an American problem? Tipping isn't that common elsewhere, fortunately.
QR menus was just the tip of the iceberg of a huge downgrade of service during Covid, which still prevails because they’re recovering costs and suffering from huge inflation.
There are less staff, worse trained staff, longer waits, reduced menus, increased prices etc in many places now.
I get it. It was hard to run a restaurant before the pandemic. I can’t imagine what it’s like now
As a lowly employee in a giant hotel that is part of a massive global company, I have to say I dislike QR codes (and the micros POS). We had an issue where menu changes were not updated automatically on the QR codes, allowing guests to order things they can no longer order. Further, when orders from QR codes went to printers in the kitchen, either parts of the order were missing, and/or the guest was able to write in certain requests, without being sure we even carried the product.
I'm sure QR codes work great in some circumstances, but they didn't in this instance.
They are very annoying when you block JavaScript in your browser.
I saw these during a holiday in Spain throughout the last week. I have no idea how to use them and didn't see anybody else use them either. It would probably be a different story if my phone had some kind of built-in support for this stuff (maybe it does?). I recall using the "Google Goggles" app for this kind of thing a _long_ time ago but it should be native - and obvious - by now.
I have a feeling that the industry has stopped depending on this stuff already... it's hard to tell without knowing how it works.
QR codes are a liability for the restaurant.
Restaurants are places where the regulars gather at predictable hours, and predictable days, and predictable tables, and don't see suspicious to give personal dietary info linked with credit cards.
Is really surprising that nobody has tried still to swap a chunk of paper or put a stick over the QR code at the table to substitute it with a different QR code hacked, so when you order, they redirect you to the official web and at the same time silently copy your personal info in a different web.
Or replaces he lamb dish of a notorius iman with a dish containing pork.
Or allows a paparazzi to change the impossible meat hamburguer of a famous vegan actress by something made of real meat. The paparazzi takes photos and sell some profitable outrage disguised as restaurant error.
Or change the dish of a CEO allergic to peanuts by one that contains a sauce made with spinach and peanut butter
Or spice the dish of a major league baseball or tennis player with a drug, so it fails the next anti doping test. It does not matter that he wear dark glasses, has grown a beard and is unrecognizable. Will be instantly caught by the personal data linked to him.
Or orders somebody in a kitchen to put a pinch of polony in that dish in the table 5. Don't need the complicity of the waiter anymore, and the dish will be served with a smile and no sweating by a waiter that will end in jail without even suspecting it.
The possibilities to abuse the system are endless. They are like the .exe dancing banana attachment of our time, except that you eat the banana now, so this time the target is your body instead your computer.
Most restaurants would not notice the replacement until later (or would never notice it if the next client in that table restores the original QR code). Specially in a world where people don't talk with the waiters anymore, or were replaced by robots.
As an investor in a QR code menu ordering company (StoreKit), I know firsthand that bar/restaurant owner sentiment is also mixed.
Some owners see clear value in increased labour efficiency and revenue generation (people order more when using their phones), while others don’t want their customers playing with phones because it cheapens the experience.
It’s really just a matter of product-market fit; some venues are naturally more receptive to QR codes than others. The jury is still out as to which venues they are.
It’s also a matter of technology catching up to the ordering experience. Who wouldn’t want to see an AR version of their dish and be able to interact with it? Imagine scrolling through every menu item as if it were right in front of you, clicking on it, zooming in, seeing the exact portions, having all dietary and ingredient information readily available and being able to tinker with your order at will, having interactive information about the source of ingredients.. The possibilities are truly endless and fully customizable by each venue.
Ordering is also a subtle signalling tool of social status, so taking that away will upset some people, like snobs at The Atlantic. Some people like showing off how much they know about an ingredient on the menu, displaying dominance over waiters/waitresses and even fellow guests, etc.
The only way to have mass adoption is to please everyone, which you can’t at the early stages. That’s why it‘s currently being used by venues that are getting a lot of value from it. (Labour efficiency)
Journalists are not hired for their imagination, particularly at The Atlantic (establishment conformists). Using tech to order from a menu will only get better over time because, at the end of the day, the paying customer will enjoy the experience. But we’re not there yet for most venues.
Bit harsh on the Atlantic - they clearly found a relevant topic where there is contrasting opinions and people want to discuss it, wasnt that their objective in the first place?
Reading this thread I see yet again why the super-app approach is probably the best one when adopted front to back in this context - selection,ordering,payment.
You’re right, that was their objective and I was harsh. And to your point about the super-app, that’s exactly what we’re hearing from venues. They want a one-stop shop that will take care of all aspects of the customer experience.
> Who wouldn’t want to see an AR version of their dish and be able to interact with it?
Me, for one. That sounds a bit like a touchscreen-enabled glove box lock from the other HN thread today.
Fair enough. The market will ultimately decide.
Why would using tech to order from a qr code improve over time when I've seen how the takeout tech has stagnated for 10 years at least?
No-touch menus and QR codes don't have to be a binary choice. Menus can be posters on the wall, papers inside a glass table, or anything else.
Reminds me of those messenger restaurants in Sweden. You have to have messenger installed and then you roder, the server comes out with the food and that's the only connection you will have with them. Swedish servers and bartenders and taxi drivers want tips. And they get super pissed if you don't tip them. The espresso house barista never asks for tips, the bartender does and gets mad if you don't tip.
All they have done is bring me a plate of food , zero interaction. Why why why should I tip them? Still pisses me off. I actively avoid restaurants that use this system. Takeouts however I am fine with in this way.
Also , do not tip in Sweden, ever.
It’s really
1) bad reception + no unprotected wifi
2) PDF that you have to zoom into, rather than a nice mobile-adapted static page
that makes the experience aweful for me.
I'm surprised when I see QR menus at upper-mid and high end restaurants. (Though that's mostly going away now.) For lower-mid and fast food, it's a clear cost reduction and turnover-boosting channel.
Some more annoyances with ordering on your phone:
- I couldn’t get a coffee recently because there was a couple complaining that their coffee hadn’t arrived. (They took ages) it turned out they had ordered coffee at the wrong location (it’s a chain).
- went for pizza. And had to enable location services to make sure I was in the restaurant. Presumably to prevent the above issue.
- allergies - went to a restaurant where a member of staff has to come out and talk about allergies even though they’re on the digital menu. So you end up ordering twice.
Hate them. Just give me a damn paper menu.
Also, it's the worst when dealing with my senior parents who struggle with technology and basically don't know how to use their smartphones.
QR Code menus work well in China because you're also ordering from the menus too. You don't have to flag down a waiter and place an order unless you want to.
That's exactly how they work in the US too.
Not universally. I found usage of mobile order to b e more prevalent in Beijing vs nyc
99% of the restaurants I’ve been to in the US (and I live in California ) absolutely do not work that way. I’ve been to a grand total of one that does, and it was so annoying to everyone that they eventually stopped.
So now in the USA the waiter doesn't even bring you the menu and tell you order recommendations or the day's special? Are they still expecting you to give them 20% of tip/alms ?
25%. They don’t even bring you silverware or water literally only thing they do is bring food. It’s infuriating.
This depends on the restaurant or maybe the area. In Portland the restaurants with QR menus (using Toast) always seem to have a server that brings out water and periodically refills.
Don’t blame poor service on a QR code.
At least in NYC, no they don't.
I've seen that at a couple of spots, but the vast majority are just a link to a menu. You order through the server.
And even where I've seen ordering through your phone, it's was just an option for those who prefer it. Not the only, or even recommended, way.
I've only seen that a handful of times. Most of the time I feel lucky just to get a responsive website instead of a PDF that I have to zoom in to read.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
When they became widespread during the covid lockdowns they were a good solution when we wanted to avoid spreading things by touch. Even how, as long as you can still ask for a printed menu, I think the QR code menu is a reasonable default as long as the menu is relatively simple. If there are a lot of options it becomes cumbersome.
Now, I f you have to order through their menu site, that almost never works well. Those sites are just not well run enough to pull off ordering well.
Bad guy idea: Stick your man-in-the-middle QR code over the restaurant's QR code sticker on the table. Use the same design. Pay thru the app. Mine credit cards! It'll probably only work once, though, because someone will say like "Hey where's my salted milksteak?" and the server will say it wasn't ordered. A fight will ensue and all moneys will be lost.
I bet it'd work a handful of times. The first couple times will be attributed to "those darn computers acting up again."
No, you're thinking too small - do it on companies that HAVE online ordering via the QR code, and tack on "fees" and still place the order through - could even hire contractors to do the actual orders.
People might not even notice, just like they don't notice the "18% gratuity included on all orders" that are appearing here and there (and still tip on top of that).
Friends, if we were all evil, this would work seamlessly.
The only outstanding item: what do we name the fee? Keep in mind names already taken are service fee, small order fee, heavy order fee, pickup fee + dropoff fee, Chicago fee (regardless of city), and the anti-fee "customer happiness refund".
Covid-19 Safety Fee refundable
Then have a phone number for "refunds" and happily issue them. Nobody will call.
The idea itself isn't bad, it's how well the restaurant executes the idea.
Nobody likes to read a 11x17-sized menu in a PDF that you have to constantly resize on a small screen.
A well-thought menu that is web-based and responsive will be much less frustrating to use.
Bonus point if you can sort by price, calories, and filter for some common allergens, intolerance or dietary choices.
You know what I love? Ordering fast food in advance through Google Maps.
I simply locate my target on the Maps App, then I click through to order online, and I pay with my favorite wallet, and when I hop off the bus and waltz in the door, my order is waiting for me.
Then I have to explain how it's "for here" and I open it up and beg for plasticware and napkins....
More and more fast food places let you order ahead all you want, but don't actually start cooking it until you "arrive". It's kinda pointless, even though I understand why they do it.
(Taco Bell and McDonald's at least don't start your order until you "arrive" at the drive-thru or pickup area; but if you order Taco Bell for "inside pickup" they seem to start cooking it right away ... sometimes?)
I’m seeing more of this post-pandemic. I like it. It’s more evolved than just view-only PDF. Now it’s scan QR to access menu listing, add items to cart and then checkout to payment. Some even with robot server bringing the food to you. Seamless and easier than waiting for a waiter to take my order, especially in a busy restaurant.
My problem with them is that the menu is always some small pdf like thing that you then need to zoom in on and move around. Not a huge issue though.
The much bigger problem at some places is it drop you on the homepage for the restaurant then you have to hunt for the menu on it. Also some of them make you sign up for an account which is super annoying.
I won’t go to any restaurant that uses at codes, if I can avoid it.
I love the QR code menus as long as the menu is working well on the phone with a seamless order an payment solution.
It’s so nice to be able to just leave when finished, at a place where you get your food delivered to the table.
Before the pandemic, this system was already in use in a few places. The pandemic made it spread fast (no pun intended).
I see their point but it still reads as the age old "these kids with their x, y, z" which is the story of the ages.
As a millennial I don't mind QR code menus at all if they take me to a website for it. If they require me to install an app that's where I draw the line; too much faff - it should be a single step. Requiring an account is a nono as well.
However most QR menus I've used so far have been like this, carefree guest checkout. Easy as. I think the sort of thinking in the article is the age old "these kids & their phones" uttered by people who had their heads in newspapers & TV channels their whole lives. Technology is here.
PDF menus, as well. In 2006, I built some hardware to scan Bluetooth IDs and published a little appliance to record them at the front of one of our restaurants and push a menu with a coupon to uniques.
Customers were ambivalent at best. I ended up hating it, though. It was a cool idea at the time, people were still wearing Bluetooth earpieces and IR beaming each other their contact cards after all, but it was easy to decide that as non-opt-in data collection, it violated volition.
QR code menus don't all suck, but if you're going to do it, have house wifi, make the codes unique to the tables, and just throw up a captive portal patrons can go ahead and order from. Go "serverless" or not at all.
I have a really hard time ordering. After spending time doing security I do not trust QR codes. They make me really, really uncomfortable. To the point I wont eat at a restaurant with them unless someone who is not as paranoid will get the menu.
Aside from me, what about people without phones?
Why are they so terrifying?
They can be used to start an exploit chain on a phone. I’ve seen 0-days personally that root a phone by triggering a drive by download. The other issue is they are unauditable. You have to almost go to the link to discover what is there. This is a problem, for example, when shell code can own the camera itself.
No thanks, just give me the physical menu. If the staff refuses to provide with such "ancient" method, it's probably a shit restaurant anyways.
The "it's not implemented correctly" argument is irrelevant. I won't take convenience over the risk of being phished, data-mined or straight out surveilled(see china & not only). I'm there to eat, not to discover the 'amazing' power of their technical staff when it comes to software development.
This is not luddism or being anti-tech, it's being anti-stupid-tech. I have no problem ordering food from a tablet or another revolutionary piece of technology that I don't have to carry with me back home or invade my personal space after leaving.
The problem is the implementation. Restaurants started embedding the PDF of the menu exactly as it is and often with complicated zoom/ pan.
They could replace it with a neat AR experience using the same mobile devices. It will be expensive but will give the user a nice user experience.
I'm a little split on this one. I'm at Disneyland reading this, and (for some places) they do a decent job of it, having a QR code on the outside so you can look at the menu while you queue or wait for your reservation (sometimes even pre-order, I think... I didn't mess with that bit). This was great, it was something to do to kill the time.
Inside of the restaurant though, I get my snob on and hate phones at the table. Once the phones come out, the dining experience tends to die quite a bit. You're taking pictures of your food instead of enjoying it, you're interacting with your phone and social media instead of each other. It's horrible. QR codes just facilitate that transition.
I hate the writer's terminology of calling them "QR Code Menus". I would call them web page menus.
The QR Code is only used to encode the URL, not the full menu content. The menu is simply a web page, whose address can be obtained by many methods - QR Code, Data Matrix code, Aztec code, PDF417 code, Google search, manually typing text, etc.
Furthermore, I don't like how many QR Codes do not have human-readable text. For example, if I wanted to access a restaurant menu on a laptop computer, it makes more sense to type a URL than to awkwardly position its webcam (if it even has one) to scan a barcode.
I very much agree with the author's sentiment that requiring a digital device with power and Internet to simply read a menu is user-hostile.
“Web page menu” does not distinguish it from the existing practice of a restaurant putting its menu on its website, so that you can read the menu before you visit. Nobody has any problem with that.
The problem is most certainly the QR code. The QR code is what is requiring me to have a charged phone (= phone+power bank+charging cable) to read the damn menu. If they gave people devices to read the menu on (e.g. how McDonalds does it) then it would be less problematic.
Fine, how about calling the practice as "web-only menus on customer's device"? Even if the restaurant didn't use QR Codes, if the table said "Visit restaurant.com/menu", then you would still be forced to pull out your phone. The QR Code is just a way to convey a URL, and there are definitely alternatives like manually typing one.
Instead of QR menus, can't restaurants have landing pages after you connect to wifi that let you view the menu and order. For those that want a waiter you can put a big button on the top to request for physical service. For those know what they want, just select the dishes like you do on a food ordering app and the instructions are relayed to the kitchen.
This by no means solves the issues in the article, it might actually expound the privacy related issues and it deepens our reliance on mobile phones. But it does allow the best of both worlds; letting people choose the sort of service they get. The other choice is to have a physical tablet on each table for people to order from (although that sounds very gross).
My one experience.
A group situation where I was the lemon who scanned the code for the table (of 8 people).
I was then forced to take orders for the table, with all the back and forth that implies.
The worst thing is, everyone had a physical menu. Just the ordering process was initiated by the QR code.
Who needs waiters,l when you have technology, eh!?
Hell.
Never again.
The restaurants are trying to maximize profits by not having to pay some meager salaries.
But by doing so they are comiting a capital mistake and that is not delivering what the customer demands, which is not only food but services and potential for human interaction.
I feel a bit conflicted here. On the one hand I absolutely love having positive interactions with waiters and I will judge my dinner companions on how graciously they treat service staff. Good service can make a great meal even better.
But also sometimes you’re at a busy chain restaurant and you don’t want faff. I still hate QR codes that just open PDFs. I hate the default iOS implementation that doesn’t open a Safari tab by default and so disappears if your phone goes to sleep. But if I can do my whole order (including three indecisive kids) from my phone, and then pay, it’s a lot of pressure off.
In a very abstract sense, QR codes in restaurants are same conceptually to me as digitization of things that need not be: IoT gadgets in the home - doors, cars, fridges, TV's and a whole bunch of technology non-sense that society is hooked up on.
If I were an artist, I would make art that uses QR codes to exemplify a deteriorating society into technological authoritarianism. Always connected, always watching. See China: https://twitter.com/bfm_jose/status/1556544301743702016
I love QR menus. I live in Singapore though were things are well designed and efficient. Pretty much all menus are web applications, some restaurants allow to pay directly from the menu web page.
I had some friends come visit me here in Nashville for a week earlier this month. We went out to eat almost every day, and I did not encounter a single one of these. Where have these things taken off?
I'd say basically wherever people wore masks during COVID.
It started as a hygiene thing. Now it's stayed as a convenience thing.
At this point in NYC I'm extremely surprised whenever I see a physical menu.
Anywhere people don’t want to pay for labor. Blue states mostly
I've seen them this year in California, Washington, Spain and NYC.
Interesting. I spent a month in San Diego earlier this year, but maybe I didn't go to the right places, or maybe it's because San Diego is conservative relative to some other parts of California.
Some restaurants paid a lot of money for QR-code things, and those push it from some kind of "sunk cost" fallacy I feel.
Out of 5 restaurants in Miami only two had QR codes, and one revealed menus instantly at the slightest hint that someone at the table couldn't read the code.
Went out for a meal with my 77-year old father last week and as always he brings a magnifying glass and flashlight as the restaurant lighting is too dim and menus too small almost universally for people with poor eyesight. He’s pretty tech capable and has a big bright phone with large text though so seems to me there’s a potentially huge accessibility opportunity here if they were done well.
(Sounds like they’re not well done in practice although don’t have much personal experience- maybe haven’t hit the UK as much yet)
I’ve experienced it once in the UK and either the phone network reception was really bad or the restaurant’s website was ultra slow so it didn’t work.
While we are on the subject… The worst app crime is the effing calmac ferry app. All the timetables would amount to about 100kb of data which is updated usually once a year months in advance. Phone reception is non existent or spotty in a lot of the Highlands and Islands, but when you go to the app to check a timetable it tries to download a PDF file! every time you open a timetable page!! It’s a reasonably rare situation where it makes sense to have an app not a website.
Hoping the QR codes at least are not printed in any Pantone colors! ;)
I think the leading implementation is Toast Tab at least in the Bay. I really like it and hope it becomes more prominent.
https://pos.toasttab.com/products/mobile-order-and-pay
>With Toast Mobile Order & Pay™, guests can easily scan a QR code to browse the menu, order, and pay, all from their mobile device. Plus with Apple Pay, guests can pay in less than 10 seconds.
Digital menus aren't bad, but very few can implement them effectively. I do like having access to the menu for the whole dinner though and not have to wait for the waiter, ever.
In general, yeah, give me a piece of paper, there are far more people who can print some text than developers who can make a decent menu page — and it's quite sad, given it should just be a single, flat HTML page with an "index"
If I were to order using apps and be served by robots I'd rather quit going to restaurants. If the food is the only thing I want, I can order it.
I hate how 1/3rd of this article is just the author describing his or her experience from using the traditional menu in the past and what a QR code is.
Maybe it’s just me but I would really like author to get to the point. Also QR code menus are great.
Edit: One thing to add is that the QR code restaurants I have went to have the physical menu as well so if you forget your phone you can still order.
How long before we discover that QR Code based menus were the thin edge to differential pricing based on the customer's profile
You can do lots of crazy tricks.
Have a menu where you have to scroll horizontally to see the prices and then set them higher based on how indifferent the customer seems to be to look at them.
Have each table have a different qr code and then raise the prices if it's a large group on the premise that auditing will be more challenging.
There's a bunch of clever executions without even basic profiling.
Love it or hate it: sometimes QR doesn't work.
Why oh why don't QR codes include a URL for users to type manually? No graceful failure here.
Yep. QR code menus are just a terrible experience. On top of that companies are just gathering more data points about me forcibly.
I love QR code menus. My husband (who has terrible vision) also loves it, because he can zoom in and actually read them himself.
If you're lucky any specials of the day will also be on it, instead of having to scan the entire restaurant for hastily written signs. And in some restaurants things that are out of stock will be marked so on the website.
I really like QR codes when it just leads to a simple static site with the menu.
Wouldn't mind if that site was a tad more advanced also let me place an order that goes into some order queue.
Also wouldn't mind if that site can text me the bill so I can pay using something standard like GPay or Apple Pay.
Just don't make it fucking impossible to use, keep it simple and fast.
In theory, it's a good idea. Unfortunately it fails when the restaurant has no Web design skills.
I was at a small but prominent Montreal hamburger restaurant recently. I scanned the QR, and was confronted with page after page of whisky, wine and beer, when all I wanted was a hamburger. Six pages down, I finally found the burgers. Irritating.
I'm in Singapore and eat out every meal. Lots of places started having QR menus after Covid and I hate it. I never knowingly go to a QR place, but sometimes I go somewhere new and forget to check.
Luckily there's a strong correlation between having QR menus and having poor service, so I could continue going to most of my favorite places.
I gave an otherwise good restaurant a 1 star review after receiving an unsolicited text ad after using a QR code menu.
How did a menu website get your phone number??
Damned if I know.
I think physical menus are an opportunity to make your restaurant memorable. QR code menus lean toward commodity.
I hate fast foods and big restaurant chains. I like small family owned restaurants where I know I am welcomed, where I can chat with staff and the owners, where people are friendly and have a good disposition.
If I would not afford to pay, I would rather cook at home then settle with subpar food and subpar experience.
In Ukraine it's the very opposite.
It's available in virtually all restaurants, it works really well and you can pay using Apple Pay incl. tips. Such a time saver and so handy.
And no local specific features are required: no apps (think WeChat or similar), no local bank accounts, etc.
It just works.
https://archive.ph/cgEXf
I like the idea. I think some do a terrible job with it, doing little more than digitizing the print menu, with all of the tiny print. An easily scrolled list, with a fast loading modal with more details when tapped, would be far better. Take it one step further, let me create my order, and then show the server a QR code. As they go to each person on the table, they can still answer questions and take the order on the fly if they need to.
tldr; It's a UI/UX problem that can be fixed. The idea itself is sound.
The worst thing about QR code menus is that smart phones are fucking terrible, and society should not be allowed to insist that I carry one. Does anyone actually like using these ad infested anticomputers? They're actually just pieces of trash.
I haven't seen an ad for years.
Install a strong adblocker on Firefox (on Android). Avoid any app where there's a website alternative.
Finally someone had to say this!! For me an allure of eating out is not just the food but the whole experience of it and ogling over the menu card is a big part of that.
I don’t have anything else to add except that I vehemently agree with this article.
Though I'm not a fan, I suspect this will be the new standard, kinda like self-checkout at the grocery store. Hated it at first, but now the idea that somebody is going to scan my groceries just seems annoying and antiquated.
I hate the self scan groceries. It takes me way more time than a fast cashier. It's just a way for extremely profitable businesses that have a semi-monopoly positions on good placement for stores to become even more profitable at expense of my ease of living. To me as a 29 year old, this feels like the same "progress" as that of companies with a customer service without telephone number. If you have a real problem and you need a person on the other side, they don't provide it. It's just cheapskating.
>I hate the self scan groceries. It takes me way more time than a fast cashier. It's just a way for extremely profitable businesses that have a semi-monopoly positions on good placement for stores to become even more profitable at expense of my ease of living.
I'm not sure how you could call grocery stores as having "semi-monopoly positions" and being "extremely profitable", when they have razor thin profit margins.
I'm tired of hearing this "we have no margins". You still hold a monopoly-like position in many areas simply because... people have to eat. I can buy a car once every few years. I can rent or buy a house. I can't rent food. I have to buy. In most places it's going to be from one of the major grocery chains. They have economies of scale. They have a captive audience (or whatever it's called when people can't live without what you're selling).
> You still hold a monopoly-like position in many areas simply because... people have to eat.
That's not what "monopoly" means. Whether you "have to eat" is irrelevant. Most states have monopolies on gambling, but even though nobody has to buy lottery tickets, it's still a monopoly.
> I can rent or buy a house.
But you still need to get shelter somehow, right? ;)
They have no margins because they blow hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars on these self-checkouts!
A few grocery chains in Tokyo have clerks that take items from your basket, scan them, place them neatly in a 2nd basket. On completion, they take 2nd basket and place it at one of two payment machines where you can pay with cash, card, or smartphone. Two payment machines are necessary to prevent congestion. If you have problems with payment they're quick to assist.
After payment, the customer takes the basket to a 3rd location to bag their groceries and leave. There are clerks available to assist.
It is amazingly fast, I had the misfortune of shopping at 6:00 pm. I looked at the lines and estimated twenty minute checkout, actually got finished in about five minutes. The basket size limits the amount of groceries which is a minus, but helps move around the store quickly vs a huge cart and checks out faster.
> It takes me way more time than a fast cashier.
Only if you don't count the time waiting in line before it's your turn. Consider this analogy: you have a single-threaded task that takes 30 seconds to complete on CPU X, which has 4 cores, or 1 minute to complete on CPU Y, which has 24 cores. If your task is the only one running, then CPU X will finish it faster, but if there are 20 other tasks that also need to run, then CPU Y will finish yours faster.
It’s funny because I am usually frustrated by how slowly many cashiers are at scanning the items and how bad many are at packing the grocery bag. It doesn’t mean that I don’t go to a cashier when I have a bunch of items, though. The worst is when people go through self checkout with a full cart and don’t have any idea how to do it making the rest of us wait.
If I have, say, 5 items or fewer I prefer the self checkout. There's usually no queue (as there are 8 or so machines) and scanning the items is only slightly less convenient than putting them on the belt at the human checkout anyway.
It's not hard to get fast at using self-scan, especially if you've worked retail. If many others can be efficient, perhaps consider whether you are part of why it's so slow?
Some of them are quite forgiving and let you go fast, others insist on you placing every item on the scale carefully and still freak out half the time. Depends on the quality of the area, perhaps.
Sure, I'm perfectly ready to admit I'm shit at it. I just don't want this to have to be something I good at.
High end restaurants have switched to ipads, but even that misses the mark: it’s bulkk, time consuming, and waaaaay overpowered/priced.
Really all that’s needed is an ARM chip from 10 years ago mated to a display of this era.
I don't mind the QR code, what I do mind is having to give out my mobile phone number each time I order through yet another service.
Thankfully I can just put in a fake number and normally the order still goes through.
I love them. Just order as soon as you sit down. No need to wait to be seen.
That’s not a QR code menu, it’s an entire QR ordering system - and I personally think they’re horrible.
Agree! It sucks. this is the tech equiv of what one Italian NYC restaurant owner pointed out about abstract/modern ambiance: in many cases it's just cheap. not high end
While I hope QR codes receive an even stronger backlash, I would bet on a general downgrade of the experience.
Given that, I have to ask the Americans: how can you still justify that absurd 20% tip?
In the Czech republic, there's one app to order in most qr restaurants. It's much better than any restaurant specific website.
Payment without the waiters is much better for the customer.
You'd think that waiting staff would take care with the part where they collect the money to pay their wages but it's incredible how often they go AWOL at that point in proceedings or double down on the "actively not looking towards the customers". In principle I'd like to be on reasonable terms with them but when that happens I'd take automation any day.
I wish that sales receipts go to QR code too
I think that the guys that use NSO products think that this is Restaurant Industry's best idea ...
I don't want human connection right now, I want to eat, and I want it sooner please, thank you.
I hate QR code menus because they feel like a truly lazy way to save a marginal amount of money.
Restaurants are an ultra low margin business. If that’s where they’re cutting a corner and it gets them more time in business or prevents a corner cut elsewhere, I’m for it!
So many negative reactions towards the QR-code menu and all because they are badly implemented.
The restaurant should provide back up devices for anyone who don’t want to use their own device.
QR codes work fine - as ever it is the local implementation which makes the difference. Experience I've had in Australia, UK, Spain, Portugal all pretty smooth - scan code with camera, click link menu displays, make order, pay bill. Saves on wait staff, which restaurants cannot hire anyway, so this will help keep restaurants in business
the only problem is the mobile UI many have..show me a pdf of the actual menu so I can see everything at once or on a few pages snd zoom in and out..it helps me make a choice about what I want when I can compare it more easily with navigation
A pdf is the only version I've seen. I don't understand these strange complaints about places that need you to sign up for wifi AND have poor reception which sounds so unlikely (and pointless, since they just hurt themselves) or how it's hard to see or whatever. It's easier for the establishments to maintain and safer and conveniently dovetails into online ordering.
I love them. I just wish they weren't all hosted in some EU-based S3 datacenter.
I like online menus by QR code and paying by QR code is amazing.
There are certainly bad QR Code menus, but good ones are just menus. They're fine. Everything in Conor's piece points to an almost incredible lack of self control--he is incapable of not being distracted by his phone--which to me is a bigger problem than the format in which your menu is presented. Besides, give restaurant workers a break: it's one less thing they have to do to serve you, so they can focus more on providing good service.
Having said that, I hope we can all agree that paying directly by phone is one of the unambiguously great COVID-era innovations.
> Besides, give restaurant workers a break: it's one less thing they have to do to serve you, so they can focus more on providing good service.
In that case, they could just hand out menus at the entrance. Or if they don't greet you and instead just let you sit wherever, they can just put the menus in an obvious place. Restaurants have done this forever in similar situations. Online menus aren't necessary to solve this problem.
> Having said that, I hope we can all agree that paying directly by phone is one of the unambiguously great COVID-era innovations.
I don't really agree. At least I don't think it's an unambiguously great innovation. Personally I find the requirement to have a phone much more irritating than to the requirement to have cash or credit cards. That said, I've never seen a place accept payments by phone not accept either cash or credit cards so I guess it's mostly just irrelevant to me.
> Besides, give restaurant workers a break: it's one less thing they have to do to serve you
Yes, I also found this sentence to be very naive. No, they don't have the 2-second task of handing you a menu, instead they have the 2-minute task of explaining why there's no menu, trying to find the QR code reader on your phone, waiting for it to actually show up, then handing the phone back to you and demonstrating how to navigate between pages.
I could probably have phrased it differently and said having the OPTION to pay by phone is great. If I can avoid having to flag down someone who is working 5 extra tables because someone didn't show, just so she can hand me a paper slip ... I mean, it's a plus from my perspective. But I'm at the age that it catches me off guard every time I can do it.
> I could probably have phrased it differently and said having the OPTION to pay by phone is great.
This article and the comments here are complaining about restaurants who _only_ use QR codes for menus. I'd presume there is basically no one against having the _option_ of seeing the menu with a QR code. While I personally find QR codes much inferior to many other simpler approaches (paper slips, menus at the door, menu on the wall, etc.), I don't care if they offer them in addition to traditional methods.
I've only seen the ability to pay (which was also kind of confusing) once or twice. Everywhere else was either hard to navigate weird websites, or a PDF that takes forever to download and is very hard to read on mobile, let alone discuss with people you are dining with, who are also buried in their phone trying to figure out yet another maze of clicks and downloads.
In many places physical menus are handed out by a hostess whose whole job is to seat you and do that. If I want to "give them a break", I often just cook or get takeout. Physical menus are not hard to do and are much more friendly than reading from the palm of your hand.
Most places I go to now have the ability to pay on the phone, and it's much easier than trying to flag down a waiter. There's also no pressure for tipping, and I save precious time than having to wait for people to get back to me.
I have never experienced a weird website as is described in this thread. Discussing with people I'm dining with is also... the same? I have no clue how you are experiencing something different here.
Digital menus are not hard to do and are much more friendly. That said, this could all depend on how modern the area you regularly dine at - I'd expect less tech-savvy regions to fumble at this, which may indeed be your experience!
> I hope we can all agree that paying directly by phone is one of the unambiguously great COVID-era innovations.
No, we can't all agree to that. I dislike it deeply and won't do it. But I'm glad it pleases some people!
Even if they're just menus, it's nice to be able to see every option at once, and scan back and forth between disparate item categories with one's eyes, without taking 5-30 seconds to navigate between them on a tiny screen.
> paying directly by phone is unambiguously great
Life tip: tipping in cash is always preferred (by the tipee) over doing so digitally.
Once I handed a $20 bill to a cab driver and told him to "keep the change" and he falsified a receipt.
Thanks, but I'm going to tip through the normal tipping mechanism with my normal payment method to ensure that everyone stays honest.
And that probably includes the honest GrubHub drivers who invariably ditch my drink if they decide I haven't tipped high enough in the app.
cash is the normal tipping mechanism, universally accepted all around the world.
I do it as often as I can, which is sadly not often because I rarely carry cash. We do, for a variety of reasons, tend to frequent places that are ethically run though, and often know everyone involved fairly well. But, yes, as long as we have tipping as a significant basis for restaurant workers' income, cash tips.
How does it benefit the tipper to help someone else evade taxes?
Reading the comments here it’s clear to me that there are two kinds of people:
1) Those that like QR code menus. Going to a restaurant is not pleasure, it’s just an annoying means of getting food and the aim is to make it as efficient as a factory. No talking, no waiting, no eye contact at all if possible, ideally they would have a robot by the table that could spoon feed them so they never have to put their phone down and use their time to be mega efficient by looking at some spreadsheets.
2) people who see the act of going to a restaurant as a way of enjoying life. They don’t mind waiting a little bit for the waiter. They have great company and already enjoy a nice conversation. They probably already have a nice cocktail in their hands which they got from the bar whilst waiting for the table. They love looking around at other people, love looking at other peoples plates to get inspired for what they might want to eat themselves. Those people are in no rush. They don’t need to be anywhere else, they enjoy spending time together so it doesn’t matter where. They love talking to the waiter and ask which items on the menu are customer’s favourites or if the chef has a special recommendation today based on the seasonal produce they managed to source on that day. They love to discover new wines based on recommendations instead of always picking the same drink off the menu. These people take pleasure in the process and the experience and therefore hate QR codes and everything that comes with it. They hate paying via the app before being able to ask the waiter if the tips get fairly shared. These people take pride in whatever they do and enjoy light hearted banter with the staff and can leave a bar man or waiter with a smile even on a long day.
Personally I am category two. Life is to be lived. There is a time and place for a quick and efficient meal, but that is takeout and not going to a restaurant for me.
I don't like QR code menus, and I don't fit in either of the categories you describe.
I am in no rush, don't need to be anywhere else, and enjoy the time I spend with those accompanying me. And yet, if there was a way to just push a button somewhere and have the food I ordered delivered to my table, I'd love that.
I don't like being asked if the food is to my liking while I'm eating, and I'd like to just push yet another button to pay, without having to deal with waiting for waiters to come to my table.
No, I don't want to look at spreadsheets, but I also don't want to spend any more energy than I have to by making banter with the staff, light hearted or not.
Life is to be lived, but there's more than one way to live it.
> Life is to be lived, but there's more than one way to live it.
Touché. That's a great comment and I've upvoted you for it!
(I know I over exaggerated in my description to make a point. I didn't expect people to take it serious down to every word. I merely wanted to convey a sentiment and how people approach dining so differently)
You're hyperbolizing, and making it easier for the people that actually like QR codes to contradict you.
In essence, I think you're mostly right though, but I see a hard battle ahead, since most people go with the flow.
I remember the barbarous days of smoking inside, and there was no way to sway even a group of mostly non-smokers to go to a non-smoking location.
> it’s clear to me that there are two kinds of people ...
Your entire comment is just an exaggerated caricature of what is actually being discussed.
I'm surprised at all the hate for QR code menus, and QR codes in general, here of all places. Most of the complaints seem to reduce to "QR codes don't work well enough" or "I'm not used to them, therefore they're bad."
Sure, QR codes aren't perfect. They'll either get better or they'll die/get replaced. That's the way technology works: we try a lot of things, and some of them work.
OTOH you could just whatever they have advertised as a special -- I liked in Paris last I went how for a ten euro note you could get a really well designed lunch.
What happened to the good old days in America, when people were scared if they so much as connected to my Wifi without permission they'd disappear for a decade? Nowadays it's like any given morning, for all I know those dastardly Distributed Denial of Secrets hackers will be sitting on the corner uploading their latest ill gotten gains.
(You don't have to use a computer at all in the restaurant.)