The worst aspect of QR codes as menu replacements is that they are a huge security risk. Who’s to say that QR code is legit? You can’t tell from looking at it. The trouble is compounded by the common practice of restaurants using some third-party service hosted off-site. The domain is no longer a trust signal either. It’s only a matter of time before someone starts snarfing information or credit card numbers this way (scan here to pay your bill).
Most of the places I've been to just put their menu on a website linked through QR code, but still take orders and payment through staff. I've been to one place that doesn't do this but only one.
I think you could set up something clever where the QR code redirected to the correct menu 95% of the time, and maybe it didn't charge the credit card initially, and that would last longer than if you had charged something immediately 100% of the time. However, I think your point still stands that it's not worth the trouble and it doesn't scale well.
> restaurants using some third-party service hosted off-site.
agreed. it's become frustrating. I shouldn't have to make an account with some 3rd party to view specials. Also shouldn't have to look at 2002 style desktop publishing to try to find a menu either.
It’s usually just a menu, not e-shoping at the table. Why would they even implement that, if a waiter has to greet you, bring orders and clean up anyway?
I personally much prefer scanning a code on my receipt then pressing the apple pay button to handing my debit card with all my payment details on it to a stranger.
I'm pretty sure that the only compromised credit card I've had in the past decade was due to something along these lines.
I called a restaurant to get some takeout on Valentine's Day (one that I'd been to for dine-in previously, and had great food), and they told me that they didn't do phone orders, only online orders. I placed my food order, and was immediately also hit with a pending charge of <$1 for a utility provider in a difference province where I've never lived. (I get email notifications of credit card transactions.) Called bank and they cancelled card, so it didn't progress any further.
I'm not inclined to eat at that restaurant again, or to ever order food online again.
It certainly crossed my mind to print up some QR Code stickers that connect you to a wifi network named %p%s%s%s%s%n when you scan them, to slap over random ones around...
I handle QR codes by taking a picture and decoding on the command line using zbarimg. If the decoded output is a URL and looks safe I might visit the site. No way I'm letting an insecure device (basically all smartphones) follow random links blindly like that. And no way I'm giving up my data points for free if I can avoid it (remember how market researchers used to pay people to participate in focus group interviews?)
As a counterpoint, QR code menus work very well in China. I've been to places where you scan the code to open a menu that lets you place all your orders. You can also pay for your table via per table QR codes.
As a side note, you don't customarily tip in restaurants in China, so a non high-end place with good food will typically have rushed and curt wait staff. Ordering through the phone will give you a better experience!
every restaurant and bar I've been to in Brooklyn in the last week now also has the menu, ordering, and payment entirely through the QR codes. most using the Toast platform. I don't see this trend going back the other way.
I find paying via QR code to be much less convenient than NFC that is more popular in the west. Tap and pay is really quick, especially in countries like Australia.
With "App Clips" or "Instant Apps" or whatever you want to call them QR codes for me take the lead again. Get a receipt at the table, open camera, scan, app pops up with receipt, add tip, click click pay, done.
Skipping the second waiter trip to swipe all the cards or the awkwardness of bringing out the PoS system to the table is immediately worth it to me.
Ya, I get that. Red Robin has screens/computers/payment kiosks at each table to avoid that problem. They won't use QR codes at sit down restaurants in the states for payments because of tipping, however. Psychologically, you are more likely to tip more if the waiter is directly involved in the billing.
Unlocking your phone, opening an app, possibly unlocking that one, tapping to scan, and then accept is NOT more convenient than NFC in your card. Unless your talking about costs.
For private free money transfer, the US and many other places have similar if not better methods.
If NFC isn't common in your area and you really want to do watch payments, you can do Samsung Pay on any terminal with a magstrip reader, which is all of them.
Okay so if your phone is your hand already and ready to be used, then it's "more convenient" (i.e. saves maybe 2 seconds) than your card, but then in all other cases it's not? I usually keep my phone in my pocket so this isn't more convenient anyway.
Personally I find any hard requirement of a phone extremely _inconvenient_, since it means I must have my phone with me. A card/cash takes up much less space than a phone.
On the other hand, here in the UK I know several people who no longer carry a wallet or cards at all because Apple Pay is so ubiquitously available. I don’t know anyone without a phone.
I do have a phone and usually have it with me, but I don't always have it with me. I think having more payment options is great. Cash, cards, phones, you name it. The variety of options is true convenience. But I don't see how someone can say a phone is more convenient than cash/card for payment. Sure if you already have it with you (an argument which is symmetric anyway), but cash/cards use up less space and...well make payments.
I think the 2 are similar enough that are a bit subjective. For me it’s easier to pull out my card holder and slide out my card than trying to unlock my phone several times in a row. It doesn’t help that some places don’t know how to use NFC so the card works 100% of the time for me.
If I lived in a post-facemask NFC-aware country I’d totally use Apple Pay
The problem is that you have to have an NFC reader that they bring to you or that is at every table (if you are, say, in a restaurant).
By contrast, QR codes are cheap to manufacture, so you can put it on every table and anyone anywhere can pay without having to go to the counter or whatever.
Plus, NFC doesn't work over distance. Nor is it bidirectional.
I think there is something about QR that helps it gain critical mass over NFC, I have not seen anywhere penetrated as heavily by NFC as the QR codes are in China. Alipay QR codes are showing up in DC & SF too now.
I'm curious if those commenting have been to China/used the QR code system, I was likewise very skeptical before visiting.
It depends. For who smartphone addict and whom cards are in a wallet in a bag, launching barcode payment is faster than taking a card. Maybe NFC on smartphone is faster.
Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not actually better for some people and some situations.
This is obviously a decent use case for QR code’s; your comments seem just like you don’t like it, and you’re not interested in even considering any other option.
I’m assuming that the GP is an American used to American standards of being waited on (where the staff are incentivized by tips and thus have to impress their customers), and so does not want ”rushed and curt” service to be encouraged (which would diminish their experience), rather than them having an aversion to QR codes per se.
Because encouraging people to be rude to each other is distasteful, I thought it was obvious.
Similarly, calling someone a “low value comment” and then taking the least charitable view of their comment is directly against hn community guidelines.
Unless you are a visiting foreigner without cell phone service and the WiFi requires you to login with a working cell phone number, then you are in 没办法 territory.
As an overseas Chinese visiting China, the cashier always look at me weirdly when I told them (in Chinese) I don't have online wallet/mobile internet. They think I'm taking them for a laugh.
Somehow I think that a visiting foreigner that can read Chinese to order off a paper menu is probably also going to have a working phone number in China. Someone that can't read Chinese and needs to use their phone for google translate is probably not going to be able to order off a paper menu either.
You’d be surprised how many overseas Chinese (who have immigrated to somewhere else) who are visiting China are trapped by this. And even foreigners who don’t read Chinese can pick out certain characters of the food they like to eat (you don’t need to read Chinese very well to recognize stereotypical 宫保鸡丁).
China is really bad at exceptions. Many of those restaurants have gotten rid of their paper menus (which didn’t have English anyways, so they aren’t worried about foreigners). It’s like the train station kiosks that can’t deal with you if you don’t have a Chinese ID card.
You can get by without cell phone service in the USA. On all my business trips back to the USA while living in China, I didn't have much a problem (free open wifi is pretty common, you can even use Uber pretty easily without a phone number).
In China...if someone else can get you a SIM, you'll be OK, or maybe you can get one at the airport in customs (that used to be possible), though they have been cracking down on SIMs without ID numbers or resident visas associated with them.
> they have been cracking down on SIMs without ID numbers or resident visas associated with them.
?? I use Google Fi which has agreements with providers in almost every country, I had data as soon as I walked off the plane in China. Alipay was almost as easy to set up, although I understand that until recently it was limited to those with a Chinese bank account.
No, I was in Beijing, Kunming, and Shanghai. But I honestly don't recall the specifics of the firewall bypass - I was using Outline (another Google sponsored project, funnily enough) to skip it most of the time anyways.
Also because WeChat scans QR codes very fast, and you have to only hit 1 tap to do the whole thing. Once WeChat sees a QR it opens the link immediately and automatically.
The ordering also makes it more useful. Most restaurants in US just have a horrible HTML 1.0 menu with no ordering system, no pictures, and sometimes even goddamn frames.
With default Android it's like Home -> swipe -> camera -> 模式 -> 智慧鏡頭 and then point at the QR code while trying to tap the link that pops up as a tiny tooltip on the screen at the same time without making it go out of focus at the same time. It's awful.
I don't have stock Android on my phone so this may be a feature my manufacturer has added, but I'm pretty sure you can press the shutter button instead of clicking on the popup to open the QR code.
Also, as others have pointed out, with Firefox you can scan and open a QR core in two taps, so no need to go to the camera app at all.
Same experience scattered across US as well, aside from compulsory tipping and added sympathy for service industry working - different conversation
but I do love paying with Apple Pay, I always hated how wait staff doesn't carry around Point of Sale systems in the US and that it takes multiple steps to 1) wait to get their attention again to get the bill 2) wait to get their attention again to pay for the bill 3) wait for them to return with your payment method and hope they don't get sidetracked. Now its down to just 1) in places with QR codes on receipts.
I gotta say, I disagree with this piece. I, for one, love QR code menus. I can pinch zoom rather than squint at a menu with small/unreadable fonts in dim lighting. I don't need to badger the already exhausted wait staff on a busy night when they forget to drop us a menu or two. When orders are taken online, rather than awkwardly force a friend to not go to the bathroom (or take their kid to the bathroom) until a server can take their order, they can just order and then go. I do think restaurants should handle payment themselves and have the option for paper menus or menus posted on a wall if needed, but otherwise I'm a fan.
You’ve built a beautiful straw man that I’ve never seen in real life, rarely if ever have I encountered a menu with tiny font that is unreadable, I’ve never been to place that seated me and didn’t bring the menus at the same time. I’ve not experienced the bathroom thing either even in large parties, but it doesn’t sound awkward… if someone says they have to go to the bathroom they go, just tell the waiter this person will order a little later… or they call tell you what they want if they already know.
I dated a girl with poor eyesight, and absent a digital version her method was the phone flashlight and holding the menu very close to her face. So the physical version was workable, but a pinch to zoom is still more dignified.
Sure, and go back to having to reprint all the menus every time you want to change something or update prices, needing extras for when menus get destroyed, paying people to wipe menus down if you have them laminated, etc.
As much as I prefer paper menus, I don't think the restaurants that have switched are going to go back to it. Would have better luck pressuring them to have less shit electronic menus.
Paper menus on request seems like the obvious middle ground. Not defaulting to putting menus out reduces the scale of all those problems, while also not alienating customers who for whatever reason don't want to or cannot use the digital menu.
Definitely agreed. I still know a couple of people who don't have smartphones, and even with smartphones you might have a dead battery, a low battery that they don't want to waste on a menu, a busted camera, or for whatever other reason be better off with a piece of paper. Keeping a few real menus handy would be the best way to handle it.
Firstly, amoung my friends I have the worst eyesight, it’s not legally blind thank god, but genetically I got pretty unlucky, my dad is legally blind and my mom’s eyesight is only slightly better than mine. But guess what, someone 400 years ago invented a great device that helps alleviate 80% of the issues that come with poor eyesight and it’s great. Anyone with poor vision can wear glasses, specifically reading glasses can be had for about $5 from any drug store (in the US). Ruining the experience of restaurants to only slightly convenience a minuscule demographic (those who have poor eyesight but for some reason refuse to acknowledge it and acquire corrective lenses) is idiotic. Bec even then, as the author pointed out you’re excluding another demographic.
Offering both options has no significant downside, and improves accessibility of your restaurant. I don’t think most restaurants have a Braille version of their menu, but having a digital version with VoiceOver-like functionality gets you something similar.
Why do you assume he's built a straw man and not just had a different experience from you? Service levels vary across the planet. I used to live in Europe and restaurant service was always dreadfully slow, it could take ages to get the menu and order and pay, having a digital system in many of those restaurants would be fantastic
This isn't necessarily the case. If restaurant service in a region is slow as a rule, it's probably a matter of different priorities. There may well be less pressure for such a system to speed up the process of ordering, because a more relaxed system is seen as a good thing, and the system that gets implemented in practice might be worse (e.g. perhaps the staff don't like/trust the online order system and they will not even check it, or when they do check it they still confirm with you).
It is almost certainly better to address the actual problem (in this case: a disagreement about priorities and service speed) than to implement a technical measure that one party thinks will fix a problem that the other party considers a feature. By failing to actually address the problem, it could cause some people to feel threatened and result in other problems.
First of all it takes a shitton of steps to scan a QR code if you don't have WeChat. On a default Android device you have to click 7 or 8 times to get into the QR scanner thingy inside Google Lens. I carry a 2nd phone with WeChat and I can scan things in 0 seconds flat, but most people don't have it around here in the US.
And then many restaurants' QR menus just redirect you to their website with a terrible experience, and sometimes no pictures.
And then it's annoying as hell to try to read a phone screen in daylight outdoors.
If you can print a QR menu just print the damn menu also. Put the QR code on the menu cover for people who really want that.
These days I often just ask wait staff what they have because I don't want to look at my phone.
I have to swipe to the rightmost tab in normal camera app and then hit Google Lens and then hover over it while trying to top the tiny tooltip that pops up with my huge finger.
Horrible experience.
It should just open the web page with zero taps if I point at a QR code in ANY camera mode, even portrait or panorama or movie or whatever the last mode I was on. I shouldn't have to tell it "I'm going to scan a QR code", it should always be looking for one, because it's computationally very, very cheap.
On the iPhone, you literally just open the camera app, point it at the QR code, and a drop-down notification will prompt opening it in the browser. Thus, it is absolutely looking for one always as you describe.
Yes, but you still need to click the link, open in the browser. I don’t trust the average restaurant to make correct security decisions on their online menu/payment system. So pass.
It’s much better. It’s easy for people to see even with visual impairments. Everyone sets up their phone to accommodate their own needs.
You can always take the time to ask for a menu and I’m sure someone will bring you one, but it’s my opinion that you’re making too big of a deal out of something that’s such a small part of the dining experience.
> First of all it takes a shitton of steps to scan a QR code if you don't have WeChat
Not really, on most real devices.
> On a default Android device you have to click 7 or 8 times to get into the QR scanner thingy inside Google Lens.
Perhaps, on stock Android with no manufacturer special apps. But the Samsung, Google, and LG Camera apps, at least, have “point at a QR code and the camera reads it”, so it takes as many clicks as opening the Camera app.
Then again, starting about 5 weeks ago it also stopped responding to "OK Google" and 3 weeks ago it stopped announcing turn-by-turn directions during GPS navigation so I guess this is the state of tech in 2021 :-/
(Definitely don't want an Apple device though, massive privacy issue for me to use a closed source kernel and that I can't easily introspect and MITM SSL requests on to see what data is being sent about me, I do like Android for the fact that I can more or less much hook into any part of the OS and execute custom code to monitor what the hell apps are doing behind the curtain, and even give them fake-but-realistic sensor data to even further protect my privacy.)
Exactly, on iOS it's not easy, on Android it's far easier because the OS listens to you, not Apple or Google, and it's far easier to root Android than it is to jailbreak iOS, or run an open source fork like LineageOS and run the same apps on that.
You can (a) decompile the app, mod it, recompile it, sign it, and then execute it (b) modify the OS to not care about app signatures (c) bypass it with Xposed hooks, ... lots of ways.
I find hard to believe that you can decompile any app that has bothered implementing key pinning (which I always assumed is done at app level, not OS).
Speaking of https, I will give my own example. I can get to the cockpit (local ip:9090) of my fedora machine on my android phone if I continue past the scary warning but not on my iphone.
You can most definitely bypass the invalid certificate warning on iOS (I also have a device that uses a self-signed certificate and listens on a local IP, I can open its web interface just fine on iOS)
I can bypass the self-signed cert error on my iPhone 8 on iOS 14.4.2
That aside, what's the point? There's no practical threat model where https makes what you're doing more secure. If you have neither a domain name that can use a real TLS cert nor your own CA added to the mobile device, it would be trivial for someone to MITM you. Just configure your Fedora dashboard to use http if you don't care about security
I think you have this backwards? Its much easier to bypass cert pinning and MITM a local process on an Apple device. Disable SIP on Mac
OS or jailbreak an iPhone (15 minutes on almost the latest iOS), ‘lldb attach’ and away you swizzle.
This must be a very personal experience as I recognize none of this and never heard this from anyone either. I think you just simply need a newer phone. I have a cheap Samsung and I live in a place where the sun is always on and usually no clouds, and yet I walk kilometers every day doing work on my phone. No issue reading anything. And like the others say: the camera app automatically and very robustly pics up qr codes when you wave it past it.
I like qr codes anyway: I don't like dead tree printing or touching stuff that is not mine but had a million hands on it (I had that before covid).
Wait, restaurants are making you order from an app too?? So now you don't really need your 'exhausted wait staff' so much. Hire less wait staff as a portion are now are underutilized. Now some wait staff have no jobs, and the remainder work the same exhausting shifts. The reason these wait staff get tips is because they work so hard, with less service comes less tips. Now you have a whole industry of overworked AND underpaid staff.
Any efficiencies you are seeing will be refactored and stretched out as any business cannot afford to carry fat if they want maximum profit and competitive edge (price).
This whole inconvenience of a friend going to the bathroom is an incredibly weak argument for foregoing the tradition and ceremony of interacting with a person who will provide you with a meal. If you want to live in a McWorld where every step of your dining experience is as sterile, efficient, and touch free as possible then I am sad for you. That's not what a meal with friends and family means to me, it's not just about eating for sustenance.
>The reason these wait staff get tips is because they work so hard
The reason they get tips is because they are waitstaff, it has zero to do with how hard they work, it's simply custom to tip waitstaff, even lazy waitstaff.
Most employees work just as hard without getting tips (like the people who are actually cooking the food).
Maybe for you, I tip extra for working hard to keep my meal hot on delivery, water topped up, checking in at appropriate times. I honestly don't understand how you can say tips are not proportional to level of service and how level of service is entirely detached from working hard.
> Most people work just as hard without getting tips (like the people who are actually cooking thr food)
Most people get paid a real wage which isn't backfilled with charity from their customers.
At many good restaurants tips are distributed to the kitchen staff too. Obviously I have no control over that, and the world isn't fair either. None of this changes my argument.
> I tip extra for working hard to keep my meal hot on delivery, water topped up, checking in at appropriate times.
Those are things happen with good management, they have little to do with how hard an individual employee is working at a given time.
Besides the claim wasn't waitstaff gets "extra" tips for working hard, the claim was that waitstaff is tipped because they work hard. Don't move the goalposts.
>I honestly don't understand how you can say tips are not proportional to level of service and how level of service is entirely detached from working hard.
I tip the same if my service is shitty, I am not going to put an individual employee in a position of taking a pay cut when I can't know the exact reason something went wrong. I don't know enough about their operations to be punishing individual employees. Even if I could tell if it were an individual employee's fault, most places pool tips, so I'd be punishing the other employees working at the same time. So everyone gets the same tip from me.
I also simply just don't enjoy LARPing as a lord of my personal fiefdom.
Again, you get good service with good management, simple as that.
All tips are 'extra' that's the whole concept. It's money on top of what I am obliged to pay.
> you get good service with good management
Good management would pay a good wage and negate the need for tipping.
> I also simply just don't enjoy LARPing as a lord of my personal fiefdom.
Low blow. You are implying that I am less than you because I have some kind of financial control over waitstaff that I enjoy. A rather bad faith position to be in given how pious and understanding you are striving to come across as.
> most places pool tips
So now you agree kitchen staff get tipped too
> I tip the same if my service is shitty
Good for you. I don't think many people operate like this, so I'd say you are an edge case.
> it has zero to do with how hard they work, it's simply custom to tip waitstaff, even lazy waitstaff
Again, this is how you operate. Wikipedia lays out the common perception of tipping
"The customary amount of a tip can be a specific range of monetary amounts or a certain percentage of the bill based on the perceived quality of the service given."
I've experienced living in the UK without tipping, and in N.America with tipping. All I can say is it's night and day. Very few make a career out of working as waitstaff in the UK, plenty of people have a career in the service industry in N.America. Working hard for large tips can give you a living wage. In the UK because everyone is treated the same, waitstaff do the minimum for the minimum wage (there are exceptions, of course) and then find a better job. Since I left the UK this has begun to change, it's now reasonably common to tip in nicer restaurants, and guess what? The service is better and the waitstaff I assume are happier with more money in their pockets for their effort.
I will admit that I gave a really shitty tip the other week. I ordered the salad bar. All she had to do was refill my pop and settle the bill. She dropped the check off and didn't come back for 15 minutes. I walked over to the bar area to find someone to run my card and she was bullshitting with another employee. Yeah, no. I make it a point to tip well and just consider that part of the cost of my food. Not this time. I rounded up to the next dollar and I don't know why I even did that.
Perhaps you are unaware, but in the US, tipped waitstaff only make $2.83/hr in most places (tipped minimum wage). These people need tips in order to make any money. Nobody is working hard for 2.83/hr.
This is changing since now people are refusing to work those jobs. And yes, the entire industry is dumb and corrupt for having this practice in the first place, but it is what it is.
> Perhaps you are unaware, but in the US, tipped waitstaff only make $2.83/hr in most places (tipped minimum wage).
Perhaps you are unaware, but:
(1) US federal tipped minimum cash wage is $2.13, not $2.83, but also
(2) Most US states and territories have a tipped minimum wage above the federal tipped minimum (and also, though by a smaller margin, most have a tipped minimum above $2.83, which is PA’s tipped minimum.)
Sorry, you're right, a quick google search revealed my state's wage, not the fed (forgot to check the difference, which is so negligible that it's insulting).
This does not change my point in the slightest, which is that wait staff need tips to survive because the tipped minimum wage is unlivable basically everywhere.
> This does not change my point in the slightest, which is that wait staff need tips to survive because the tipped minimum wage is unlivable basically everywhere.
Its the same as the general minimum in several places, and at or above the federal general (not just tipped) minimum even more, so if its unlivable “basically everywhere” that's more than just a tipped minimum problem.
In practice, tipped employees typically get 0 dollar paychecks from their employers; the business assumes that your tips bring you up to the minimum wage, whether true or not, and they pay taxes on your behalf accordingly. This is also typically calculated on a pay period basis, rather than by hour or by day, which results in overstaffing during slow periods to the detriment of all employees, because as long as you get up to the general minimum wage via tips (which is a paltry wage), the business still pays you peanuts.
Thats not true, tipped employees typically do get >0 dollar paycheck from their employers. That is their base hourly wage.
general minimum wage is peanuts, yes. but tipped waitstaff only make $2.83/hr is not true. If the employer did not make up the difference then they risk being fined/shutdown.
> Thats not true, tipped employees typically do get >0 dollar paycheck from their employers. That is their base hourly wage.
This is not true. I’ve been a service employee. Your employer withholds taxes on estimated tipped earnings, typically resulting in literal $0 paychecks. This is the norm in states with lower tipped minimums (might not hold true in states like CA). In fact, getting actual cash on your paycheck means the business was so slow that they needed to pay you to make up the difference (or close to it). In which case, barely over $7 is still abysmal to deal with the bs in that biz, and obviously far too little to actually live a decent life.
That's not true. I've been a service employee too. You typically get your hourly wage in the paycheck resulting in >$0 paycheck, even with tax withhold.
>In which case, barely over $7
Right, so tipped waitstaff only make $2.83/hr is not true.
> general minimum wage is peanuts, yes. but tipped waitstaff only make $2.83/hr is not true.
True, tipped minimum is $2.13/hr.
> If the employer did not make up the difference then they risk being fined/shutdown.
Employers make up reported shortfalls in tipped jobs, but they also often treat shortfalls as a negative performance indicator, justifying termination. In jobs where there are cash tips (not everything through a payment system), this incentivizes enployees to assure that there are no shortfalls.
Yeah, I find it very very sad. I am so isolated after 15 months of lockdowns that I literally go to a restaurant for a tiny bit of social interaction, just smalltalk with a waiter. Just about 4 out of 5 times they insist on ordering online. It gets me quite angry, I can just as well stay home if I have to look at the screens even more after looking at the screen the whole day.
Outside of high end restaurants, I'm not sure that I've ever once been provided with useful information by a server. "See if you can get our server's attention when they come by, we are ready to order/pay" is a fairly common occurrence, even at solid places.
Does this reduce the need for waitstaff at most places? Yes. Is that bad for waitstaff. Yes. Is that a reason to want a person to physically write down my order and type it into a machine in the back? Eh.
When I go out to eat with friends and family, the important part is spending time with friends and family (and sometimes strangers, but that’s usually other patrons). I don’t mind interacting with waitstaff, but it’s not adding any value to my experience, either - as long as I get my order I don’t really care about the tradition and ceremony, as you put it.
We went out recently to a place where we ordered with our phones and had a great time. It was simple and painless, orders were served quickly and it didn’t matter that the only thing I ever said to staff was ”thanks” - I focused on my people instead.
To each their own, but to me this ceremony provides zero value. Waiters take the order and may comment on the weather, it's not like we're developing a deep friendship here.
The "tradition" is to sit, wait for a waiter to appear. Ask for purpose (lunch? big meal? just a drink?). Then you wait again for the correct menu to appear. Then you get asked for a drink. And wait for the drink. And then comes the longer wait where the waiter tries to detect when you are ready to order, if they see it at all.
Combined, that's some 20-30 mins in and the prepping of your meal hasn't even started yet.
Now if you're the kind of person that's going to be in there 3-4 hours anyway, the ritual doesn't harm, but it doesn't add much value either. It's needlessly slow and inefficient.
Your future dystopian nightmare is already here, and it's fine. In the Netherlands, some sushi restaurants work as follow. You are seated. There's an iPad for everyone, and people just tap what they want. Some minutes later, your food arrives. This supposed cold-hearted efficiency means I get to spend more time engaging with my friends, the very point of the visit.
By the way, you're not doing restaurants any favors with a slow and long visit. It means they can't use your table twice. So finish your meal in 1.5-2 hours and if still not bored with your friends, go to a damn bar.
3-4 hours is a long time. That sounds like a leisurely dinner set on "Italian Mode" [no offence] with a reservation, not a work lunch on Tuesday in the US.
This ritual or ceremony of waiter, menu, waiting, ordering, signalling for the cheque that you apparently find vile... I enjoy it. Any inefficiency you have declared is part of the experience of going out to eat.
You want fast food? Go get fast food.
You want a butler and cook? Hire them.
You want to go out to dinner? Here's a waitress, menu, and some time for walking back and forth between their station and your table and their other tables in their zone.
All of this is, or at least should be, factored in to the restaurant's business. It's been 100 years, at least in the US. If they don't get it by now, at least you should.
Then you should continue patronizing restaurants that have the traditional method, and whoever doesn't want that can seek out restaurants with more efficient methods. Forcing your definition of what a restaurant "should be" is detrimental to everyone, more choice is better for everyone.
It didn't say any of those steps are vile. I said that in my opinion, they are needless steps that don't add value to guests or the restaurant itself.
A restaurant wants to know your order. Why does this simple thing take 20-30 mins? Whom benefits? How does it enrich your experience exactly, this useless waiting and pointing at a menu?
"Wait, restaurants are making you order from an app too?? So now you don't really need your 'exhausted wait staff' so much. Hire less wait staff as a portion are now are underutilized. Now some wait staff have no jobs, and the remainder work the same exhausting shifts. "
Not around here, no. Was out eating yesterday. That place we went to has the exact same number of wait staff as before QR codes, the difference is only that they're not exhausted, they are not stressed when interacting with us (showing us the table, bringing food, checking in on us if we need something else, etc). We don't have to wait for them to get the bill or to pay. The overall atmosphere is much more relaxed now. And yes the other places I visit also keep the same number of staff as before, as far as I can tell.
> Now some wait staff have no jobs, and the remainder work the same exhausting shifts.
This is a lot to unpack. I'm always surprised by people in the tech industry, where we seek to automate so much to make things better... be against innovation?
If a QR menu can tangibly provide a similar or better experience, for less cost, then it is objectively a better value for everyone involved. We shouldn't keep manual jobs around "just because." If that was a valid mindset, then we should get rid of all cars and have large caravans of people to trade across the country to ensure more people have jobs.
In this case, the question becomes "does the QR code provide a similar, or better, experience?" Only time will tell - but if it does, overall, then it will replace the wait staff, and this is a good thing.
This is why discussions of UBI take place, because we shouldn't intentionally do things less efficiently just to save jobs.
> The reason these wait staff get tips is because they work so hard, with less service comes less tips. Now you have a whole industry of overworked AND underpaid staff.
I don't disagree here, but tip culture is an absurd concept and I wish it would die in America. Just bake it into the price of the menu, and pay workers better.
For me it's an automatic yes as long as the restaurant has wifi that is easy to access. Mostly because I get to avoid germs from all the previous hands who held the menu. Most people's hands are far more germy than a toilet seat if they haven't been recently washed.
I have one interesting observation about one part of what you said: I wouldn't say that tips will go down. If anything, COVID has shown us that tips actually go up the less service that we get.
> Now you have a whole industry of overworked AND underpaid staff.
There is a ton of abuse in the food service industry in America, not the least of which is paying servers less than 3 bucks per hour, and thats one of the cushier jobs. I was a server a long time, and sometimes you make the money in tips, sometimes you don't. I knew a lot of servers who put up with workplace abuse because of the illusion of easy cash the job creates. BOH staff work harder and usually take home even less.
Ordering from an app is great. No mistakes, no forgotten orders, and nobody abusing the machine.
What is varying quality is the menus served by the links in QR codes. Some can be great, some can be terrible, and everything in between. Same thing with paper menus, except they are also bulky.
A lot of menus on phones I find difficult as it is pretty unclear what the popular items are. Am I supposed to be looking at antipasta or "chicken" or "plates"?
This isn't a given. Places could design better instead of designing for paper and then just putting that online. But I still strongly prefer not to have to take out phone when with people.
A good menu generator, with competent web layout, readable, zoomable, searchable. Results may be hosted or sent as a bunch of static files.
The menu SPA page collects patrons' choices and forms a nice order for the waiter, as a text and as a QR code.
Flat monthly rate for up to 200 menu updates a day, effectively unlimited but preventing abuse. A small flat fee for serving the menus online and generation of the QR code. One-time fee for each piece of personalization / branding work beyond the standard templates.
Looks like a perfect side project for a couple of weekends, and then incessant low-intensity marketing efforts.
The worst thing about QR code menus is that they're often just a paper-sized PDF that you have to pinch and zoom around. If they could design QR code menus like responsive mobile sites inspired by food-ordering apps this wouldn't be an issue, they'd be even better than paper menus.
When I was in China I enjoyed using their mobile menus.
A common layout I saw was a narrow vertical bar on the left with categories(appetizers, main, drinks, etc) and cards with photos + details on the right.
That design language makes sense with Chinese because it's dense. I'm not sure it would work with any language written in Roman script. Uber Eats for example uses a single vertical scrolling menu with horizontal separators and tab bars top and bottom.
Every pandemic ordering system I've used has been a proper app or website. Surely you have to have that in order to actually enter your order? You can't click "buy" on a PDF.
In France. Payment by cash is very rare, most everything is paid by contactless. But I think it's more of a habit that in restaurants and bars, you usually pay when leaving.
This comment and the one below it, also about China[1], should be higher up. It was very convenient to be in a restaurant and have a digital menu in a standardized format. Of course, it required a number of factors to align: all interactions were through one of two apps (WeChat or Alipay), the menu layout was standard, font size was not tiny (no zooming necessary), cell and/or wifi coverage was not lacking. There was also a choice between having a menu portal and just a payment portal. Street food vendors usually had a laminated QR code tacked to their cart and you could scan and pay without the vendor needing to ever handle cash, which made for a more efficient processing of the line.
It certainly wasn't a perfect system, but it was a lot better than the US, where restaurants have multiple different menu layouts, some are PDF, some let you pay via mobile, etc. The lack of relative uniformity makes for some positive but many negative user experiences.
I’ll say it. Bring back menus, QR code’s are terrible.
You already printed this goofy thing why not just print the menu so I don’t have to dick around with some PDF on my phone.
Perfect example of a solution looking for a problem
Wash your hands before the food is served, it's super common and recommended even in the pre-covid times.
If you're touching your phone right before eating you DEFINITELY want to wash your hands. Think about where your phone usually sits, tightly pressed against your body absorbing all the sweat and detritus and bacteria on your person. Think of the last time you actually washed or sanitized your phone too...
I do wonder how this effects accessibility. What if I don't have a device with me? What if I have a disability that prevents me from using a device? Seems like this might be an ADA compliance liability.
I am guessing you then ask for a paper menu and they give you one. You can probably just do that even if you don't have any issues. I've done that a few times when the online menu was annoying.
Many bars (that now call themselves "tap houses") have beer menus that are either only online, or printed in a 20pt font on a 54" LCD TV behind the bar.
It is super annoying to have to get up for each beer because the server doesn't know what #32 out of 70 is let alone which number is a lager, and then not be able to read the menu (because my eyes suck) until I'm leaning over the bar.
With two competing channels, we won't have to wait long until one becomes an afterthought. I personally hope that QR codes (or whatever requires to use a smartphone) will be the one going the way of the dodo.
At the same time the hostess asks "Would you like crayons for the toddler?", it'd be simple to add "We have a digital menu, but would you like physical menus?". Or even a put "Physical menu available on request" below the QR code.
Digital menus can work when they are made for the digital format. Most Qr codes are just the menus that were made to look beautiful on paper and suck to look at on your phone, I don't want to have to open up my phone and jump between pages on two separate documents on my phone. It's also terrible that I have to waste my battery life to order food every time.
The ideal situation is isn't the China situation people are describing of scanning with their phone and opening an app or custom made site, it's the situation in Japan with a small tablet on the table everyone just puts their orders into and food is delivered as the orders are received when combined with a call bell for refills or asking questions. I don't have to install anything or worry about tracking.
Indeed, pair it with Apple Pay and it's like 5 tap deal.
QR code already knows which table it is and even payment can be optional after the meal (tho I got so used to paying before I might just leave without paying nowadays).
This is a point I see missing in many of the top level posts, here. Restaurants literally went to the easiest solution for a more sanitary and viral transmission-free method to communicate a menu to customers. Of course it isn't going to be perfect. But everyone is a critic.
Definitely not looking forward to it whenever I get to travel internationally again and am relegated to free 2G or 3G networks and trying to load a restaurants heavy website just so I can look at the menu.
QR codes are no good if cell service is spotty with certain carriers. Recently at a distant restaurant, I scanned the QR, waited for it to time out, discover there was no cell service, find the free wifi, enable my VPN, connect to the restaurants wifi, wait for authentication, then open camera app and scan QR again, wait for the kindle app to open the PDF, only to be handed a paper menu a few seconds later...
I know how a menu works. I read the food, see the price, and order. Personally I want to relax at a restaurant and not troubleshoot for myself and others, all while increasing my stress levels.
One way to fix this might be to encode the full text of the menu within the QR code, instead of a link?
QR codes are handy for easing people into eating out again... but wow; it can be pretty frustrating. Something I find myself thinking about more, is how Technology really needs to be more reliable, and how we really need to consider all the edge cases, before we can begin to replace the simple items such as a menu, let along more complex systems....Rant: I want something that will work 100% of the time.
Because the digital menu is cheaper. A lot cheaper. You don't have to reprint when you alter it, you can automatically move people to the right menu based on the date/time.
The menu is probably going to insist on using lower case letters, and the "Binary/byte" encoding will be interpreted as something between 7-bit ASCII and UTF-8 depending on the client. With the ECC payload 2,953 bytes sounds like quite a lot, THEN you look at the giant art linked in the article for even small examples. The size (version) 40 takes 177×177 width of decodable, clearly visible pixels.
At that point the QR code is in the ballpark of a printed 8.5x11 or A4 sheet of paper, and is far less useful to humans than a laser printed page with multiple sizes of lettering, super high contrast, and no requirement for a computer to decode.
They are also no good if you don't bring your phone with you. I generally leave my phone at home unless I expect to have to make a call or something. If the restaurant doesn't have a paper copy somewhere, I'll just leave and go find another restaurant. There are tons of restaurants, and I'm happy to vote with my wallet on this one.
IMHO it should be like this: Read QR code next to dish. It executes order for dish, and subtracts set amount of Bitcoin (perhaps with a confirmation so you're not scammed).
My biggest surprise in these comments is that people seem to have actually successfully used a QR code! I always assumed they were an iPhone only feature, so I ignore them.
I've read that the Android camera app is supposed to recognize QR codes, but it doesn't seem to on my phone.
The text "Google Lens" may not appear even though it is present. My Google Lens button is a cryptic symbol. Modern user interface design seems to give bonus points for being cryptic and obscure because companies are hostile to the idea that they might empower the user - a sense of confusion and uncertainty acts as a form of lockin.
It varies on Android, some manufacturers ship custom camera apps that include automatic QR code detection and decoding. Many people don't even realize the Android they're using is really a highly-customized vendor skin and suite of apps. Samsung in particular does this, and its camera app auto recognizes QR codes.
I have a Pixel bought directly from the Google Store, so I assumed it'd have the most recent features, whatever they are! The Pixel 3a, though, doesn't seem to do anything special with QR codes, besides photographing them.
That's super weird because I have the original Pixel and it has no problem scanning QR codes from the camera app. That's a pretty big QoL downgrade two versions later.
Firefox has a QR code scanner - if you tap the URL bar, it has a "scan" button that lets you scan a QR code and use it as a URL. Perhaps Chrome does as well, i d k because I don't use Chrome.
Till I learnt about that, I used a simple QR code scanner from F-Droid (since Playstore is completely untrustworthy for generic utilities).
I believe earlier Android versions did use camera, but now you have to use Google lens. It's extremely well hidden.
On my phone, I have to open up the Google app and click on the icon after the microphone on the search bar to open up Google Lens. Once I am in it, clicking on the three dots icon gives an option to add Lens to home screen.
The camera app I have (preinstalled from Moto) can read QR codes. Links are OK, but it can't handle QR payments. You'd expect the phone to forward it to the right app, but no - you need to open that one yourself and use the scanner in there. There's probably a reason for it, maybe all the banks I use do something wrong and Android is capable of this, but at the end of the day, this doesn't matter. QR codes are more often than not frustrating experience for end users, especially those not tech-savvy enough. It's ridiculous, we can do better than this.
As mentioned in the article, having a digital menu allows for a restaurant to adjust its offering in subtle and responsive ways. If a place is out of one ingredient, those items for which it is necessary could be struck.
Or one could have "surge pricing" — not desirable as a customer, but certainly for a dining establishment. And one could also collect more information on customers.
I'm still inclined toward tangible menus. For the one positive point (adaptability), I am reminded of one of the best restaurant meals that I ever had. The beer menu was a small laminated card, but the brief food menu was just written on a chalk board each day. When I arrived a few items were already struck with a line through them. One really can't beat that kind of simplicity, with no reliance on digital devices unless for payment, if desired.
(kelnos pointed out that I missed something in the article; edited to address that point.)
Or show a more affluent customer a different menu — one where everything is labelled deluxe, bespoke, or through terminology substitutions similar to "Patagonian toothfish" → "Chilean sea bass".
Depends on the setting, honestly. In a cafe, it's nice to continue working while just ordering on the QR. In some sit down restaurants, it does feel like the service is strictly lower quality with the QR codes. It's hard to convey what exactly you want sometimes, especially since not all these QR apps have a notes section.
Allergies? Substitutions? This stuff just gets slightly harder/annoying, albeit not horribly difficult ofc. I find myself agreeing most with the authors on this, though:
> I despise spending the first 10 minutes of a social engagement on my phone.
"... it's nice to continue working..." yes, this is also the problem with so many cafes. People go there to get some work done but also to interact. To strike up conversations about work or life with people outside your usual bubble. If you didn't want to be around other people you could stay in the office or at home. But in recent years everyone wears headphones and has so many devices that walking into a cafe at lunchtime is like going into a call center. What's the point? I've worked on laptops in cafes since the early 90s when I was usually the only one with a computer. But I learned the civility that if you're going to work in a public space, part of the reason you're doing that is to take time away from your work to interact with other people, including the service staff. Usually I would never go work "out" until all the job reqs for the day were done and I was comfortable being interrupted. To go into a public space and tune everything out and demand that it function like your private office is a bizarre antisocial feature of a generation that has spent too much time on social media and doesn't know how to act or respond in real life. Walking into those places now just makes me sad.
From my view... there are cafes for working and cafes for socializing, and to me they have different vibes and regulars. Or perhaps I'm fortunate enough to live in a city where there's such a distinction, I'm not really sure.
For example, there used to be a cafe around here with a designated 'no laptops, no work' area and some board games (R.I.P. Longfellow's). There's a local chain that doesn't even provide WiFi. Contrast that to the hyper-sterile Blue Bottle Coffee less than a mile away -- I actually do like their coffee, but I don't go there to socialize. It's a space optimized to cycle people in-and-out ASAP.
Pre-COVID I actually ran a small mailing list for people to hang out at rotating local cafes, so I get what you mean to some extent. Even then, you're probably right that doesn't seem as dire to me because I grew up post-2000.
I'm old enough to remember when the 'no laptops' signs sprouted and then quickly were overwhelmed or went out of business. I didn't take it personally - by that point I understood that my gf and I making graphics and websites while talking to the regulars wasn't the problem. Most of what I'm referencing is in South America, Thailand, Vietnam, France, Czechia and Spain. Generally liquor licenses are permissive and they're family owned, so, a lot of places serve coffee during the day and transition to bars and nightclubs at night. There is a general flow to your day where as evening approaches, you switch from corfee to alcohol and people you know come and populate your table, sometimes they work and if they're coders you talk shop about databases or something, then it gets too loud so you go out with whoever came by and get dinner. And if the server is finished you invite them too. This is what I considered a civilized form of working in a cafe with a computer on your table. And even at that,any times my gf thought it might be rude so we'd put it away and play chess or read.
I think if people had an awareness of their surroundings in these spaces, the spaces wouldn't have turned into sterilized off-campus work sites. But that may be asking too much from people who've never experienced it. I think this is what some of the 90s/00s startups were trying to replicate with their play rooms, but that's a far cry from sitting with a local dev and a taxi driver and a drunk musician spitting out ideas To me that's what the cafe is for.
(edit) I don't mean this to come off as the rant of an old gen X-er... it sounds to me like you had a real appreciation for the counterculture of ideas that could bubble up from having some limits and creativity in those spaces. You woulda loved the 90s. But maybe if enough people get sick of Blue Bottle Coffee and Starbucks, we can claw some humanity back. As it is, the less work-centric and more friends-and-family-centric parts if the world mostly reject the cafe as workplace model. They didn't used to find it so rude but they do now. I hope we have a backlash in the States if only because people really need that space to be verbal, interacting humans with each other. Especially on a lunch break.
I live in France and I've never heard of something like that. There's usually a strict distinction between bars and cafés, with cafés being where people take a coffee or an orange juice during the day with friends, and bars where people drink beer during the night with friends, and sometimes meet other people.
The conversion from cafe in the day to bar/club at night is more common in Spain and Argentina, but there are places around in France. I lived in a couple villages in Auvergne near Clermont-Ferrand and also in Avignon. The places that are cafes in the day will convert at night in these smaller towns. The whole square in Avignon is cafes in day and bars at night. (In Paris or Marseille I didn't really see this - but it's prevalent in Madrid and Buenos Aires).
I wish I had spent more time in Lyon. The countryside around there probably seems boring to you, since you grew up in the city. But coming from America, it's obvious that the smallest village in France is light-years more advanced, more educated, clever and civilized than the country I grew up in. It has its problems of course, but it's paradise compared to most other places I've been.
Funny, slightly dark story about Avignon. I became friendly with a guy there who was a good musician but turned out to be a bit of a...right wing type. National Front. There was a cafe on the square that was a gay club at night, and my girlfriend and I used to have coffee there in the day. One day this guy walked by and said "don't you know what this bar is where you're sitting?" I said, "come on, chill out, sit down." He took some convincing. So finally he sat down and I said, "I know you like Le Pen. How do you feel about sitting in front of a gay bar with an Filipina/Mexican and Jew/Argentine? Are you angry we're in your country?" He said, "as long as you're here because you're interested in France, I'm okay." Later, walking through town, he saw a kid urinating on the front step of an apartment. He shouted at the kid and the kid pulled a knife out. This guy tackled him. Still later we took a bus to the station through the banlieu and saw the desolation - she said, "what have they done to their country?"
Eh. I shouldn't tell these stories on HN. I guess it taught me that life is complicated and to bring it full circle to the cafe question, your view of the world is very relative to where you grew up, in what time period, and what you expect people to behave like.
On the contrary, the countryside has a lot of appeal to me. For a few years we lived in a rather isolated house in Dardilly and I have fond memories of them. Not really the same experience as the countryside but I'm really glad I spent some of my youth here and not directly in the city.
Thank you for sharing that story, it's thanks to people like you that bring some new perspective I started to love my country for what it is.
As a former waiter, I tip extra well. If I encountered this, I'd be tempted not to tip at all except maybe slipping a $10 bill to the runner or the bus boy. And I wouldn't go back to the restaurant.
Pretty much this. I would probably quit a restaurant that did this because on the face of it, it takes away my ability to serve the customer, listen to them, explain, upsell, and generally provide the service they're tipping me for. Why would I expect a good tip if I didn't have that interaction with them?
I read an article a few years back (Though I am unable to find it now) that complained about diners taking longer and longer to order these days, especially because they play around with their phones instead of perusing the menu. (I think this conclusion was based on surveillance tapes)
I do wonder if having the menu on your phone could actually be more engaging to these kind of diners (or at least prevent them from doing anything else), so that the whole ordering food process is sped up?
A less-polite phrasing of your theory: Fed-up restaurant owners are trying to claw back as much as they can from the overhead and miseries of dealing with phone-addicted customers.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 377 ms ] threadagreed. it's become frustrating. I shouldn't have to make an account with some 3rd party to view specials. Also shouldn't have to look at 2002 style desktop publishing to try to find a menu either.
some have been well done. but not nearly enough.
I wish they would just take orders from the site, but pay with a card machine which 107% of people are used to.
I called a restaurant to get some takeout on Valentine's Day (one that I'd been to for dine-in previously, and had great food), and they told me that they didn't do phone orders, only online orders. I placed my food order, and was immediately also hit with a pending charge of <$1 for a utility provider in a difference province where I've never lived. (I get email notifications of credit card transactions.) Called bank and they cancelled card, so it didn't progress any further.
I'm not inclined to eat at that restaurant again, or to ever order food online again.
http://api.qrserver.com/v1/create-qr-code/?color=000000&bgco...
I handle QR codes by taking a picture and decoding on the command line using zbarimg. If the decoded output is a URL and looks safe I might visit the site. No way I'm letting an insecure device (basically all smartphones) follow random links blindly like that. And no way I'm giving up my data points for free if I can avoid it (remember how market researchers used to pay people to participate in focus group interviews?)
As a side note, you don't customarily tip in restaurants in China, so a non high-end place with good food will typically have rushed and curt wait staff. Ordering through the phone will give you a better experience!
Skipping the second waiter trip to swipe all the cards or the awkwardness of bringing out the PoS system to the table is immediately worth it to me.
But can they afford to have an NFC reader at every single table?
Can street vendors without access to electricity/mobile connection just hold up a QR code cut into some wood and you can pay that way?
NFC seems to put the onus on the vendor, Wechat pay/Alipay has no such problem.
It's definitely not quick in the US, where it hasn't been really adopted at the same level, it might be fast in Australia.
I've seen and used NFC pads attached to cellphones using Square adapters, so you can go that route if you want.
NFC is definitely much faster in Australia than in the USA.
For private free money transfer, the US and many other places have similar if not better methods.
The difference is slight, but real.
Personally I find any hard requirement of a phone extremely _inconvenient_, since it means I must have my phone with me. A card/cash takes up much less space than a phone.
If I lived in a post-facemask NFC-aware country I’d totally use Apple Pay
By contrast, QR codes are cheap to manufacture, so you can put it on every table and anyone anywhere can pay without having to go to the counter or whatever.
Plus, NFC doesn't work over distance. Nor is it bidirectional.
I think there is something about QR that helps it gain critical mass over NFC, I have not seen anywhere penetrated as heavily by NFC as the QR codes are in China. Alipay QR codes are showing up in DC & SF too now.
I'm curious if those commenting have been to China/used the QR code system, I was likewise very skeptical before visiting.
I still like not having to wait for the wait staff and just paying with QR code
Not sure why that’s something we want to encourage.
Why not?
Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean it’s not actually better for some people and some situations.
This is obviously a decent use case for QR code’s; your comments seem just like you don’t like it, and you’re not interested in even considering any other option.
Similarly, calling someone a “low value comment” and then taking the least charitable view of their comment is directly against hn community guidelines.
China is really bad at exceptions. Many of those restaurants have gotten rid of their paper menus (which didn’t have English anyways, so they aren’t worried about foreigners). It’s like the train station kiosks that can’t deal with you if you don’t have a Chinese ID card.
In China...if someone else can get you a SIM, you'll be OK, or maybe you can get one at the airport in customs (that used to be possible), though they have been cracking down on SIMs without ID numbers or resident visas associated with them.
?? I use Google Fi which has agreements with providers in almost every country, I had data as soon as I walked off the plane in China. Alipay was almost as easy to set up, although I understand that until recently it was limited to those with a Chinese bank account.
That sounds really nice...and a bit surprising considering nothing else Google works in China without a VPN.
So...does it also work as a normal phone with a Chinese number so you can logon to wifi at Starbucks in China?
It is a bit surprising, although Google does have offices in China. It also has a VPN built in, which I recall would intermittently bypass the GFW.
> So...does it also work as a normal phone with a Chinese number so you can logon to wifi at Starbucks in China?
No, I don't think so, but I had unlimited data.
The ordering also makes it more useful. Most restaurants in US just have a horrible HTML 1.0 menu with no ordering system, no pictures, and sometimes even goddamn frames.
With default Android it's like Home -> swipe -> camera -> 模式 -> 智慧鏡頭 and then point at the QR code while trying to tap the link that pops up as a tiny tooltip on the screen at the same time without making it go out of focus at the same time. It's awful.
Also, as others have pointed out, with Firefox you can scan and open a QR core in two taps, so no need to go to the camera app at all.
but I do love paying with Apple Pay, I always hated how wait staff doesn't carry around Point of Sale systems in the US and that it takes multiple steps to 1) wait to get their attention again to get the bill 2) wait to get their attention again to pay for the bill 3) wait for them to return with your payment method and hope they don't get sidetracked. Now its down to just 1) in places with QR codes on receipts.
Waiter: I'm sorry, we don't use printed menus anymore. You'll have to scan the QR code with your phone.
Me: Actually, I need a printed menu as an ADA accommodation. Are you refusing?
Waiter: Give me a minute and I'll get you a menu.
Personally I'd rather have a paper menu, but digital ones can definitely be more accessible for low vision.
I say can because half of the digital ones are godawful UX disasters.
As much as I prefer paper menus, I don't think the restaurants that have switched are going to go back to it. Would have better luck pressuring them to have less shit electronic menus.
It is almost certainly better to address the actual problem (in this case: a disagreement about priorities and service speed) than to implement a technical measure that one party thinks will fix a problem that the other party considers a feature. By failing to actually address the problem, it could cause some people to feel threatened and result in other problems.
First of all it takes a shitton of steps to scan a QR code if you don't have WeChat. On a default Android device you have to click 7 or 8 times to get into the QR scanner thingy inside Google Lens. I carry a 2nd phone with WeChat and I can scan things in 0 seconds flat, but most people don't have it around here in the US.
And then many restaurants' QR menus just redirect you to their website with a terrible experience, and sometimes no pictures.
And then it's annoying as hell to try to read a phone screen in daylight outdoors.
If you can print a QR menu just print the damn menu also. Put the QR code on the menu cover for people who really want that.
These days I often just ask wait staff what they have because I don't want to look at my phone.
Horrible experience.
It should just open the web page with zero taps if I point at a QR code in ANY camera mode, even portrait or panorama or movie or whatever the last mode I was on. I shouldn't have to tell it "I'm going to scan a QR code", it should always be looking for one, because it's computationally very, very cheap.
You can always take the time to ask for a menu and I’m sure someone will bring you one, but it’s my opinion that you’re making too big of a deal out of something that’s such a small part of the dining experience.
> On a default Android device you have to click 7 or 8 times to get into the QR scanner thingy inside Google Lens.
Perhaps, on stock Android with no manufacturer special apps. But the Samsung, Google, and LG Camera apps, at least, have “point at a QR code and the camera reads it”, so it takes as many clicks as opening the Camera app.
https://i.imgur.com/kjFEwiR.jpg
Then again, starting about 5 weeks ago it also stopped responding to "OK Google" and 3 weeks ago it stopped announcing turn-by-turn directions during GPS navigation so I guess this is the state of tech in 2021 :-/
(Definitely don't want an Apple device though, massive privacy issue for me to use a closed source kernel and that I can't easily introspect and MITM SSL requests on to see what data is being sent about me, I do like Android for the fact that I can more or less much hook into any part of the OS and execute custom code to monitor what the hell apps are doing behind the curtain, and even give them fake-but-realistic sensor data to even further protect my privacy.)
You can (a) decompile the app, mod it, recompile it, sign it, and then execute it (b) modify the OS to not care about app signatures (c) bypass it with Xposed hooks, ... lots of ways.
That aside, what's the point? There's no practical threat model where https makes what you're doing more secure. If you have neither a domain name that can use a real TLS cert nor your own CA added to the mobile device, it would be trivial for someone to MITM you. Just configure your Fedora dashboard to use http if you don't care about security
Drop down menu > Camera Settings > Google Lens suggestions.
So, double press power button, long tap QR code, and click link to visit site.
It's been a downhill expectation on experience since.
I like qr codes anyway: I don't like dead tree printing or touching stuff that is not mine but had a million hands on it (I had that before covid).
“yeah I'll get right on that”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpQQohcHk9Q
I also really love how many restuarants put a QR code on the receipt that opens Apple Pay
Any efficiencies you are seeing will be refactored and stretched out as any business cannot afford to carry fat if they want maximum profit and competitive edge (price).
This whole inconvenience of a friend going to the bathroom is an incredibly weak argument for foregoing the tradition and ceremony of interacting with a person who will provide you with a meal. If you want to live in a McWorld where every step of your dining experience is as sterile, efficient, and touch free as possible then I am sad for you. That's not what a meal with friends and family means to me, it's not just about eating for sustenance.
Why do you draw the line at taking payment?
The reason they get tips is because they are waitstaff, it has zero to do with how hard they work, it's simply custom to tip waitstaff, even lazy waitstaff.
Most employees work just as hard without getting tips (like the people who are actually cooking the food).
> Most people work just as hard without getting tips (like the people who are actually cooking thr food)
Most people get paid a real wage which isn't backfilled with charity from their customers.
At many good restaurants tips are distributed to the kitchen staff too. Obviously I have no control over that, and the world isn't fair either. None of this changes my argument.
Those are things happen with good management, they have little to do with how hard an individual employee is working at a given time.
Besides the claim wasn't waitstaff gets "extra" tips for working hard, the claim was that waitstaff is tipped because they work hard. Don't move the goalposts.
>I honestly don't understand how you can say tips are not proportional to level of service and how level of service is entirely detached from working hard.
I tip the same if my service is shitty, I am not going to put an individual employee in a position of taking a pay cut when I can't know the exact reason something went wrong. I don't know enough about their operations to be punishing individual employees. Even if I could tell if it were an individual employee's fault, most places pool tips, so I'd be punishing the other employees working at the same time. So everyone gets the same tip from me.
I also simply just don't enjoy LARPing as a lord of my personal fiefdom.
Again, you get good service with good management, simple as that.
All tips are 'extra' that's the whole concept. It's money on top of what I am obliged to pay.
> you get good service with good management
Good management would pay a good wage and negate the need for tipping.
> I also simply just don't enjoy LARPing as a lord of my personal fiefdom.
Low blow. You are implying that I am less than you because I have some kind of financial control over waitstaff that I enjoy. A rather bad faith position to be in given how pious and understanding you are striving to come across as.
> most places pool tips
So now you agree kitchen staff get tipped too
> I tip the same if my service is shitty
Good for you. I don't think many people operate like this, so I'd say you are an edge case.
> it has zero to do with how hard they work, it's simply custom to tip waitstaff, even lazy waitstaff
Again, this is how you operate. Wikipedia lays out the common perception of tipping
"The customary amount of a tip can be a specific range of monetary amounts or a certain percentage of the bill based on the perceived quality of the service given."
I've experienced living in the UK without tipping, and in N.America with tipping. All I can say is it's night and day. Very few make a career out of working as waitstaff in the UK, plenty of people have a career in the service industry in N.America. Working hard for large tips can give you a living wage. In the UK because everyone is treated the same, waitstaff do the minimum for the minimum wage (there are exceptions, of course) and then find a better job. Since I left the UK this has begun to change, it's now reasonably common to tip in nicer restaurants, and guess what? The service is better and the waitstaff I assume are happier with more money in their pockets for their effort.
This is changing since now people are refusing to work those jobs. And yes, the entire industry is dumb and corrupt for having this practice in the first place, but it is what it is.
Perhaps you are unaware, but:
(1) US federal tipped minimum cash wage is $2.13, not $2.83, but also
(2) Most US states and territories have a tipped minimum wage above the federal tipped minimum (and also, though by a smaller margin, most have a tipped minimum above $2.83, which is PA’s tipped minimum.)
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
This does not change my point in the slightest, which is that wait staff need tips to survive because the tipped minimum wage is unlivable basically everywhere.
Its the same as the general minimum in several places, and at or above the federal general (not just tipped) minimum even more, so if its unlivable “basically everywhere” that's more than just a tipped minimum problem.
Yes, the general minimum wage is a problem too. But in 43 states the tipped minimum is a greater problem.
general minimum wage is peanuts, yes. but tipped waitstaff only make $2.83/hr is not true. If the employer did not make up the difference then they risk being fined/shutdown.
This is not true. I’ve been a service employee. Your employer withholds taxes on estimated tipped earnings, typically resulting in literal $0 paychecks. This is the norm in states with lower tipped minimums (might not hold true in states like CA). In fact, getting actual cash on your paycheck means the business was so slow that they needed to pay you to make up the difference (or close to it). In which case, barely over $7 is still abysmal to deal with the bs in that biz, and obviously far too little to actually live a decent life.
>In which case, barely over $7
Right, so tipped waitstaff only make $2.83/hr is not true.
True, tipped minimum is $2.13/hr.
> If the employer did not make up the difference then they risk being fined/shutdown.
Employers make up reported shortfalls in tipped jobs, but they also often treat shortfalls as a negative performance indicator, justifying termination. In jobs where there are cash tips (not everything through a payment system), this incentivizes enployees to assure that there are no shortfalls.
Tipped minimum is 2.13/hr is true but tipped waitstaff only make 2.13/hour is not true.
Does this reduce the need for waitstaff at most places? Yes. Is that bad for waitstaff. Yes. Is that a reason to want a person to physically write down my order and type it into a machine in the back? Eh.
We went out recently to a place where we ordered with our phones and had a great time. It was simple and painless, orders were served quickly and it didn’t matter that the only thing I ever said to staff was ”thanks” - I focused on my people instead.
The "tradition" is to sit, wait for a waiter to appear. Ask for purpose (lunch? big meal? just a drink?). Then you wait again for the correct menu to appear. Then you get asked for a drink. And wait for the drink. And then comes the longer wait where the waiter tries to detect when you are ready to order, if they see it at all.
Combined, that's some 20-30 mins in and the prepping of your meal hasn't even started yet.
Now if you're the kind of person that's going to be in there 3-4 hours anyway, the ritual doesn't harm, but it doesn't add much value either. It's needlessly slow and inefficient.
Your future dystopian nightmare is already here, and it's fine. In the Netherlands, some sushi restaurants work as follow. You are seated. There's an iPad for everyone, and people just tap what they want. Some minutes later, your food arrives. This supposed cold-hearted efficiency means I get to spend more time engaging with my friends, the very point of the visit.
By the way, you're not doing restaurants any favors with a slow and long visit. It means they can't use your table twice. So finish your meal in 1.5-2 hours and if still not bored with your friends, go to a damn bar.
This ritual or ceremony of waiter, menu, waiting, ordering, signalling for the cheque that you apparently find vile... I enjoy it. Any inefficiency you have declared is part of the experience of going out to eat.
You want fast food? Go get fast food.
You want a butler and cook? Hire them.
You want to go out to dinner? Here's a waitress, menu, and some time for walking back and forth between their station and your table and their other tables in their zone.
All of this is, or at least should be, factored in to the restaurant's business. It's been 100 years, at least in the US. If they don't get it by now, at least you should.
A restaurant wants to know your order. Why does this simple thing take 20-30 mins? Whom benefits? How does it enrich your experience exactly, this useless waiting and pointing at a menu?
Not around here, no. Was out eating yesterday. That place we went to has the exact same number of wait staff as before QR codes, the difference is only that they're not exhausted, they are not stressed when interacting with us (showing us the table, bringing food, checking in on us if we need something else, etc). We don't have to wait for them to get the bill or to pay. The overall atmosphere is much more relaxed now. And yes the other places I visit also keep the same number of staff as before, as far as I can tell.
This is a lot to unpack. I'm always surprised by people in the tech industry, where we seek to automate so much to make things better... be against innovation?
If a QR menu can tangibly provide a similar or better experience, for less cost, then it is objectively a better value for everyone involved. We shouldn't keep manual jobs around "just because." If that was a valid mindset, then we should get rid of all cars and have large caravans of people to trade across the country to ensure more people have jobs.
In this case, the question becomes "does the QR code provide a similar, or better, experience?" Only time will tell - but if it does, overall, then it will replace the wait staff, and this is a good thing.
This is why discussions of UBI take place, because we shouldn't intentionally do things less efficiently just to save jobs.
> The reason these wait staff get tips is because they work so hard, with less service comes less tips. Now you have a whole industry of overworked AND underpaid staff.
I don't disagree here, but tip culture is an absurd concept and I wish it would die in America. Just bake it into the price of the menu, and pay workers better.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/tipping-for-online-orders-becam...
There is a ton of abuse in the food service industry in America, not the least of which is paying servers less than 3 bucks per hour, and thats one of the cushier jobs. I was a server a long time, and sometimes you make the money in tips, sometimes you don't. I knew a lot of servers who put up with workplace abuse because of the illusion of easy cash the job creates. BOH staff work harder and usually take home even less.
Ordering from an app is great. No mistakes, no forgotten orders, and nobody abusing the machine.
What is varying quality is the menus served by the links in QR codes. Some can be great, some can be terrible, and everything in between. Same thing with paper menus, except they are also bulky.
This isn't a given. Places could design better instead of designing for paper and then just putting that online. But I still strongly prefer not to have to take out phone when with people.
A good menu generator, with competent web layout, readable, zoomable, searchable. Results may be hosted or sent as a bunch of static files.
The menu SPA page collects patrons' choices and forms a nice order for the waiter, as a text and as a QR code.
Flat monthly rate for up to 200 menu updates a day, effectively unlimited but preventing abuse. A small flat fee for serving the menus online and generation of the QR code. One-time fee for each piece of personalization / branding work beyond the standard templates.
Looks like a perfect side project for a couple of weekends, and then incessant low-intensity marketing efforts.
When I was in China I enjoyed using their mobile menus. A common layout I saw was a narrow vertical bar on the left with categories(appetizers, main, drinks, etc) and cards with photos + details on the right.
https://www.smartshanghai.com/uploads/articles/2019/06/63615...
It certainly wasn't a perfect system, but it was a lot better than the US, where restaurants have multiple different menu layouts, some are PDF, some let you pay via mobile, etc. The lack of relative uniformity makes for some positive but many negative user experiences.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27671788
Perfect example of a solution looking for a problem
If you're touching your phone right before eating you DEFINITELY want to wash your hands. Think about where your phone usually sits, tightly pressed against your body absorbing all the sweat and detritus and bacteria on your person. Think of the last time you actually washed or sanitized your phone too...
Many bars (that now call themselves "tap houses") have beer menus that are either only online, or printed in a 20pt font on a 54" LCD TV behind the bar.
It is super annoying to have to get up for each beer because the server doesn't know what #32 out of 70 is let alone which number is a lager, and then not be able to read the menu (because my eyes suck) until I'm leaning over the bar.
Super, super annoying.
The ideal situation is isn't the China situation people are describing of scanning with their phone and opening an app or custom made site, it's the situation in Japan with a small tablet on the table everyone just puts their orders into and food is delivered as the orders are received when combined with a call bell for refills or asking questions. I don't have to install anything or worry about tracking.
QR code already knows which table it is and even payment can be optional after the meal (tho I got so used to paying before I might just leave without paying nowadays).
This is only the case because restaurants had to hurriedly find a solution to a bazillion problems at once, on a strained budget. Corners get cut.
I know how a menu works. I read the food, see the price, and order. Personally I want to relax at a restaurant and not troubleshoot for myself and others, all while increasing my stress levels.
One way to fix this might be to encode the full text of the menu within the QR code, instead of a link?
QR codes are handy for easing people into eating out again... but wow; it can be pretty frustrating. Something I find myself thinking about more, is how Technology really needs to be more reliable, and how we really need to consider all the edge cases, before we can begin to replace the simple items such as a menu, let along more complex systems....Rant: I want something that will work 100% of the time.
E.g. https://www.meandu.com.au/
The menu is probably going to insist on using lower case letters, and the "Binary/byte" encoding will be interpreted as something between 7-bit ASCII and UTF-8 depending on the client. With the ECC payload 2,953 bytes sounds like quite a lot, THEN you look at the giant art linked in the article for even small examples. The size (version) 40 takes 177×177 width of decodable, clearly visible pixels.
At that point the QR code is in the ballpark of a printed 8.5x11 or A4 sheet of paper, and is far less useful to humans than a laser printed page with multiple sizes of lettering, super high contrast, and no requirement for a computer to decode.
I've read that the Android camera app is supposed to recognize QR codes, but it doesn't seem to on my phone.
Till I learnt about that, I used a simple QR code scanner from F-Droid (since Playstore is completely untrustworthy for generic utilities).
On my phone, I have to open up the Google app and click on the icon after the microphone on the search bar to open up Google Lens. Once I am in it, clicking on the three dots icon gives an option to add Lens to home screen.
I've been using that reader for about 10 years, it still works great despite seeing few updates: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.google.zxing.client.android
There may be quicker, prettier or more featureful apps, but this one serves my needs. I use zbarcam on my PC.
(It's open source so you can take a look at the source and then compile it yourself if you don't trust this page.)
Or one could have "surge pricing" — not desirable as a customer, but certainly for a dining establishment. And one could also collect more information on customers.
I'm still inclined toward tangible menus. For the one positive point (adaptability), I am reminded of one of the best restaurant meals that I ever had. The beer menu was a small laminated card, but the brief food menu was just written on a chalk board each day. When I arrived a few items were already struck with a line through them. One really can't beat that kind of simplicity, with no reliance on digital devices unless for payment, if desired.
(kelnos pointed out that I missed something in the article; edited to address that point.)
The article actually does mention that exact thing.
Allergies? Substitutions? This stuff just gets slightly harder/annoying, albeit not horribly difficult ofc. I find myself agreeing most with the authors on this, though:
> I despise spending the first 10 minutes of a social engagement on my phone.
This just sucks and I'm tired of it.
For example, there used to be a cafe around here with a designated 'no laptops, no work' area and some board games (R.I.P. Longfellow's). There's a local chain that doesn't even provide WiFi. Contrast that to the hyper-sterile Blue Bottle Coffee less than a mile away -- I actually do like their coffee, but I don't go there to socialize. It's a space optimized to cycle people in-and-out ASAP.
Pre-COVID I actually ran a small mailing list for people to hang out at rotating local cafes, so I get what you mean to some extent. Even then, you're probably right that doesn't seem as dire to me because I grew up post-2000.
I think if people had an awareness of their surroundings in these spaces, the spaces wouldn't have turned into sterilized off-campus work sites. But that may be asking too much from people who've never experienced it. I think this is what some of the 90s/00s startups were trying to replicate with their play rooms, but that's a far cry from sitting with a local dev and a taxi driver and a drunk musician spitting out ideas To me that's what the cafe is for.
(edit) I don't mean this to come off as the rant of an old gen X-er... it sounds to me like you had a real appreciation for the counterculture of ideas that could bubble up from having some limits and creativity in those spaces. You woulda loved the 90s. But maybe if enough people get sick of Blue Bottle Coffee and Starbucks, we can claw some humanity back. As it is, the less work-centric and more friends-and-family-centric parts if the world mostly reject the cafe as workplace model. They didn't used to find it so rude but they do now. I hope we have a backlash in the States if only because people really need that space to be verbal, interacting humans with each other. Especially on a lunch break.
That's probably this then, I've lived in Lyon all my life.
Funny, slightly dark story about Avignon. I became friendly with a guy there who was a good musician but turned out to be a bit of a...right wing type. National Front. There was a cafe on the square that was a gay club at night, and my girlfriend and I used to have coffee there in the day. One day this guy walked by and said "don't you know what this bar is where you're sitting?" I said, "come on, chill out, sit down." He took some convincing. So finally he sat down and I said, "I know you like Le Pen. How do you feel about sitting in front of a gay bar with an Filipina/Mexican and Jew/Argentine? Are you angry we're in your country?" He said, "as long as you're here because you're interested in France, I'm okay." Later, walking through town, he saw a kid urinating on the front step of an apartment. He shouted at the kid and the kid pulled a knife out. This guy tackled him. Still later we took a bus to the station through the banlieu and saw the desolation - she said, "what have they done to their country?"
Eh. I shouldn't tell these stories on HN. I guess it taught me that life is complicated and to bring it full circle to the cafe question, your view of the world is very relative to where you grew up, in what time period, and what you expect people to behave like.
Thank you for sharing that story, it's thanks to people like you that bring some new perspective I started to love my country for what it is.
That doesn't sound like a cafe (or a workplace)
I do wonder if having the menu on your phone could actually be more engaging to these kind of diners (or at least prevent them from doing anything else), so that the whole ordering food process is sped up?
https://gothamist.com/food/restaurant-finds-phone-zombies-sl...
A less-polite phrasing of your theory: Fed-up restaurant owners are trying to claw back as much as they can from the overhead and miseries of dealing with phone-addicted customers.