I'd be completely fine with QR code menus if the menu websites weren't horrifically bad 90% of the time. Doesn't take more than 10 seconds to scan the code.
Ironically I've seen people take a snap of the paper menu so that they can zoom in on their handheld screens. Which works much better than zooming in on a mobile website or in an app, so another point for the paper menu.
(not as often as seeing people snap the paper menu so that they can get it through their translation service of choice or share a copy without banging their heads together, apparently paper menus only get better through technology)
Your list feels a bit like r/WhereDidTheSodaGo, that is those silly infomercials that make it seem like putting dishes away in the cupboard is some monumental task. I mean "find the scanner apps"? Are there phones nowadays where the code scanner isn't just built into the camera app? I don't think I've used a dedicated scanner app for at least half a decade.
I find QR menus annoying when you're at a place where you specifically want to forget about your phone, like a nice restaurant for dinner, but I don't think they're some huge amount of work.
Don't overestimate the general audience. You can scan QR codes with every modern camera app, but if you don't know you can, you'll have to wait for someone to tell you. It's been months since I last saw a QR code and that was just because of a TOTP setup, I doubt most people use them in their daily lives. Many apps using them like to pretend you need to download their app to scan them as well.
My biggest issue, outside of the usual terrible websites these codes link to, is that I often find myself with a phone already on battery saving mode when I go into a restaurant at the end of the day. Having to do conscious battery management in case I want to order desert is just an unnecessary pain.
All of that takes 10% of the time it takes for a waiter to arrive at your table and take an order.
It’s also way faster for on iPhones which most restaurant customers have. You just lift your phone, tap the camera icon on the Lock Screen and it scans the code right away.
Then you just double tap the power button and it’s paid and ordered.
As an android user that hates Apple I thought this was funny.
65% of the market in the US, you know basically everyone! All the plebs with androids just sit home eating our turnips and porridge dreaming that one day our children will be able to afford to check their iphones at T.G.I. McFunsters.
Keep in mind that the Covid-19 putative justification for QR codes was touchless interaction --- multiple people weren't handling the same menu.
Printing out single-use paper menus runs less than a dime an impression. Laminated menus which can be sanitised after each use would have a per-instance cost below that and can be reused 100s to 1,000s of times.
* Support damn Apple/Google Pay without requiring a email, phone number, login, or app! Or even allow that payment at the register, either before or after service.
* Include the table number in the code!
* Include any weekend/public holiday/service/surcharge in the prices! It makes sense not to print a new menu for 1 day a week, but this is digital and already implemented in your system!
* Don't forcefully 'suggest' a tip before service has been delivered! (in places where tips aren't customary/required).
* For fast food/take out places, include back-pressure in your ordering/time estimates. If there are 20 orders queued with one cook, don't give an estimate of 5 minutes!
* Ordering in your own time is amazing!
* Pictures are great!
* Being able to instantly remove "out of stock" items, perfect!
If only restaurants actually did that. All I've ever gotten from these are broken websites. Pictures are generic stock pictures (hiring a food photographer every time you change the menu is expensive), ordering is still done the old fashioned way as a means to get some overpriced drinks on your table as soon as possible, and "out of stock" is something you get told when you order because asking the kitchen to update the website as they cook is just unnecessary overhead.
In theory this can be nice, but in practice restaurants seem to use these as a way to mess with prices on the fly or save on printing menus.
Ordering via code in the US would be a challenge I think. As you said, restaurants would lose the chance to offer drinks (and appetizers and specials), and servers might lose out on tips if there’s less customer interaction.
Also, I think you’d want to charge people as they order to incentivize people to double check their orders, and that would make it harder for people to seamlessly treat each other or split shared items.
In general I think people in the US have built a lot of little rituals and social customs around how restaurants work, for better or worse, and messing with those makes people uncomfortable, especially now after all the shifts around covid
> Ordering via code in the US would be a challenge I think. As you said, restaurants would lose the chance to offer drinks (and appetizers and specials), and servers might lose out on tips if there’s less customer interaction.
It might be a hard transition for a restaurant that currently has full table service, OTOH, it would be an easier challenge for a fast-casual restaurant (the kind that does “order & pay at the counter, get a number, then get served at your table”, to go to tableside ordering with QR menus.
What's the lowest rate you can do in-app purchases at in an app clip? And to put it in perspective with tips, how much of that goes to poor, underpaid Apple employees and how much goes to shareholders?
I've seen some patterns which suggest that might not always be the case. That is, apps which support Apple Pay but nudge you towards entering card details instead by making it not-the-default or hiding it behind an extra layer of UI.
For example, the Odeon cinemas app or Too Good To Go (food app). I always assumed it must be because the merchant pays a higher fee for Apple Pay transactions.
> I always assumed it must be because the merchant pays a higher fee for Apple Pay transactions.
I've never seen evidence of such, but there is certainly concern about becoming ever more reliant on credit card companies. So there can be an odd push to set up a first-party-account-based payment method (even if that winds up actually being backed by credit cards today).
The behavior doesn't always make immediate sense - for example, Walmart going as far as to special-order payment terminals without NFC so that they can never accept contactless, but then having you pay with their app - with a credit card online transaction, which I believe is a higher rate.
For some apps, it may be that they don't prioritize Apple Pay merely because they know only some browsers support it, and only some percentage of people on those browsers have set it up.
Nice, or rather: nice, as long as it can be wrapped in a good cross platform layer (which means that it boils down to website repackaged with the platform's out-of-browser payment mechanism).
I only know the supposed Android equivalent from the inside, and while I believe that it could be used for the "browser plus platform payment" pattern, it's main focus seems to be incremental delivery of large apps. That is a hard problem given the circumstances of the Android build process and their solution seems kind of stuck in those last 20%. Fortunately incremental is not really related to the temporary use case (if stuff like media in the menu is dealt with by the platform browser), but the attention given to (andvTwitter by) the much harder problem of incremental delivery isn't exactly helpful when that's not what you want to use it for.
> as long as it can be wrapped in a good cross platform layer (which means that it boils down to website repackaged with the platform's out-of-browser payment mechanism).
If you are trying to build a cross-platform application using some large framework, it will likely be too large. There is an upper size limit of 10 MB.
Once you move to platform specific tech, you can do things like grab just the image assets needed for a particular device dot pitch and resolution. Hypothetically you could use those in a WKWebView to render HTML content, although I do not know of existing efforts to do so.
If it is more than four screens I would expect the technology to be a bad fit. If you could figure out maintenance of menu changes, you'd likely be better off just using native libraries (similarly, sometimes its better to just use PHP and inline javascript)
The tipping function on electronic payments is a blight. I'm starting to see this regularly in Berlin, a place where tipping is not customary in many settings and just having this as a step you have to click through on the payment processor creates a level of social expectation.
Oh I do. But are teenagers going to have a thick skin for instance? It's fine for me to reject it for now, but if it becomes a social expectation it will be hard to say no without facing social consequences.
This is how American cultural norms proliferate through technology.
Agreed. I visited a pizza place in London a few years back which automatically added a 15% tip to all orders. You had to ask to remove it. Social engineering at its finest; most people won’t ask to remove a tip that’s already been added. I simply never returned; I refuse to support a business that favours tipping culture over higher minimum wages.
This is standard practice in London. Virtually all table-service restaurants (but not pubs) add service charge to your bill, usually 12.5%. (15% sounds excessive, I don’t think I’ve seen that).
You are not expected to tip in addition to the service charge, and by law, staff get paid 100% of any service charge and gratuities with no deductions.
> by law, staff get paid 100% of any service charge and gratuities with no deductions
If only that was true. Staff are only currently entitled to 100% of cash tips - service charges paid by card are not counted, and often form part of the staff's base pay, or go to the owners.
Funny how the Tories can push through sweeping changes to our constitution in a single night, while bills like this take... 7 years just to reach their second reading in the commons.
> "service charges paid by card are not counted, and often form part of the staff's base pay, or go to the owners."
This was true some years ago. But now days, most (vast majority of?) restaurants are compliant with the (upcoming) law and pay out all tips to staff. Source: friends who work in the industry. This issue has gotten significant media attention in the past any any restaurant not paying out tips fairly would get shamed pretty hard!
It’s 15% free extra cash flow for payment processors to calculate fees on, not for the restaurants. Then they might be able to double dip it by transfer fees, or maybe simply hold it and expire it until owners correctly configure some nuisance_feature.
I remember in Berlin back around 2004 that all the expat Americans were always online, and most of the Germans simply weren't. The things we knew about and talked about were different. Many people I knew didn't have broadband. We didn't have a shared culture.
Now everybody has phones and we are all feeding from the same spigots. Kids grew up like this.
I do think this has resulted in significant Americanization of German culture.
I remember travelling around Europe as a young adult in the late 00s.
In every country, the teenagers dressed slightly differently, and these styles were all very different to what I saw on the streets at home in London.
Now, in every European city the teenagers, and the younger adults <35yo, are all wearing one of a handful of styles, which have been unified across borders by social media.
It's been interesting to observe the monoculture as an American living in Germany. For instance, during the George Floyd protests in the states, there were mass demonstrations against police brutality in the US being held in Berlin.
I think that police brutality and racial discrimination are important issues, but I could not help wondering what those (mostly) teens and young adults hoped to accomplish by protesting what's happening in a completely different society thousands of kilometers away. Especially when there's plenty of discrimination to get upset about right here in Germany.
I've yet to see a QR-code ordering system that let you choose to pay at the end of your meal. The idea of deciding how much to tip before you've even interacted with any of the staff or tasted your meal seems utterly absurd to me - what are you actually tipping?
If I were running a restaurant I'd explicitly avoid using a pay-up-front system largely because I'm sure for most customers it would remove any incentive to tip based on the level of service/quality of food provided.
Revise your understanding of thick please. I a business is expecting me to do all the work to obtain service from them, they should be tipping me, not me tipping them. Next time I see Jeff Bezos's yacht maybe try to step on board and ask for my service fee...
> Support damn Apple/Google Pay without requiring a email, phone number, login, or app!
Wait, no idea how Apple works, but with Google Wallet in Europe you just tap your phone over the POS display and it goes straight to your credit card without any other step.
Nah, it’s the same, but the problem is that most QR menus force you to provide a phone number when ordering which is highly invasive and unnecessary. Just let me order and pay without collecting a bunch of PII.
US has NFC although to a lesser extent than EU/Canada. But this is talking about on-device Apple/Google Pay, where you get prompted to use your stored payment with native UI.
The tips are forcefully suggested to offset the cost of the order processing service.
These apps often take a 10%+ cut from every order. Which makes it hard to sell to a restaurant. If I pre-select 10% tip, most people will pay it making the app basically free and a no-brainer for the restaurant.
I think it should be communicated better, but this is how I've seen it work.
you are assuming that the experience should be tailored on the US market
most of those assumptions don't apply outside the US
for example: tipping at the checkout, bill splitting, different timezones, different prices based on holidays and whatnot, are not a common requirement (or non existent) where I live.
OTOH constantly changing menus are quite common, they are handled in the simplest way possible: you get a printed menu with the classics and then there are blackboards all around with the daily specials and/or the waiters will tell you what they are, before taking the order
QR code menus are extremely popular in countries that have wide digital payment adoptions, such as China.
Each QR code is linked to a table number. You take out your phone, turn on the camera with one click, scan the code, select the items you want to order, then click “pay”. It will take you to your digital payment provider (in China it’s often WeChat), which already has your payment info. Enter your PIN, and you’re done.
China has lacked affordable NFC payment terminals, so they went with QR codes instead (no special hardware needed, just mobile phones with cameras). They are increasingly moving to NFC, so it will mostly be like how digital payments work in the west eventually.
I really hate QR coupons at the grocery store. They are pretty easy when they scan, but grocery store glossy curved labeling makes that as hard as possible.
This part made me a bit mad on behalf of restaurant owners:
> paying for the QR menus on top of printed menus can be costly — especially if customers aren't using them.
I mean, hosting a low-volume static website and printing out a URL as a QR code are nearly free. So many tech businesses take advantage of restaurant owners (and restaurants are already an extremely low margin business) solely because most restauranteurs are not tech savvy.
Hosting is cheap, but people who can write HTML and CSS aren't. You need some kind of SaaS and that's where you need to know that you can use Squarespace/Wix/whatever free tool you prefer and just print out a QR code, but that's not something restaurant oriented SaaS providers will tell you.
Printing menus costs a few cents, laminating them a bit more. That's a tough price to beat.
Dodgy QR code sites are surprisingly common (pro tip: convert it back to text, and see if they are bouncing through a server so they can later charge you to prevent the code from “expiring”).
S3 sync + https lambda + cdn is a shockingly huge pain in the ass to setup, but once it is done, you just “s3 sync” the directory with the pdf you printed.
I agree with your general point though. That corner of the industry is full of predatory service providers.
Assuming $50 per hour it’s 260 hours of work. Divide that between a programmer (static websites still need too be coded) and designer that’s 130 hours each - less than a month of work. If the website was custom made (didn’t just use a premade Wordpress template) then this price is entirely believable.
I was making 4 page sites in 1998. Honest time, including a log in and management of content, was a few days of work (php 3, mysql, and the awesome js that auto placed the cursor on the login input). If it didn't have db driven content, it would be a few hours max.
I used to make websites for small businesses. That was a decade ago but still.
There's a lot of overhead with small clients. They don't have an internal employee who makes and sends the copy and the content. You really build everything from the ground up. You also have to host it and keep it online. There's only you; you're the whole IT department.
Also I made 50 an hour a decade ago as a student. It's a low income for a freelance professional with unsteady work.
Realistically, it's closer to a month of full time work, but it's spread over 3-6 months of talking, meeting, getting feedback, waiting for images etc.
It was one of my favourite jobs because I could apply tech to solve smaller, tangible problems. It was also the hardest to live from.
This math is out of touch with how good static websites are actually made these days, imho.
1. $100 per hour min for anyone good. Possibly more if in a high-cost labor market and/or working with certain agencies (mostly boutique). So that’s 130 hours right there.
2. No discussion of interaction with customer. That could be many, many hours depending on the customer and project specs.
3. The 130 hours for design and coding are way, way over actual time required unless the specs are highly stylized. My guess for each would be 4-20 hours, depending on complexity.
4. Depending on the site, copywriting and SEO might be a bigger labor/money sink than the design and coding.
All that said, there are many agencies who can make good, basic static websites for $5-7k plus hosting. The catch is knowing which ones are good.
Another possible issue, depending on the agency, is what is the smallest account that they will do business with. $13k may have been the agency’s minimum.
We have just evolved a type of racket to over charge people but this massively inefficient racket will hopefully die soon.
At this point it is really just a type of business tax and anti-progress. Paying 13k for a geocities site is increasing the probability the business fails.
I just can't imagine anyone paying that by 2030. Midjourney can already do the
most amazing design work but it is stuck at the conceptual level. It won't be stuck at that stage for ever.
That’s really high, unless there is part of the story that we are missing.
I could see it costing this much if there was extensive copywriting needs, detailed SEO needs, super-high performance requirements, and/or highly-stylized design.
In my experience they aren’t just static files. They are paying for an entire platform and integrated system that takes orders and payments. That’s expensive. But probably cheaper than a fully manual process.
One of the primary concerns regarding QR codes is their security. How can we ensure that malicious individuals are unable to place stickers containing QR codes that direct users to fraudulent payment sites pretending to be legitimate restaurants?
It’s the same threat space as those placing card skimming machines. It’s not like people are falling for this at a large scale. The ones that should care are the restaurants, since customers will just report the fraud and get refunded. In that case, restaurants will have staff validate each QR code anyways
Worse than accidentally paying a wrong vendor, with the right zero-click zero-day remote execution sploit visiting a malicious link can lead to pwnage of your device.
This is why it's better to never click links in emails or scan QRs. I remember an Airbnb listing that mandated extra "check in" via scanning some QR and denied stay otherwise... sorry but no way.
This is way overblown. How do you see this heist going down exactly?
Someone targets a restaurant, gets QR stickers made, replicates the restaurant ordering system, replaces them on tables, hopes the servers and customers don't notice, people order, somehow the food comes? Or they order from the waiter and then pay, and somehow the bill on the faked site is correct? Then the customer leaves, and the restaurant doesn't even notice and let's this keep happening.
> Customers don't want to take out their phones when dining out, because it can be perceived as rude or distracting
This is why I HATE QR code menus. I’m at a restaurant to enjoy time with others. If I wanted to stare at my phone, I’d have ordered takeout or delivery. It sets up the wrong vibe.
So I take it you don't look at physical menus either? I imagine that would largely detract from you enjoying time with your people as you'd be staring at a piece of paper.
I just ask for a real menu, restaurants still have them. The worry about getting COVID from a paper or plastic menu was wildly overblown. Sitting in a restaurant with other people is much more of a risk than touching a menu.
Funny how expensive restaurants print their menus daily, on paper, and then throw them away after the customer uses them. Cheap restaurants have big plastic-coated menus. Simply photocopying the menu for one-time use would get around the QR code hassle/risk, and the (probably unwarranted) germ phobia.
I always recommend https://qrmenucreator.com/ to restaurant owners. I feel it is simple enough for them to get started, gives features like instant changes and comes with a sane default layout/ui and is free of charge.
Payment and ordering would still be done in the classical way, but you get the chance to at least have an always up to date menu with the possibility to reflect when something is sold out or temporarily unavailable.
My favorite restaurants in Japan were the ones you could order at will at the table, or where you buy the ticket at the door. No flagging down servers, no waiting for the check, waiting to get checked out.
Seeing the outrage here just from scanning a qr code for the menu, it doesn't look like any automation is going to be coming any time soon.
For me, and others, ‘waiting’ is time to think, converse, or watch the world rotate. I also prefer the old fashioned method of communicating with a fellow human to order my food. I want the opposite of what you want, and that’s okay.
in my experience (here and there in the EU) servers still come and talk to you, simply the menu is a webpage. and nowadays they ask you if you need the hardcopy :)
Same. I’ve experienced over several dozen half baked QR / digital order implementations. I guess it’s an extreme case of the second system effect, where every vendor thinks they can build a better solution than the other 10, but they don’t.
The problem is that they don't do it to create a seamless experience. The temptation to suck in the personal data and exchange money for some "credits" is simply too big... and an excuse not to hire any front staff.
QR menus are a life saver for large meetups or people you know casually. You can just scan and pay without leaving the conversation, and there is no headache around trying to recover payments from everyone, especially if you don’t know them all.
I'm not visiting a restaurant to get food the fastest way, I do it to relax, for the experience, to talk to whoever is with me. I just hate QR workflows for that. Do it for fast food joints, but not in proper dining places.
If it's done well it can be in addition to regular service. One thing I really like is when they make it easy to order another round of drinks or make it easy to pay without having to wait for the server to get me the check or bring a terminal over to me.
I happen to hate the server based workflow. When I visit a restaurant I do it to relax, for the experience, and to talk to whoever is with me. Not mess around talking to a random employee.
I think a lot of the hate has to do with these being the worst possible implementations of such systems, like requiring you to create an account with a password just to order food.
Restaurants that have the latter are chains or catering to tourists, and unfortunately not going to have such a system.
The latter are ramen and other cheap eats, excluding shokudo. One “boutique” ramen shop owner has told me it was not cost effective to buy a ticket vending machine. I guess you have to be at a particular scale and throughput to have a ticket vending machine. And restaurants that optimize for throughput are usually not the best ones. Again unfortunately.
Then izakayas menus are in Kanji and even Japanese people have trouble ordering at times. That’s kind of the experience and point though.
Regarding QR code based menus, I’m curious whether you’ve experienced bad implementations. I live here, traveled all 47 prefectures maybe 3 times over, and have used dozens of digital menu implementation. There’s only been 1 or 2 that were smooth, but they were not ubiquitous. The face-to-face business / sales culture here means the tech products that spread are not necessarily the good ones.
Japanese do that because eating out is cheap enough that it is an option to go there to just eat, not rarely alone, but it's absolutely not common to go to the restaurant to be left alone.
all the things you mentioned as unpleasant are part of the reason why people gather to eat together
Just gimme that tablet, I hate QR but I wouldn’t mind poking that badly done HTML on Android 6, it just works better. Also feeds us food for nomikai thoughts to discuss what happens if we hit “Send” with “x99: ¥0 - Test Food Please Ignore” on the order.
The absolute worst menu experience I ever had was the Newark airport. All restaurants appear to be required to place tablets on the tables, which display a QR code that I have to scan on my phone, which requires me to create an account to order, does not accept cash, and has the audacity to ask for a tip. I flagged down a server to ask if I could just order directly, but apparently that's not allowed. I ended up going to Starbucks and getting a croissant, because I guess they had enough clout to not get roped into the mandatory ordering system.
I think they're trying to "scale" out order-taking to sell more. But interestingly it seems like they screw up the order more than if they took it from you in person.
I’m all for QR code ordering (and even better, QR code payment!). With a well thought out, streamlined UX, it can be a great timesaver. But it needs to be optional: trying to force it on everyone is just crazy.
I agree with this. After entering my card into Toast once, now from any restaurant I can scan the code, enter my tip amount and I'm done. So much better than using either cash or a card.
Similarly the online ordering for pickup sites that have sprung up to power the “non-DoorDash/Uber” option that restaurants want you to use. I like them, I like the usually not-inflated prices, but wish they would (A) be a fast, simple UI that works, and (B) stick to Apple/Google Pay and ask for no other info. No I don’t want to create a password or sign up for your newsletter!
iPhones can only do what Apple allows developers to do, which isn’t much.
A random payment provider can’t use NFC on the iPhone, but they can use the camera. So here we are. QR payments are super popular all over Asia (and yes they suck, but you can blame Apple)
The QR code is physically attached to the table and links directly to the menu and/or your bill. QR codes are cheap (any printer can print one) so don't need special equipment. And people already understand how to use QR codes: they might not understand what an NFC tag/beacon is, or it might not work with all devices.
What would NFC add that you can't do with a QR code?
(Use of a QR code doesn't preclude paying in the normal way by calling over a server and using a contactless payment terminal. It just gives you the option to skip that and pay directly from your device.)
China has the best adaptation of this trend that I have seen. Simple UIs with no registration, and direct payment with Alipay and Wechat. Seamless and helps with the language barrier as well.
In many cases you probably never even have to leave Wechat. That's assuming you even needed your phone at all and the waiter didn't just scan your face to pay.
Somehow I always end up defending China on HN but really I'm just sharing what I have seen/heard during my time there.
The majority of the Chinese do not worry about those things.
The great firewall is probably the greatest inconvenience you listed. However, the Chinese that come here and see FB and Google say, hey, maybe the firewall is not a bad idea. It's easy to circumvent anyway. It just blocks the majority of the population from western media.
The social credit system I don't know anything about, sorry.
The camps, AFAIK, are for Uyghurs classified as dangerous or high risk. At least, that's what the Han believe. The general understanding is if you do something like text "terrorism" as a Uyghur - you disappear for a while. I think part of this is because they are terrified the US will radicalize the muslim extremists. The truth is we barely have to - they hate the Chinese enough there are recorded events of the Uyghers just running around killing Han Chinese with knives. This was before cameras were super popular, but there is potato footage. This is partly why large cities in Xinjiang have such high security (think officers with MP5s outside every K-6 school) So, the Han do not protest at such camps.
Looks like the great firewall worked well for you. Painting an entire ethnicity as terrorists who slash away randomly at people is exactly the kind of propaganda it serves. Israel does the same for Palestinians. Yes, terrorism exists and should be supressed, but you can’t de-humanize entire populations based on that.
Picture yourself being jailed, taken away from your family, forced to learn another language and change your customs because “people who look like you can be dangerous”.
Internal destabilization by manipulating group fractures is a known specialty of US foreign policy.
China has valid reasons to be concerned about such methods given explicit admissions from the US government at the highest levels, that they are considered an enemy.
I'm in Thailand right now. The US is attempting to destabilize Thailand with the coming elections in order to break its strong ties to China, ties that are quite reasonable and rational given the cultural and economic ties between the countries. The Americans are seeking to get rid of the Thai monarchy, which the average Thai is not particularly interested in doing.
Even in the US your kids are not likely to get shot unless they're involved with youth drug gangs, that's where most of the child gun deaths come from. In France they trade the mass shooting incidents in for truck or bomb attacks.
The fact that you think this is something you should be concerned about when sending your kid to school shows that you lack critical thinking and base your idea of the US on agenda pushing media instead of rationality.
Well I was recently at a US airport that had automatic "scan your face to board the plane" gates (non-optional) instead of providing boarding pass + passport, so from there to "scan your face to pay" it's a very small leap. They already know all about you and have your biometric identity, what's tacking a payment method to it?
Sorry, I was responding in the original context of GP talking about Newark airport's terrible system. In it, scan your face to pay doesn't seem too far fetched; outside of it, I agree, pretty scary stuff.
Hah, I thought I was the only one! You sit in-front of that tablet at EWR and fiddle around.. I thought it might be due to a lot of people/orders, but places are always available. It's not Heathrow-like lines to enter restaurant.
> All restaurants appear to be required to place tablets on the tables
All the shops (except Starbucks) are operated by a single company: OTG. They are absolutely swimming in the monopoly dividend. There are several such airports in USA.
Not that familiar with the US, but presumably (just because it seems reasonable, and is the case here) they don't have to serve you at all (err, as long as it's not discriminating on grounds of a protected characteristic) so it would be weird for the law to require accepting cash when it also allowed them to nominally comply with that but then refuse to serve anyone who wouldn't pay by card?
I believe the general rule in the US (unless there are state-specific laws that override this) is that a company is free to not do business with a cash customer, but once they do business with a customer, they cannot refuse cash payment. IE, a store could refuse to sell products for cash, but a restaurant couldn't refuse to accept cash in payment for the meal you've already eaten.
If you ate, and tried to give the restaurant $50 cash to cover the bill, what's the restaurant going to do? Call the cops? The cops will just tell the owner to take the cash or forget about it.
I hate Newark airport so much because of this. Even worse, as a non-American just visiting, I tend to not have mobile data stateside. The wifi is pretty shit in many spots, I've had to literally leave one place because I could not get a wifi signal to even order and the staff refused to help. All this nonsense while there is a tablet right in front of me! Stupid company that does this, stupid airport that allowed a company to do this.
Newark is unquestionably one of the worst airports in the country. It seems to be carefully designed to make people feel unwelcome. It reminds me of the Terry Pratchett book where a building had been constructed in the shape of a demonic rune so that people moving around would activate it as if it were an evil prayer wheel.
It uses a lot of the same "hostile architecture" techniques that public spaces use to keep homeless people out. There's literally nowhere you can get comfortable, unless you want to lay on the ground in the middle of traffic.
Side note, I was thinking of Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett + Neil Gaiman, and it was a roadway, not a building:
> In fact, very few people on the face of the planet know that the very shape of the M25 forms the sigil odegra in the language of the Black Priesthood of Ancient Mu, and means "Hail the Great Beast, Devourer of Worlds." The thousands of motorists who daily fume their way around its serpentine lengths have the same effect as water on a prayer wheel, grinding out an endless fog of low-grade evil to pollute the metaphysical atmosphere for scores of miles around.
I had an experience at Newark where I sat down an opened one of the mobile menu's only for a 30 second ad to start playing, the server told me "oh yeah just watch the ad and you can order after that". Like really? I'm already paying way over what the food would normally cost and you guys have the audacity to stuff an ad in front of me before I even have the privilege.
Nice I will never fly through here ever in my life and will pay like 300$ extra just to avoid it in the future if I have to. Thanks for the tip, that is actually super useful.
If it makes you feel any better, Newark's restaurant ordering system was terrible right from when they replaced all the restaurants and added those IPads at every seat even before they threw QR codes into the mix. I wrote a blog post about it in around 2014 or so (ignore the update date - that was me resurrecting the blog after a server failure) https://www.uncarved.com/articles/falafel/
Absolutely. Newark airport is a food desert disaster because of this. I've learned that if I need to stop through Newark, always buy enough food for the layover at the previous airport since it's impossible to get anything in Newark. Thanks for the Starbucks tip, I hadn't noticed that (as I don't drink coffee).
It is still very popular throughout Asia Pacific and even starting its journey in places like South Korea and Japan who have had alternative ways of ordering food.
We'll need your phone number and email. Here are the terms and conditions. Expecting mobile website, what kind of weirdo are you?! Download our app or Facebook. Pay with our credits, minimum recharge amount is 20 EUR. The balance expires after 12 months. We gamified the UI to piss you off even more. Enjoy!
> The bar dropped its coded menus in summer 2021, “the moment that it was OK for us to go back to a proper menu,” he said. His main objection to them? “A menu is a window to the soul of the restaurant, and a QR code has no soul.”
Nice intro phrase.
In the past 3 years of requesting 3-D menus, they were usually available. Otherwise, a Socratic menu emerged from conversation with staff or patrons.
last time I encountered this, I had my phone on me, but had no cell signal in the area and the restaurant had no public wifi. I asked my server for a physical menu and they brought me a goddamn iPad with the brightness locked to max in a dimly lit restaurant. Absolutely awful.
Even though I pay with a debit card most of the time, I still refuse to frequent card-only places exactly for that reason. Having a smartphone on you should never by a requirement to participate in society.
> A dining innovation that once looked like the future has worn out its welcome with many restaurateurs, customers and servers who say it takes the joy out of dining.
This starts out bad. I don't think the process of talking to waiter first, and at the end trying to wave someone down so I can just pay to get out of there, is the "joy of dining".
I want to eat and talk to whoever I am with, not talk to the waiter and wait for my bill.
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[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 312 ms ] thread* You must connected to inet,
* unlock your phone
* find the scanner apps
* pointing your phone to qrcode
* scan
* wait for menu loaded. depend on inet & server speed.
wtf. peoples came to restaurant as customer. to eat. Not as an inventory staff.
(not as often as seeing people snap the paper menu so that they can get it through their translation service of choice or share a copy without banging their heads together, apparently paper menus only get better through technology)
I find QR menus annoying when you're at a place where you specifically want to forget about your phone, like a nice restaurant for dinner, but I don't think they're some huge amount of work.
My biggest issue, outside of the usual terrible websites these codes link to, is that I often find myself with a phone already on battery saving mode when I go into a restaurant at the end of the day. Having to do conscious battery management in case I want to order desert is just an unnecessary pain.
I mean, yeah, sure, in 2019. But it's 2023, and certain world events forced it so that even my parents can read a QR code with their phone now.
- Realize restaurant is in a cell dead spot.
- Wander around looking for wifi code.
- Conclude the hand-written I in the password is an l or 1 on your third attempt typing it in.
QR code gets printed at different resolution and or ratio, and or laminated glare, and now not getting scanned.
It’s also way faster for on iPhones which most restaurant customers have. You just lift your phone, tap the camera icon on the Lock Screen and it scans the code right away.
Then you just double tap the power button and it’s paid and ordered.
That's a very US centric view of the world.
65% of the market in the US, you know basically everyone! All the plebs with androids just sit home eating our turnips and porridge dreaming that one day our children will be able to afford to check their iphones at T.G.I. McFunsters.
Printing out single-use paper menus runs less than a dime an impression. Laminated menus which can be sanitised after each use would have a per-instance cost below that and can be reused 100s to 1,000s of times.
But do people think there is room for a better menu experience through the browser?
I feel like there is but haven't really seen it yet.
* Include the table number in the code!
* Include any weekend/public holiday/service/surcharge in the prices! It makes sense not to print a new menu for 1 day a week, but this is digital and already implemented in your system!
* Don't forcefully 'suggest' a tip before service has been delivered! (in places where tips aren't customary/required).
* For fast food/take out places, include back-pressure in your ordering/time estimates. If there are 20 orders queued with one cook, don't give an estimate of 5 minutes!
* Ordering in your own time is amazing!
* Pictures are great!
* Being able to instantly remove "out of stock" items, perfect!
* Bill splitting "by default" is useful!
In theory this can be nice, but in practice restaurants seem to use these as a way to mess with prices on the fly or save on printing menus.
Also, I think you’d want to charge people as they order to incentivize people to double check their orders, and that would make it harder for people to seamlessly treat each other or split shared items.
In general I think people in the US have built a lot of little rituals and social customs around how restaurants work, for better or worse, and messing with those makes people uncomfortable, especially now after all the shifts around covid
It might be a hard transition for a restaurant that currently has full table service, OTOH, it would be an easier challenge for a fast-casual restaurant (the kind that does “order & pay at the counter, get a number, then get served at your table”, to go to tableside ordering with QR menus.
That's precisely what Apple's App Clips are. I've used these on several restaurant receipts and they're amazing:
https://developer.apple.com/app-clips/
You basically just scan the QR, checkout instantly with Apple Pay, and nothing to sign up for, and no horrible App to install.
Apple do get a small cut of all Apple Pay transactions, reported to be 0.15% in the US. In Europe it will be substantially less.
For example, the Odeon cinemas app or Too Good To Go (food app). I always assumed it must be because the merchant pays a higher fee for Apple Pay transactions.
I've never seen evidence of such, but there is certainly concern about becoming ever more reliant on credit card companies. So there can be an odd push to set up a first-party-account-based payment method (even if that winds up actually being backed by credit cards today).
The behavior doesn't always make immediate sense - for example, Walmart going as far as to special-order payment terminals without NFC so that they can never accept contactless, but then having you pay with their app - with a credit card online transaction, which I believe is a higher rate.
For some apps, it may be that they don't prioritize Apple Pay merely because they know only some browsers support it, and only some percentage of people on those browsers have set it up.
I only know the supposed Android equivalent from the inside, and while I believe that it could be used for the "browser plus platform payment" pattern, it's main focus seems to be incremental delivery of large apps. That is a hard problem given the circumstances of the Android build process and their solution seems kind of stuck in those last 20%. Fortunately incremental is not really related to the temporary use case (if stuff like media in the menu is dealt with by the platform browser), but the attention given to (andvTwitter by) the much harder problem of incremental delivery isn't exactly helpful when that's not what you want to use it for.
If you are trying to build a cross-platform application using some large framework, it will likely be too large. There is an upper size limit of 10 MB.
Once you move to platform specific tech, you can do things like grab just the image assets needed for a particular device dot pitch and resolution. Hypothetically you could use those in a WKWebView to render HTML content, although I do not know of existing efforts to do so.
If it is more than four screens I would expect the technology to be a bad fit. If you could figure out maintenance of menu changes, you'd likely be better off just using native libraries (similarly, sometimes its better to just use PHP and inline javascript)
Apps are an attack on the open web and I don't want them being able to do things like access location or other app-related things.
This is how American cultural norms proliferate through technology.
You are not expected to tip in addition to the service charge, and by law, staff get paid 100% of any service charge and gratuities with no deductions.
If only that was true. Staff are only currently entitled to 100% of cash tips - service charges paid by card are not counted, and often form part of the staff's base pay, or go to the owners.
Parliament has voted through a law which will change this - but it isn't in force yet. https://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/knowledge/articles/2021/10/...
Funny how the Tories can push through sweeping changes to our constitution in a single night, while bills like this take... 7 years just to reach their second reading in the commons.
https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2927
This was true some years ago. But now days, most (vast majority of?) restaurants are compliant with the (upcoming) law and pay out all tips to staff. Source: friends who work in the industry. This issue has gotten significant media attention in the past any any restaurant not paying out tips fairly would get shamed pretty hard!
I disagree that it's all restaurants, it's closer to half. The other half might have it for groups 6+ or 8+ people.
Now everybody has phones and we are all feeding from the same spigots. Kids grew up like this.
I do think this has resulted in significant Americanization of German culture.
In every country, the teenagers dressed slightly differently, and these styles were all very different to what I saw on the streets at home in London.
Now, in every European city the teenagers, and the younger adults <35yo, are all wearing one of a handful of styles, which have been unified across borders by social media.
I think that police brutality and racial discrimination are important issues, but I could not help wondering what those (mostly) teens and young adults hoped to accomplish by protesting what's happening in a completely different society thousands of kilometers away. Especially when there's plenty of discrimination to get upset about right here in Germany.
Wait, no idea how Apple works, but with Google Wallet in Europe you just tap your phone over the POS display and it goes straight to your credit card without any other step.
Is that different in US?
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_w...
These apps often take a 10%+ cut from every order. Which makes it hard to sell to a restaurant. If I pre-select 10% tip, most people will pay it making the app basically free and a no-brainer for the restaurant.
I think it should be communicated better, but this is how I've seen it work.
most of those assumptions don't apply outside the US
for example: tipping at the checkout, bill splitting, different timezones, different prices based on holidays and whatnot, are not a common requirement (or non existent) where I live.
OTOH constantly changing menus are quite common, they are handled in the simplest way possible: you get a printed menu with the classics and then there are blackboards all around with the daily specials and/or the waiters will tell you what they are, before taking the order
https://10619-2.s.cdn12.com/m0/Rome-Taverna-Romana-menu.jpg
I really hate QR coupons at the grocery store. They are pretty easy when they scan, but grocery store glossy curved labeling makes that as hard as possible.
> paying for the QR menus on top of printed menus can be costly — especially if customers aren't using them.
I mean, hosting a low-volume static website and printing out a URL as a QR code are nearly free. So many tech businesses take advantage of restaurant owners (and restaurants are already an extremely low margin business) solely because most restauranteurs are not tech savvy.
Printing menus costs a few cents, laminating them a bit more. That's a tough price to beat.
The level of "create a static online version of my menu" is something ChatGPT could actually do quite easily.
Dodgy QR code sites are surprisingly common (pro tip: convert it back to text, and see if they are bouncing through a server so they can later charge you to prevent the code from “expiring”).
S3 sync + https lambda + cdn is a shockingly huge pain in the ass to setup, but once it is done, you just “s3 sync” the directory with the pdf you printed.
I agree with your general point though. That corner of the industry is full of predatory service providers.
$13,000 dollars + monthly hosting charges.
There's a lot of overhead with small clients. They don't have an internal employee who makes and sends the copy and the content. You really build everything from the ground up. You also have to host it and keep it online. There's only you; you're the whole IT department.
Also I made 50 an hour a decade ago as a student. It's a low income for a freelance professional with unsteady work.
Realistically, it's closer to a month of full time work, but it's spread over 3-6 months of talking, meeting, getting feedback, waiting for images etc.
It was one of my favourite jobs because I could apply tech to solve smaller, tangible problems. It was also the hardest to live from.
1. $100 per hour min for anyone good. Possibly more if in a high-cost labor market and/or working with certain agencies (mostly boutique). So that’s 130 hours right there.
2. No discussion of interaction with customer. That could be many, many hours depending on the customer and project specs.
3. The 130 hours for design and coding are way, way over actual time required unless the specs are highly stylized. My guess for each would be 4-20 hours, depending on complexity.
4. Depending on the site, copywriting and SEO might be a bigger labor/money sink than the design and coding.
All that said, there are many agencies who can make good, basic static websites for $5-7k plus hosting. The catch is knowing which ones are good.
Another possible issue, depending on the agency, is what is the smallest account that they will do business with. $13k may have been the agency’s minimum.
At this point it is really just a type of business tax and anti-progress. Paying 13k for a geocities site is increasing the probability the business fails.
I just can't imagine anyone paying that by 2030. Midjourney can already do the most amazing design work but it is stuck at the conceptual level. It won't be stuck at that stage for ever.
I could see it costing this much if there was extensive copywriting needs, detailed SEO needs, super-high performance requirements, and/or highly-stylized design.
Otherwise, that’s way overpriced.
This is why it's better to never click links in emails or scan QRs. I remember an Airbnb listing that mandated extra "check in" via scanning some QR and denied stay otherwise... sorry but no way.
Someone targets a restaurant, gets QR stickers made, replicates the restaurant ordering system, replaces them on tables, hopes the servers and customers don't notice, people order, somehow the food comes? Or they order from the waiter and then pay, and somehow the bill on the faked site is correct? Then the customer leaves, and the restaurant doesn't even notice and let's this keep happening.
Oceans 14 we have your plot right here!
This is why I HATE QR code menus. I’m at a restaurant to enjoy time with others. If I wanted to stare at my phone, I’d have ordered takeout or delivery. It sets up the wrong vibe.
Funny how expensive restaurants print their menus daily, on paper, and then throw them away after the customer uses them. Cheap restaurants have big plastic-coated menus. Simply photocopying the menu for one-time use would get around the QR code hassle/risk, and the (probably unwarranted) germ phobia.
The QR codes have nothing to do with the germ phobia, but with restaurants wanting to hire less staff. The customer does the waiter's job now.
Submitters: "Please submit the original source. If a post reports on something found on another site, submit the latter." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://archive.ph/XrO8i
My favorite restaurants in Japan were the ones you could order at will at the table, or where you buy the ticket at the door. No flagging down servers, no waiting for the check, waiting to get checked out.
Seeing the outrage here just from scanning a qr code for the menu, it doesn't look like any automation is going to be coming any time soon.
In the US it’s seen as pure cost cutting measure, and not integrated smoothly as part of the considered experience a lot of the time.
When it’s considered as part of the experience it works tremendously well, it’s just not common enough
It goes both ways.
The latter are ramen and other cheap eats, excluding shokudo. One “boutique” ramen shop owner has told me it was not cost effective to buy a ticket vending machine. I guess you have to be at a particular scale and throughput to have a ticket vending machine. And restaurants that optimize for throughput are usually not the best ones. Again unfortunately.
Then izakayas menus are in Kanji and even Japanese people have trouble ordering at times. That’s kind of the experience and point though.
Regarding QR code based menus, I’m curious whether you’ve experienced bad implementations. I live here, traveled all 47 prefectures maybe 3 times over, and have used dozens of digital menu implementation. There’s only been 1 or 2 that were smooth, but they were not ubiquitous. The face-to-face business / sales culture here means the tech products that spread are not necessarily the good ones.
Japanese do that because eating out is cheap enough that it is an option to go there to just eat, not rarely alone, but it's absolutely not common to go to the restaurant to be left alone.
all the things you mentioned as unpleasant are part of the reason why people gather to eat together
A random payment provider can’t use NFC on the iPhone, but they can use the camera. So here we are. QR payments are super popular all over Asia (and yes they suck, but you can blame Apple)
What would NFC add that you can't do with a QR code?
(Use of a QR code doesn't preclude paying in the normal way by calling over a server and using a contactless payment terminal. It just gives you the option to skip that and pay directly from your device.)
But I'll bite.
Somehow I always end up defending China on HN but really I'm just sharing what I have seen/heard during my time there.
The majority of the Chinese do not worry about those things.
The great firewall is probably the greatest inconvenience you listed. However, the Chinese that come here and see FB and Google say, hey, maybe the firewall is not a bad idea. It's easy to circumvent anyway. It just blocks the majority of the population from western media.
The social credit system I don't know anything about, sorry.
The camps, AFAIK, are for Uyghurs classified as dangerous or high risk. At least, that's what the Han believe. The general understanding is if you do something like text "terrorism" as a Uyghur - you disappear for a while. I think part of this is because they are terrified the US will radicalize the muslim extremists. The truth is we barely have to - they hate the Chinese enough there are recorded events of the Uyghers just running around killing Han Chinese with knives. This was before cameras were super popular, but there is potato footage. This is partly why large cities in Xinjiang have such high security (think officers with MP5s outside every K-6 school) So, the Han do not protest at such camps.
Picture yourself being jailed, taken away from your family, forced to learn another language and change your customs because “people who look like you can be dangerous”.
China has valid reasons to be concerned about such methods given explicit admissions from the US government at the highest levels, that they are considered an enemy.
I'm in Thailand right now. The US is attempting to destabilize Thailand with the coming elections in order to break its strong ties to China, ties that are quite reasonable and rational given the cultural and economic ties between the countries. The Americans are seeking to get rid of the Thai monarchy, which the average Thai is not particularly interested in doing.
I have a quite sobering article for you, which has a very different take on the Chinese propaganda.
https://www.theatlantic.com/the-uyghur-chronicles/
https://youtu.be/mCtOh_7_tDo
This is an honest to God, real reply to that question :D
"Macron is an asshole"
Without thinking it will affect my life in any way.
So at this point, I'll just assume you are a troll and ignore you.
I think that, in terms of insulting the leader... most Chinese are pretty happy with Xi? But yeah, totalitarian regime, insulting leader, bad idea.
Even in the US your kids are not likely to get shot unless they're involved with youth drug gangs, that's where most of the child gun deaths come from. In France they trade the mass shooting incidents in for truck or bomb attacks.
Propaganda and brainwashing is probably a worse risk than that.
Buying things is a benign thing of your day to day life. Scanning your face to pay is a wet dream for surveillance states.
All the shops (except Starbucks) are operated by a single company: OTG. They are absolutely swimming in the monopoly dividend. There are several such airports in USA.
https://www.federalreserve.gov/faqs/currency_12772.htm
Blocking unbanked people from the economy is sorta bad if you have any kind of homeless population.
If you ate, and tried to give the restaurant $50 cash to cover the bill, what's the restaurant going to do? Call the cops? The cops will just tell the owner to take the cash or forget about it.
> In fact, very few people on the face of the planet know that the very shape of the M25 forms the sigil odegra in the language of the Black Priesthood of Ancient Mu, and means "Hail the Great Beast, Devourer of Worlds." The thousands of motorists who daily fume their way around its serpentine lengths have the same effect as water on a prayer wheel, grinding out an endless fog of low-grade evil to pollute the metaphysical atmosphere for scores of miles around.
Magnificent book.
It is still very popular throughout Asia Pacific and even starting its journey in places like South Korea and Japan who have had alternative ways of ordering food.
Nice intro phrase.
In the past 3 years of requesting 3-D menus, they were usually available. Otherwise, a Socratic menu emerged from conversation with staff or patrons.
I refuse to provide PII to strangers to buy food.
These were terrible and I'm glad they are going away.
Normalize not needing a smartphone or a payment card to exist in society.
This starts out bad. I don't think the process of talking to waiter first, and at the end trying to wave someone down so I can just pay to get out of there, is the "joy of dining".
I want to eat and talk to whoever I am with, not talk to the waiter and wait for my bill.