I’ve yet to experience the self-ordering QR code thing, which sounds quite useful. In the UK, some chains had apps where you could order.
In the US, at least here in New England a menu QR code is a link to a PDF or a nightmare website (recently saw one that was a canva.com presentation formatted for a desktop computer or a TV) — a paper menu is almost always better around here.
And people cook the food, people do the dishes, people clean the restaurant, do maintenance on the chairs... All costs that should simply be part of the quoted price.
In theory a digital menu should be better for accessibility but I’ve found they’re either a link to a PDF (which offers some ability to zoom in) or they’re a hideous nightmare website with no easy way to increase font sizes due to them being more like a presentation rather than a simple menu.
Yea, my experience as well. Cramming a 11x14 foldout menu onto a phone pdf is not a good UX.
That said, I find the kiosk app at Panera Bread a much better experience than ordering from the menu simply because there’s a lot more information. Options, bread types, ingredients, etc. You can claw that out of the clerk, but it’s a bit arduous.
So it can be done well. It just isn’t. And it’s don’t really blame the restaurants either. A comprehensive digital experience is really not their ballywick.
Then there was a time I went to an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. There, we had no menus.
The server came up, “What do you want?”
“Well, what do you have?”
“We’re an Italian restaurant. What do you want?”
And I told him, and I got it. I mean, indeed, it was an Italian restaurant.
I'll buck the trend and say that I love QR code menus. It lets us order at our own pace, even after our initial order, without waiting on the waiter. Additionally, my wife and I can both queue up what we want in the cart on each of our own phones and discuss before submitting the order. It's just way more convenient, the whole "wait on a stranger to take our order" thing isn't a necessary component of the restaurant experience for me, and if I need to ask questions, I've never had issues waving over a worker to help.
Full mobile ordering is great, but there’s lots of places that have the worst of both worlds: a QR code linking to a digital menu, but still take orders with the waiter
FWIW, I vote heavily against full mobile ordering. The more I have to do on my phone the worse it is.
Things that admittedly make this worse:
- Using an older phone.
- Not saving credit cards to your phone.
It's just slow and clunky, and -- it feels like work.
I don't want to file a JIRA ticket to get my appetizer. I don't want to fill out a form. I just want to sit down and tell somebody.
Another way to look at this is that it's the "self checkout" version of dining out. Self checkout is slow, because it's different at every store, and you will never be as fast as a cashier who has some practice with their particular system. Same deal here.
> I'll buck the trend and say that I love QR code menus. It lets us order at our own pace, even after our initial order, without waiting on the waiter.
Why not a paper menu plus order online? You could even have the order QR code and URL printed on the menu.
Many restaurants (quite possibly most) take away the menus after you've ordered and traditionally had to bring them back if you wanted dessert/another round of drinks/etc. If they left menus, they're fighting space on what is often a table barely large enough to hold a plate for everyone seated at it
Most of the time the only reason is there is just no room on the table for the menus to be kept.
There are a few places (usually burger joints) where the menu is a piece of paper that actually serve as a placemat that the waiters won't take back from you. I doubt a lot of people are changing their mind. I've rarely seen that.
Nah. They take away physical menus because they need them for the next guests. Restaurants never - even high-end ones (which might be surprising, but high-end restaurants have more-expensive to produce menus) - never have enough menus. Owners skimp on printing menus because they're as penny-foolish as any other out-of-touch manager. At the worst places waiters hurry guests' orders, and hang around trying to intercept menus from each other. It creates a whole load of unnecessary stress: just make some more damn menus!
Source: waited lots of tables in lots of restaurants.
I'm describing regular sit down restaurants. Everything about the restaurant is the same except ordering with the waiter is replaced with a webpage you order off of. The QR code even automatically enters your own table number since each table's QR code is unique. The PDF thing sounds super lazy, thankfully never come across that before.
I have only seen online ordering from a table as you describe at a couple of places. Maybe two times. Most QR codes I see link to a (often nightmarish) website or a PDF that would be suitable for printing a paper menu.
They’re certainly good at sushi conveyor belt bars, where most people don’t care which food they’re selecting beyond what it looks like but a small minority want to know what they’re actually biting into.
Handheld card readers are price competitive, or at least marginally more expensive. I’d attribute it more to the time investment of switching POS systems.
Everything is weird in the US so can't tell how different it would be, but in Chile you can get a handheld personal car reader [1][2] for around ~25USD to 50USD, even if they needed something more specialized I really can't see them becoming prohibitively expensive, even the matching POS from the same company is just like 400USD[3]
I can get the same deal here if I look for it, nothing special about Chile, etc. Most restaurant/business owners aren't tech savvy and will switch when their equipment fails, not to keep up with tech trends.
The UK also does "chip and pin" authentication for requests, so the waitstaff are forced to either bring a portable cardreader to you or for you to walk to a terminal and enter a code. I think this is why mobile card readers are so common.
In the US, most credit card transactions are simply "(swipe or chip)". If you have the card, you can use it. Gas stations seem to be the slight exception in America -- they generally require "(swipe or chip) and billing zipcode". This is quite funky and not at all secure against fraud.
In the US a few months ago, a food truck used one of those carbon copy card swiper things. And yesterday I tried to pay for a cabin reservation and the lady took it down over the phone and said she'd run it next week. Many grocery stores and gas stations still swipe. Our tax people still use faxes and our hospitals manually create and deliver CD-ROMs for medical imaging. We're not a very advanced country, lol.
I wish swipe/on card numbers were completely gone here and chip only too. I use my phone for most purchases, but most restaurants here haven't caught up on wireless pay.
because america hasn't caught up with the rest of the world. I'd guess about half of all restaurants still take your card to swipe it at a machine tethered to the register. it's getting less common in stores and fast food restaurants though.
Probably at least 80% of sitdown restaurants in my suburban town in the US seem to have those portable card readers. Now I can’t even think of the last restaurant I ate at that didn’t do that.
I'm afraid most US chains/restaurants will only change their equipment when their equipment dies. It's going to be a few more years to a decade I think. Most of these units are pretty reliable and can go for a decade or more easily. At least most POS at gas stations, chain stores take NFC now.
Tap phone, confirm payment, tap fingerprint reader to confirm.
vs
Try to flag down waiter (x5), ask for the bill, wait for waiter to return with the mobile POS, fiddle around in your wallet to find the card, tap card, decline tip, write PIN code, finally get to leave.
most restaurants here are take your code to their payment station. With all the insurance against fraud in the USA I don't care. I've only had it happen once and I'm pretty sure it was with a skimmer/MITM at a big box store roughly 15 years ago. They actually had used my 3 digit code on the back in an online purchase.
I like the mobile order option the best, but very few places I've been have that.
The QR option is nice, as long as it's just an option. A physical menu is, generally, much nicer to use. That being said, sometimes you want to go back and reference what you ordered, or other options (like for drinks) and ... the menus have all been taken away.
Wrong. When you pay with a credit card it gives your name and amount. Activate a QR code and you're giving up your IP address at the bare minimum, it becomes possible to calculate how long you've been in the restaurant and who knows what else based on the cookies that come back or pdf telemetry. Every day there are stories here on HN about how people's data can be exfiltrated from their phones, but somehow you think this could never happen in a restaurant?
> you're giving up your IP address at the bare minimum
Your phone's dynamic IP. Which is a redundant, and much weaker, identification than your payment info.
> it becomes possible to calculate how long you've been in the restaurant
Also doable by the staff.. using their eyes. And most restaurants will use some form of system anyway to track the orders and payments, because that information is vital to running a functioning restaurant.
Conventional observation by restaurant staff isn't bundled and resold by data brokers. I find it astonishing that a reader of HN would be unaware of commercial data collection and resale practices.
Your credit card transaction is bundled and sold. Because it has value in establishing a consumer profile for marketing.
The fact that you visited some restaurant PDF or webpage from a dynamic IP address is not.
Like the parent commenter said, any information about how long the table is being occupied comes from the POS and reservation system. But that data is for the restaurant -- there's no market in selling it, though it absolutely has value to the restaurant for its business decisions. But your phone isn't being used for that part.
Data collection is certainly a thing. But it happens in specific ways for specific purposes.
Using a credit card tied to your identity, but then worrying about revealing your phone's IP address while ordering, doesn't make any sense.
No, it's you that don't seem to understand. I'm well aware that paying with your credit generates information which is repackaged and sold. But following a QR code to a webpage potentially opens your phone up to cookies, tracking pixels, and all sorts of other things, depending on what permissions you give it or what exploits can be leveraged. All the major fast food vendors have their own apps now, for example. One hopes they don't exfiltrate unrelated data from the phone, but it's not a certainty and it's even less of a certainty if individual restaurants start encouraging their customers to install a generic 'my tasty meal' app.
I often end up ordering more thanks to QR. No longer do I have to try to flag down a waiter to get a menu looking for desserts after I'm done eating. Then having to flag them down again to order. Such a hassle I often don't bother. Same with getting another drink.
With QR? Just scan it an order. Done eating? Just leave, having already paid in the app. Also removes the whole stupid tip thing.
>Additionally, my wife and I can both queue up what we want in the cart on each of our own phones and discuss before submitting the order.
This is exactly the thing I loathe about QR code menus. It normalizes having phones out at the table, with everyone looking at their own. Defaults are powerful, and "phones out" as a default leads to increased distraction and inattention among the people you're dining with.
it's ok to do your own thing sometimes. if you want to share a nice meal with your wife without your phones just say so. people are often more social now than they used to be, at the cost of some personal attention, sure.
i hang out with and eat out with my partner almost every day all the time. i don't need to be present 100% at every single moment, and if i or he wants to be during a meal, we will simply share that thought. i've never had issues having normal social interaction with people when out, even with some phone usage. it's normal.
I don't have any issue with them, but I would hope they would have a reasonably recent paper version available for downed internet or older customers. I don't think it should be the "only" option. Also please make your menus searchable. Sometimes I just want to see what all your chicken/beef/veggie options are.
The only time I can midly bear a digital menu is if it's a single PDF file that I can pinch and zoom. Otherwise it just feels obnoxious to have to tap thru menus or only see my choices isolated in multiple pages based on a category or something. It feels awkward to sit down with people at a restaurant then we all are tapping away thru some stupid interface for a menu. If it's a single PDF file that one can pinch and zoom around thats the only time I dont get extremely annoyed by this whole thing.
The data to download a menu is more than the meal. Is free wifi common in Europe? I remember it being quite hard to find a hotspot. Same in the UK.. UK had those “the cloud” things in places.
Always get a local SIM / eSIM from where you’re traveling. I doubt there’s any country in the world that costs more than $20 / 10GB (give or take). I’ve done this through several countries in Latin America, Singapore, Malaysia, and all over Europe and it’s worked like a charm every time.
You should never use your home carrier and roam when traveling internationally, unless you have something like Google Fi which explicitly states that your data allocations apply worldwide.
I kinda make a point of asking the waiter for a physical menu anymore, and they usually give a very understanding smile and go grab one for me. I hope if enough people ask (in a non-shitty way) for paper menus that restaurant owners might get the picture.
Or they'll just implement the standard business playbook, which is "do what we really want to do and claim it's what the customers demanded"... or the new twist post-2020, "do what we've been desperate to do for years and claim it's for health reasons"
I'm probably in the minority, but I don't see what's so appealing with physical menus. I never actually cared whether a restaurant has one or the other, I will just use whatever they have, but I would much rather use a QR Code menu on my phone (especially if it allows me to order without talking to a waiter) than using a greasy, bulky menu that everyone else touches. I get that there are some disadvantages, but some of the ones listed in the article seem to be grasping at straws. Important historical documents? Give me a break. I don't know if this is a generational thing or not, but my friends (from 20 to 35) don't care for physical menus either.
It's not so much that physical menus are good/better, it's that needing to open a digital menu on your phone when you're already in the restaurant and (presumably) paying to be served is the literal opposite of service.
The really fancy restaurants even have the waiter verbally tell you their menu, or at least their special(s) of the day.
I think that's completely subjective, because if I'm indifferent between the two mediums, then the service is not worse. I'd say it depends a lot on the restaurant. If I'm in a pricey restaurant, then give me both, because I want an experience tailored for me. If I'm in a Pub, please give me a digital menu, because god knows what is encrusted in those physical menus.
Now, having to listen to a waiter recite a menu from memory is just plain bizarre. I've been to a lot of fancy restaurants and I've never seen this. The specialty of the day? Sure. But never the whole menu. Worse than having a written menu in a format you don't like would be having no written menu at all.
A pub I used to love is now order on the QR code menu, pay on the app it leads you to -- you see a server exactly once to drop off your food. I still tip 20% every time because that's how I roll, but it doesn't feel great, and mostly I just don't go there anymore.
I'm on the computer and mostly by myself all day, if I'm out I actually want to not be on my phone and be interacting with humans?
If I am out with a group, the last thing we want is to all by on our phones ordering (and being distracted by notifications etc)
Nice restaurants have (physically) big menus that are easy to scan and read. You can see sections, specials, and you can browse easily.
Smart phones are typically less than 7" across. Best case scenario is they learn from McDonald's (which uses like a 35" screen...) with big categories to click and then a few items per category. But it'll still be tiny.
Usually nice restaurants have small menus with only a few carefully selected options based on the season. Which restaurants are you referring to that have "big menus"?
I know a wide range of nice restaurants. There's the seasonal French guff you mention, but there's also pizzas, places that have breakfast menus, curry houses...
I'm personally a bit torn on this. One of my local restaurants has the QR menu and it is a whole system. The waiter doesn't even come to the table, you just put your order in on your phone and they deliver it when it is ready. All in all, it's much more efficient and it means you're never waiting for your waiter to reappear if you want to order another drink or something. You also pay the bill through your phone, which avoids the need to hand your credit card to the waiter. It probably saves at least 5-10 minutes per table, meaning possibly one more turnover during each dinner period.
You do lose a bit in the personal interaction. There's also no chance to ask the waiter questions about the menu or ask for recommendations.
A local restaurant did this. However in making you pay for your order up front they also ask for the tip then. And they play the usual games to try and get you to pay more than the typical 20%. The server drops your food off and you never see them again. It's a horrible experience.
20% ? what the fuck justifies that as an automatic tip, except exceptionally good service. Absurd nonsense. All the more so if you barely interacted with the supposed waiter during your ordering process.
I prefer a real menu, but there are people that feel pressure when holding one, or interacting with the personnel, but I’m not convinced they do the right thing for themselves trying to keep it digital to avoid interaction in the real world with real people.
There are of course a few advantages to having a menu available immediately, including for ordering something afterwards, but I got into the habit of always asking for a menu to be left at the table. Not only for this reason.
In general I also enjoy interacting with the personnel when ordering, having a real menu definitely helps with that.
I can imagine if it hasn't happened yet, it will happen soon enough where QR code menus will be tailored to the person. Change the order of items and possibly even costs to try and drive the individual diner to choose the options that are better for the restaurant. Digital menus already offer many of these perks for the restaurant, and I suspect forcing around the margins can definitely make a difference at the expense of the customer.
Yeah, this is why I don’t want to use QR codes. Prices need to be set in writing and be the same for everyone, although I’m okay with things like discounts for seniors, students, active service members, etc.
I don't see that happening except at very big businesses like chains. Most locally owned restaurants have trouble maintaining a working website let alone something so complicated.
That's where a lean and hungry third party startup comes in and offers to take a little piece of that action in exchange for handling all the backend work.
Tack on some image recognition to gauge customers "value" as they walk in and track where they sit. See a party sporting luxury bags and watches and charge them a little bit extra eh? Add in some facial recognition too to keep prices consistent between visits and voilà.
Restaurants already know how to design menus to drive diners to choose the options that are better for the restaurant. I don't see how personalisation can improve the situation. Maybe the illusion of personalisation?
I believe there was a Planet Money (or similar) piece about this recently. There are already services to enable dynamic pricing for restaurants. E.g. on super bowl Sunday ordering wings will be more expensive. (They don't like the term "surge pricing" though:-)
However it can also go the other way and lower prices to incentivize demand during slow periods like middle afternoon.
Can't say I blame restaurants for this. As many other comments mention, it is all about having good UX
Wifi passwords... just let people scan a photo to join the network. Duh!
Sharing your contact details... why are we messing with Bluetooth when both Apple and Android support QR codes?! Next time you're at a convention, just set your contact card (Vcard QR Code) as your phone home screen image... so much easier to share details vs. watching people try and bump between devices not knowing if it'll work. "Did you get it, I don't know if I'm bumping in the right place... did it send? Do you have airdrop on?" Ha. It's silly. No clue why Apple and Android don't just have a QR share option. =P
Sending SMS... I love the "vote for X with this code, vote for Y with this code" options. Just an easy way to network people, again, regardless of what device they are on.
QR codes are great! Maye not if you want to go to Italy and feel a paper menu, maybe not so much... but there's still plenty of great uses for QR codes.
I refuse to go to any restaurant in Switzerland that has qr only menu and does not accept cash.
Not accepting cash is against the law[1] but sadly there is no penalty defined. The argument is always it costs to much to deal with cash. You know what also costs money? Cleaning the kitchen, I wonder what other laws these companies think are ok to ignore.
Interesting law. That means that if you want to take a holiday from work you can just pay your employer the equivalent cash value of your labour instead of showing up and there is nothing your employer can say about it since they are always required to accept money as payment. In fact, you can evade all contractual obligation by offering money in place of what was expected to be paid.
Wouldn't it be much be easier to list the small handful of cases where you want it to apply?
Think I am going to pay you in my house when you pay me money for said house? Ha! By this law, I can simply give you your money back. You are obligated to accept it since you must always accept money as payment, and now the house you lived in prior is gone. Seems incredibly problematic for the vast majority of transactions.
A million Swiss francs in bill form isn't that much. We have CHF 1,000 denominated bills and the law states the maximum in coins is CHF 100 that you have to accept.
> Think I am going to pay you in my house when you pay me money for said house? Ha! By this law, I can simply give you your money back.
No. That would be a violation of your sales agreement. That is a contract to transfer ownership of a property.
Likewise after six months on a waiting list a surgeon cannot then say to their patient "Haha! No actually here's a cash payment instead. It's cash and you are obligated to accept according to Swiss law!". There would be legal consequences. It's not a contract to exchange a monetary value. It's a contractual obligation to provide a service and it is regulated.
You are really hung up on misinterpreting this. I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but this is like the 4th place you've confused "must accept cash for payments" with "must accept a cash replacement for goods or services purchased". Clearly, if I buy a good from you, you have to deliver me that good. And I have to pay you in some form. Because I am giving you a credit card or other cash equivalent, you have to accept cash (up to a certain level).
The law doesn’t say that at all. It only applies to instances in which payment is made, and says you can’t accept credit card and not cash:
> Everyone is obliged to accept up to 100 Swiss regular issue coins in payment. Regular issue coins, commemorative coins and bullion coins are accepted at nominal value without restriction by the Swiss National Bank and the public cash offices of the Confederation.
Nowhere does this imply that you can trade working for paying an equivalent cash amount of your labour.
Yes, that's right, labour offered in a trade is a form of payment. All trades sees both sides of the transaction make a payment. In the most common case as it pertains to employment, I pay you labour, you pay me money, at which point the trade is settled.
But since the law states that money must always been accepted as a form of payment I can also pay you money in place of my labour. Per the law, the employer has to accept it. Thus, any time you don't want to go to work you simply have to offer money instead of labour, which you will get back since the employer is still obligated to fulfil their side of the trade.
It's an interesting approach. But doesn't seem tenable in the real world, so it is not surprising that it is oft ignored.
> and says you can’t accept credit card and not cash
Exactly. Credit cards don't offer money, but instead offer tokens that you can later trade for money. Practicalities aside, no different than accepting chickens and then trading those chickens for money. Or no different than accepting labour and then trading that labour for money. It's all the same. A trade is a trade is trade.
The law here requires that the cash must be accepted as a substitute in a trade.
No, that is considered unpaid leave and it is a common practice where the cash amount is deducted from your salary. The terms of unpaid leave are determined by employment law and your employment contract.
You're mixing creative usages of language with legal terminology.
Colloquially, in English, one could think of "labor" as a form of "payment" in the way you describe.
In the legal context, things like "labor" and "payment" and "trade" have specific meanings. These meanings cannot be interchanged with any other "technically not grammatically incorrect" definition of the same word as it might be used in spoken English.
Misunderstandings like this are also leveraged by, for example, the Sovereign Citizen movement, with similar levels of validity.
It doesn't mean any of that. "Obliged to accept as payment" does not mean "obliged to sell things that are not otherwise for sale."
You've made three different comments now smugly pontificating on the implications of a law that you made up in your head and acting like it's equivalent to an actual law that we have the text of. What's going on?
That is what the law, as provided, states. Naturally one understands that law isn't just the words on the page, but also a tangled web of precedent. No doubt there is already plenty of precedent to invalidate usage of the law in many contexts, but that's where someone who understands the legal state in full detail would come in and add more colour, not just retort with "It doesn't mean that. I can't say why, but trust me, I know!" Ouch.
And, well, if nobody here knows, at least I get to enjoy the button presses. Imagine people taking time out of their day to press a button just for me. I feel the love, for sure. That's worth something.
Any unauthorized leave, whether paid or unpaid, would be a violation of your employment contract. The terms are set by employment law and your employment contract.
We're not talking about "not legally obligated to do it", we're talking about "being legally obligated not to do it". The law forces them to accept cash, they can't just say "I'm gonna impose my own social norms that are above the law."
the equivalent to your example would be them accepting cash even if they don't legally have to. Which is literally the opposite of what they're doing.
Fuck their invented social rules. If cash is a legal tender medium of exchange, one should not have to walk into a place that's designed to serve them as a customer and be forced to obey arbitrary customized rules of convenience for the place itself.
Why do you want to use cash though? NFC tap to pay or QR code-based mobile payments, which is what everyone in China uses, are so much better. No need to carry around a heavy and bloated wallet full of physical coins, no need to touch dirty bank notes that have germs and even drugs on them [1]. As a child, my parents always made me wash my hands with soap whenever I touch money, since you never know where the note has been. It just seems so unsanitary to handle physical cash in a place that deals with serving food to customers.
Privacy. I'm not opposed to using my card at restaurants or other stores, but I don't at all want a future where every single transaction is tied to an identifiable account.
Restaurants will end up (and already do) buy systems that keeps track of Bluetooth and WiFi MACs that walk in the place. Your cell phone has to tell your carrier where it is for calls and data to be routed to your handset. You were picked up on a dozen security cameras dumping their feeds to "the cloud" walking to the restaurant. Your license plate was caught on another dozen cameras driving to the restaurant.
You were already caught up in the Panopticon. Refusing to use a credit card at the restaurant is a completely empty gesture and provided you no extra privacy.
I'm not saying give up on privacy or anything but pick your battles.
That is not the case in Switzerland which has privacy laws. Private cameras for example are not allowed to film public areas. Cameras on private property need to state where the data is stored, how long etc.
Because we've already seen thag they don't. It doesnt have to be logical, it's just the way things have worked out, and there doesn't seem to be any will to change that.
The issue I have is that there are middlemen when using non cash payment systems. Until the central bank provides an anonymous digital payment system there is no alternative to cash.
I don't want my purchase habits ending up in a database located who knows where and as a merchant I don't want to pay x percent to middle men handling the transaction.
I also don't want foreign companies deciding what I am allowed to purchase or sell. As we have seen many times visa/mastercard will prevent you from selling and/or buying items legal in my country.
The central banks job is to provide a currency for payment and I want them to keep providing this service.
Switzerland has pretty low fee debit cards (Maestro?), which I used extensively during my time there, as a foreigner I didn’t qualify for a credit card with BCV, so no visa/mastercard, but I really didn’t need it.
Back in my he states, I avoid any business that takes only cash, because I’m not carrying anything but my phone and a backup credit card in case tap to pay isn’t accepted. I also think businesses should be allowed not to accept cash given that those that do are targets for armed robbery these days (a problem I expect Switzerland not to share).
This is the trajectory "they" want the discussion on. Eventually people start asking you why you would ever want to use cash, then that bewilderment turns to suspicion, using cash becomes something that drug dealers, homeless people, and thieves do. Until trying to use cash becomes grounds for infornal interogation and the last few holdouts become exhausted, and then eventually they can get rid of it altogether, since only bad people use cash anymore.
Becuase maybe, just maybe, not all of us fetishize "convenience" at the expense of all else in this economic world, and want to be able to buy things without having our transactions parastically logged, stored, traced and later used for all sorts of bullshit commercial/government survey tracking purposes. If you like the budding Chinese dystopia and all its garbage just because you can't stand to get your hands "dirty" with a bit of paper (as if the million other things you touch per day were much cleaner) that's your business, but hopefully you can at least see the notion of someone wanting a modicum of very basic privacy.
Sadly, you are correct. It used to be that prices didn't change that frequently and a printed menu would not be too much overhead. Now, prices are changing so rapidly, it's a non-trivial cost associated with printing new menus every time the price changes.
I think digital menus are accommodating of the restaurant owner, in this regard. But they sure suck for customers, or at least, for this customer.
I've seen this argument come up frequently and I find this is just a weird hill to die on. I can see where the author is coming from as far as taking you out of the experience, but QR codes and NFC absolutely have a place in the restaurant ordering experience and I'm here for it.
Interesting that the person in OP was in Italy when they realized they hated QR menus. I'm in a South American city where the QR menus are pervasive, and I love it because it's so, so easy to immediately translate it to English. I get that you can take a photo of a physical menu and do the same thing with Lens, but the QR menu removes a few pieces of friction and has generally been a positive feature.
Honestly, if I'm going to a restaurant especially with other people, I prefer to leave my phone behind. I try to never bring a "smart" device.
This QR code thing is just another mine in the field of trying to live in society today without a smartphone. Other notable mines being online banking, apps to access government issues documents.
A lot of this nowadays require an app. If i want to find out my health insurance status? it's an app, no website. Heck even checking my grades at uni requires i install some sketchy app! it used to be posted at the department entrance...
My family and I go to a cafe for breakfast most saturday mornings.
The one place we usually go to has no phone signal at all anywhere in the ~150 seat restuarant. Its part of the reason I like going there.
We turned up last weekend to see they had put new QR code menus on all the tables. I had no intention of using them so I ordered from the counter as I usually do, knowing they wouldnt even work because of the lack of phone signal.
I spent over an hour that day silently chuckling as I watched pretty much every single customer pick up the QR code menu and try to use it. I saw a few get really annoyed and end up leaving.
Im not sure how much damage the place did to their clientel in a single day, but I went back yesterday and they had all been removed.
Slight tangent: I've noticed that robot waiters seem to never actually be doing their jobs, and the presence of one in the store is the sign of the restaurant being poorly managed.
The idea that there could be hucksters selling these door to door to bad managers explains so so much.
Small businesses often get sold tech things that don't make sense. VOIP is one I see frequently. There's nothing quite like a small business with a 2Mb/s upload, several Dropbox/OneDrive clients, and a VOIP contract.
Why does VoIP not make sense for a small business? From my experience working at small businesses it looks like VoIP and the features it enables is a huge gain. Call waiting queue, voicemail to email/website, automatic hours/go straight to voicemail, holding/transferring calls, multiple lines with only one phone number, etc.
It's the 2Mb/s upload in my example that's the catch. That'll often be asymmetric at a 10:1 download:upload ration (or worse), so it's almost impossible to do any kind of traffic management to make it work well.
I'm talking about places that can't get an internet connection that can support the VOIP systems they're sold.
2 Mbps is tight but can definitely support 0.1 Mb/s calls. The vendor needs to ensure the phones tag audio packets with EF priority and the router uses a strict priority queue. (Whenever a voice packet arrives it pauses handling non-voice traffic until the voice queue is clear. This ensures a voice packet is never delayed by more than 1500B / 2 Mbps = 6 ms).
I hear you with the 2Mb/s upload, but that isn't a problem for VoIP in and of itself. What makes 2Mb/s upload an issue with VoIP is not having a good router (i.e. one with CAKE queuing support or something similar) and then getting hammered with buffer bloat making your latencies go to 1000+ ms because someone's iPhone decided to back something up (don't know why it never seems to be an issue with Androids).
^ The above is precisely my experience and is a large part of why my workplace hasn't moved to VoIP yet, despite needing the features.
Even Comcast is doing 50Mbps/15Mbps with overprovisioning giving you an extra 10% or so.
AT&T, CenturyLink and other telecoms have ceased making ADSL and often VDSL2 readily orderable, and jacked up the rates on legacy customers to push them off old, slow connections on their aging DSLAMs.
I travelled about 13,000km around the country less than a year ago. At very few points in that trip did I have 2mbps, let alone more than that, not even in some of the fancy places.
I definitely had better than that in Perth, and Kalgoorlie, and I had surprisingly good speed in Ceduna - maybe even 10mbps. It was pretty good in the Barossa, too - it's fine if you happen to be near a city.
But the places with good internet represent perhaps 1% of the area I covered.
Where in this self-reporting and not-at-all-independent pdf that you've linked to does it talk about what percentage of rural customers are on this fixed wireless service you speak of?
Seems to me they're saying that 92% of fixed wireless users are above 25mbps, but I don't see anywhere where it says what percentage of rural users have that service, as opposed to e.g terrible long-haul adsl connections getting a couple hundred K if they're lucky.
If they're saying that 92% of users are over 25mbps, and you believe it, then my response is a simple chortle. Maybe 92% of fixed wireless have it, but if that's the case then about 5% of people in the outback are on fixed wireless, it would seem.
A couple of places I visited told me "oh, no, there's no phone or internet at the moment, hasn't been for a couple of days"... like it wasn't at all unusual or unexpected.
Yeah, QR codes should come at a minimum with a WiFi password written on them exactly because of this. Even better would be not to even bother with all of that but it's easy for owners to fall for grifters selling "the future" to them.
If you're forcing me to look at your menu on my tiny screen, optimise for that. Do !not! optimize for fricking print when you're not going to give me the printed version! Grrrrrmbl.
My favourite are the ones that straight up give you the print-prepped PDF: CYMK color space, bleed, crop marks, test patterns and a whopping 12 MB for a single page.
I think they are great. Last night we went to a little Thai restaurant in New Hampshire and we self-seated, sat down, realized there was a QR code for menus and to register that the table was occupied; a half hour later two bowls of pad thai were delievered to our table for 70 dollars plus 20% tip. For 84 bucks we had a small meal and almost no human interaction: the perfect night for half of us, and the worst experience possible for the other. Whether I'm being completely sarcastic or not is not detectable because this thing is damned divisive.
It's fascinating to me that we went from "embedding important information in QR codes is silly because they look ridiculous and no one will ever use them" ( https://picturesofpeoplescanningqrcodes.tumblr.com/ ) all the way to "sweet, I can read the whole menu online and order and pay when I'm ready, this is great" in like 3 months.
This reads like a farewell and it probably is the next generation of dining. In North America the workforce isn’t there to staff restaurants and some of these digital menus allow you to order without staff needing to support it.
We should start to encourage some online menu standards though to
welcome it in.
I don’t like them. But I’m not sure how many people in this thread have friends in hospitality who are owners. They LOVE them.
Labor costs are killing restaurants, not having wait staff makes a huge difference to them
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[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 299 ms ] threadThe less service part is I have to scan the QR code.
In the US, at least here in New England a menu QR code is a link to a PDF or a nightmare website (recently saw one that was a canva.com presentation formatted for a desktop computer or a TV) — a paper menu is almost always better around here.
That said, I find the kiosk app at Panera Bread a much better experience than ordering from the menu simply because there’s a lot more information. Options, bread types, ingredients, etc. You can claw that out of the clerk, but it’s a bit arduous.
So it can be done well. It just isn’t. And it’s don’t really blame the restaurants either. A comprehensive digital experience is really not their ballywick.
Then there was a time I went to an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. There, we had no menus.
The server came up, “What do you want?”
“Well, what do you have?”
“We’re an Italian restaurant. What do you want?”
And I told him, and I got it. I mean, indeed, it was an Italian restaurant.
edit: 2022 discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36174607
Things that admittedly make this worse:
- Using an older phone.
- Not saving credit cards to your phone.
It's just slow and clunky, and -- it feels like work.
I don't want to file a JIRA ticket to get my appetizer. I don't want to fill out a form. I just want to sit down and tell somebody.
Another way to look at this is that it's the "self checkout" version of dining out. Self checkout is slow, because it's different at every store, and you will never be as fast as a cashier who has some practice with their particular system. Same deal here.
Why not a paper menu plus order online? You could even have the order QR code and URL printed on the menu.
QR code to PDF improves both these scenarios.
There are a few places (usually burger joints) where the menu is a piece of paper that actually serve as a placemat that the waiters won't take back from you. I doubt a lot of people are changing their mind. I've rarely seen that.
Source: waited lots of tables in lots of restaurants.
[1]https://sumupchile.com/products/lector-air?variant=399949779... [2]https://sumupchile.com/products/lector-solo [3]https://sumupchile.com/products/punto-de-venta
Edit: apparently this was a thing even back in 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/27/busking-joins-...
Bringing a reader to the table is gare though, mostly a thing at the large chains that are pretend to have ethnic food, but it is really poor quality-
In the US, most credit card transactions are simply "(swipe or chip)". If you have the card, you can use it. Gas stations seem to be the slight exception in America -- they generally require "(swipe or chip) and billing zipcode". This is quite funky and not at all secure against fraud.
With NFC card payment I just hold my card to the terminal and that's it.
vs
Try to flag down waiter (x5), ask for the bill, wait for waiter to return with the mobile POS, fiddle around in your wallet to find the card, tap card, decline tip, write PIN code, finally get to leave.
The QR option is nice, as long as it's just an option. A physical menu is, generally, much nicer to use. That being said, sometimes you want to go back and reference what you ordered, or other options (like for drinks) and ... the menus have all been taken away.
Your credit card already identifies you by name, and your precise location is known because you're at the restaurant by definition.
Your phone's dynamic IP. Which is a redundant, and much weaker, identification than your payment info.
> it becomes possible to calculate how long you've been in the restaurant
Also doable by the staff.. using their eyes. And most restaurants will use some form of system anyway to track the orders and payments, because that information is vital to running a functioning restaurant.
Your credit card transaction is bundled and sold. Because it has value in establishing a consumer profile for marketing.
The fact that you visited some restaurant PDF or webpage from a dynamic IP address is not.
Like the parent commenter said, any information about how long the table is being occupied comes from the POS and reservation system. But that data is for the restaurant -- there's no market in selling it, though it absolutely has value to the restaurant for its business decisions. But your phone isn't being used for that part.
Data collection is certainly a thing. But it happens in specific ways for specific purposes.
Using a credit card tied to your identity, but then worrying about revealing your phone's IP address while ordering, doesn't make any sense.
With QR? Just scan it an order. Done eating? Just leave, having already paid in the app. Also removes the whole stupid tip thing.
I go to a vegan restaurant with a 3 course 10,95€ meal deal and they have excellent menus.
This is exactly the thing I loathe about QR code menus. It normalizes having phones out at the table, with everyone looking at their own. Defaults are powerful, and "phones out" as a default leads to increased distraction and inattention among the people you're dining with.
i hang out with and eat out with my partner almost every day all the time. i don't need to be present 100% at every single moment, and if i or he wants to be during a meal, we will simply share that thought. i've never had issues having normal social interaction with people when out, even with some phone usage. it's normal.
Otherwise, totally agreed.
You should never use your home carrier and roam when traveling internationally, unless you have something like Google Fi which explicitly states that your data allocations apply worldwide.
Or they'll just implement the standard business playbook, which is "do what we really want to do and claim it's what the customers demanded"... or the new twist post-2020, "do what we've been desperate to do for years and claim it's for health reasons"
The really fancy restaurants even have the waiter verbally tell you their menu, or at least their special(s) of the day.
Now, having to listen to a waiter recite a menu from memory is just plain bizarre. I've been to a lot of fancy restaurants and I've never seen this. The specialty of the day? Sure. But never the whole menu. Worse than having a written menu in a format you don't like would be having no written menu at all.
I'm on the computer and mostly by myself all day, if I'm out I actually want to not be on my phone and be interacting with humans?
If I am out with a group, the last thing we want is to all by on our phones ordering (and being distracted by notifications etc)
Smart phones are typically less than 7" across. Best case scenario is they learn from McDonald's (which uses like a 35" screen...) with big categories to click and then a few items per category. But it'll still be tiny.
You do lose a bit in the personal interaction. There's also no chance to ask the waiter questions about the menu or ask for recommendations.
There are of course a few advantages to having a menu available immediately, including for ordering something afterwards, but I got into the habit of always asking for a menu to be left at the table. Not only for this reason.
In general I also enjoy interacting with the personnel when ordering, having a real menu definitely helps with that.
However it can also go the other way and lower prices to incentivize demand during slow periods like middle afternoon.
Can't say I blame restaurants for this. As many other comments mention, it is all about having good UX
OK, but there are so many great uses for them!
Wifi passwords... just let people scan a photo to join the network. Duh!
Sharing your contact details... why are we messing with Bluetooth when both Apple and Android support QR codes?! Next time you're at a convention, just set your contact card (Vcard QR Code) as your phone home screen image... so much easier to share details vs. watching people try and bump between devices not knowing if it'll work. "Did you get it, I don't know if I'm bumping in the right place... did it send? Do you have airdrop on?" Ha. It's silly. No clue why Apple and Android don't just have a QR share option. =P
Sending SMS... I love the "vote for X with this code, vote for Y with this code" options. Just an easy way to network people, again, regardless of what device they are on.
QR codes are great! Maye not if you want to go to Italy and feel a paper menu, maybe not so much... but there's still plenty of great uses for QR codes.
https://www.qr-code-generator.com/
Not accepting cash is against the law[1] but sadly there is no penalty defined. The argument is always it costs to much to deal with cash. You know what also costs money? Cleaning the kitchen, I wonder what other laws these companies think are ok to ignore.
[1] https://www.fedlex.admin.ch/eli/cc/2000/186/en#art_3
I can see why it isn't generally honoured.
The law needs an update for sure.
Think I am going to pay you in my house when you pay me money for said house? Ha! By this law, I can simply give you your money back. You are obligated to accept it since you must always accept money as payment, and now the house you lived in prior is gone. Seems incredibly problematic for the vast majority of transactions.
Which is no doubt why nobody actually follows it.
Any big money laundry is done digitally today.
No. That would be a violation of your sales agreement. That is a contract to transfer ownership of a property.
Likewise after six months on a waiting list a surgeon cannot then say to their patient "Haha! No actually here's a cash payment instead. It's cash and you are obligated to accept according to Swiss law!". There would be legal consequences. It's not a contract to exchange a monetary value. It's a contractual obligation to provide a service and it is regulated.
At night a kiosk or petrol station or similar might only accept cars.
> Everyone is obliged to accept up to 100 Swiss regular issue coins in payment. Regular issue coins, commemorative coins and bullion coins are accepted at nominal value without restriction by the Swiss National Bank and the public cash offices of the Confederation.
Nowhere does this imply that you can trade working for paying an equivalent cash amount of your labour.
Yes, that's right, labour offered in a trade is a form of payment. All trades sees both sides of the transaction make a payment. In the most common case as it pertains to employment, I pay you labour, you pay me money, at which point the trade is settled.
But since the law states that money must always been accepted as a form of payment I can also pay you money in place of my labour. Per the law, the employer has to accept it. Thus, any time you don't want to go to work you simply have to offer money instead of labour, which you will get back since the employer is still obligated to fulfil their side of the trade.
It's an interesting approach. But doesn't seem tenable in the real world, so it is not surprising that it is oft ignored.
> and says you can’t accept credit card and not cash
Exactly. Credit cards don't offer money, but instead offer tokens that you can later trade for money. Practicalities aside, no different than accepting chickens and then trading those chickens for money. Or no different than accepting labour and then trading that labour for money. It's all the same. A trade is a trade is trade.
The law here requires that the cash must be accepted as a substitute in a trade.
Colloquially, in English, one could think of "labor" as a form of "payment" in the way you describe.
In the legal context, things like "labor" and "payment" and "trade" have specific meanings. These meanings cannot be interchanged with any other "technically not grammatically incorrect" definition of the same word as it might be used in spoken English.
Misunderstandings like this are also leveraged by, for example, the Sovereign Citizen movement, with similar levels of validity.
You've made three different comments now smugly pontificating on the implications of a law that you made up in your head and acting like it's equivalent to an actual law that we have the text of. What's going on?
And, well, if nobody here knows, at least I get to enjoy the button presses. Imagine people taking time out of their day to press a button just for me. I feel the love, for sure. That's worth something.
Any unauthorized leave, whether paid or unpaid, would be a violation of your employment contract. The terms are set by employment law and your employment contract.
For somebody who doesn't know what they're talking about, you sure do press a lot of buttons.
the equivalent to your example would be them accepting cash even if they don't legally have to. Which is literally the opposite of what they're doing.
If you were told before you ordered, its not cool to (implicitly) agree to pay via one method and then change your mind later.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contaminated_currency
Privacy. I'm not opposed to using my card at restaurants or other stores, but I don't at all want a future where every single transaction is tied to an identifiable account.
You were already caught up in the Panopticon. Refusing to use a credit card at the restaurant is a completely empty gesture and provided you no extra privacy.
I'm not saying give up on privacy or anything but pick your battles.
I don't want my purchase habits ending up in a database located who knows where and as a merchant I don't want to pay x percent to middle men handling the transaction.
I also don't want foreign companies deciding what I am allowed to purchase or sell. As we have seen many times visa/mastercard will prevent you from selling and/or buying items legal in my country.
The central banks job is to provide a currency for payment and I want them to keep providing this service.
Back in my he states, I avoid any business that takes only cash, because I’m not carrying anything but my phone and a backup credit card in case tap to pay isn’t accepted. I also think businesses should be allowed not to accept cash given that those that do are targets for armed robbery these days (a problem I expect Switzerland not to share).
Different strokes for different folks :)
I think digital menus are accommodating of the restaurant owner, in this regard. But they sure suck for customers, or at least, for this customer.
This QR code thing is just another mine in the field of trying to live in society today without a smartphone. Other notable mines being online banking, apps to access government issues documents.
A lot of this nowadays require an app. If i want to find out my health insurance status? it's an app, no website. Heck even checking my grades at uni requires i install some sketchy app! it used to be posted at the department entrance...
The one place we usually go to has no phone signal at all anywhere in the ~150 seat restuarant. Its part of the reason I like going there.
We turned up last weekend to see they had put new QR code menus on all the tables. I had no intention of using them so I ordered from the counter as I usually do, knowing they wouldnt even work because of the lack of phone signal.
I spent over an hour that day silently chuckling as I watched pretty much every single customer pick up the QR code menu and try to use it. I saw a few get really annoyed and end up leaving. Im not sure how much damage the place did to their clientel in a single day, but I went back yesterday and they had all been removed.
You couldnt make it up!
The idea that there could be hucksters selling these door to door to bad managers explains so so much.
And V40 is not something I've seen(1) in the wild :)
0: https://www.qrcode.com/en/about/version.html 1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Qr-code-ver-40.svg
I'm talking <15 employee businesses.
I'm talking about places that can't get an internet connection that can support the VOIP systems they're sold.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/support/docs/voice/voice-quali...
^ The above is precisely my experience and is a large part of why my workplace hasn't moved to VoIP yet, despite needing the features.
AT&T, CenturyLink and other telecoms have ceased making ADSL and often VDSL2 readily orderable, and jacked up the rates on legacy customers to push them off old, slow connections on their aging DSLAMs.
0. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index/australia
https://www.nbnco.com.au/content/dam/nbn/documents/how-we-ar...
Are you trolling, misinformed, or do you have access to some data I can't find?
I definitely had better than that in Perth, and Kalgoorlie, and I had surprisingly good speed in Ceduna - maybe even 10mbps. It was pretty good in the Barossa, too - it's fine if you happen to be near a city.
But the places with good internet represent perhaps 1% of the area I covered.
Where in this self-reporting and not-at-all-independent pdf that you've linked to does it talk about what percentage of rural customers are on this fixed wireless service you speak of?
Seems to me they're saying that 92% of fixed wireless users are above 25mbps, but I don't see anywhere where it says what percentage of rural users have that service, as opposed to e.g terrible long-haul adsl connections getting a couple hundred K if they're lucky.
If they're saying that 92% of users are over 25mbps, and you believe it, then my response is a simple chortle. Maybe 92% of fixed wireless have it, but if that's the case then about 5% of people in the outback are on fixed wireless, it would seem.
A couple of places I visited told me "oh, no, there's no phone or internet at the moment, hasn't been for a couple of days"... like it wasn't at all unusual or unexpected.
If the restaurant isn't smart enough to compose an HTML menu which is very friendly with mobile devices, then they should not be using QR codes.
If you're forcing me to look at your menu on my tiny screen, optimise for that. Do !not! optimize for fricking print when you're not going to give me the printed version! Grrrrrmbl.
We should start to encourage some online menu standards though to welcome it in.