QR codes have replaced restaurant menus. Industry experts say it isn’t a fad | Hacker News Reader

QR codes have replaced restaurant menus. Industry experts say it isn’t a fad

cnbc.com

17 pointshiddencache23 comments

I saw this roll out in China five years go when we lived there as a family for some years. The mobile platforms there are much more highly integrated than in the West, with in-built payments and reviews all in-app. So it was all very friction free. The locals were not all happy about it. Younger people took to it well. But it was great for expats who found the language(s) hard to navigate person to person. It cut down on wait times in busy restaurants and those with staff hesitant to serve foreigners with likely no local language skills. It seemed more efficient as the waiters generally took your order and then rekeyed into an order app, either there and then or at the serving station. I guess at high-end restaurants it would lack the personal and tailored dining experience. But for average places I found it an improvement over the often spotty experience of in person order taking with mistakes in ordering or forgotten items etc. It’s new so not everyone likes it. Without better integrated payment and feedback the UX will likely be clunky for a good while.

I find it unusual that it is preferable to make a network connection probably half way across the world to retrieve list of food than have it locally available. Restaurant 802.11 portal pages should have a menu on it.

The true dark pattern at the restaurant is in the checkout screen. Often with the waiter standing next you while you fill it out. Tip options used to be 15, 18, 20% or something close. More recently, I've seen 20, 25, 30%. Ingenious, but not cool.

The solution is not to have tip and pay true minimum wage for waitresses.

I'd probably tip anyways. I like tiping and most of friends agree that they want to be able to tip.

Industry experts want everyone to get used to them so they can start filling them with ads is my guess. No thanks.

Besides QR code menus, a wonderful breakthrough has been the prevalence of QR-code bills at the end of the meal which allow the patron to pay without going through the credit card and credit card slip dance. It’s delightful not to need to needlessly wait for ten minutes at the end of each meal!

Depends on the QR code. I spent some time in nyc and saw some really good and bad implementations. The good have QR code’s per table and allow you to have a dedicated experience where the server knows exactly who you are and the bill is automagically tabulated whenever you are ready to pay. The bad ones where literally a link to their not mobile friendly menu.

QR code menus are still nonexistent down here in Texas..

Anecdotally, I saw them quite a lot in Plano.

What's the advantage over a regular menu? That you don't have to wait for the waiter? I get the point when paying but for the menu I'm not seeing it. Is the entire menu baked in the QR code or is it actually just a URL to a website?

Vendors can have a translated version of your menu in many languages without having to maintain hard copies of each, or running out of a particular language on a day the tour bus arrives.

Vendors can mark items as sold out for the day in real time.

Vendors can re-price without needing to print all new menus or make ugly and tedious modifications on existing menus.

Patrons can place their order and pay the bill through the menu system.

Patrons don't need to wait to be provided a menu.

Patrons don't need to handle an item that's been touched by dozens-hundreds of people that day.

Vendors /can/ do those things, but I’ve never seen it done. What I have seen are lots of static PDFs with no consideration for mobile friendly viewing. And you still have to wait for the waiter to place your order.

There's your startup opportunity. Bonus points if you add surge pricing and the ability to tack on 15% to every item if the party is obviously there on an expense account or just looks like a bunch of rich guys.

That I don't need to stare at a small, bright, distracting screen when I'm there to relax and enjoy time with friends. Add to that that most restaurants have terrible accessibility in these digital menus, like PDFs with tiny fonts, poor zooming capabilities, etc. Paper menus don't waste my data and battery. They are also inherintly private and don't communicate my personal data to others.

I think you might have misread the parent comment, because you are agreeing with them, but it feels like you are arguing against them. The parent comment was stating that they don’t see much extra benefit to QR codes over paper menus, so they are asking if they are missing any potential benefits and why anyone would prefer QR codes. And you say that the benefits include not having to stare at a small screen instead of enjoying time with friends, which sounds like a benefit of paper menus, not QR codes.

I am fully with you on your points btw, i vastly prefer paper menus over QR codes myself. Especially given that every single time i dealt with a QR code at a restaurant over the past year, it was always just a URL to their website. Which suffers from bajillion different issues (in addition to the inherent ones, like having to stare at your phone screen and attempting to navigate it, instead of having it all in one place on a large piece of paper), pick as many as you want from this list:

* poor website layout rendered on phone

* bajillion different menus (brunch menu, weekend menu, happy hour menu, dinner menu, etc.) without any clear indication which of them is currently active (“oh, you want item X? Too bad, we are currently on our lunch menu at 3pm that switches to happy hour menu at 4pm until 7pm, but normally it would be dinner menu at 4pm, but today is friday, so it is different, but on weekends you can pick from both happy hour and dinner items after 4pm”)

* outdated items on the website, some of which aren’t available

None of those are imo inherent problems with qr codes/online menus, but so far I’ve seen exactly zero establishments that put any thought into this. Theoretically, online menus could offer tons of advantages over paper menus. Two very obvious examples off the top of my head:

* for restaurants that tend to run out of certain menu items throughout the course of the day, they could update the availability status for those items in their online menus, so that customers could easily see what they can actually order. Instead of wasting waiter’s time with “I want to order item X. Oh, it isn’t available right now? Can you come back in 5 mins, I need some time to pick another one.”

* they could at least show “current active menu”, instead of having to make you figure out which of the bajillion menus is the one that applies right now (weekend menu, brunch menu, dinner menu, happy hour menu, or some mix of multiple ones?)

* stretch/bonus goal: ordering items to the table and paying the check through the portal, though this is actually a significant task/feature to implement, compared to the previous two

But as it stands now, my personal experience with QR codes at restaurants have been largely unfavorable compared to that of paper menus.

EDIT: reading other comments in the thread, it seems like there are quite a few places that implemented payment and ordering through QR codes, which tells me that it can definitely be done the right way. I have a feeling that me not encountering those in real life might be due to my location (Seattle), but here the situation with that has been abysmal.

A year ago, when restaurants (in Virginia) were allowed to start opening up again, offer outdoor seating, etc. they had to go to disposable, one-time use menus. I noticed a number of local places that went to QR codes rather than print up a bunch of menus.

One place that went carry-out only and has continued that way, doesn't have a huge display menu and has one menu they can wipe down and let people look at; but, has the QR ode posted in several spots.

Normally it's just a URL encoded in QR code, as the storage capacity of a QR code would likely not be sufficient for a whole menu.

One benefit of a web-based menu is that you don't have to relabel the menu when the price change, or when you need to add or remove a menu entry.

You could also make your menu dynamic and hide a meal if you're short on some ingredients.

A/b test on pricing(or even personalization of pricing) comes to mind.

How advanced are the analytics these provide? Depending on what signals they collect,I could see this being used to map with demographic data, etc.

The last time I went to a restaurant the menu was a QR code linking to a Facebook page. I coulnd.t even use it, had to rely on my wife's which has a FB account to read the menu. Now that you mention analytics I wonder if they get info based on this strategy.

I've walked out of restaurants without menus. I'm not the only one.

The last thing I want to do at a restaurant is to pull out my phone.

This really baffles me. What does a restaurant with no paper menus do if a customer doesn't have a phone (or is visited, from abroad, say, and doesn't have mobile data)? What about a family with kids (and/or grandparents) who don't have phones?

I have a phone, of course, but I don't take it with me everywhere I go. If I were going out for dinner, at least locally, I'd probably leave my phone at home. I don't want to be interrupted with emails or messages (or car warranty phone calls, which seem to be the only flavor they come in these days) while I'm eating. Spoils the appetite. If a waiter refused to give me a menu -- if a phone were, in other words, a prerequisite for dining -- I'd leave forthwith to look for a different spot.

We haven't really gone out to eat much since the pandemic started. Perhaps a few times at places with outdoor tables. I've never not been given a traditional menu at those places, though. Is this really as prevalent ("QR codes have replaced restaurant menus") as the article suggests?

experts say it isn't a fad

QED: It's a fad.

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