The QR-code menu is being shown the door
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> One reason is etiquette. Everyone knows it’s rude to take a phone out at a table, but that’s what a digital menu demands.
> Still, he said, more dynamic QR-code menus that allow a customer to order and pay without waiting for a server are gaining in popularity. In the first quarter of this year, the number of businesses signing up and actively using the service grew 37.6 percent over the last quarter of 2022, he said.
QA code menus failed for three very, very obvious reasons:
1: It's very hard to make a working web site when you're not tech savvy. Restaurants are not "tech" businesses. Many QR menus were difficult to operate, difficult to navigate, and difficult to read. I often found them so confusing that I asked for a paper menu.
2: Tiny menus (because of a tiny phone screen) suck.
(edit) 3: It's actually very rude and insulting to force someone to "learn tech" on the fly. It has little to do with if the patron is tech-savvy. Because it takes a long time to debug tech and get out of the problems that I listed in point #1, it's really insulting, as a patron, to get forced to endure a half-baked website when a low-tech paper menu works perfectly.
I'm glad you said this. Our industry is full of people who quantify that their job is "easy". We have a history rife with these assertions, including a period of time where we thought everyone would want to code and that we were just trailblazers. I think that hypothesis is becoming less and less true in interesting ways every day. The most I've seen is people interacting with very facade levels or niche implementations of languages to do their jobs. Even then, those are mostly scientific fields to begin with.
Everyone forgot about digital menus fairly quickly after it became clear that covid doesn't spread through surfaces though.
When it's a website, it's often lousy long lists where you can only see 3 or 4 things at a time, have to scroll super far back up and down to compare things, and have no idea what the restaurant is nudging you to order.
Not just any website. Often it sends you straight to some online ordering portal like Toast or Doordash. And this bring all the slow performance and pop-ups and adware that implies. Very fun to try to load these bloated web apps when you have 1 bar of cell signal.
I imagine most of the business in such places comes from delivery so they don't care much about dine-in guests.
Reused menus were always a gross idea so I'm on board with this.
That said, menus spend a lot of time on the table, some of that while food and drink is being consumed - apps/drinks are ordered and people continue to ponder their meal choices as they munch. The drinks splatter, the food drips sauce and grease, etc.
Because of the visibility factor, you're confronted with this information far more than you would be for a doorknob or chair. That's going to cause some to consider the menu more gross than those other features.
Finally, tables and chairs and doorknobs and railings all get cleaned from time to time, with tables and chairs often wiped down between guests. Paper menus don't take well to being wiped down with water or cleaning solutions. You can laminate, but laminated menus tend to be associated with cheaper / lower class establishments.
At a place with a continuously changing menu this is less of a factor as menus are reprinted often, sometimes daily. When the menu is static, paper menus might stick around for a while, accumulating residue and getting more visibly dirty over time.
Everything could be gross to touch if you really think about it too much. Your phone is probably worse than any menu.
I disagree with the everyone knows part. In certain age groups, I don't think they actually consider it rude to be glued to their phone regardless of location. Whether I agree with them or not, social norms evolve.
It's rude to be glued to your phone everywhere I've traveled; or to talk on a phone during a meal.
Which is also why I said TFA missed the reason by a mile. "Everyone knows it’s rude to take a phone out at a table" isn't true at all; and demonstrates that the author is out of touch with the general public's relationship with tech.
Yeah no...
I was on a wifi-only plan during covid and QR menus absolutely sucked.
> 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.
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.
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.)
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)
Blocking unbanked people from the economy is sorta bad if you have any kind of homeless population.
- I don't like being tracked
- I don't have a smartphone
- I like to see the prices printed because that makes it much harder to present me with different pricing based on date, my phone or profile
- Dining out is one of the few places where I can get away from computers
- I'll tip as much (or as little) as I see fit
- Places that force you and/or your companions to bring out their phones tend to have those phones on the table (with all of the associated interruptions/cat video sharings/other distractions) for the rest of the meal
Usually I just ask for a paper menu, which quite a few places still have, and if they don't they might have a customer tablet lying around. And if it is forced then I just walk, there usually are plenty of restaurants.
> Dining out is one of the few places where I can get away from computers"
if I go to a restaurant it's to be with people, not phones.
Physical menus are way better because they're bigger, more personal (the choice of the materials give a strong feeling for the vibe of the restaurant), more engaging and playful (it's easier to finger point stuff to the people you're with on a menu). All these are strong arguments in favor of a physical menu, there's no need to invent weird conspiracies around QR code menus.
Or you are very naive about how businesses operate today.
And that’s why they get ripped off by ubereats and other delivery services. They will outsource their whole ordering process and lose almost 30% of their margin because they can’t be bothered to have their own app or a proper website.
Restaurants are just not tech savvy. It’s just a common industry trend. Sure you’ll find exceptions and may be someone will track you with a QR code. The reality is that they won’t.
They’d get a lot more info from you if they had a free wifi anyway.
There’s no way they’d risk their reputation by serving a different menu to people depending, say, on the OS. Also it’s probably 100% illegal where I live.
Hot tip: don't install company specific apps.
While it's certainly possible, I find it highly unlikely. Larger chains certainly could pull it off and likely do (e.g. the McDonalds of the world), but I also don't tend to eat at those places. Places I dine could not justify creating an app for their business. Maybe people's dining choices effect these perception a bit?
Also I've yet to be anywhere that forces a tip without explicit clear gratuity information on the menus, usually related to party size. Tip culture is a whole other growing issue in that places have started introducing mandatory recovery fees and service fees instead of integrating costs into their menu prices (where they should be).
For me in this case it is readability. My eyes decided in the past couple of years to go from 20/20 to can not read small print randomly anymore. Especially if I have to switch from dark room to bright phone (most restaurants). It seems okish if I am already in a bright area.
I couldn't give a rats ass how they take my order as long as the food arrives timely and tastes good. I'm not buying some mystical pretentious dining experience. I'm buying food and a place to eat it at.
However I do care about not being tracked by my bank or some random app, which is why I pay cash and use paper menus.
Consider that your experience is very anecdotal and the systems that have emerged surrounding dining traditions probably wouldn’t exist if everyone felt the way you did. There’s nothing pretentious or mystical about it, some people enjoy a pleasant conversation with a stranger :)
The tips are an american issue as far as I can tell. The rest of the world has no mandatory tips and manages just fine.
And yes, this is a distictly American issue, and needs to be abolished. In the US, I worked as a bartender for $2.65 an hour in 2005. Basically, my employer payed me nothing, since that was just covering taxes, and each customer that ordered a drink from me was my main source of income. It irks me to my core when people wave this off as some normalized "part of the experience" and not a problem of greed that requires correction.
And you'd be wrong about tips. They are at quite a lot of places, in fact, I find that it's rarer when a system or culture explicitly does away with them. In Japan for example, people can even get upset and give back the tipped amount. And at many places, it's not called a tip, but it's rather a bribe, but frankly, I think they have a lot in common.
The US is something else altogether of course, but I can't rememeber many restaurants where I thought having a waiter a positive part of the experience. And I'm clearly not the only one, looking at the robot waiter development pace and actual sales data.
* 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!
This is how American cultural norms proliferate through technology.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
You flip through the menu on your phone and then order with a waiter. When done, you pay online via Apple Pay or whatever you want. Instantly and with tips.
Just a couple of companies do provide this service here in Ukraine and both managed to get the UI/UX just right so the experience is excellent.
Visiting Europe, I see so many absolutely brain-damaged implementations of online menus that I have to ask myself whether the developers ever used their product or if they are just dead inside people.
I could also request a staff member to the table (if I preferred to talk in person). It kept a running tab of my bill and at any time I could just pay online and walk away. The feeling was like the first time just getting out of an uber and walking away. Again, I didn't have to flag down a staff member, ask for the bill, get the bill, ask for "the machine", wait for them to return, tap my credit card etc etc. It was all very well done.
Unfortunately, most QR code menus are just a link to their mobile site. It has 0 added functionality.
But yes, concern is valid. But yes, they know anyway because you pay online.
And if you don't have a phone -- you starve to death?
Or you can resort to a paper menu and/or cash payments both of which are always readily available.
But on mine, the appearance of QR menus has been paired with a disappearance of paper menus, about 50 percent of the time.
It's really quite obnoxious, actually. But that's modern tech for you.
Not aware of the others
The most frustrating thing about them is that many restaurants don't have their own website, and simply host the PDF on some third-party website, often through a URL shortener. So scanning a restaurant's QR code yields an obfuscated link that, when opened, immediately triggers a download of a PDF menu.
That's shady AF from a security perspective, and we should not be normalizing it.
How do those PDF menus even work? Do they have a waiter come around and take your order? Do you order up front and the QR menu is just a convenience in addition to a large menu sign?
At another, the restaurant's entire menu was online and expected you to place the order through the website so that it was nearly indistinguishable from a carry-out/DoorDash order. The only difference was that you specified a table number in the order if you were dining in.
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.
It goes both ways.
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
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
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.
> 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.
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.
The level of "create a static online version of my menu" is something ChatGPT could actually do quite easily.
$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.
No buttons on the machine, but a QR code. Leads to an app download. Installed. The menu is only visible after creating an account. Created account. Chose my snack. Asks for Swedish payment system. I don’t have that. Tiny option for credit card. Hope. But only Swedish cards accepted. Arghh.
There is a chai vending machine in a WeWork I visit sometimes. It has a screen to choose your chai, but you can also scan a QR code. The code simply takes you to a webpage with all the options. One touch on your preferred chai, and it dispenses.
I quickly figured out that the QR code is a regular URL. I can copy it and open it in my home and spam the buttons and waste their chai all day long.
I didn't do it, but I could.
I was just thinking how useful it would be to be able to preorder from your desk/on the way to the vending machine, but indeed, it sounds easily abusable.
it seems obvious to me:
>what can we do to lower operating costs?
>remove coins and banknotes from the machines and only allow credit cards, so we don't have to pay people to collect all the money!
>ok, so should we install a POS on every machine so that people can pay with the card?
>no! that would cost too much! just install a QR code so the customer has to use an app with an account and pay there, so our machine is basically as dumb and featureless as possible!
About qr-code menus, there's a place that went fully online only (app required) to order their food. They don't have a kiosk on site either last I checked. It's really weird from a business sense to just cut off customers without smartphones.
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!
* 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.
- 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.
(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.
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.
QR code gets printed at different resolution and or ratio, and or laminated glare, and now not getting scanned.
My main beef is when a restaurant has no paper menu, and when you attempt to scan the QR code it takes you to a portal, where you have to REGISTER/SIGN-IN to see a menu.
Nuh-uh. F you and your dodgy dark pattern data mining crap. I'm eating somewhere else.
I quite like ordering from an app if it's well designed, but unfortunately most of them aren't, so you go round in circles trying to figure out how to get the options you want together.
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 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.
It's kind of like suburbia and drive-throughs: If you just assume everyone owns a nice car and drives everywhere, then it makes sense. Nevermind the pedestrian over there.
So if you want to make everything awkward for the people who haven't dropped $1k for an iPhone, this is a good way to do it. It keeps the poors and the old folks away.
I would honestly recommend everyone, especially on this site, use a cheap android or an old iphone from time to time to see what the experiences you’re building are like for the large subset of people who don’t upgrade to the newest iphone every year.
You know what's even more crap? Waiting for the bill after eating.
Let me pay my bill by scanning the table's QR code in my own time!
But it seems like QR menus are one way to handle inflation and changing prices for the restaurants.
I hate QR menus with a passion, but I also feel for the restaurants who would otherwise have to print new menus every few months.
In use cases where the experience is an important component, such as the steakhouse example from the article, QR codes can be a net negative. Automation might not be desirable there.
One of the more insufferable ideas from the long line of dumb Covid ideas that solved nothing.
The ones that are decent are also not that great, the JS code that runs constantly stutters and its basically a delivery menu, allowing you to place orders, seems off putting in dining out.
Have had a hard time convincing waiting staff to give me a physical menu, and I keep hearing a response, we have QR, as if that's making them somehow tech-savvy. Its a restaurant, I don't think you ever need to be tech-savvy, just serve good food. Doubt they'd be able to reduce waiting staff by introducing these tech features anyway.
Worst is McDonald's (IND) attempting to force people to use the large TV touchscreens to place orders, and two or more people (helpers) keep helping you use it and eventually place the whole order for you, and it lacks customizations like no tomatoes etc, so you anyway give up and go to the counter. It's possibly an attempt to reduce work staff, but seems forced on to the customer. And the touch latency is just... resistive touch phones were a lot better.
I'm an introverted dude, but QR-code menus just feel like I'm eating a take-out meal, but dining in, which is weird.
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.
While there might be some tracking or what not, it's probably less harmful than all the other tracking going on, including even the carrier's own systems.
- sanitary: coming back from the pandemic a lot of people were/are trying to avoid touching stuff other people touch
- menu costs: facilitates adjusting prices. While this may not seem like an advantage, the truth is that if restaurants had the cost of re-printing their menu to accommodate higher prices, they would probably do it in a bump and possibly overshoot to account for the possibility they will have to do it again soon.
- for some restaurants, it also serves as a way to attract certain crowds. For example, a restaurant catering to older people is likely not going to do this, but a hip restaurant vying for a teenager clientele might very well use it as a means of "branding"
Like, a basement bar should be aware pretty quickly why everyone seems to be sharing a single phone for the menu - it’s the only one that loads!
I stopped reading at that point because they're conflating two very different ideas. It's one thing to have a QR menu, it's another thing to have a contactless ordering system. Most of the restaurants in my area have QR code menus, almost none of them have a contactless ordering system - the server takes your order. A lot of those same restaurants bring a payment device to your table instead of a bill so you can take care of your bill when you're ready.
It works great.
I feel like every SaaS provider in this space just had a really low bar for "minimum" in MVP and never bothered improving it through the whole pandemic.
If you have physical menus, you should ALSO have a QR menu, just to make sure that people can order (additional) dishes and drinks without having to ask or hunt for a menu first.
And don't get me started on multiple physical menus that look the same externally, but one is the wine list, the other is only for lunch, etc.
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.
I don’t need any pageantry at 95% of restaurants by the waiter or waitress then long wait times while they prepare the food.
Some restaurants allow it and will ask you to pay first, some will act like you are from another galaxy, and others aren’t sure how to approach the situation.
cricket
Asked for hard menu, they said "we don't have them any more". Later learned that people toss these hard menu into the trash when confronted with Q-code offer.
Sounds like an active protests going on in form of a Denial-of-Service (via deprivation of hard menus).
What a disaster; especially when you snap the QR, and are immediately shown a massive, full-page ad, that you need to dismiss, before seeing the part of the menu that you don't care about, and then, find out that the designer had no grasp of Information Architecture, as you stumble around, searching for the dish you want.
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.
At least with a paper menu I can point Google Translate at it and get something understandable back!
Are there some annoyances with implementations? Of course. I've also had terrible cashiers before. YMMV is true of the old and the new.
Ordering takes longer with QR than saying:
I'd like a double bacon cheesburger, extra bacon, lettuce and tomato on the side with a side of fries and medium sprite in a large cup.
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.
it's not rude. it's ultra-convenient; you don't have to wait on service. i will continue to scan.
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.
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