Hacker News Reader

Comment by fowl2 | Hacker News Reader

* Support damn Apple/Google Pay without requiring a email, phone number, login, or app! Or even allow that payment at the register, either before or after service.

* Include the table number in the code!

* Include any weekend/public holiday/service/surcharge in the prices! It makes sense not to print a new menu for 1 day a week, but this is digital and already implemented in your system!

* Don't forcefully 'suggest' a tip before service has been delivered! (in places where tips aren't customary/required).

* For fast food/take out places, include back-pressure in your ordering/time estimates. If there are 20 orders queued with one cook, don't give an estimate of 5 minutes!

* Ordering in your own time is amazing!

* Pictures are great!

* Being able to instantly remove "out of stock" items, perfect!

* Bill splitting "by default" is useful!

View on HN

The tipping function on electronic payments is a blight. I'm starting to see this regularly in Berlin, a place where tipping is not customary in many settings and just having this as a step you have to click through on the payment processor creates a level of social expectation.

Then have a thick skin and say no. That's the only way.

Oh I do. But are teenagers going to have a thick skin for instance? It's fine for me to reject it for now, but if it becomes a social expectation it will be hard to say no without facing social consequences.

This is how American cultural norms proliferate through technology.

Agreed. I visited a pizza place in London a few years back which automatically added a 15% tip to all orders. You had to ask to remove it. Social engineering at its finest; most people won’t ask to remove a tip that’s already been added. I simply never returned; I refuse to support a business that favours tipping culture over higher minimum wages.

"If she doesn't like it, she should learn to type."

This is standard practice in London. Virtually all table-service restaurants (but not pubs) add service charge to your bill, usually 12.5%. (15% sounds excessive, I don’t think I’ve seen that).

You are not expected to tip in addition to the service charge, and by law, staff get paid 100% of any service charge and gratuities with no deductions.

> by law, staff get paid 100% of any service charge and gratuities with no deductions

If only that was true. Staff are only currently entitled to 100% of cash tips - service charges paid by card are not counted, and often form part of the staff's base pay, or go to the owners.

Parliament has voted through a law which will change this - but it isn't in force yet. https://www.simplybusiness.co.uk/knowledge/articles/2021/10/...

Wow, "first consulted on in 2016"

Funny how the Tories can push through sweeping changes to our constitution in a single night, while bills like this take... 7 years just to reach their second reading in the commons.

https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2927

It's actually this bill - https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/3197 - which has been completely passed already (received royal assent).

Well, that's good news at least. But still, 7 years from consultation to passage through parliament is far too long!

> "service charges paid by card are not counted, and often form part of the staff's base pay, or go to the owners."

This was true some years ago. But now days, most (vast majority of?) restaurants are compliant with the (upcoming) law and pay out all tips to staff. Source: friends who work in the industry. This issue has gotten significant media attention in the past any any restaurant not paying out tips fairly would get shamed pretty hard!

There is a tax benefit for the restaurant as well, VAT is charged on restaurant meals but not on these "service charges".

I disagree that it's all restaurants, it's closer to half. The other half might have it for groups 6+ or 8+ people.

It’s 15% free extra cash flow for payment processors to calculate fees on, not for the restaurants. Then they might be able to double dip it by transfer fees, or maybe simply hold it and expire it until owners correctly configure some nuisance_feature.

European countries have culture stretching back a thousand years. We will resist.

I remember in Berlin back around 2004 that all the expat Americans were always online, and most of the Germans simply weren't. The things we knew about and talked about were different. Many people I knew didn't have broadband. We didn't have a shared culture.

Now everybody has phones and we are all feeding from the same spigots. Kids grew up like this.

I do think this has resulted in significant Americanization of German culture.

I remember travelling around Europe as a young adult in the late 00s.

In every country, the teenagers dressed slightly differently, and these styles were all very different to what I saw on the streets at home in London.

Now, in every European city the teenagers, and the younger adults <35yo, are all wearing one of a handful of styles, which have been unified across borders by social media.

It's been interesting to observe the monoculture as an American living in Germany. For instance, during the George Floyd protests in the states, there were mass demonstrations against police brutality in the US being held in Berlin.

I think that police brutality and racial discrimination are important issues, but I could not help wondering what those (mostly) teens and young adults hoped to accomplish by protesting what's happening in a completely different society thousands of kilometers away. Especially when there's plenty of discrimination to get upset about right here in Germany.

Depends on if you pay before or after you receive your food.

I've yet to see a QR-code ordering system that let you choose to pay at the end of your meal. The idea of deciding how much to tip before you've even interacted with any of the staff or tasted your meal seems utterly absurd to me - what are you actually tipping? If I were running a restaurant I'd explicitly avoid using a pay-up-front system largely because I'm sure for most customers it would remove any incentive to tip based on the level of service/quality of food provided.

Almost all the ones I've seen are pay-to-order, and prompt for tip (sometimes preselected!) at that time.

Revise your understanding of thick please. I a business is expecting me to do all the work to obtain service from them, they should be tipping me, not me tipping them. Next time I see Jeff Bezos's yacht maybe try to step on board and ask for my service fee...

In the U.K. I’ve seen a lot of bar staff press 0% as they hand you the machine.

If only restaurants actually did that. All I've ever gotten from these are broken websites. Pictures are generic stock pictures (hiring a food photographer every time you change the menu is expensive), ordering is still done the old fashioned way as a means to get some overpriced drinks on your table as soon as possible, and "out of stock" is something you get told when you order because asking the kitchen to update the website as they cook is just unnecessary overhead.

In theory this can be nice, but in practice restaurants seem to use these as a way to mess with prices on the fly or save on printing menus.

Ordering via code in the US would be a challenge I think. As you said, restaurants would lose the chance to offer drinks (and appetizers and specials), and servers might lose out on tips if there’s less customer interaction.

Also, I think you’d want to charge people as they order to incentivize people to double check their orders, and that would make it harder for people to seamlessly treat each other or split shared items.

In general I think people in the US have built a lot of little rituals and social customs around how restaurants work, for better or worse, and messing with those makes people uncomfortable, especially now after all the shifts around covid

> Ordering via code in the US would be a challenge I think. As you said, restaurants would lose the chance to offer drinks (and appetizers and specials), and servers might lose out on tips if there’s less customer interaction.

It might be a hard transition for a restaurant that currently has full table service, OTOH, it would be an easier challenge for a fast-casual restaurant (the kind that does “order & pay at the counter, get a number, then get served at your table”, to go to tableside ordering with QR menus.

> without requiring an email, phone number, login

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.

What's the lowest rate you can do in-app purchases at in an app clip? And to put it in perspective with tips, how much of that goes to poor, underpaid Apple employees and how much goes to shareholders?

In-app purchase fees only apply to digital downloaded content, not “real world” purchases like restaurant meals.

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.

Which comes out of the bank's share, not the merchant's.

I've seen some patterns which suggest that might not always be the case. That is, apps which support Apple Pay but nudge you towards entering card details instead by making it not-the-default or hiding it behind an extra layer of UI.

For example, the Odeon cinemas app or Too Good To Go (food app). I always assumed it must be because the merchant pays a higher fee for Apple Pay transactions.

> I always assumed it must be because the merchant pays a higher fee for Apple Pay transactions.

I've never seen evidence of such, but there is certainly concern about becoming ever more reliant on credit card companies. So there can be an odd push to set up a first-party-account-based payment method (even if that winds up actually being backed by credit cards today).

The behavior doesn't always make immediate sense - for example, Walmart going as far as to special-order payment terminals without NFC so that they can never accept contactless, but then having you pay with their app - with a credit card online transaction, which I believe is a higher rate.

For some apps, it may be that they don't prioritize Apple Pay merely because they know only some browsers support it, and only some percentage of people on those browsers have set it up.

Nice, or rather: nice, as long as it can be wrapped in a good cross platform layer (which means that it boils down to website repackaged with the platform's out-of-browser payment mechanism).

I only know the supposed Android equivalent from the inside, and while I believe that it could be used for the "browser plus platform payment" pattern, it's main focus seems to be incremental delivery of large apps. That is a hard problem given the circumstances of the Android build process and their solution seems kind of stuck in those last 20%. Fortunately incremental is not really related to the temporary use case (if stuff like media in the menu is dealt with by the platform browser), but the attention given to (andvTwitter by) the much harder problem of incremental delivery isn't exactly helpful when that's not what you want to use it for.

> as long as it can be wrapped in a good cross platform layer (which means that it boils down to website repackaged with the platform's out-of-browser payment mechanism).

If you are trying to build a cross-platform application using some large framework, it will likely be too large. There is an upper size limit of 10 MB.

Once you move to platform specific tech, you can do things like grab just the image assets needed for a particular device dot pitch and resolution. Hypothetically you could use those in a WKWebView to render HTML content, although I do not know of existing efforts to do so.

If it is more than four screens I would expect the technology to be a bad fit. If you could figure out maintenance of menu changes, you'd likely be better off just using native libraries (similarly, sometimes its better to just use PHP and inline javascript)

It sucks that when you scan these you can't choose to open the website.

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.

There is no App in this case.

The tips are forcefully suggested to offset the cost of the order processing service.

These apps often take a 10%+ cut from every order. Which makes it hard to sell to a restaurant. If I pre-select 10% tip, most people will pay it making the app basically free and a no-brainer for the restaurant.

I think it should be communicated better, but this is how I've seen it work.

Don't put your menu in fucking Facebook and force me download that app to see it.

you are assuming that the experience should be tailored on the US market

most of those assumptions don't apply outside the US

for example: tipping at the checkout, bill splitting, different timezones, different prices based on holidays and whatnot, are not a common requirement (or non existent) where I live.

OTOH constantly changing menus are quite common, they are handled in the simplest way possible: you get a printed menu with the classics and then there are blackboards all around with the daily specials and/or the waiters will tell you what they are, before taking the order

https://10619-2.s.cdn12.com/m0/Rome-Taverna-Romana-menu.jpg

> Support damn Apple/Google Pay without requiring a email, phone number, login, or app!

Wait, no idea how Apple works, but with Google Wallet in Europe you just tap your phone over the POS display and it goes straight to your credit card without any other step.

Is that different in US?

Nah, it’s the same, but the problem is that most QR menus force you to provide a phone number when ordering which is highly invasive and unnecessary. Just let me order and pay without collecting a bunch of PII.

Both can also be used on the web.

I suppose the payment goes through the app like it does for online purchases, not via the waiter handheld/POS terminal?

US has NFC although to a lesser extent than EU/Canada. But this is talking about on-device Apple/Google Pay, where you get prompted to use your stored payment with native UI.

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/apple_pay_on_the_w...

Red Robin has terminals at each table that can take NFC payments. No need to enter an email address. Too bad they seem to be going out of business.

Chilis does this too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com