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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

I refuse to use them. There isn't just one reason, but off the top of my head:

- 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.

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Honestly most of this is tinfoil hat level. I just agree on:

> 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.

Honestly, maybe I know more about how this stuff is used than you.

Hot tip: don't install company specific apps.

A web page doesn’t stop a restaurant from giving you a different menu. Printers exist, after all.

I would not expect custom menus to be printed on the fly based on the restaurant's camera customer face recognition. QR codes makes this kind of targetting practical enough to be routine.

Server: this guy looks rich, let me give them 'the rich prick' version of the menu.

I'm 99% sure this is possible without any technology, actually.

Right, but i think the scenario being imagined is more like some valley startup tried to capitalize on the tracking that already exists, and through the insane amount of investment money can profit share with restaurants that use their technology. It'll start about "selection satisfaction" and be used to create a profile to present the dishes you're most likely to enjoy based on your previous data. This will help people. Then it'll creep and creep and creep. After a certain time, the company pays restaurants to remove paper menus. And then everything goes to shit. Sure, certain restaurants will capitalize on the disdain by having paper menus and raising prices to match their novelness. But the general everyday experience of the average person will be worse, with more tracking, and less money.

Go ahead and say tinfoil hat, if i told you about the current state of streaming services or social media back in the early days of those existing we'd all say the same thing. The only barrier to entry to making the world worse is money. Every app i love, every service i use, my experience with the general internet, it's all gotten worse. And it's always in service of tracking and/or profit. So it's not hard to imagine a scenario where this is possible.

It's extremely difficult to not be cynical about the world. I really mean it when i say the social apps i have to use to keep up with friends have only gotten worse. There hasn't been a single improvement in over 5 years. Every update is more ads, more tracking, less human.

This comment got a little off track but my main point is that restaurants will adopt it when it becomes "free money", which a sufficiently capitalized start up will be able to do for a period of time. They'll handle everything for you, and it will start helpful. But as investment money dries they'll implement more and more shady practices to make up that difference.

You're spot on though. This is exactly how it goes. I've seen many, many examples of this up close and as soon as a restaurant wants you to download 'their App' to view the menu you just heard the first click of the ratchet.

What strikes me as interesting about this whole discussion is that the tech world should be a lot more knowledgeable about these patterns and far less naive about the typical tech cycle. In a nutshell you can condense it to disrupt, gain marketshare, squeeze the lemon.

Whether it's Uber, AirBNB, Food delivery, Social media, Gaming or restaurants doesn't really matter. What I've seen - under NDA - would make your skin crawl and that's just the very limited sample of all companies out there, and it's mostly just Europe. But over the course of 200+ such in depth looks at how the tech world works it is very clear to me that the new middle-men are at least as bad as the old ones were.

I’ve seen about the same, except from the US side (even from companies that market themselves as “privacy friendly”).

I was just pointing out that this dystopia already can exist without tech. Tech makes it easier and takes power away from the little-guy (the server ‘doesn’t have to’ give the rich prick his expensive menu) but software doesn’t care about impressions.

Indeed, tech is a massive accelerator in this and leads to transnational entities becoming the dominant player (not always, but very often anyway).

Funny that it actually happens in a lot of locations with tourists. Also Chinese restaurants in the US often have a “real Chinese” menu and a regular menu in English.

But what you’re arguing doesn’t make sense. As a restaurant owner, I can change online menu prices on the fly. 4th of July? Don’t mind me if I +20% that bad boy.

That just isn’t possible with paper.

And arrogant too!

The people who frequent HN are fairly well-informed about how the sausage is made.

Including the person you're responding to, who is telling the person above them that they are ignorant as to how the sausage is made (and I agree).

I regularly compare ordering from business-specific apps vs. Uber Eats. I can save up to 25% on some orders with the business-specific apps. Why do you think they're a bad deal?

Because you will be paying in some other way, for instance because your data is sold out the backdoor. Ryan J Shaw always orders from these two addresses, that means he's probably living there, he orders a lot of fancy food so we can enrich his profile and sell it to the highest bidder. Any app that you install should be reviewed as to what permissions it requires and you should be very careful with anything that wants to have your location, especially if it is on a regular basis. And location is something that can be inferred from many things, that QR code that you just scanned doesn't look like it is location data but it may have location attached to it which gets recovered when you scan it. So completely invisible to you you just allowed your lat/long pair+timestamp to be sent to a bunch of servers outside of your control, and with a bit of luck with your device ID or other identifying info added to it. As well as which cell phone provider you are using, what make and model phone you've got etc.

But all that information goes to the large platform vendors (eg DoorDash, Uber Eats) if you use their app instead. What makes the business-specific app worse in this regard? At least with the business-specific app, there's one less middle man involved.

Maybe. Or maybe they just see that as their additional source of revenue. For instance there are third party libraries that you get paid to include in your app which leak all kinds of data about you. Easy money for the app vendor.

Again, I would assume that UberEats and DoorDash have been paid to install all of those third party libraries, so it still feels like a lateral move to install my local pizza app instead. The only argument I see at the moment against the belief that the major apps have installed these trackers is that they feel they can negotiate for more money when they sell my personal information, but I don't see a scenario where I'm ordering on a phone and my personal information isn't being tracked and sold.

I'm not sure the dozens upon dozens of small businesses I've seen with QR linked menus are doing more than barely passing a PDF (the one they use to print their menus) or functional page that often isn't even designed for mobile are doing the vast majority of this sort of stuff. They're almost assuredly not doing any real sort of tracking, highly dynamic situational pricing, or forcing tip values.

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).

This is my reasoning. I’ve never seen anything more advanced than a link to a pdf. Yes it’s possible to do some basic tracking or even serve a different pdf depending on the os. No, I don’t believe restaurants would care enough to do that. Also I’m not sure of the legal implications if it could be proven they actually do that, but at the very least their reputation would plummet, and this is the last thing a restaurant want.

I see a bunch of restaurants using flowcode, which has built-in user tracking. Not sure how many of them use the tracking features, but given that it comes free with the product I’d bet it’s a lot.

> Honestly most of this is tinfoil hat level.

Or you are very naive about how businesses operate today.

They can be aware and not care. This is tinfoil hat.

What do you gain from calling normal people interested in their privacy with the grave name of "tinfoil hat"?

A false sense of superiority and a big red flag.

Then you're using "tinfoil hat" with a much different definition than the usage I've generally seen. I tend to see the term applied in cases where somebody is mistaken about matters of fact, not merely differences in value judgments about the facts. It's the difference between "Is there meat in this dish? I'm vegan." and "Is there meat in this dish? All meat dishes are made from dolphins.". The former is reaching a different conclusion based on the same facts, whereas the latter is reaching a different conclusion based on erroneous understanding of the world. Only the latter is "tinfoil hat".

By calling a difference in value judgment "tinfoil hat", you are stating that they are wrong about the facts, not merely that they care where you don't.

Or realistic. In literally all the restaurants I’ve been to in the last years, the QR code is nothing more than a link to a PDF version of the menu. Everywhere.

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.

I don't know where you live, but I would be very, very surprised if your country happened to have "mobile OS" enshrined in law as a forbidden avenue of price discrimination.

Come on, do you see absolutely no way a law preventing price discrimination could be formulated without referring to "mobile OS"? I know American laws are sometimes weirdly specific but still.

From a quick check on my government's website:

- prices must be displayed outside and inside the restaurant

- the prices can't be different depending on where they're displayed

- the displayed price must include taxes and service fees

That's enough to guarantee there's no possibly legal price discrimination. Not a single mention of "mobile OS".

Hmm… is a restaurant allowed to offer a kids menu?

Can they refuse to allow an adult to order from it?

https://youtu.be/Q7FxpK_yC0U

Didn’t know this show, it kinda reminds me of Louie. Thanks!

Actually children menus are sometimes marked as < 12 years old now that I think of it. Not sure if it’s legal, but I don’t think it would be enforced.

It's a reference to the concept in US law of protected class - discrimination is entirely legal against certain kinds of people. It's only protected classes that it is illegal to discriminate against. Specifically the law prohibits discrimination based on race, color, national origin, religion, sex, age, or disability. But if your restaurant wanted to charge people named Thomas or left-handed people $2 extra, that would be totally legal.

I don't know where you live but I would be very surprised if a restaurant had a high enough operational surplus to pay for any of this. Most resurants, even fancy ones are continuously a couple particular bad services away from bankruptcy.

This appears to be trying to suggest that low-margin businesses are somehow inherently immune to the idea of increasing their margins by any means necessary?

Ignore the legality of it for a second and just think what would happen when you have a dinner party that shows up where some people have different phones. The groups would immediately see the price differences.

Also, the QR menus I’ve seen don’t connect to the actual ordering process. Waitstaff come over to get the order, then they punch it into the POS device that tallies the bill. So maybe they could have dynamic pricing day to day, but not from customer to customer

It’s not business. It’s restaurants. If there’s one thing restaurants are awful are, it’s technology. They have no time, interest or margin for anything sophisticated.

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.

I dunno. One of the best SEO people I know runs a Thai restaurant and on a good day controls the whole first page when searching for Thai restaurants in his town.

That would be the exception that proves the rule then. If he's able to SEO the whole first page for Thai restaurants, that would seem to say the rest of them are terrible at the web.

His main tactic is that he grabs all the "internet real estate" that he can, that is he has a landing page for his restaurant in absolutely every place a restaurant could have a landing page.

Plenty of restaurants would like very much to have you order through their own website. But they are less (not not) tech savvy than the people that run the various large aggregators, who will stop at absolutely nothing to muscle their way in.

It started off with 25 cents per lead and it ends with 27% of your margin because the counterparty engages in unfair business practices, not because the restaurant isn't tech savvy. Blame the perp, not the victim.

> 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.

I don't think this makes sense. For anything but the largest chains (McD's etc), few are going to install an app just to order from you. And food aggregators have the same advantage that restaurant streets or mall food courts do: people who would like to eat but are not sure what have a place to start looking at options. Pair that with a nice unified payment and uniform no-call ordering interface, and you have a virtually unbeatable advantage compared to any restaurant handling their own orders, tech-savvy or not.

The parent doesn't have a smartphone, which immediately puts them in a small minority (depending on their country and age, say 5%). Do companies use smartphones to track people? Yes, of course. But rejecting technology and returning to monke is definitely not a mainstream choice, though admittedly not as extreme as literal tinfoil hats. I think you could argue it qualifies for a figurative one, though.

My previous close circle of friends had a restaurant etiquette where we placed our phones (then dumb at the time) in a pile and whomever picks theirs up from notifications or answered a call, they would foot the entire bill plus the tips.

That's a good one.

How to show your friend group are rich professionals, without saying your friend group is rich professionals.

That list seems very reasonable. All of those things are possible (and done). I walked into one store a few years ago. They matched me to my phone and started sending me text messages in the store for discounts on different floors (and that was 15 years ago). If there is a way to grift a bit of extra cash. There will be someone willing to code it up.

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.

You understand that an LLM running against a corpus of your collected online presence and payments would be able to make astonishing insights into your life and habits, and that anyone who had access to such a tool would have great power over you?

Plus you come to the restaurant, pay top price for food, for the setting and ambiance.. and the waiter taking the order is part of the experience you buy.

They aren't, and I wish we'd stop regurgitating this idea because restaurants use it as a justification to get out of paying servers proper wages. The person at the checkout at my local grocer is just as much "part of the experience" when I buy groceries, but their employer pays for them to be there, as opposed to expecting me to do so. This gaslighting of consumerism as an experience is damaging, and allows the greedy to foist the cost of doing business onto the customer more and more.

Are you comparing dining at a restaurant to grocery shopping?

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.

The common thread between the two is calling consumerism an "experience." This isn't a theme park. The server, retail worker, or whomever is not an actor in a costume there for the amusement of the customer. They work for their employer, carrying duties that allow that employer's business to profit, and therefor, should be paid by the employer.

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.

It's still quite bizzare to me. The theme park employees are working for the employer too, just like the waiters and barmen working for the establishment. Going out for drinks with friends or for a dinner date is an experience, how could it be otherwise? I don't expect the staff to entertain me, sure, but that doesn't mean that it's just "engaging in consumerism" for the customers. I'm sorry if you have bad memories about the job, but your point of view is quite angsty and jaded.

> The common thread between the two is calling consumerism an "experience."

That is your interpretation, and tbh I expressed myself poorly. In Europe working in a restaurant earns at least minimum wage and likely more now, since the pandemic led to worker shortage. I am talking social in reference to experience. The waiter being a real person you talk to, who can inform you on menu choices. A restaurant isn't a McDonald's factory that serves calories at minimum cost price and maximum productivity. The automation trend will see people lose their jobs.

I would, personally. Not on the level of service, but on the way the worker should be compensated. I hate it when employees are pitted against each other at a workplace, like how they often do with sales people. I think this is exploiting them, and I don't like the idea of that, no matter what results it produces.

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.

I get that everyone has different expectations, for a relevant number of people a restaurant is a place to eat nice food in the best state.

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.

The customer pays for 100% of the cost of doing business.

I go to restaurants for every lunch break as they're affordable and serve good food in Germany.

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.

A lot of people, myself included, really enjoy chatting with servers and absolutely consider it part of the experience that we’re paying for.

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 :)

Big difference between a 45 minute lunch break and a nice Saturday night dinner.

For sure! Though if I'm on a 45min lunch break, I think I'd still prefer the 30s conversation with a server over 30s looking at my phone.

This is the absolute last thing I care about. If they didn't have to be part of the experience I'd rather they not be. Using human language to convey what you want is, at best, an inconvenience. It is slow and error prone. There's no reason they need to take my order.

I can agree with a lot of your points but has there been a proven case of price manipulation or tracking? While the idea of a sliding price scale sounds possible I can't see it happening without a massive backlash from the public. Tracking is much more realistic though I suspect that could be done via credit cards as that is what most people use these days.

From a business point of view, what percentage of customers do not have a smart phone?

14% or so in 2022, and dropping every year.

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