But I don't understand why so many restaurants still hang on to it.
It used to be impolite to mess with your phone in a restaurant. Now it's mandatory. Luckily it's not so common anymore now in Spain, only the Asian restaurants still do it. And McDonald's are trying to force their app by removing ever more ordering screens.
In some Chinese cities you can walk all day without finding a restaurant/shop that can give you change if you try to pay with cash or that accepts your western credit card.
Without Alipay/WeChat you will be stuck in your hotel unable to do anything.
However unlike the crappy western solution, where each business wants to have their own app, the experience is extremely smooth: Scan a QR code with WeChat, the menu opens in the app, order, pay.
Want a bottle of water in a small shop? Grab it from the cooler, scan the QR code on the cooler, type in 2 CNY and hit send money. Cashier gets a ding that you paid 2 CNY. Confirm with a nod and just leave.
Ride hailing (Didi - which ate Uber's lunch here), airplane&train tickets, and much more is also done right through WeChat/Alipay.
Last time I was there (2019) you had to tie your account to a Chinese bank account. You can only get a Chinese bank account if you have a resident ID. You, for obvious reasons, cannot get a resident ID if you’re not a resident or there on a work visa.
Effectively, I couldn’t even go down to the corner store and grab a snack without an escort because I had no ability to pay for anything.
Both Alipay and WeChat allow that now. I had no issues using my Visa with Alipay, and while WeChat was a bit confusing, it worked in the end.
I recommend setting it up 2-3 days before you're going to need it because especially WeChat may want to do some manual verification.
It's cheaper than having to deal with paper that gets dirty, torn apart by kids or outright stolen. And "daily special" doesn't need to be manually inserted into menus any more.
I've mentioned it in another thread about ice cream machines already: restaurants and hospitality in general are absurd cheapskates. Whenever a tiny avenue opens that saves them money, they'll do it, legal or not - the only thing that matters is that it looks acceptable to customers.
You've never run a bar or restaurant have you. What do you think the profit margins are?
And no matter where I worked at, if you'd send in the health department, fire safety inspectors, plumbers, electrical inspectors or cybersecurity experts, you'd find a truckload of code violations, not to mention constant issues with getting paid.
Also, they can use their enforcers as doormen. Where I'm from most of them had a criminal record even though they managed to obtain the "Tickmark" security logo (though I don't know whether that was legit or fake). Really, that should never be granted to anyone with any kind of violent crime history.
It's the same with a lot of Chinese restaurants. Lots of laundering there :(
Phone based ordering, which can include pictures of all menu items, is a huge win in comparison.
Covid still exists, but most everybody has natural or induced immunity, and it just isn't as severe (new strains) or as much of an unknown.
It's not going away. If you want to live in a state of emergency in perpetuity, go for it, just don't expect the world to not move on.
That’s why I compared to 2021, not 2020. In 2021 anyone who wanted a vaccine could get one.
> it just isn't as severe (new strains)
AFAIK this is still unproven, do you have a source?
> If you want to live in a state of emergency in perpetuity, go for it
I don’t, and never did. You’ve understood my point exactly backwards. I don’t think QR code menus make sense, and, along with a lot of other pandemic theatre, I don’t think they ever made sense, as evidenced by the fact that once people decided to stop using them, nothing catastrophic happened, despite the fact that the state of the pandemic is not meaningfully different from 2021.