In restaurants, We need a new way to signal that we're ready to pay
sebs.website
sebs.website
this is 100% unrelatable to me
I have never once used my phone to pay in a sit-down restaurant. I have only seen someone else use their phone when forced to, such as due to a forgotten wallet, and with much fussing and apologizing
I see people pay with cash in the Netherlands, but half the time it's with card or mobile.
Sometimes when traveling my credit card will get blocked and only then is there much fussing and apologizing as I attempt to find cash or pay with a physical credit card.
I love it not only for convenience, but for the security as well. I don’t have to worry about a potential pickpocket seeing where I keep my wallet or how much cash is on me. I keep my transit pass on my watch for the same reason.
(Before that I was mostly using card-based tap-to-pay, but that has the disadvantage that there's a limit both on transaction size and on transactions since last validation, after which it requires pin validation. The phone-based solution don't have this; being able to unlock the phone satisfies the PSD2 requirements.)
It used to be. But in a lot of the places I shop, it's not anymore. Especially the supermarket. And Target!
Enter your store rewards card number. Skip.
Do you want to pay with your store card? No.
Do you want to donate to our charity of the month? No.
Do you want to round up your total to save the dying baby whales? No.
Tap, insert or swipe. Wave the phone around the payment pad to find the invisible, not marked sweet spot so it bleeps.
Oh, it's a debit card! Enter your PIN. Push. Push. Push. Push.
Do you want cash back? No.
Confirm the total. Push.
Do you want your receipt printed, e-mailed, or not at all? Not at all.
Transaction complete.
Your total is $28.52. Hand over $40.00.
Teller puts the bills in the slot, and the machine tells her how many bills of which denominations to give me, while my coins slide down the little chute into the change tray.
But funding the oayment spot in a new place indeed looks like waving a magic wand
Strangely, it hasn't always been the case. Early on, I really wondered if the tech would catch on, as I had a lot of issues. Lots of places didn't support tap, or had the hardware but had it disabled. For some reason, it wasn't fast at all, often taking as long as a regular card too! And worse, a tap failure seemed to require the person at the register to have to cancel the transaction on their end to allow a retry. They weren't used to tap-to-pay and would often act annoyed.
Somewhere along the way, this all changed. Taps are near instant, they rarely fail, and they usually reset pretty quickly when they do! I'd guess a lot of people who are hesitant were bitten by some of the early problems and don't realize how much smoother it all is now.
If my wallet or credit card is lost, I'm canceling cards, watching my credit report, etc.
If my wallet or credit card are stolen, I go on the bank's web site and mark them as such, and the transactions are automatically blocked by the bank and a replacement card is FedExed to me the next day. Credit report? I'm not sure how that relates to losing a wallet. I don't keep my mortgage details in my pocket.
If my phone gets lost? I don't care that much. But based on what I read on HN, people will be locked out of their bank accounts, their cars, their homes, and everything else in their lives. They won't even be able to call a loved one for help because they don't know anyone's phone number.
People on HN rail against single points of failure. Putting your entire life and trust into a piece of glass is the definition of single point of failure.
I may need to pay 150 or 250€ (cannot remember) max, and that's the limit of my liability. I would like to see the bank that will try to make me pay that, it happens once and they backtracked immediately when I told them I am closing my account then.
We do not have the US credit thing, so no repairs to watch.
This said, I am 100% with you on the security of phones vs cards.
Not a high frequency problem, but a chore all the same.
Crazy to me but ok
I know this is a bit of a bubble but all my friends that have androids have them rooted, so paying with our phones isn't even an option.
Random anecdote from Estonia. I noticed around a year ago that I'm getting old - I was the only person in a restaurant that used his card to pay - everybody else used either their watch or phone. Since then, I've also upgraded/downgraded and started to use my phone for payments.. just because I don't wanna be _that_ dinosaur.
It's not always like that though - you still have lots of people using credit cards (or rarely cash) in grocery stores etc, but it does seem much more common for _the elderly_, like me, 40+ :P
I will check myself in May when I spend a week in Tallin :)
You need to get a little bit older, eventually you’ll find amusing to be the dinosaur surrounded by sheeps.
But for normal usage, why would I carry around a card to tap on terminals when I can just tap a phone on them instead?
I think the US is possibly slightly behind the curve here because mobile terminals are a fairly new thing there; they mostly became common with Apple/Google Pay, so about ten years ago. In most of Europe, chip and pin became largely mandatory around the turn of the century, so people taking your card out the back to process it was no longer an option, and they pretty much had to have a solution that could come to the payer anyway.
arguably, I don't want to. I have a credit card, I have cash. I have no reason to use a phone esp. in a situation where I have people literally waiting on me.
why do I tip these people if I have to do it all myself? might as well just order at the counter using my phone
Believe it or not, most servers/staff at restaurants that do QR code and self-bussing don't care if you tip.
I almost always pay with my phone using tap.
Some restaurants have a fully online payment system where you get the bill on your phone and pay from there through some online payment system. I've seen this at airport restaurants, where it makes sense as you may be in a hurry and don't want to have to wait to get the server's attention. I wouldn't like it at normal sit-down restaurants in other situations.
I don't think this is a technology problem. There are lots of lo-tech ways of signaling that would like the cheque.
I pay for evertything with my phone.
When I pay by myself I always pay in cash, although I am usually with someone else who wants to pay by credit card (or sometimes by debit card). A signal does not seem needed though since they will just tell them they are ready and then will pay immediately when they have the bill ready. When I am by myself, I will pay in cash and I will try to pay in advance when I can (which has other advantages as well, such as to know the price and if I have the money to pay).
We can create an app that needs location data and microphone access so that it can automatically sit there and wait for us to say “check please” and it can turn on a BLE beacon that talks to the servers phone, which, running the app, has already linked to the tables phones and recorded the guests orders for the server.
The server can access the users tipping history, sort of a restaurant social credit score, and the users get to have their data harvested 24/7 to support the app’s seamless automatic functionality! It’s going to be great!
This is when you pay, just have your card or whatever ready to go. Skip the extra limbo state and leave when you're ready.
It is more efficient this way. Often times the wait person may have multiple tables sat at the same time. This way they can greet each table shortly after sitting (you don’t want to know how people react if they wait “too long” for that first greeting). Then take drink orders for all tables, get those delivered, take apps, get those fired. While those are cooking, get the mains ordered, and so on.
Yes, some people want to order all at once. However, that’s not most guests. Most folks want to sit at the table and relax for 1.5 - 2 hours and hate feeling rushed.
I don’t think most people realize how hard a job it is to wait tables. I think everyone would be well served by working as a wait person in their early work years.
Some places still do, but most places I've been to post-pandemic have the servers carrying handheld POS terminals and do it tableside.
This is also has the advantage that if for whatever reason it is impossible to pay because all the servers have disappeared and no is up front, you can just calculate out the bill+tax+tip from the prices in the menu, lay it on the table, and leave.
Most the problems around credit/phones revolve around the fact that restaurants are operating around customs and inertia of the cash system, and awkwardly injecting other collection methods into this routine, personally I don't bother fighting it.
What two sides are you referencing? I can't fathom that customers is one of those sides. Cash is just about my least preferred method, maybe second only to writing a check.
1 - https://www.clearlypayments.com/blog/statistics-for-cash-and...
I do carry cash, and probably use cash more than someone younger would, but for restaurant bills beyond the burger and brew range I tend to use a credit card. Once one gets into the white-tablecloth world, bills are beyond the amount of cash I usually carry.
For most of recorded human history literacy was rare. A typical Roman citizen could not read, certainly beyond the ability to understand a handful of marks or make their name. By the nineteenth century it is entirely unremarkable that Patrick Brontë's daughters are taught to read and write, but it is also entirely unremarkable that several of them† died of TB since at the time we didn't know a cure for it.
† It's contested whether, for example, Charlotte died of TB, it probably didn't help.
For various reasons the US was very slow to adopt chip-based cards, and even when it did they were usually chip and sig. It was also slow to adopt tap to pay (likely because mobile terminals were less of a thing, because chip and pin was not a thing); it only _really_ took off when Apple and Google kinda forced the issue by putting it in phones.
I think Apple and Google released their implementations when they did exactly because the US credit card companies moved over to EMV (tap and pay) standard.
There was a “liability shift” [1] that happened nearly a decade ago after many high profile card database leakage events (target retail stores being one).
The shift was that instead of credit card companies always accepting the liability for stolen cards, the policies were changed so that retailers that still used magnetic stripes would have to accept liability (because with magnetic stripes, the same card number is used everywhere). Or they could avoid it by moving to chip and wireless readers, since these protocols used a different virtual card number for every transaction.
As card holders, we all started getting our banks sending us new chip and wireless cards before Apple Pay came out.
1: https://squareup.com/us/en/the-bottom-line/operating-your-bu...
That's not what EMV is, or, at least, while most tap and pay cards are EMV (besides some 90s oddities in Europe), EMV long predates tap and pay (it's from the 1980s).
Most US cards were EMV (chip and sig, usually, not chip and pin), _long_ before Apple/Google Pay came out, but usually did not support tap to pay, which is a separate standard also falling under EMV (the terminology is kinda unhelpful).
To make clear that you want to make the payment immediately in case this wasn't already obvious, one could use speech: I'd like to pay now.
That's the system.
In the exceptional and unlikely scenario where a waiter speeds away upon you wanting to pay, they aren't going to care about your green sticker system either.
If it takes forever for them to return, I drop cash on the table and leave. I'm not going to sit around for 20 mins and beg to collect my money.
No need for a new prop when there's already one handy.
When the call the waiter to ask for the bill, or when you ask directly when he comes to take out your dishes or ask for dessert, just say directly how you will pay:
The bill please, I will pay by card (/phone)...
The world has evolved and moved to decent fixed salaries.
Japan: amazing service, perfect food, 0 tips.
America: shitty burger joint, rude waiter, 20% tip or they chase you outside.
The tipping culture in the US is horrible, but not that horrible. I've never seen such a thing happen, anyway.
(fresh video, "funnily" a Japanese ramen restaurant, though I agree it's probably exceptional. At least, I hope)
If a place makes me bus my own table or use qr code ordering, I'm probably not tipping anymore.
I don't tip on pickup orders either. This is definitely becoming more common in the US.
Never. I also consider it extremely rude when people I'm dining with do this. It's even more irritating than those horrible table kiosks.
Fortunately, at least with my friends, that's not a thing that really happens much. Phones stay in pockets where they belong, generally speaking.
we are apparently solving the problem of anti-social and socially awkward people not wanting to talk to other people.
Seems like a lot of fuss to avoid initiating contact with a human.
"Man up", Sebastian.
At some fancy restaurants, they have two versions of their menus, the idea is that the person paying (who historically would be a man) gets a menu with prices, but people who aren't paying (historically wives, girlfriends and maybe children or clients) get the same list of dishes but no pricing.
In 2025 it's definitely not OK to assume that people who appear male are paying and people who appear not to be male are not - but it is very much possible that somebody is paying and some people are not, and so it would be nice if the person who is paying can delegate the choices but still pay and the systems I've seen do not facilitate this.
The kind of fancy place which historically had two menus (or maybe even still does although it probably pays to ask who gets which menus these days) this isn't a problem. Somewhere with a decent cellar and the sommelier to guide inexperienced users to a sensible choice is also going to have somebody just memorize what everybody is eating and if only a single person is paying for it all that's discretely handled, no problem.
But the place with a choice of red or white is going to expect phone ordering and it'd be nice if I could let other people choose what they're eating without also just handing them my phone or else expecting them to pay and then I refund it (which is embarrassing for them)
Anyway;I should have mentioned that it is not an ONLY pay like this, they also have menus and the normal way. Here (EU or at least where I live) this is not a cost saving thing; it came from covid and many people liked it so they kept it. But waiters and menus are back next to that. I prefer electronic as then I don't have to sit and wave for a waiter or the bill for 30 minutes. But other do whatever they want.
There is no app to install. WiFi is always available so you don’t even technically need to have a mobile data plan.
If you don’t want to use this then you call the waiter over and someone brings the mobile credit card terminal instead.
The “how does the waiter know to come and take payment” problem is unique to how restaurants in some countries handle paying the bill.
In Europe maybe? I've never seen anyone pay with their phone. Not in big cities and not in rural areas in the US. I will never do financial transactions with my government spy device. To each their own obviously.
As for when I am ready to pay, I go to the counter and give them cash or I might use a debit card if I am picking up everyone's tab. If they give me grief then I simply do not return to that establishment and they will get negative reviews.
I probably could have taken them to small claims court but I ended up paying the amount as I was moving cross country to a different court jurisdiction so I wouldn't have defaulted in a suite and I didn't want to be blacklisted from banking.
I don’t think I want a burner bank account lol.
This is similar to how in Brazilian churrascarias you have a red/green coaster that you flip green if you want the server to come around with more meat, and red, when you're done.
I tend to try to pay in advance when I order so I don’t have to wait 5-10 minutes to get a bill, then have them run off as I grab my payment method of choice, to wait another 5-10 minutes to actually pay.
I was a little confused how my requests to pay early seemed to slightly irritate waitstaff. So I asked some restraint owner friends of mine and they mentioned how, depending on the POS configuration, the act of requesting or paying the check (forgot which one) automatically queues up your table availability to the next guest.
So I guess, convenience workflow feature for the restaurant host impacts creates an annoyingly rigid behavioral pattern that unexpectedly passes “waiting frustration” on to diners.
You press the button, a server appears a few seconds later. Need to order, press the button. Need water, press the button. Need the check, press the button. Need for them to pick up credit card, press the button. I love it; it's like a flight attendant call button and I never have to wait for anything.
Japan has ticket vending machines in many restaurants. You prepay and order at the front of the restaurant, it prints a little ticket, and you give that to the waiter or kitchen.
I've been to several restaurants with this.
Reading people's expectations in here is absolutely wild and reminds me of how weirdly entitled people become when they're paying for something.
Chilis didn't solve it. They just added their own hardware.
Nevertheless, this is the answer, and much better than the proposed colored card.
This way you pay on your phone and just show it when leaving.
Is the article meant to be a light-hearted little piece that is not meant to be taken seriously? Or is this "guilt" for not ordering dessert a real thing??