I will not. I refuse to get a smartphone.
Then the menu is a broken webpage with “old” prices and the restaurant tries to charge you more than the menu prices. I thought the point of these were to be easily updated.
Restaurant: Best I can do is a PDF, which I don’t have the original to update it anymore.
Nah, a series of JPEGS. Which are displayed in a little Javascript carousel, which automatically flips the pages every 7 seconds without any user input and can’t be stopped from doing so.
You laugh. There’s actually a restaurant around here whose website works that way. You have to kill the script from console if you don’t want to drive yourself insane.
Jeez that’s awful…
Why not use a blackboard on the wall for prices that change everyday? Why everything needs to be unnecessarily complicated?
Because a guy can only sell you a blackboard one time, and you can get chalk anywhere. When it’s online, some tech company can sell you their Menu-as-a-Service every month.
Why would a restaurant pay for that? Look elsewhere in this thread for the story of the boss that thinks QR codes are magic spells or something.
Generally the best places to eat is where the have a simple single white A4 print out of a menu on a clipboard.
“Are you using the app today?”
“No.”
“I only have a work phone. I’m not supposed to do those.”
I have a couple restaurant apps on my phone. These are for takeout or delivery type places like Domino’s Pizza or Sheetz. In that context, it’s a genuine upgrade. Like, i can either drive to Sheetz, type my order into the kiosk there, and wait the whole time they’re preparing it, OR I can place the order from home on my phone, and they’ll prepare it as I’m driving there.
At a sit-down restuarant, what are you trying to do? Trying to use that instead of the waitstaff for ordering or paying…some customers are going to and some aren’t. There’s a procedure people understand about eating at a restaurant, and now you’re throwing a wrench in it for…what? The ability to update the menu without printing a whole bunch of them, somewhere to write down the specials so the waitstaff doesn’t have to remember them, or “because technology?”
And at something with counter service like a deli? Fuck off.
I’m nowhere that old and I still make the same face when a restaurant doesn’t have paper menus.
Fun with QR codes! Two things are on the top of my mind today.
My boss loves QR codes. He wants to put a QR code on every single publication we print, for any reason, or often for no reason. To this day, he does not understand that QR codes are not magic, and all they contain is a link. I can’t make the QR code “do” this, that, and the third thing he wants; I have to program our web site to do whatever it is. When he is explaining what he wants, he is inevitably tracing his fingers around in the air making a box shape, as if this means anything.
His latest brainwave was trying to make me put QR codes on internet banner ads. Which are displayed on the viewer’s screen. ~90% of which are viewing on their mobile device to begin with. I had to explain to him using small easily understandable words that you cannot make a phone take a picture of itself. (Yes, I left the topic of screenshots out of it.) The fact that the banner ad is not only inherently clickable but being clickable is really rather the entire point, and this click directs the user to anywhere we want – say, the same place as his mythical QR code – did not sink in for him.
He also doesn’t get that merely generating the pixels of the QR code does not automatically create the landing page and all of its content. He also doesn’t grok that, to the nearest decimal place, nobody scans the fucking things on our literature anyway. Like I don’t track that kind of thing.
But I have a theory as to why, now. Thing the second is that just today I had a customer tell me, “I won’t scan them QR code things because I saw on the news they’re all controlled by the Chinese government.” (Our quotes have a QR code at the top you can use to view the products therein on our web site without having to type anything. It’s practically the only genuinely useful thing we do with them.) I had to demonstrate to him right there and then that the QR code is literally just a block of text, and you can see every single damn fool character in it before you visit whatever link it is if you feel like it and/or don’t trust it. Our QR codes clearly just go to our web site, with a ?products=[list] tacked on to the end of the URL.
I am positive he didn’t get it.
I’m positive my boss still doesn’t get it, either.
Whatever, it all pays the same.
I dare you to make a QR code for something that hotlinks to another QR png!
Jesus christ it must be painful working for such a massive moron.
On my phone, you don’t need to screenshot to use QR codes. I can just use the Google Lens app to scan it, or reverse image search something without even closing my Brave browser.
Im so sorry. i dont know how you dont go bald from pulling your hair out
Atleast on IOS, holding your finger over an image with a QR code will activate the QR code, so he’s not entirely off his rocker dude….
Sure, but in this context guess what happens if you don’t hold and you just tap it.
…
The same thing, but with fewer steps.
Most bosses like this in tech are dazzled by sales team but what got your boss to get such hard-on for QR codes?
If it just takes me to a website with the menu, fine.
If it takes me to the app store, no.
An app which is just a webview of the site.
How else are they supposed to pester you with notifications?
But then they typically still want your name, address, phone number, email address, gender, etc.
I just want some food.
You can print out QR codes to Rick Astley videos.
If I’m going out to eat somewhere, it’s mostly because I’m out to socialize or get away from screens. The last thing I want when I sit down at a restaurant is for everyone at the table to get out their phones. I can’t think of a dumber way to undermine restaurant socializing. Just charge me the $0.03 it cost to print the menu.
I took my elderly aunt to eat and she couldn’t navigate the menu at all on a phone screen. I don’t like it either.
I’ve only been to one restaurant that had that and I was able to order online. It was a good experience for me.
I’ve worked in Tech for 30 years, done software development in enough areas and at a sufficient senior level to be able to implement the whole QR code support, both coding and systems design, all the way from an App in a smartphone taking a picture and translating into a URL, to the webserver and if needed database on the other side including if needed an ordering system integrated with some internal order request system.
If I was faced with this I would ask for them to bring me or show me a menu. If they said “no” I would literally get up and leave.
I’m not going to be spending time mucking about with my phone to read in it’s comparativelly small screen something they could have available on an A4 piece of paper or an even larger format hanging from somewhere in the restaurant just to, at best, save them a few cents or, at worst, satisfying somebody’s totally misplaced idea that any Tech is cool just for being Tech. I’m even less going to enshittify my smartphone experience with some app that demands access to my Contacts and wants to pester me with notifications entirelly for the benefit of somebody else.
If there is one thing 3 decades in the Industry, often at the bleeding edge, have taught me is that Tech isn’t necessarilly the best solution for everything and that being newer doesn’t make something better and I’m not interested in being the beta tester for some half-arsed solution which serves most customers’ requirements worse than the older solution and I’m even less interest in installing a software agent doing the will of somebody else on my phone.
It’s exactly because I know Tech so well that I just judge Tech tools as I would any other tools and, damn, so much of it out there are just horrible ill-adjusted unstable tools worse than the old-Tech or non-Tech versions.
Digital menu
Pros: You can change it at any time, no problem. You can let them order digital and the register automatically checks in the order.
Cons: can’t read shit on a smartphone.
Solution: Big tablet for each table. Now everybody can read it.
But you have to spend a lot more on tablets than you would 5 years printing new menus.
Yupes.
My problem is that for me as a customer their chosen “solution” (me using my phone to see their easy to change menu) provides me no gain whatsoever whilst adding hassle. There are various possible options they could’ve gone with (blackboard, digital system with tablets for customers, printed piece of paper) with various balances of cost and ease-to-change and they chose the one that maximizes their advantages, minimizes their cost (and maybe it doesn’t even do that properly compared to, say, a blackboard) and increases hassle for customers.
In other words, in their requirements for the solution they’ve chosen to use, they focused entirelly on what was best for them and screw the customer, and if I have a choice I’m not going to bring my custom to a business which has activelly chosen to make my life more of a hassle purelly for their own gain.
Even though they’re using Tech for what they’re doing, the actual problem for customers is a Tech-agnostic “they did what was best for themselves and made the customer experience worse”, and maybe because of my immense familiarity with Tech I really don’t get dazzled by there being lots of Tech in their choice and just look at it from a “what does it do for me” point of view (a way of looking at business practices which itself derives from my professional experience: since I both worked on and implemented Business Requirements I got used to look at systems from a “what does this provide to the user” angle as part of the work of designing such systems).
somebody’s totally misplaced idea that any Tech is cool just for being Tech
Nah, it’s worse than that. It’s somebody’s totally awful idea that they can meddle with their menu prices in real-time and do “surge pricing” and other schemes to rip you off. If they committed to a paper menu they would have to honor that printed price in most jurisdictions, which would preclude them from such shenanigans.
Once, I was given a real menu and then told to use the QR code to place an order.
I said, “No.”
“But you have to.”
“Haha, no.”
I showed her what I wanted and put the menu back in her hands. She left dejected and returned wordlessly with my food.
Don’t be a technocrat when I’m hungry.
type “LMAO”, show her the phone with a dead serious face and leave
So the business still got your money? I guess it’s a difficult decision when one’s hungry.
I could understand using qr codes in a self service restaurant, but when the server is right here? This reeks of the owner being wormtongued by a salesman.
