Here’s a Louis Rossmann rant that hits home for me: How online menu apps for restaurants suck compared to ordinary paper menus.
I hate having to scan QR codes on my phone just to get a menu so badly that I will avoid eating at any restaurant that wants to make me do that. ToastTab is especially infuriating.
And while I’m ranting about things that infuriate me, having you rate your transaction when ordering at the counter, before you’ve even received your food, is so unacceptable that I always give them the lowest rating possible when they make me do that.
Ahem. Back to the topic at hand.
Everyone but a small minority of perpetual covid paranoids have gotten over the stupidities of 2020. It’s time for every restaurant to go back to printed menus as the default.
Tags: coronavirus, Louis Rossmann, restaurants, video
Ditto, especially since I can’t do that. I only have a prepaid $20 a month flip phone. I refuse to pay $100 for services I never use.
It has been several years since I had a phone whose camera actually worked. They crack/flake out very quickly and I don’t use it enough to bother fixing it. If I need to take an important photo I go get…a camera. For impromptu snaps the selfie camera is good enough, but QR apps are too f*&**ing stupid to use it (not a technical limitation, since my Meego-Linux based Nokia N9 did that just fine 11 years ago). If I really need to read a QR code, I do it on a laptop computer, or selfie-cam it and then use the zbarimg command.
If a restaurant won’t offer a printed menu or have a display board, I verbally ask the server what they have.
By itself, QR code is a perfectly fine technology, but the implementations are so universally Big-Tech schlocky that scanning them is a guaranteed waste of time, instead of the time-saver they are supposed to be. It is faster to websearch the restaurant. And when did static html become blasphemy? It’s not like the menu changes every time a new patron walks in the door. Hell, a *text* file would be adequate for a menu.
Not to mention the potential for malware and viruses.
If the restaurant has the QR codes at the tables or other places where they can’t watch them constantly, bad actors can put peel and stick fake QR codes over the top of the real ones. Those QR codes can direct victims to malicious sites that can then install malware or viruses to their phones.
Easy. Do what I do: don’t use a cell phone. Costs less, nothing to lose and I never walk into poles, fountains or traffic. I don’t need to know all the ancillary crap that goes with owning one, either.
“…my Meego-Linux based Nokia N9 did that just fine 11 years ago”
Wait, wait: someone out there had a working Nokia N9?
I hate them, too, but I figured it was because I’m old. Glad to know I have plenty of company. Covid was the original rationale, but I think they are keeping them because it makes it easier to change prices in this inflationary time–which is just another reason to hate them.
The potential for “hacking” with fake codes hadn’t even occurred to me.
Wait, there are restaurants that want you to rate your experience when you order? What the hell? Care to share names, that I may avoid them better?
And along the same note:
Please stop asking me to download your app in order to shop your brick and mortar store! I just want to buy my stuff and go.
Also: I will not review every single item I buy!
If it is really good or really bad, you will get a review. Common items like washers and screws will not get a review!
Leave me alone!
Fortunately, most of the restaurants around me seem to have returned to normal “hard copy” menus. In fact, I can’t even remember the last time I need to use a QR code. So I count myself lucky there.
What I’m really getting sick of is the “do you have a rewards account with us? it only takes a second to sign up!” inquiry.
Agree, but we’re never going back. It was clear pretty early on that certain things were going to remain from Covid … and the lack of hard-copy menus was one of them. Just be thankful the plastic dividers and ridiculous social distancing floor stickers are (mostly) gone.
I think a lot of these things are just representative of adaptational behaviors; the restaurants and others are just trying things out, to see what works and what people will put up with.
Big Tech is probably going to get its comeuppance in the next few years simply because people are going to do to them as they did unto MySpace: Move on to something else, ‘cos the people running the service got too full of themselves and decided to intrude too much. Whatever the hell Zuckerberg is doing with what used to be FaceBook, I don’t think it’s going to be around in a few years. Same with Google. Both of those companies have zero reputation for sticking to anything; nobody, at this point, is going to invest themselves in a Google offering after having been burned a few dozen times by their fickle approach to anything. I know a guy who heard that Google had purchased Nest, and the very next day, he’s out looking for alternatives because he knew what was coming and he didn’t want anything to do with being one of Google’s abandonware victims. Their reputation among people who know better is abysmal.
Not if enough people bitch and complain and downvote them for not providing real printed menus.
wait whut? my favorite place. writes the menu on av blackboard on the wall
I expect that places that have you order from your phone once in the restaurant should do what places that keep pushing self-checking lanes should do: offer a discount. It wouldn’t have to be all that much; 1-5% would probably be enough. But people are tired of having to do stores’ work with no gain for themselves.
It’s amusing to see the Angry NYC Real Estate Man make a regular appearance on this blog – well, formerly NYC as of this month, anyway. It’s an interesting convergence of otherwise unrelated media – I first found him years ago when I was trying to figure out how to replace the battery on my Galaxy S6, and as an expat New Yorker stuck around for his rants on commercial real estate and NYC bureaucracy.
“It has been several years since I had a phone whose camera actually worked.”
Perhaps you need either better phones, or to start treating them better. I’ve got a 5 year old Motorola mid-range in my closet that I don’t use any more, but the camera worked fine last time I had it on.
I hate QR code menus, I refuse to use them, if they push I tell them my battery is dead.
The thing I hate more is “sorry we don’t take cash” Wait a minute, it says right on the f****** bill, This note is legal tender for all debts public and PRIVITE! Even worse I was recently trying to enter a National Park that refused to take cash. The US government won’t even take the money they print!
Tipping for purchasing at the counter. What are you paid for? You put my choice in the bag and didn’t drop it on the floor, here’s 20%.
Online menus – driven by QR code links – make it easy and painless for restaurants to change their offerings and jack up the prices. No need to actually print a nice menu, or even to use paper to generate a plain-paper menu; the prices can go up and – rarely – down at the owner’s pleasure. The prices could even change from hour to hour if they needed to get more revenue at peak times.
Paper menus are dead.
Ultimately reliance on a QR code is reliance on a customer entering into a business transaction with a third party to lease or purchase a device with a camera and operating system featuring the capability to scan and decode QR codes. This places an implicit socioeconomic barrier to entry in that lack of QR capable cellphone ownership excludes you from participating in part of what is otherwise an open market. My opinion is that requiring reading a QR code to interact with the exchange of goods and services without an alternative is discriminating on the basis of class and/or income and as such has no place in a civil society. Until the day that every human being is born with the no-strings-attached ability to interact with QR codes, they can only ever serve to establish haves and have nots.
Oh, look! Your robo-cat ate the menu and barfed it up all over the table. Can you get me a new one?
They want the data about you. They want an “in” to be in your phone. They being the restaurant, its owner, or whatever middleman runs the online ordering menu service.
They want an app with insane permissions like seeing your location 24/7 if you’re one of the many who leaves location services on, or knowing who your contacts are so they can send targeted ads to both sets of email inboxes, get y’all to go to dinner together and spend more money than usual.
Then there’s the data brokers who’ll happily pay for the data. Some bs line in the TOS of the app or the menu website or some other site you didn’t even know was part of the relationship will make this legal.
Covid was just an excuse.
@M. Rad
If it’s an online menu, it can. What’s to stop a restaurant from charging a different price (more) for a customer whose browsing, shopping, and other habits (visible to the data brokers) reveal that they will pay $1 more than some other guy without realizing it? Especially if there’s no paper menu or board to verify the “real” price.
With enough data, it wouldn’t be hard to optimize the price point for each customer and make more $$$ than charging the same thing to everybody.
I’ve already heard of websites doing this. You search for a product, and lo and behold, the price starts going up – because they know you’re looking for it. Hell, some sites even know what competitors you’ve looked at, so they know how far they can go.
Service businesses – airlines, hotels – are notorious for this.
[…] more […]
I don’t like QR codes for menus either, but in Mexico City this week I saw a unique way to avoid the “fake QR code installs malicious software” issue:
https://rightontheleftcoast.blogspot.com/2023/01/qr-codes-in-restaurants.html
[…] already mentioned how I hate having to order at restaurants using QR codes in general and Toast Tab in particular. Today I found out yet another reason to hate Toast Tab: Al Gore is an […]
[…] Dear Restaurants: Shove Your Damn QR Codes. “And while I’m ranting about things that infuriate me, having you rate your transaction […]
[…] Dear Restaurants: Shove Your Damn QR Codes. “And while I’m ranting about things that infuriate me, having you rate your transaction […]