“All you have to do is scan a qr code, sit on your phone for 5-10 minutes to figure out our menu system, get water for yourself at the station over there, get your own silverware, pick up drinks at the bar, grab this vibrating puck, and pick up food on the other side of the restaurant. Don’t forget to tip!”
Is this still common or are people beating a dead horse?
The whole QR code thing was big during the pandemic but every restaurant in my city deactivated their QR menu and setup.
I say that as a person who loves ordering from a QR and just having the server bring it over. Fight me.
I’ve still seen it quite a few times. It’s only annoying when it’s the only option to order.
The worst one was when they got mad at us for making 20 separate orders (group of 20 everyone orders on their own phone). Apparently we were supposed to take half an hour passing 1 phone around hoping the shitty webapp doesn’t wipe our order.
I guess they wanted to be able to auto add gratuity to your large party and totally agree with you. I personally don’t mind the QR code when it is just me or one other person.
Vancouver is littered with QR Only restaurants, which is extra fun when we take out our boomer tech-illiterate parents.
It’s been so long since I’ve eaten out, but I feel like I’ve seen QR codes quite recently.
One was a yoga studio. I saw yoga happening (big plate glass windows at street level so it was hard to miss), and on a whim I thought “Well this seems like a nice place”. A teacher was finishing up and I asked her about a schedule, and it’s all online!
It’s such a minor thing but it annoys me so much. I want their class schedule stuck to my fridge with a magnet. I don’t want more time looking at this god-awful thing. Yoga is me trying to touch grass, get out of the house.
Maybe I’m some kind of bauhaus idealist, but I think paper in hand could play a nice role in turning that plate glass window full of yogis doing yoga into some walk-in traffic.
It annoys me because the world I grew up in, every business had some kind of paper handout with info. A yoga class schedule, assuming it’s stable, is the perfect thing to stick to my fridge and notice sometimes.
Being an old fogie sucks.
When a good portion of them end up just thrown out, IMO this is a step in the right direction. If you want it in your fridge you could write it down or print it. And then anyone who doesn’t want it on their fridge or doesn’t care enough to open the website doesn’t cause another piece of coloured and printed paper to just be waste.
I’m not sure what the OP had in mind but with their description I was picturing the fast dining places, kinda like Panera bread. Sometimes in the more trendy places where they put like dandelions or some shit on sandwiches they will have a really convoluted bs system that requires as little human interaction as possible. But then they need all this extra staff because the system they made is confusing
a lot of them just kept both systems around here, which is nice because I love the ability to decide “man I could use another side” without having to slflag the server down
Both is definitely the best. As a software developer I see a potential SSOT violation but it’s not that bad. The paper menu is a representation. It’s a cache expiry problem which, as someone who’s worked in software and in restaurants, isn’t as hard as a tough bussing problem.
I was in a Buffalo Wild Wings recently that only had the menu available via QR code. You still ordered like normal, but in order to see the options, you had to scan the code.