Bring back menus, QR codes are terrible

QR codes are no good if cell service is spotty with certain carriers. Recently at a distant restaurant, I scanned the QR, waited for it to time out, discover there was no cell service, find the free wifi, enable my VPN, connect to the restaurants wifi, wait for authentication, then open camera app and scan QR again, wait for the kindle app to open the PDF, only to be handed a paper menu a few seconds later...

I know how a menu works. I read the food, see the price, and order. Personally I want to relax at a restaurant and not troubleshoot for myself and others, all while increasing my stress levels.

One way to fix this might be to encode the full text of the menu within the QR code, instead of a link?

QR codes are handy for easing people into eating out again... but wow; it can be pretty frustrating. Something I find myself thinking about more, is how Technology really needs to be more reliable, and how we really need to consider all the edge cases, before we can begin to replace the simple items such as a menu, let along more complex systems....Rant: I want something that will work 100% of the time.

Why not just setup wifi hotspot, make the captive page the menu.

The data limits for a QR code are rather small. Note the storage is also used by ECC payload, which generally isn't optional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code#Storage

The menu is probably going to insist on using lower case letters, and the "Binary/byte" encoding will be interpreted as something between 7-bit ASCII and UTF-8 depending on the client. With the ECC payload 2,953 bytes sounds like quite a lot, THEN you look at the giant art linked in the article for even small examples. The size (version) 40 takes 177×177 width of decodable, clearly visible pixels.

At that point the QR code is in the ballpark of a printed 8.5x11 or A4 sheet of paper, and is far less useful to humans than a laser printed page with multiple sizes of lettering, super high contrast, and no requirement for a computer to decode.

They are also no good if you don't bring your phone with you. I generally leave my phone at home unless I expect to have to make a call or something. If the restaurant doesn't have a paper copy somewhere, I'll just leave and go find another restaurant. There are tons of restaurants, and I'm happy to vote with my wallet on this one.

Usually the restaurant hasn’t made their own site but is paying some menus-as-a-service company to handle it for them.

E.g. https://www.meandu.com.au/

This exactly :)

Why not hand out regular menus instead of using unnecessary technology?

Because the digital menu is cheaper. A lot cheaper. You don't have to reprint when you alter it, you can automatically move people to the right menu based on the date/time.

Haha, yeah... I'm not sure how important it is to have ECC to menu text.. good info.