Bring back menus, QR codes are terrible

It's really interesting to see how a crowd of tech workers who generally are trying to pave the way are so quick to attack and be negative.

Like all things in life, when its implemented well it works and when it does not it is terrible. I still think there is room for this to be the future though. I say this as a westerner but perhaps the west is not ready for it yet but I really enjoyed the experience of using QR codes in China. Go to a restaurant I just get shown where to sit and don't need to waste time with the host/server giving me menus or telling me anything. If I have questions they are there to answer the but I can also just sit down, scan the QR code, menu opens up and I can order food. Food just shows up minutes later. When I am done I go to the front and pay with Alipay.

The benefits to me of not having physical menus is huge. From the business perspective there is less interaction time necessary to serve a diner. Sure if this is an upscale high touch experience physical menu is where it stays BUT the majority of dining experiences are not like this. The menu is up to date and easy to modify. Possible to include multiple pictures and information about the food.

I might be wild but I really like the experience and wish more places would adopt it. Like all things I think here in the west its still too new so we have a mixed bag of good and bad implementations. Give it a few years and I think it will be narrowed down to the POS providers who offer it as a feature.

It's odd because it almost seems like a middle ground of having both options is unacceptable. It's chalk and cheese, black or white.

You can literally have both physical and digital menu's and cater to everyone's needs. No harm done.

People who loathe the idea can carry on, people that love the idea can carry on.

That's what I'm seeing at restaurants around here, both options. Default to digital, with the offer of a physical menu if you need. It's nice. Is that not common?

Main downside: I don't always take my phone with me. I don't hate QR code, but adding a "backup" menu that is accessible without phones is a must I believe.

> The benefits to me of not having physical menus is huge.

"Huge" might be a bit of an overstatement relating to such a minor convenience.

Going from the mass hate for QR code menus you would think not? Honestly, what's up with these polar opposites on HN. Never a middle ground.

Having both could cause issues, as the digital menu is much easier to update than the physical one, which can lead to inconsistencies. Not that it means it shouldn't be an option, it's just something that needs to be considered

This process was one of my most hated "innovations" in food ordering in China. It turns every restaurant into a production line fast food operation, exactly like American chain restaurants. At that point, why even bother going to a restaurant at all? Might as well just order a Sysco-equivalent microwave meal at the supermarket or 7/11, because the flavor and the service will be exactly the same.

For me the best restaurants in China were the mom and pop joints where the person who takes your order is also the person who cooks your meal, or at least where you can see into the kitchen from the dining room so you can call out a request or ask a question as they're preparing it. This way it's much easier to figure out what's in the dish, see if the food is fresh, ask for it a bit more spicy, add another side, whatever. It makes the meal into a more of a social experience, and something that feels homey and satisfying rather than mass-produced.

Ironically going to these sorts of Chinese chain restaurants with the QR code menu, they also tended to be twice the price of the mom and pop joints, so whatever money they might be saving by eliminating a server is definitely not passed down to the consumer.

My big issue, which should be easily correctable, is that every menu QR code I've scanned results in a PDF that I have to download.

Nobody wants PDFs. On desktop sites, it's common to add a (PDF Warning) to links that lead to PDFs.

And on a phone, PDFs are even worse. They're almost always sized for the desktop, which means you have to pinch and scroll to see anything, and I don't download stuff from Firefox often enough to know how to find and delete the menus for every single restaurant I eat at.

If the menu QR code led to a responsive website, I'd be fine with it. When the QR code leads to a PDF, it makes me angry. If the QR code led to an app I had to install, I'd walk directly out of the restaurant.

This is very true.

I wonder how often restaurants change their menus. I live on the coast of Poland and 5 years later of living here, I can probably tell you what the menu is for the 5 'hot' locations to go to because it literally hasn't changed.

> It's really interesting to see how a crowd of tech workers who generally are trying to pave the way are so quick to attack and be negative.

This statement is utterly useless. It provides no value to the discussion, doesn't make any interesting points, and tries to emotionally manipulate the reader.

> Like all things in life, when its implemented well it works and when it does not it is terrible.

HN readers seem to be bearish on these technologies because they're usually implemented poorly, and there's very little reason to believe that the situation will substantially improve anytime soon (or at all). People generally discriminate between restaurants based on price and food, not menus, so there's little incentive for restaurants to improve electronic menus - similar to business websites - meaning that if QR code menus gain wide adoption, we're extremely likely to see significantly worse experiences near-universally.

Yeah, QR code menus are superior, until you have to use them. They never have instructions and every device does it differently and not in obvious ways. The only instructions you get from a stressed out server is "just scan it." Ok, how?

This is a great way of making tech look stupid to luddites and it reminds me of modern UX trends that expect people to just know how to do some mysterious thing--and developers rely on most users assuming they are the stupid ones because they don't know how to use an app's hidden functionality. Not. Accessible.

Every restaurant used to have the same UX, now they are all different. Stupid.

It's also super fun to download a 45mb menu on your cellular data plan every time you want to look at the menu.

That's a bit like saying "why bother serving wine from bottles with impractical corks, each table should just have a wine hose with a tap". Going to a restaurant is an experience. A waiter, a physical menu and lots of other inefficiencies are part of that experience.

Then you might wonder whether the restaurant can't change their menus often because paper menu is hard to change!

Definitely not the same so please don't imply as such. Everyone has a different taste for their dining experiences definitely. For me, the normal I need something to eat experience does not need a waiter. But definitely if I a going to a nice place to sit, relax, enjoy the service, yes a waiter, paper menu is a nice experience. These are very different segments in the dining market imo. Kind of like how your normal restaurant is not going to use Tock for reservations.

So you are speaking for my opinions and feelings now? Y'all are crazy.

Inconsistency between the digital and physical menu isn't really the problem. We care more about consistency between either menu and the single source of truth, which is what the chef is able to prepare today.

A little while ago, I was making labels for cannabis products. All cannabis products need to be tested by a lab to show their constituent properties (pesticides, THC, CDB, etc)

One of the things I did was create a QR code on the labels such that they pointed to a bitly address which then redirected to the PDF of the lab results for each product.

This allowed for the consumer to actually read the Lab results, and it provided an litmus to the interest in each product by count of scans.

I loved it, it worked really well - but the company wasnt too fond of showing the direct lab results for the reason that the PDFs had the manufacturing facilities address on the PDF...

Could have done it better, but the overall idea was sound and was very easy to implement. An admin assistant could build this out.

Thought of also tying it to slack or something such that we could just have a product interest channel and get an alert any time the products were scanned into that channel...

There were actually a number of creative things that could be done using QR codes.

This is great for very small packaged goods, such as pre-rolls, wax, diamonds, etc - where you have very little space on the package, and are already regulated on exactly what information you must include on the packaging, so if you wanted to provide more detailed product info, this would work well..

I don't understand the "now they're all different" facet of this. In my experience during the pandemic, they are all the same, just in a way that is not discoverable, as you point out. But after the first time I realized I just needed to open my camera app to make it work, it became a really nice experience. There is a balance here - discoverability is good until it becomes clutter because nobody needs to discover it anymore because it is commonplace, and symmetrically a mechanism that is quick and easy but lacks discoverability is bad until it becomes commonplace and second nature. A great example of this is the mechanisms to open camera apps on phones (which this QR menu thing builds on!): there is no way to discover that I need to press my power button twice to open my camera, but once I know this and it is second nature, there is absolutely no better way to accomplish that task.

> It's really interesting to see how a crowd of tech workers who generally are trying to pave the way are so quick to attack and be negative.

It's really interesting to see how a different crowd to tech workers who are constantly in contact with the myriad of ways in which technology can be harmful to human interaction and happiness can be so quick to downplay any legitimate criticisms.

> Go to a restaurant I just get shown where to sit and don't need to waste time with the host/server giving me menus or telling me anything.

...in which you view a human being as a hurdle to be surpassed rather than a human being.

Conversations with waitstaff are often some of the most rewarding parts of a restaurant experience. Even just focusing on the food, the best way to find out about dishes you haven't tried is by talking to waitstaff. And I've formed great friendships with waitstaff at places I go regularly.

I love this. It reminds me of transparency from amazon. Products have a QR code on the outside of the packaging to have some minimal effort prevention on counterfeits. Includes some metadata like manufacturing date and location.

https://brandservices.amazon.com/transparency

For sure, I guess for me there is a time and place. Sometimes I am eating because I am hungry and sometimes I eat for the experience. For the former I like the idea of using a QR code. I never had troubles in China talking about the food when I used a QR code. I don't have romantic ideas about it though, I still was able to interact with the owners or wait stuff just as easily. Reminded me of the use of vending machine tickets in Japanese mom and pop restaurants.

Which mobile browser downloads PDFs instead of just rendering them?

I guess passing accusations of hyperbole are violence now.

Agreed - I actually don't mind the QR thing when done elegantly (it often isn't but that's not the QR's fault) but what about travelers without a phone plan? Or folks who don't want to carry a phone?

If you're going to print out a half dozen menus, you're pretty much right back where you started.

Interesting, so the presence of a QR menu is a restaurant-quality filter perhaps.

If they have a QR menu move on until you find one that does not ... you are likely getting a more authentic meal.

DDG is one example. I prefer it this way because I can choose how to view it, and not have to redownload it in case I lose the page or the cache for the file.

I give it about 3 months before these QR code menus start asking for your email "for deals" before they'll display the menu. And I'm sure some great new YC backed startup will be created to collect all the data and aggregate it with other data broker information.

All of them. The data still needs to be downloaded to be rendered.

> Like all things in life, when its implemented well it works

As does a physical menu.

I don't want to take my phone out when dining.

Depends on the restaurant. Cooks are human too, so some will get bored after making the same exact thing for a year. Others might never get bored after a decade, or decide to keep making a dish because it sells well.

Even more so: "a crowd of tech workers who generally are trying to pave the way" are professionally engaged in using, critiquing and developing user interfaces. These are the people you hire to tell you "this wasn't a good idea, here's a better one".

Super-thin phones.

Touch-screen controls in automobiles.

QR codes instead of menus.

All of these things seem nifty to marketing departments, may be accepted by consumers, and are detrimental to actual usage.

"Wine hose" you say, I'm interested ...

> I say this as a westerner but perhaps the west is not ready for it yet

This seems like an odd take. I'd be interested in tangible data, but I'd be inclined to believe that most tech-affluent people are probably OK with QR codes being the norm, in general. It saves money, paper, and isn't really a hard step for anyone with a phone. In general the west is pretty pro-tech.

Huh, yeah the basic intent is the same as with Transparency (hadn't heard about that service until today) -- but its super simple to build out, and any company can easily do it...

There is a bad-ass product from Seagull Scientific, called "barTender" (as in Barcode Tender) -- which is free to use, and does any and all barcodes/QR codes - and label document design.

The only cost is a $500/$600 license for actually connecting it to a printer - but it makes it a breeze to create awesome labels, and print them out en-mass (like many thousands on the high speed printers)...

You can hook it up to a DB or a spreadsheet for pulling all your product labeling info easily to fields so they auto fill for the products you are printing.

Also, with using bitly - you also get a map of the geoip location of each scan - so you can see where interest is high geographically...

Exciting positive answers to this problem would be:

1) All such restaurants offering free open wifi + 2) A commercialized system that hosts the menu PDFs on tiny https servers on the restaurant's wifi router and serves them locally (potentially avoiding issues with far-away outages and also saving on the internet bandwidth for the common case).

Depends on what the inconsistency is. You order something from the menu and later find out it's more expensive and the updated price is only shown in the digital menu. Depending on where you are that'd be an instant win in court I believe.

> Like all things in life, when its implemented well it works

This is false. A QR-code based menu does not work for people that do not use a smartphone.

> Even more so: "a crowd of tech workers who generally are trying to pave the way" are professionally engaged in using, critiquing and developing user interfaces.

“I don’t like it” is not a critique though. The people you would want to hire could try to answer “here is an imperfect solution, how would you improve it?”

Now I have to connect to their wifi before I can see the menu? And the restaurant is expected to maintain a menu server? What is MORE practical about this?

>This process was one of my most hated "innovations" in food ordering in China. It turns every restaurant into a production line fast food operation, exactly like American chain restaurants. At that point, why even bother going to a restaurant at all? Might as well just order a Sysco-equivalent microwave meal at the supermarket or 7/11, because the flavor and the service will be exactly the same.

I usually can't stand comments that are just "correlation does not imply causation," but are you sure you aren't mixing up the two here? It's not hard to imagine why a McDonalds wouldn't be one of the first to pick this kind of technology up, but I have a hard time that a previously good restaurant that adopts this will suddenly have their quality fall down the shitter. Nothing really changes for the wait staff except now the order shows up on a screen instead of a handwritten form.

>For me the best restaurants in China were the mom and pop joints where the person who takes your order is also the person who cooks your meal, or at least where you can see into the kitchen from the dining room

There's a similar sort of thing in Japan, but with older technology. You place your order with an automated kiosk out in front of the restaurant and pay the machine. It spits out a ticket that you hand to whoever and eventually your food comes to you. It exists at large chains as well as some mom and pop places, including some where you're sat eating your food a few feet from the cook/chef. The places I went to that had these didn't seem to suffer from lower quality than their counterparts without such a system that didn't have it, nor did they feel more "mass-produced."

> I'd be inclined to believe that most tech-affluent people are probably OK with QR codes being the norm, in general

Everyone I know, "tech-affluent" and tech-savvy alike, hate them. Next time you go out for a meal with a large group, ask for physical menus and gauge the reaction of those around you - likely that most of them will ask for one too.

Firefox Mobile

How does ordering via QR code change the quality of the food itself? Just because you clicked a button to order the food instead of telling a server what you want who then wrote it in a notebook and went back to a terminal to enter it, should not have any bearing on how the food tastes.

Already in the US, I'm seeing some restaurants where you pay right at the table as well.

In NYC, you can see this at World's Wurst [1] in SoHo.

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/World's+Wurst/@40.7279645,...

This setup seems beneficial to both restaurant owners and customers in China. The faster ordering process saves time for servers, which reduces labor costs, and the savings can be passed on to customers.

But it cannot work in America because of the tipping culture.

> The benefits to me of not having physical menus is huge

But the negatives are also huge.

- My phone is slow, so it's painful to navigate the menu

- Half the restaurants have horrible UI for their menu

- You can't casually peruse the menu, you have to go item by item down the list.

At least to me, it's an awful experience.

this whole pandemic thing really worried me. I leave my phone at home on purpose all the time. I really struggled with everything from food to doctors. phones are becoming a requirement.

The current state of tech is pretty horrible. The web is a terrible platform for how it is being used today. There is little to no innovation happening anymore, and everything driven purely by advertisements and user-hostile practices to increase revenue over usability. It's very difficult to not be pessimistic about tech.

The QR code doesn't change the quality of the food. It's just a correlation that the restaurants that moved to a QR code ordering system tended to also be the ones that hired kids who didn't much care about cooking, and who just produced the same bland dish every time, regardless of who was ordering.

I do my best to eat plant-based most of the time, so I always appreciate when I can have a chat to the cook or server to see what is in the dish and if they can avoid garnishing with ground pork or whatever. To me that's the whole point of going to a restaurant, to have someone cook for you personally. If you're just going to get a production line meal, then you might as well order from a vending machine or get a meal to go from a convenience store. No judgment on those meals, they are fine too, but when I go to a restaurant I expect a bit more of a personalized service.

What changes is you no longer have a customer service rep on the line, which is what you de facto have with a server at your table. I could ask them questions about all sorts of specific ingredients on the menu so I end up guessing nothing about what I am ordering. For online menus, sometimes you take a shot into the dark because you can't get any description on the item besides "89. - Orange chicken" or however it comes up on the online menu. Does it come with rice? How big is the portion? Who knows.

I see any system that requires people to have and use a smart phone to be negative for inclusivity and accessibility. Use this technology for progessive enhancement, not as a replacement.

This was exactly my experience as well when I recently went to some restaurants for the first time since pre-pandemic.

GP's experience sounds great; an interactive mobile/responsive website that I can directly order from would be more convenient than the traditional experience. PDFs are basically fine, but given the option I'd rather have a physical menu.

(Thankfully, I haven't yet heard of or encountered a QR code that redirected me to an app; that would be a pretty quick way to make me leave if no alternative were provided.)

My comment wasn't very clear. What I was getting at - and perhaps this is a China-specific issue - is that the QR code style restaurants are imo a symptom of gentrification and are contributing to the "blandification" of local cuisines.

In China restaurants can go under very quickly - you might see at a certain location two or three different restaurants in a year. The mom and pop operations tend to be eaten up by the national chain restaurants and "hip" (i.e. QR code ordering) franchises, and when one of these restaurants moves in then not only does the food quality go down, but the prices go up too. I think a lot of young Chinese techies like the change because it seems more clean or more hygienic or more futuristic, but if you just want to sit down and get some local food made by a local person, that experience is harder and harder to find.

Most ordering-apps I've tried allow customers to customize items and make special-requests. It's often easier to do these things on an app, and these modifications are automatically reflected on the receipt.

I guess an app could give people access to a webcam to engage in discussion with a cook as they prepare the food, for people who really want to watch the process and talk to the cook.. is that a feature you'd be interested in?

I mean, obviously, that wouldn't be right for a lot of places -- many eateries don't want people bothering the kitchen staff -- but if you've been going to places where people can interact with the kitchen-staff as they work, and if that's something the customers value, it'd seem like that process could be made more available.

Edit: Actually, when you were talking about engaging kitchen-staff, were you thinking of places like Subway? Or did you mean actually talking to people in a separate-kitchen, like you walk back there and chat with them while they make the food?

I think this is more than just a difference in technology. The entire culture of restaurant dining is different in China. The greatest example of this is the fact that servers in China will always wait to approach the table until they are called over. This is quite different from the American approach in which the servers always come to us without being asked.

I believe they’re referring to places small enough and slightly open so that you can see the few kitchen workers.

I ran into a few of those mom and pop joints in Korea as well. Basically every 김밥 (kimbap) shop is kinda like subway where you can see them prepare the food.

I believe they were talking about how interacting with an actual human is part of the experience of going out for them. And just going to a restaurant in order to fiddle with a menu screen and order kind of defeats the purpose since you could just do that with takeout? It doesn’t bother me either way, but I prefer restaurants that have a button on the table to call the server.

I suppose for me, going to a restaurant is not a matter of "efficiency". I go there to socialize with friends, to enjoy the atmosphere, to interact with people. If service is slow, then, yes, I get annoyed. However, I don't think I ever go into a restaurant thinking, "I wish they would make restaurant ordering more efficient." If I want that, I go to a fast food place or place that does takeout.

I don't think it is bad as an option, but I resent it as the only method.

* Homeless/poor may not have phones

* Old people don't have smartphones or know how to use them

* I don't want to have my phone with me at all times. I actually leave my phone in the car when dining sometimes.

* Something as simple as a listing of options, which is often static for weeks or more at a time, now depend on a WAN connection! It's meatspace dependency hell.

I know "menu costs" are such a thing that it is taught in accounting and business classes. Nevertheless, the idea of getting rid of a hard menu, even as a backup, is absurd, unnecessary, and dare I use a buzzword I hate, "privileged".

I agree with the efficiency sentiment. Nothing worse than waiting on a waiter for what feels like hours at a restaurant when the chef could just be preparing my meal.

I would also be okay with an NFC approach or both NFC / QR code approach, NFC stickers are cheap and can do similar to QR codes.

I think my comment is a bit centered around the Chinese experience.

A lot of smaller Chinese restaurants are just one guy at a wok standing near the entrance and a bunch of stools inside (sometimes also outside). They're commonly a husband and wife team, where the husband cooks and the wife acts as a runner or takes orders when it's too busy to bark what you want at the cook, but sometimes it's just the one person. If you get there early, sometimes the wife is preparing mise en place at one of the tables, or on a stool out front.

Another common layout for larger restaurants is tables and stools on the inside plus a small counter to pay, but there's a window at the back going into the kitchen where they might have a couple of cooks and more space to prep.

In both of these cases it's not unusual for customers to know the owners and engage in some smalltalk, whether about the food, or whatever other thing. It's a lot like a classic diner in the US, or a UK "caff".

These QR code ordering systems tend to be in place at a different type of restaurant. They are more like strip mall chain restaurants with optimized seating and standardized menus and nobody knows anyone or cares. Personally I don't see the point of these sorts of places, because if you're just getting Sysco-style meals without any service then you could cut out the middle man and buy the meal without going to a restaurant.

Maybe there's some setting I'm missing, but the default android experience seems to be Chrome downloads a pdf which then is read by Google drive.

I’ve had experiences ordering through a QR code in San Francisco which were even more seamless: pre-pay for your food with Apple Pay right off the website, tip included. Scan again if you want to order something else. Everyone at the table can order separately.

I don’t hate it, but I don’t love it. It was like a custom web-DoorDash for one table with only one restaurant option. Probably someone could run with that and scale it up to a food court without much difficulty and a willing mall partner. Efficient, but if I gave a damn about the economics I would cook at home and this definitely removes some of the hospitality of the hospitality business.

Not really the issue with PDFs. Even if they are directly rendered the problem is they have a non-responsive rendering which forces pinch zoom and scrolling to see/read things.

Yeah, I could see something like an open restaurant where you come in, scan the QR code, place the order, and get/pay for your food all without really interacting with someone. That'd be great, but I'd want a "push for server" button on every table for people without smart phones or people that don't know how to interact with QR codes.

It certainly could be made super slick (embedding the table number, for example, in each QR code).

But with all that, it'd cost money. So pretty much the only places you'll see do this well are big chains which tend to have crappy food.

I still have my phone with me when I leave the house, but because now I work from home and don't need much mobil data, I downgraded my data plan to 250mb per month.

I can see at some point I'll try to open a menu but won't be successful

> Yeah, I could see something like an open restaurant where you come in, scan the QR code, place the order, and get/pay for your food all without really interacting with someone. That'd be great, but I'd want a "push for server" button on every table for people without smart phones or people that don't know how to interact with QR codes.

Your belief that it's good to cut out a human interaction is one you should reconsider.

I would think a paper menu will be easier to change?

I love scanning a QR code and having a pdf open in my browser. Faster than waiting for wait staff and easier for restaurants to change the menu. I think most people disagree that nobody wants PDFs.

If QR-code based ordering doesn't decrease the quality of the food (I think everyone agrees it doesn't) why should others have to subsidize your 'personal touch' experience paying higher prices for increased wait staff attention when they may be OK with (and prefer!) impersonal service, which has a built-in lower cost of delivery?

It seems to me your focus is less on the quality of the food (provided it means quality standards) and more about the ambiance and experience of another human catering to your customized requirements. In any other domain this would be a luxury you'd be expected to pay more for.

I say bring on the impersonally delivered, high quality, cheap food!

No, you can use your cellular connection all you want. It'll just eat your data. If you want to trade a little effort for a little data saving, that option is open to you.

They can change prices and/or update the menu at any time and they avoid printing, storing, handing out, collecting, and cleaning the physical menus.

An appliance menu server would cost practically nothing if they're already offering Wi-Fi or use electronic POS/ordering systems.

> Like all things in life, when its implemented well it works and when it does not it is terrible.

for a good example of this look at the iPhone's predecessors and the iPad's predecessors... before those the PDAs were basically awful and internet phones were junk. the iPad basically created a wide-spread tablet market.

PDFs are better than a paper menu, for sure, but wouldn't you prefer a website that scales properly and allows you to place orders? I think that is the point parent post is making.

I'm open to reconsidering it. What's the evidence that human interaction with restaurant servers is good for either the servers or the person being served? Do people that pack in lunches to work experience lower health than those that eat out?

We went to a restaurant last week for the first time in a year, and sat there for 10 minutes waiting for a menu. The person who seated us didn’t tell us about the QR code. I discovered it after idly looking at the piece of paper on the table (which previously I assumed was an ad for drink specials).

A few minutes later I witnessed an elderly couple experiencing the same thing. They sat for 10 minutes expectantly waiting for menus to be delivered.

Lame experience.

The article gives reasons why it is an imperfect solution.

That depends on whether the @ff317's solution (2) also includes availability over the internet.

The point was not about the article but the "crowd of HN".

As I mentioned in my earlier post, this is literally the opposite of my experience. The restaurants where I was made to order by QR code always cost more than the restaurants where I was not. In China, I suspect this is because QR code places tend to be national chains which have some kind of brand name recognition, so people pay more to prove their status.

On top of the increased cost, the food tends to be lower quality, not higher quality, presumably because the ingredients are mass produced and reheated by cooks who don't have any personal reputation at stake if they prepare something poorly. This is exactly what chain restaurants in the west are like, and they tend to be a much worse dining experience than either mom and pop or boutique outfits.

"I guess an app could give people access to a webcam to engage in discussion with a cook as they prepare the food..."

headdesk

> > It's really interesting to see how a crowd of tech workers who generally are trying to pave the way are so quick to attack and be negative. > This statement is utterly useless. It provides no value to the discussion, doesn't make any interesting points, and tries to emotionally manipulate the reader.

Funny enough this applies more to your statement than the statement you're responding to. They were making a meta-critique of the general discussion here, and I find it to be a legitimate perspective.

Personal sentiments on liking or not liking QR codes, which any lay user can make, does not make as interesting a discussion as a principled approach to what components of the UX flow exactly fails, whether these failures are essential to QR codes or specific to the implementations today, and how/if they could be addressed as an engineering exercise.

It is akin to saying "this first gen ICE automobiles suck, bring back horses" and go on to discuss the annoying doors of the car while the unexploited fertile land of discussions await on the actual engine, cost benefit analyses, incremental improvements, adoption barriers, UX flows etc.

> also be the ones that hired kids who didn't much care about cooking, and who just produced the same bland dish every time, regardless of who was ordering

I personally go to restaurants for consistency. Do you really think waiters taking orders pass along information about who ordered the order and their preferences? You can give instructions to the waiter but from my experience it's not carried a large chunk of the time. Every layer is a place for miscommunication, so going consumer -> app -> cook is a lot less likely to be messed up than consumer -> waiter -> notebook? -> terminal -> cook. There's generally a high turnover for waiters and I don't think they're all super informed about the meals, but I guess it depends what restaurant you go to. But with online ordering a restaurant that can't afford to have a highly trained wait staff can still deliver high quality information to customers

You can provide a lot more information on an app about a dish, including pictures, ingredients and customization options than a person.

"The benefits to me of not having physical menus is huge."

Come now. Let's not get carried away.

You're saying it's okay to require the entire stack of technology of 50+ years of CS and hw/sw engineering to be able to order something at a restaurant at negligible benefit is something desirable?

Requiring an inordinate amount of technological sophistication/complexity for simple things is how to build vulnerable systems.

I think there is a misunderstanding in this thread about what types of restaurants provide these QR code ordering systems in China.

From my perspective, if I need to use an app to select my dish, applying only the pre-approved customizations, then the experience is no different from ordering delivery. If you live in the US, then perhaps this experience is not unusual, since it's a lot like the experience of visiting a chain restaurant - same menu in every location, same customizations available, same "perky" waitstaff, same supplier of ingredients behind the scenes - it's basically just a more expensive version of fast food. Adding a QR code ordering system to this kind of restaurant is not changing much about the experience other than the speed of ordering.

But in other countries - notably China - there is a whole nother class of restaurants that is both cheaper and more personalized than a chain. And these family-owned restaurants are the ones that are being edged out by more expensive, less culinarily interesting restaurants whose primary appeal appears to be gimmicky apps that provide either the same or less functionality than a food delivery app does.

It might be that these chain restaurants are successful because a lot of people prioritize consistency over everything else. But I feel like in China in particular it is more trend- and status-based. People think it's cool to order on their phones instead of talking to the server, or they think it's classy to eat what the folks in Shanghai are eating instead of the local food from their region.

Personally, I would prefer to see more local restaurants and less chains, not just in China but everywhere in the world. I understand that's an orthogonal issue to QR code ordering, just in China it does appear to be correlated.

On the flip side, I don't always take my wallet with me. It seems a lot easier to go phone only (especially in China) than wallet only.

> I usually can't stand comments that are just "correlation does not imply causation," but are you sure you aren't mixing up the two here?

FWIW I didn't read the gp's comment as implying causation. I read it purely as correlation. That restaurants that use these systems are much more likely to use other cost saving "short cuts" as well. Just because someone notes a correlation does not mean they imply a causal relationship between the two. Correlation, even without causation, can still be highly useful. Lack of causation does not equate to spurious correlations[0]. You'll note that on this website that the problem isn't that one doesn't cause the other, but rather that there's no reason to suspect these factors are correlated in the first place, and that correlation does not imply connection.

[0] https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations

> why bother serving wine from bottles with impractical corks, each table should just have a wine hose with a tap

To be fair, you just 100% described a keg. It's just not common -- or is even non-existent? -- for wine to come in kegs.

I really enjoy reading your comments :) Thanks! And I fully agree with you about how the restaurant restaurant should be.

Wine is stored in barrels, which is pretty much the same thing, and there is of course the barbaric bag in box, but it’s not served that way in many reputable restaurants…

> On desktop sites, it's common to add a (PDF Warning) to links that lead to PDFs.

In 2000 maybe?

You're starting from an opinion that you haven't presented any evidence for, and then asking for evidence when someone disagrees with you? Let's be clear here: we're both presenting opinions without scientific studies behind them.

The study you proposed doesn't address the topic at hand, because there's a very large confounding factor: packed lunches are going to have very different foods in them than what you'd get at a restaurant, which has obvious health implications.

I think most people have life experience that shows them that in-person human interaction is a necessary component to human happiness, especially after the pandemic. Maybe somehow you've never experienced or heard other people's experiences of that, but if that's the case, you really should seek out the opinions of people who aren't like you more often. Maybe start with the waitstaff at your local restaurant. ;)

Are you aware that there's a widespread feeling that tech/business folks are out of touch with reality?

> You're starting from an opinion that you haven't presented any evidence for, and then asking for evidence when someone disagrees with you? Let's be clear here: we're both presenting opinions without scientific studies behind them.

Correct. Like most of my life, I have things that are opinions but I'm more than willing to change my mind if evidence comes along.

And to be clear, I did not make any assertions with my initial post about health and wellbeing from contactless ordering. It was you that came here to tell me:

> Your belief that it's good to cut out a human interaction is one you should reconsider.

The quote you quoted said nothing to that effect.

Personally, I don't believe it has an effect one way or the other. My opinion is this would probably only really matter for someone who's only social interactions came from talking to the waitstaff. That'd be a pretty rare individual.

> I think most people have life experience that shows them that in-person human interaction is a necessary component to human happiness

Correct, I don't disagree with this

> Maybe somehow you've never experienced or heard other people's experiences of that

Incorrect. What I've not experienced is any positive impact from talking to waitstaff, store clerks, bar tenders, valets, etc. I, like I'd assume most other people, do not get my human interaction from people I purchase services from. I get it from my family, friends, and coworkers.

Perhaps if I were proposing we move to a world where everyone lives in a box never interacting with another individual, you'd have more of a point. That said, my week is no better or worse as a result of moving to online banking or when I have groceries delivered.

I could concede that if the only form of human interaction someone experiences is from a restaurant wait staff then there'd be a net negative for that individual. However, getting food delivered or preparing food at home hardly seems like the problem you are painting. Nor does it seem like me being "out of touch with reality".

Perhaps another concession I'd give is that I could see how limiting human interaction would minimize opportunities for empathy. Certainly, I think more people would be empathetic to field hands were they to directly interact with them.

But, again, I don't see how that really translates when talking about food prep at a restaurant.

Sounds nice until your menus have pop-unders and you need adblock to order food.