What frustrates me is how fragile this can quickly become.
I recently was traveling with my 7 year old daughter on public transit, and her card was denied... something was wrong with the 'kids free travel' product loaded on her card. Since her card is actually issued by a train company, I had to login to their website. Since I hadn't logged into their site (as her) in a while, I had to verify my account with a password reset link. The site then sends a create password link to HER email (they would not let me use my email since I was already a user), which I had also not used in a while, so I needed to answer some security questions. The email was severely delayed so cue lots of refreshing. I then had to 'pick up' the product at a terminal in the back of the bus, thankfully this bus had a working one, and then 'check in' at the front.
Thankfully it was a long bus ride but the driver was clear I would need to pay if I couldn't arrange it. This is all totally insane as kids ride free and you don't need an RFID card to see that at 7 year old is under 14. And the worst part is that since it's a bus pass loaded on a train card linked to an email address you need to access on your mobile phone... there is just no accountability.
A similar event happened when my bank just decided I couldn't login since I accidentally used a VPN once, with no error message. Congrats, you won the lottery, you get to play the 3 hour call support game.
If you're technically illiterate, disabled, poor, or have little time, you just can't play these games with companies and are totally screwed.
The biggest problem is mediocre business people at all these companies for whom digitalization means copy-pasting the order process from an e-commerce site. I want to see a museum, why ask me for 8 different fields of data you won’t use ever?
Taking the example of the transit card, a simple login with the card number (in your hand) and a PIN number (in your head) should suffice to view card status and order a new balance top up (without storing CC numbers). Same as when you do a top up in a 7-11 with cash. Just don’t show any confidential information or hide those under an additional authentication request.
Many mediocre companies and organizations bought the “data is money” mantra and soak up useless information they will never use but make their clients life difficult for it.
I just keep 3 fake personas in Bitwarden and roll with them for these services.
It is also plausible that since these businesses are unlikely to have their own software development capability, they outsource the job to providers that are experienced at bringing up e-commerce sites and simply apply a project template without much thought.
> This is all totally insane as kids ride free and you don't need an RFID card to see that at 7 year old is under 14. And the worst part is that since it's a bus pass loaded on a train card linked to an email address you need to access on your mobile phone... there is just no accountability.
Sounds like the person who should be held accountable is the driver. They should have just let her on, or if they're going to dodge accountability, they should do it by raising the problem to their management, or at least promised they will and given you a phone number/email address or something.
your bank story reminds me of an issue friends of mine ran into. their bank website has a section about security where they helpfully show the finger print of the tls key of the online banking website. except, it's wrong or outdated. so my friend called the bank, because the instructions even said so: if this key doesn't match, then do call the bank. he did, and promptly got his bank account locked, because obviously the problem must be on his end (his computer could be compromised), and not on the banks side. he had to walk into the local bank branch to resolve the issue in person.
Seeing more of this at museums and institutions as well which is really disheartening.
Gone are the days where you could pay at the door. Now you must go to their website and fill out a long string of forms and manually type in your credit card number, all so you can get a QR code and wait even longer to enter.
Or go to a restaurant and use your phone to scan a QR code to read their PDF menu on your phone.
Once a refuge from always-connected society, restaurants and museums now require it and I'm finding myself not returning to these places.
I usually hate the cliche "vote with your wallet" solution, but in this case, it's the right way. Now is the time, while this garbage is still trying to get a foothold and there are still many alternatives that do not treat their customers like shit. Loudly refuse to do business with those companies that require unnecessary technology, and complain to the right people. Not the faces behind the counter making minimum wage.
I don't want to victim blame, but the elderly couple in the article should know better. Isn't Ryanair notorious for their shittiness to customers? We should stop dealing with shitty companies just to save $10.
The issue is we want restaurants and museums. If we vote with our wallet and boycott than they will look at it as a disinterest in the venue and not a failure of their IT team.
Yes, and demand alternatives. I went to an urgent care clinic last year, they wanted me to provide all my info on an app using my phone. I refused, said give me a clipboard. They were reluctant but eventually agreed.
Restaurants, just screw them if they demand apps. No restaurant is that good, and across the board the apps make the ordering experience much worse.
I can call Dominos and say "I'd like a large pepperoni pizza for carryout," give them my name, and be done before the app finishes loading and showing all its promo/coupon deals.
So yes, do business with companies that still have some vague notion of what customer service is. I have stopped expecting businesses to exceed my expectations (used to be the norm for most) but it's nice when it happens and they will definitely get my business again.
Ryanair is sufficiently bad that, as it's the only airline flying from where I live to where most of my friends live in the UK, I am likely to use the train next time.
Last time I used them, mass-cancellations from 1cm of snow combined with the next alternative flights being a week later, meant that I had to get home via a combination of ferry and train.
> I don't want to victim blame, but the elderly couple in the article should know better. Isn't Ryanair notorious for their shittiness to customers? We should stop dealing with shitty companies just to save $10.
In defence of RyanAir, they are upfront end honest about this and you know what you're getting with them. Whether you think it's a good deal is a subjective matter you can decide for yourself, but I do think it's a fair deal.
That said, I would have used my discretion as a RyanAir employee here: the heavy fee is to encourage people to not "lazy out", which is clearly not what happened here.
That's kinda the problem with the current consumer capitalism destruction of life support systems. Everyone has principles, until they look at the price tags and just chose the cheapest option. And it's perverse because for most people budgeting is a matter of survival.
So we're stuck in this death spiral where only companies that find ways to exploit us and the ecosystems survive, and even tho we know this, we can only patronize companies that exploit us and the ecosystems because the ones that don't are a luxury/lifestyle signaling tool for the affluent.
I don't see any way out. The current civilization paradigm will crash and burn and only then something different will emerge.
This has not been my experience. Paying for admission to museums/sporting events I apple pay from safari on my phone then am presented with a QR or a pass to add to my apple wallet. It's really nice and I much prefer it to standing in line.
One day or an other, your proprietary pocket tracker and his mandatory connectivity will fail. What if the device is broken (yah, go buy another) ? What if the upstream service don't work ? What if the GSM network is locally in maintenance ? Overall, why should we require obsolete-when-bought, extremely costly and polluting locked-down devices you don't even control to access public places ?
So why, any concrete response capable of holding up in practice ?
I agree with you in principle, but one of the problems is that some exhibitions are so popular that you really have to book weeks in advance if you want to get in.
Case in point: A friend suggested the biggest ever Yayoi Kusama exhibition in Manchester[0], which I relayed to my girlfriend because we would be in the city 3 weeks later.
She sent me a frantic sms Get Tickets Now! since the exhibition was sold out weeks in advance.
And that's an issue you see with a lot of popular exhibitions. You can't just walk into a David Hockney exhibition at Centre Pompidou on a whim, because the time slots are sold out for weeks in advance.
That may not be fair and super inconvenient if you don't book far in advance. But popular exhibitions in big cities are so overwhelmed by visitors that there's really no other way than selling time slots well in advance.
The Kusama exhibition was totally worth it. But we wouldn't have stood a chance if we hadn't organized the tickets weeks before the visit.
I think the insistence on smart phones for basic services is much worse than asking the public to organize a museum visit well in advance if the exhibition is super popular.
I've been to a lot of venues where that's the preferred option.
I recently took my kids to the county fair. There was a big line of people waiting to buy tickets, and a short line for ticket holders.
We went to the line of ticket holders, I popped up the website, and thanks to browser autofill, I completed the transaction in less than a minute, and we had our tickets by the time we reached the front of the line.
I 100% agree that this shouldn't be the only option. But I think it's a great alternative, and for many events it makes sense for it to be the default option.
Museums could have a booth that takes cash/card and prints the tkts instead of a random/poorly maintained website that'll do who knows what to you CC number (which probably costs more than having the person selling tkts)
>Or go to a restaurant and use your phone to scan a QR code to read their PDF menu on your phone.
Don't worry, they will have paper copies if you don't have a phone or are insistent you want to handle a grubby, contaminated piece of paper before you eat your meal.
Not everyone has paper copies and if I’m going out to dinner with my wife the last thing we want to do is pull our phones out and figure out a pdf menu
In all seriousness, there is a point to be made about equity at a minimal viable level, and if you don’t want to enable access for everyone, you’re not permitted to operate. Very similar to how some jurisdictions have outlawed not accepting cash (because this policy impacts the unbanked, underbanked, and low income disproportionately). Streamlining, efficiencies, and improved experiences via digital delivery are welcome, but once you start tiptoeing into disenfranchising cohorts by doing so (even unintentionally), that’s where regulation comes in.
“You should just get a smartphone” is an unreasonable position to take and policy should actively discourage outcomes based on that position. It’s an accessibility and “fail safe|gracefully” issue.
That's the problem, they haven't changed staffing. Customer service is still there. Staff for managing queues is still there. The wait has increased, and hasn't decreased the need for staff.
Presumably this is all done so they can get a verified email address for marketing purposes, as proof of entry only arrives via email.
I hate to say it but there needs to be some regulation about customer service, ie not allowing companies to not provide it by pawning people off on digital solutions. So many businesses are only viable because they don't provide customer support, and I don't think that's un society's interest.
Neither one of those roles has become obsolete with the introduction of said apps, I wouldn't even say there's any difference in staffing requirements. You've simply replaced one problem with another, instead of simply taking your money, the worker now has to figure out why the app doesn't accept your card/phone/address/etc which is arguably much more time consuming.
I don't think this is really an issue, but even if you do it's trivially solvable. Vending machines have [somewhat surprisingly] been around for hundreds of years. Single slot generic items, like generic tickets, could easily be 'automated' by a vending machine. Few to no places do this because it's not a meaningful bottle-neck or labor issue.
Isn't the entire point of a museum customer service? What else are they doing other than preserving the stuff? Isn't a museum with bad customer service more properly called a "warehouse"?
What's wrong with QR codes for restaurant menus? Here are the pros I can come up with off the top of my head:
- Restaurants can experiment with more food options and more frequent updates to their menu
- Real time info on what's in stock
- Cuts out the cost of having to constantly reprint the menu
- Easier for customers to find the menu online when searching for restaurants (huge issue pre-COVID)
What are the actual downsides? Sure, there may be a tiny fraction of people without a smartphone, but they're likely accompanied by someone who does have one. Despite that, restaurants would likely keep a few physical menus on-hand.
In addition to all the other downsides listed, here's another more basic one: I don't want to order food from a smartphone!
If I wanted to push a button and get food, I'd eat out of a vending machine or order with DoorDash. One of the reasons I go into a restaurant or some other meatspace "event" is to escape technology for a tiny bit of time and enjoy life. I want to sit down in a comfortable place, enjoy a conversation with my family, or bask in the ambience of the restaurant. I want to have a pleasant, human interaction with a human server. With these digital-only menus, now I'm yet again pulling out my smartphone and scrolling-scrolling-scrolling. Sorry, due to work I've got screens blasting at me for hours every day. I'm not going to go out in the evening to look at another screen.
The problem is that most of the time a "QR Code Menu" means a QR code pointing to a PDF hosted on Google Drive or alike, a digitized version of a paper menu which was never meant to be read on tiny phone screens and is a pain to read with no reflow. You have to squint at your screen to figure out what you want, and then the rest of the process is the same, someone comes down and takes your order.
What you presumably mean by "QR Code Menu" is a QR code pointing to a website where the content is optimized for screens and perhaps interactive, allowing you to order from your table without involving wait staff and thus streamlining the entire ordering process for you and the restaurant.
A major con for me is that I don’t want to get my phone out. If I use my phone to read the menu I’m also seeing notifications, they may distract me even if only by making me think about them. I’d rather just not check my phone for the duration of the meal.
Also I have friends and relatives who have never owned a smartphone, some who would be essentially unable to do so.
That said, another benefit is more scope for accessibility. I would bet that most restaurant sites are terrible for accessibility, but implementing screen reader or large font support would apply everywhere, whereas I’d also bet that most restaurant never have braille or large print menus.
- Lots of restaurants have no WiFi and may also have poor cell reception for certain networks. This either makes the menu slow to access or impossible to access.
- I shouldn’t have to pass my phone around the table to people who can’t access the online menu. That slows everything down and most people don’t want others on their phones anyway.
- When they throw in payment with their online menu there are inevitably issues. I’ve had this fail numerous times (money taken, order didn’t go through).
- Lots of restaurants have PDF menus designed for a computer screen. They’re awful to browse on a phone.
It's not just the 'non tech-savvy' that are failed by this, it is all of us. I don't want to be required to take my smartphone everywhere I go and to make sure the battery doesn't die. There is no excuse for it in most cases. And as for Ryanair requiring a printout, that's just a way of forcing users to pay more. When I last flew with SAS from Trondheim, many years ago there were no check-in staff. I put the credit card I had used to book the ticket with in a reader, it spat out a label that I attached to my bag which I then placed on the belt. I used the same card to gain entry to air side. I used the same card to enter the corral by the actual gate. Finally when boarding there was a person there to attend to any problems and that was it. No need for apps, no paper.
These systems also regularly fail for travellers who don't fit the assumptions developers make about users. For instance the app might not be available on the app store for foreign users, or might require a local phone number, or might enforce a format that does not match the user's data.
They frequently fail for groups who complete a task together, or people who act on behalf of someone else.
The parking app is the worst, IMHO. I can see the parking space but I have to figure out which parking app works with this particular lot and then hope I don't get a ticket.
I work in tech as a software engineer, and even I resent the assumption that I have a smart phone and want to use it as a single point of failure for absolutely everything.
Even my local gas company, after switching to paperless billing, now requires me to login to their ridiculous web app, which uses Okta and often gives me problems trying to sign in, just to be able to access my stupid bill. And this ridiculous web app has so many pointless "features" and annoyances. If I want to switch back to being mailed my bill like a normal sane person (yes I'm showing my age) I can't do this online but have to phone them, jump through hoops and pay an outlandish fee. I know paper and mail costs money, but how much did the contractors who built that pointless web app charge?
But my bank also seems to be encouraging its customers to do mobile online banking more and more. Which I don't want to do. I do online banking, but I don't like nor trust smart phones enough to want to use it for something as critical as banking.
TicketMaster has also switched to mobile tickets by default. Given how uptight most events are about cell phones my wife and I often opt to leave ours at home when attending shows. At least they still allow you to pay for a print ticket (for now).
The conspiracy theorist in me believes that adding all these pointless features is a government ploy to keep Product Owners employed… /s
Really, “You give me electricity,I give you money.”
Via Direct Debit. How many menus you need in your web? I log in once every 2 years… why force me to download a crappy app?
I recently saw an advertisement for a comedy show that would let you bring your smart phone but required that it be stored in a pouch that prevented use. If you really need it, there would be "stations" available where the pouch could be removed. I assume that once the show ended there would also be a massive line to unlock and remove these pouches.
As opposed to, say, a paper ticket and requiring people to leave their phones at home. Is that really such an outlandish request?
Yes? Do you not see any of the endless ways that could be an instant deal-breaker. Anyone who is relying on ride-share apps to get there or get back; anyone driving who wants to use their phone for navigation (or even someone walking there!) or has to use an app to pay for parking; even people using public transit benefit from being able to look up schedules or get updates.
So yes, I do consider it absolutely an outlandish request to require that people leave their phones at home.
I don't know... I had to use an app to get into a concert not too long ago, and the company screwed up and there was no way of fixing it (basically my id information is correct due to a big in their system).
What upsets me is there's all sorts of legitimate reasons for not wanting to use a particular app for something that could be done differently. Everything should have multiple methods of entry for many reasons.
One problem going back to the 80s are companies leveraging tech to exert unreasonable control over access. This seems like another version of that, extended into other domains.
Really glad to see this getting traction outside of our lil bubble here.
I've tried twice to go without a smartphone in the last year or so (once due to stolen-phone-necessity, the other just a social experiment) and it was a GIANT PITA each time.
Even just a Saturday night downtown... parking, restaurant, show ticket... each part more or less NOT doable without a smartphone
I finally got one this year (I'm 36, but realized this stuff was nonsense on an iPaq) just to do away with potatophone service and a landline that only worked some of the time. I still mostly use it as a phone. Maybe the pervasive need for vendor smartphone applications just hasn't reached anywhere I go, but I do travel for work a fair bit.
Is this just, again, something that's prevalent outside the USA?
EDIT: comment further down did remind me that I think someone in our group had to use some parking app last time we were in Cambridge, MA.
> I've tried twice to go without a smartphone in the last year or so...
Go where? Airport? Somewhere else?
I still prefer printing out tickets. I've just seen tech fail so often, or had to deal with bad tech so often, that I'd rather have a fallback for when (not if) it breaks.
If you paid with a credit card then there is absolutely no need for a paper ticket; inspectors, etc., can just use a card reader to connect you to the record of you paying.
The last 2 or 3 times I've been at a local restaurant with friends, the sequence has been:
- Waitress points us to the QR code to get to the menu
- Everybody pulls out a smart phone
- After a minute or three of trying to deal with their el-crapo on-line menu via a tiny screen, everybody asks for real menus. (Which are at least 8.5"x11" - bigger than even an iPad Pro screen - and decently laid out and readable.)
- We notice that there's considerably more conversation than when we were squinting at their web menu
I've stopped eating at places that require QR codes. The only advantage is when you can select the items in the app and pay for it all in that one place. It's quite useful for things like Dim Sum where you're getting lots of small things over a longer period of time.
More frequently, there's that one old man yells at crowd person who insists on a paper menu and makes things uncomfortable for everyone. But I also get it.
If something like 95% of your customers could manage a step or two at the entrance , society has still decided you should build a ramp or install a lift - and law has codified that.
Not needing an app for everything is, I think, one of the next big accessibility issues that will at some point come to a courthouse near you.
This might depend on your country whether it's allowed and/or possible, but it's really not that hard technically to hook up a tablet, a contactless card reader, and a roll printer that can produce QR codes.
Readit News
I recently was traveling with my 7 year old daughter on public transit, and her card was denied... something was wrong with the 'kids free travel' product loaded on her card. Since her card is actually issued by a train company, I had to login to their website. Since I hadn't logged into their site (as her) in a while, I had to verify my account with a password reset link. The site then sends a create password link to HER email (they would not let me use my email since I was already a user), which I had also not used in a while, so I needed to answer some security questions. The email was severely delayed so cue lots of refreshing. I then had to 'pick up' the product at a terminal in the back of the bus, thankfully this bus had a working one, and then 'check in' at the front.
Thankfully it was a long bus ride but the driver was clear I would need to pay if I couldn't arrange it. This is all totally insane as kids ride free and you don't need an RFID card to see that at 7 year old is under 14. And the worst part is that since it's a bus pass loaded on a train card linked to an email address you need to access on your mobile phone... there is just no accountability.
A similar event happened when my bank just decided I couldn't login since I accidentally used a VPN once, with no error message. Congrats, you won the lottery, you get to play the 3 hour call support game.
If you're technically illiterate, disabled, poor, or have little time, you just can't play these games with companies and are totally screwed.
Taking the example of the transit card, a simple login with the card number (in your hand) and a PIN number (in your head) should suffice to view card status and order a new balance top up (without storing CC numbers). Same as when you do a top up in a 7-11 with cash. Just don’t show any confidential information or hide those under an additional authentication request.
Many mediocre companies and organizations bought the “data is money” mantra and soak up useless information they will never use but make their clients life difficult for it.
I just keep 3 fake personas in Bitwarden and roll with them for these services.
Sounds like the person who should be held accountable is the driver. They should have just let her on, or if they're going to dodge accountability, they should do it by raising the problem to their management, or at least promised they will and given you a phone number/email address or something.
Unfortunately, many people on immigrant visas can’t afford to raise problems to their management and risk getting fired for being “troublemakers”
Gone are the days where you could pay at the door. Now you must go to their website and fill out a long string of forms and manually type in your credit card number, all so you can get a QR code and wait even longer to enter.
Or go to a restaurant and use your phone to scan a QR code to read their PDF menu on your phone.
Once a refuge from always-connected society, restaurants and museums now require it and I'm finding myself not returning to these places.
I don't want to victim blame, but the elderly couple in the article should know better. Isn't Ryanair notorious for their shittiness to customers? We should stop dealing with shitty companies just to save $10.
Restaurants, just screw them if they demand apps. No restaurant is that good, and across the board the apps make the ordering experience much worse.
I can call Dominos and say "I'd like a large pepperoni pizza for carryout," give them my name, and be done before the app finishes loading and showing all its promo/coupon deals.
So yes, do business with companies that still have some vague notion of what customer service is. I have stopped expecting businesses to exceed my expectations (used to be the norm for most) but it's nice when it happens and they will definitely get my business again.
Last time I used them, mass-cancellations from 1cm of snow combined with the next alternative flights being a week later, meant that I had to get home via a combination of ferry and train.
From Stansted to Berlin.
(I'm glad work was understanding).
In defence of RyanAir, they are upfront end honest about this and you know what you're getting with them. Whether you think it's a good deal is a subjective matter you can decide for yourself, but I do think it's a fair deal.
That said, I would have used my discretion as a RyanAir employee here: the heavy fee is to encourage people to not "lazy out", which is clearly not what happened here.
So we're stuck in this death spiral where only companies that find ways to exploit us and the ecosystems survive, and even tho we know this, we can only patronize companies that exploit us and the ecosystems because the ones that don't are a luxury/lifestyle signaling tool for the affluent.
I don't see any way out. The current civilization paradigm will crash and burn and only then something different will emerge.
So why, any concrete response capable of holding up in practice ?
your phone just broke/stolen/lost, do you forfeit your right to enter these places and use their services some of which might be "essential"?
Case in point: A friend suggested the biggest ever Yayoi Kusama exhibition in Manchester[0], which I relayed to my girlfriend because we would be in the city 3 weeks later.
She sent me a frantic sms Get Tickets Now! since the exhibition was sold out weeks in advance.
And that's an issue you see with a lot of popular exhibitions. You can't just walk into a David Hockney exhibition at Centre Pompidou on a whim, because the time slots are sold out for weeks in advance.
That may not be fair and super inconvenient if you don't book far in advance. But popular exhibitions in big cities are so overwhelmed by visitors that there's really no other way than selling time slots well in advance.
The Kusama exhibition was totally worth it. But we wouldn't have stood a chance if we hadn't organized the tickets weeks before the visit.
I think the insistence on smart phones for basic services is much worse than asking the public to organize a museum visit well in advance if the exhibition is super popular.
[0] https://factoryinternational.org/whats-on/yayoi-kusama-you-m...
I recently took my kids to the county fair. There was a big line of people waiting to buy tickets, and a short line for ticket holders.
We went to the line of ticket holders, I popped up the website, and thanks to browser autofill, I completed the transaction in less than a minute, and we had our tickets by the time we reached the front of the line.
I 100% agree that this shouldn't be the only option. But I think it's a great alternative, and for many events it makes sense for it to be the default option.
Museums could have a booth that takes cash/card and prints the tkts instead of a random/poorly maintained website that'll do who knows what to you CC number (which probably costs more than having the person selling tkts)
Don't worry, they will have paper copies if you don't have a phone or are insistent you want to handle a grubby, contaminated piece of paper before you eat your meal.
In all seriousness, there is a point to be made about equity at a minimal viable level, and if you don’t want to enable access for everyone, you’re not permitted to operate. Very similar to how some jurisdictions have outlawed not accepting cash (because this policy impacts the unbanked, underbanked, and low income disproportionately). Streamlining, efficiencies, and improved experiences via digital delivery are welcome, but once you start tiptoeing into disenfranchising cohorts by doing so (even unintentionally), that’s where regulation comes in.
“You should just get a smartphone” is an unreasonable position to take and policy should actively discourage outcomes based on that position. It’s an accessibility and “fail safe|gracefully” issue.
Presumably this is all done so they can get a verified email address for marketing purposes, as proof of entry only arrives via email.
And security staff and queue management is always going to be needed if the place is large and crowded.
I hate to say it but there needs to be some regulation about customer service, ie not allowing companies to not provide it by pawning people off on digital solutions. So many businesses are only viable because they don't provide customer support, and I don't think that's un society's interest.
- Restaurants can experiment with more food options and more frequent updates to their menu
- Real time info on what's in stock
- Cuts out the cost of having to constantly reprint the menu
- Easier for customers to find the menu online when searching for restaurants (huge issue pre-COVID)
What are the actual downsides? Sure, there may be a tiny fraction of people without a smartphone, but they're likely accompanied by someone who does have one. Despite that, restaurants would likely keep a few physical menus on-hand.
If I wanted to push a button and get food, I'd eat out of a vending machine or order with DoorDash. One of the reasons I go into a restaurant or some other meatspace "event" is to escape technology for a tiny bit of time and enjoy life. I want to sit down in a comfortable place, enjoy a conversation with my family, or bask in the ambience of the restaurant. I want to have a pleasant, human interaction with a human server. With these digital-only menus, now I'm yet again pulling out my smartphone and scrolling-scrolling-scrolling. Sorry, due to work I've got screens blasting at me for hours every day. I'm not going to go out in the evening to look at another screen.
What you presumably mean by "QR Code Menu" is a QR code pointing to a website where the content is optimized for screens and perhaps interactive, allowing you to order from your table without involving wait staff and thus streamlining the entire ordering process for you and the restaurant.
Also I have friends and relatives who have never owned a smartphone, some who would be essentially unable to do so.
That said, another benefit is more scope for accessibility. I would bet that most restaurant sites are terrible for accessibility, but implementing screen reader or large font support would apply everywhere, whereas I’d also bet that most restaurant never have braille or large print menus.
- Lots of restaurants have no WiFi and may also have poor cell reception for certain networks. This either makes the menu slow to access or impossible to access.
- I shouldn’t have to pass my phone around the table to people who can’t access the online menu. That slows everything down and most people don’t want others on their phones anyway.
- When they throw in payment with their online menu there are inevitably issues. I’ve had this fail numerous times (money taken, order didn’t go through).
- Lots of restaurants have PDF menus designed for a computer screen. They’re awful to browse on a phone.
I have no issue with it being default, but since covid ended, the places that still use qr menus seem not to have paper menus on hand.
It’s not the end of the world but it makes your restaurant feel cheap.
Still 100 times better than places that make you order on your phone.
The future is going to be hysterical as the US ages out.
So I see part of the drink menu horizontally and vertically. Another example: Non-alcoholic is on the "back" of the menu but wine is on the "front".
And now the restaurant needs to hire a UX designer.
Surveillance. For those of us who still care, that is.
They frequently fail for groups who complete a task together, or people who act on behalf of someone else.
Dead Comment
Even my local gas company, after switching to paperless billing, now requires me to login to their ridiculous web app, which uses Okta and often gives me problems trying to sign in, just to be able to access my stupid bill. And this ridiculous web app has so many pointless "features" and annoyances. If I want to switch back to being mailed my bill like a normal sane person (yes I'm showing my age) I can't do this online but have to phone them, jump through hoops and pay an outlandish fee. I know paper and mail costs money, but how much did the contractors who built that pointless web app charge?
But my bank also seems to be encouraging its customers to do mobile online banking more and more. Which I don't want to do. I do online banking, but I don't like nor trust smart phones enough to want to use it for something as critical as banking.
TicketMaster has also switched to mobile tickets by default. Given how uptight most events are about cell phones my wife and I often opt to leave ours at home when attending shows. At least they still allow you to pay for a print ticket (for now).
Now get off my lawn.
Really, “You give me electricity,I give you money.” Via Direct Debit. How many menus you need in your web? I log in once every 2 years… why force me to download a crappy app?
As opposed to, say, a paper ticket and requiring people to leave their phones at home. Is that really such an outlandish request?
https://www.overyondr.com/howitworks
Yes? Do you not see any of the endless ways that could be an instant deal-breaker. Anyone who is relying on ride-share apps to get there or get back; anyone driving who wants to use their phone for navigation (or even someone walking there!) or has to use an app to pay for parking; even people using public transit benefit from being able to look up schedules or get updates.
So yes, I do consider it absolutely an outlandish request to require that people leave their phones at home.
What upsets me is there's all sorts of legitimate reasons for not wanting to use a particular app for something that could be done differently. Everything should have multiple methods of entry for many reasons.
One problem going back to the 80s are companies leveraging tech to exert unreasonable control over access. This seems like another version of that, extended into other domains.
I've tried twice to go without a smartphone in the last year or so (once due to stolen-phone-necessity, the other just a social experiment) and it was a GIANT PITA each time.
Even just a Saturday night downtown... parking, restaurant, show ticket... each part more or less NOT doable without a smartphone
Is this just, again, something that's prevalent outside the USA?
EDIT: comment further down did remind me that I think someone in our group had to use some parking app last time we were in Cambridge, MA.
Go where? Airport? Somewhere else?
I still prefer printing out tickets. I've just seen tech fail so often, or had to deal with bad tech so often, that I'd rather have a fallback for when (not if) it breaks.
I go to a lot of concerts and printing tickets is not even an option anymore for most of them.
- Waitress points us to the QR code to get to the menu
- Everybody pulls out a smart phone
- After a minute or three of trying to deal with their el-crapo on-line menu via a tiny screen, everybody asks for real menus. (Which are at least 8.5"x11" - bigger than even an iPad Pro screen - and decently laid out and readable.)
- We notice that there's considerably more conversation than when we were squinting at their web menu
Not needing an app for everything is, I think, one of the next big accessibility issues that will at some point come to a courthouse near you.
This might depend on your country whether it's allowed and/or possible, but it's really not that hard technically to hook up a tablet, a contactless card reader, and a roll printer that can produce QR codes.