Restaurant QR codes considered harmful

QR menus are at best a massive PITA, and at worst a frustrating and obnoxious intrusion preventing a good dining experience. (Let's face it, almost all digital menus suck when viewed through a business-card-sized porthole, whether PDF or web...)

In today's ever-more expensive dining world, should we skip tipping for any restaurant that forces the use of QR/web menus?

Original title:

Against Restaurant QR Codes

Subtitle: They degrade the social experience of dining out.

It is (right or wrong) an opinion piece, where the harmfulness is mentioned as follows:

>QR codes may also raise data-security concerns. Data collection on our food choices will leave some people justifiably unnerved. It may seem farfetched to tie QR service to authoritarianism, but provincial governments in China are already using similar consumer data to nudge behaviors in their preferred direction. In Guangdong, people are docked or credited with price adjustment at local restaurants and retailers for their transit choices, all via digital platforms. In light of this practice, coercive pressure on food choices hardly seems implausible.

I'm tired of restaurants I like closing due to lack of staffing. If this is what it takes to keep them open through this labor shortage, then I'm more than willing to put up with its downsides.

It's odd to see conservatives: (1) pick up the "considered harmful" meme and (2) get so indignant about something private enterprise does. (Of course now "conservatism" is all about having a good sense of the little resentments of everyday life... If it wasn't for those "press 1 to hear this in Spanish" messages the U.S. would be run by Leon Trotsky, Che Geuvera and Nancy Pelosi right now)

For that matter I'm a little amused that it took a year and a half for this to become a populist issue.

What really annoys me is the situation of scanning QR codes on Android because it's hard to give people instructions to download a QR code reader. You can't just tell them to scan this QR code. You have to tell them to go to Google Play, and any search for a QR reader creates results that look like

  (1) SCAM
  (2) SCAM SCAM
  (3) SUPER SCAM
  (4) GREAT SCAM OF 2019
  (5) SCAM 2023 SCAM

and so forth. It's an unholy marriage of phone maker's and carriers "don't give a damn" attitude and Google's dependence on the scamvertising model.