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Comment by Salgat | Hacker News Reader

I'll buck the trend and say that I love QR code menus. It lets us order at our own pace, even after our initial order, without waiting on the waiter. Additionally, my wife and I can both queue up what we want in the cart on each of our own phones and discuss before submitting the order. It's just way more convenient, the whole "wait on a stranger to take our order" thing isn't a necessary component of the restaurant experience for me, and if I need to ask questions, I've never had issues waving over a worker to help.

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Full mobile ordering is great, but there’s lots of places that have the worst of both worlds: a QR code linking to a digital menu, but still take orders with the waiter

Yeah bonus points if the digital menu is a regular-sized PDF, meaning anyone over 20 has to pan and zoom.

QR. code that takes you to a Google Drive PDF with a scan of the printed menu.

To top that, that QR code is distorted before printed, like rectangle. Happened to me in central valley.

Was it still scannable? I thought they had perspective correction built in, given that any picture you take of one will always have some distortion?

edit: 2022 discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36174607

No, it did not scan. They did not have any url listed below. I was using Barcode Scanner from zxing. I snapped a photo, edited, and then scanned.

FWIW, I vote heavily against full mobile ordering. The more I have to do on my phone the worse it is.

Things that admittedly make this worse:

- Using an older phone.

- Not saving credit cards to your phone.

It's just slow and clunky, and -- it feels like work.

I don't want to file a JIRA ticket to get my appetizer. I don't want to fill out a form. I just want to sit down and tell somebody.

Another way to look at this is that it's the "self checkout" version of dining out. Self checkout is slow, because it's different at every store, and you will never be as fast as a cashier who has some practice with their particular system. Same deal here.

Yeah I do like wait staff, eating out is a bit of a ritual for me, I do tend to go to smaller family owned establishments.

Paying with QR instead of having a stranger take your credit card somewhere to swipe it is also a much better experience for me.

Why not have the waiter come over with the card reader? That's usually how it's done here.

I figure not every restaurant has the money/motivation to invest in the mobile POS and so it's still not super common.

Handheld card readers are price competitive, or at least marginally more expensive. I’d attribute it more to the time investment of switching POS systems.

Everything is weird in the US so can't tell how different it would be, but in Chile you can get a handheld personal car reader [1][2] for around ~25USD to 50USD, even if they needed something more specialized I really can't see them becoming prohibitively expensive, even the matching POS from the same company is just like 400USD[3]

[1]https://sumupchile.com/products/lector-air?variant=399949779... [2]https://sumupchile.com/products/lector-solo [3]https://sumupchile.com/products/punto-de-venta

I can get the same deal here if I look for it, nothing special about Chile, etc. Most restaurant/business owners aren't tech savvy and will switch when their equipment fails, not to keep up with tech trends.

In the UK there is no swipe. Everyone has mobile card readers. Even tiny food trucks in the middle of nowhere have mobile card readers.

In UK. Even the stalls at the school fair take cards now.

I've even seen buskers in London with a machine set up so you can tap your card to tip.

Edit: apparently this was a thing even back in 2018 https://www.theguardian.com/music/2018/may/27/busking-joins-...

I remember seeing panhandlers with a mobile card swiper as early as 2009.

swipe is all but gone in the us. Will still say swipe, but that isn't what happens.

Bringing a reader to the table is gare though, mostly a thing at the large chains that are pretend to have ethnic food, but it is really poor quality-

The UK also does "chip and pin" authentication for requests, so the waitstaff are forced to either bring a portable cardreader to you or for you to walk to a terminal and enter a code. I think this is why mobile card readers are so common.

In the US, most credit card transactions are simply "(swipe or chip)". If you have the card, you can use it. Gas stations seem to be the slight exception in America -- they generally require "(swipe or chip) and billing zipcode". This is quite funky and not at all secure against fraud.

In the US a few months ago, a food truck used one of those carbon copy card swiper things. And yesterday I tried to pay for a cabin reservation and the lady took it down over the phone and said she'd run it next week. Many grocery stores and gas stations still swipe. Our tax people still use faxes and our hospitals manually create and deliver CD-ROMs for medical imaging. We're not a very advanced country, lol.

I wish swipe/on card numbers were completely gone here and chip only too. I use my phone for most purchases, but most restaurants here haven't caught up on wireless pay.

because america hasn't caught up with the rest of the world. I'd guess about half of all restaurants still take your card to swipe it at a machine tethered to the register. it's getting less common in stores and fast food restaurants though.

Much closer to 100% IME. I think I've seen a mobile terminal once, in an airport restaurant.

Probably at least 80% of sitdown restaurants in my suburban town in the US seem to have those portable card readers. Now I can’t even think of the last restaurant I ate at that didn’t do that.

How is that better than.. just paying with the device you already have, without having to bother the waiter?

It's more work for me.

With NFC card payment I just hold my card to the terminal and that's it.

I'm afraid most US chains/restaurants will only change their equipment when their equipment dies. It's going to be a few more years to a decade I think. Most of these units are pretty reliable and can go for a decade or more easily. At least most POS at gas stations, chain stores take NFC now.

Tap phone, confirm payment, tap fingerprint reader to confirm.

Try to flag down waiter (x5), ask for the bill, wait for waiter to return with the mobile POS, fiddle around in your wallet to find the card, tap card, decline tip, write PIN code, finally get to leave.

most restaurants here are take your code to their payment station. With all the insurance against fraud in the USA I don't care. I've only had it happen once and I'm pretty sure it was with a skimmer/MITM at a big box store roughly 15 years ago. They actually had used my 3 digit code on the back in an online purchase.

>Additionally, my wife and I can both queue up what we want in the cart on each of our own phones and discuss before submitting the order.

This is exactly the thing I loathe about QR code menus. It normalizes having phones out at the table, with everyone looking at their own. Defaults are powerful, and "phones out" as a default leads to increased distraction and inattention among the people you're dining with.

it's ok to do your own thing sometimes. if you want to share a nice meal with your wife without your phones just say so. people are often more social now than they used to be, at the cost of some personal attention, sure.

i hang out with and eat out with my partner almost every day all the time. i don't need to be present 100% at every single moment, and if i or he wants to be during a meal, we will simply share that thought. i've never had issues having normal social interaction with people when out, even with some phone usage. it's normal.

You’re describing online ordering. This article is about links to a PDF.

Many restaurants (quite possibly most) take away the menus after you've ordered and traditionally had to bring them back if you wanted dessert/another round of drinks/etc. If they left menus, they're fighting space on what is often a table barely large enough to hold a plate for everyone seated at it

QR code to PDF improves both these scenarios.

They took menus away to discourage changing your mind

Who changes their mind after ordering?

I'll go further, what kind of monster inconveniences the whole process by changing the order after the fact??

Humans can be aweful at times.

No they don’t. They take them away to make room on the table for your food.

Usually the waiter take back the menu right after you ordered so I doubt it.

That is why the waiter took them away. Wome seem to interput what I said as why some are taking away paper menus, not what I meant

Most of the time the only reason is there is just no room on the table for the menus to be kept.

There are a few places (usually burger joints) where the menu is a piece of paper that actually serve as a placemat that the waiters won't take back from you. I doubt a lot of people are changing their mind. I've rarely seen that.

Nah. They take away physical menus because they need them for the next guests. Restaurants never - even high-end ones (which might be surprising, but high-end restaurants have more-expensive to produce menus) - never have enough menus. Owners skimp on printing menus because they're as penny-foolish as any other out-of-touch manager. At the worst places waiters hurry guests' orders, and hang around trying to intercept menus from each other. It creates a whole load of unnecessary stress: just make some more damn menus!

Source: waited lots of tables in lots of restaurants.

I'm describing regular sit down restaurants. Everything about the restaurant is the same except ordering with the waiter is replaced with a webpage you order off of. The QR code even automatically enters your own table number since each table's QR code is unique. The PDF thing sounds super lazy, thankfully never come across that before.

I have only seen online ordering from a table as you describe at a couple of places. Maybe two times. Most QR codes I see link to a (often nightmarish) website or a PDF that would be suitable for printing a paper menu.

I often end up ordering more thanks to QR. No longer do I have to try to flag down a waiter to get a menu looking for desserts after I'm done eating. Then having to flag them down again to order. Such a hassle I often don't bother. Same with getting another drink.

With QR? Just scan it an order. Done eating? Just leave, having already paid in the app. Also removes the whole stupid tip thing.

> I'll buck the trend and say that I love QR code menus. It lets us order at our own pace, even after our initial order, without waiting on the waiter.

Why not a paper menu plus order online? You could even have the order QR code and URL printed on the menu.

I like the mobile order option the best, but very few places I've been have that.

The QR option is nice, as long as it's just an option. A physical menu is, generally, much nicer to use. That being said, sometimes you want to go back and reference what you ordered, or other options (like for drinks) and ... the menus have all been taken away.

What I really, really love about QR code menus is that, unlike real menus, they aren't sticky and covered in grime.

The prices aren’t sticky either.

You've never gotten a paper menu with stickers over the prices? Or those places that re-print the menus every week.

If you do to a decent place they're not sticky and covered in grime. After all they're used and taken away before the food even arrives.

I go to a vegan restaurant with a 3 course 10,95€ meal deal and they have excellent menus.

lots of hole in the wall restaurants have great food for reasonable prices but not a lot of waitstaff to make sure every menu is pristine.

It means everyone is staring at their phones once they sit down, can kill the vibe

I don't have any issue with them, but I would hope they would have a reasonably recent paper version available for downed internet or older customers. I don't think it should be the "only" option. Also please make your menus searchable. Sometimes I just want to see what all your chicken/beef/veggie options are.

They’re certainly good at sushi conveyor belt bars, where most people don’t care which food they’re selecting beyond what it looks like but a small minority want to know what they’re actually biting into.

Think about all the data you're giving up on yourself in exchange, and how that is being rebundled and sold.

Literally zero more than if you're already paying with a credit card.

Your credit card already identifies you by name, and your precise location is known because you're at the restaurant by definition.

Wrong. When you pay with a credit card it gives your name and amount. Activate a QR code and you're giving up your IP address at the bare minimum, it becomes possible to calculate how long you've been in the restaurant and who knows what else based on the cookies that come back or pdf telemetry. Every day there are stories here on HN about how people's data can be exfiltrated from their phones, but somehow you think this could never happen in a restaurant?

> you're giving up your IP address at the bare minimum

Your phone's dynamic IP. Which is a redundant, and much weaker, identification than your payment info.

> it becomes possible to calculate how long you've been in the restaurant

Also doable by the staff.. using their eyes. And most restaurants will use some form of system anyway to track the orders and payments, because that information is vital to running a functioning restaurant.

Conventional observation by restaurant staff isn't bundled and resold by data brokers. I find it astonishing that a reader of HN would be unaware of commercial data collection and resale practices.

You don't seem to understand.

Your credit card transaction is bundled and sold. Because it has value in establishing a consumer profile for marketing.

The fact that you visited some restaurant PDF or webpage from a dynamic IP address is not.

Like the parent commenter said, any information about how long the table is being occupied comes from the POS and reservation system. But that data is for the restaurant -- there's no market in selling it, though it absolutely has value to the restaurant for its business decisions. But your phone isn't being used for that part.

Data collection is certainly a thing. But it happens in specific ways for specific purposes.

Using a credit card tied to your identity, but then worrying about revealing your phone's IP address while ordering, doesn't make any sense.

No, it's you that don't seem to understand. I'm well aware that paying with your credit generates information which is repackaged and sold. But following a QR code to a webpage potentially opens your phone up to cookies, tracking pixels, and all sorts of other things, depending on what permissions you give it or what exploits can be leveraged. All the major fast food vendors have their own apps now, for example. One hopes they don't exfiltrate unrelated data from the phone, but it's not a certainty and it's even less of a certainty if individual restaurants start encouraging their customers to install a generic 'my tasty meal' app.

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