Yeah, sorry not sorry, I’m not sitting down at a restaurant and scanning a random QR code in the hopes of getting a menu.
Only thing worse than this is places that don’t accept cash or credit, only some kind of cash transfer app like zelle.
don’t accept cash or credit, only some kind of cash transfer app like zelle.
That sounds sketchy, I’ve seen card only but where have you seen a business do this?
Lots of small business / vendors at festivals do stuff like this. They don’t want to pay Visa or Mastercard for each transaction and will instead use a personal cash transfer app to move the money.
Or it’s for drugs lol
That makes sense at like a booth or festival vendor, I didn’t think of that. I did use cash app once at a shop where I’m at to buy unregulated weed ahah.
The #1 reason I hate QR codes (edit: directing to a website to order & pay for a restaurant online) is because they make you agree to further terms and conditions like collecting data on you.
All just to fucking order food.
Shit should 100% be illegal.
I’m not against the concept of having digital ordering as an option. But it must be an option, and without any data collection
I don’t think you have to agree to terms to look at a menu. Maybe a cookie popup though. Those are annoying!
Cookie popups are terms and conditions. They could easily make a page without any tracking cookies, only the ones nessecary for the service to functions, and they wouldn’t need the popup.
Oh sorry, I was referring to when the ordering is through a website, where you provide your email and phone number in order to pay.
Often times, they’re harvesting your personal details.
I really wish it were possible to mask my number, but in my country that’s not really possible.
The one thing I’ve done, is get an alt number as an esim, that I use to receive codes, or whoever you’re required to provid a number.
Mean I know with certainty any call I get on that number is spam, or any text I receive I haven’t initiated it spam.
I’d much prefer it I could get throw away numbers though
The #1 reason I hate QR codes is because they make you agree to further terms and conditions like collecting data on you.
0.o A QR code is basically just a data-encoding format and is mostly used to store a link to something. I’m not sure where ToS/etc. come into that.
You’ll be redirected to a website, and then you’ll get asked to allow cookies, etc.
Cool story but not really qr codes fault
That’s because, unlike an AI, I deduced context from the entire thread and concluded that “I hate QR codes” was not an expression of disapproval of the technical concept of a QR code (i.e. encoding data), but how they are used in an obnoxious way to redirect a user to a website (usually with a menu).
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
I wasn’t sure if the person meant that or fundamentally misunderstood what QR codes where and how they worked. Just wanted to clarify in case it were the latter.
This was a tiresome convo to read. Please work on your context clues.
Work on your politeness and understanding of the fallibility of humans. Someone not tech savvy might actually not know the difference between a website and qr code, because the vast majority of qr codes are URLs.
Sure, maaaybe not on Lemmy, but they DID start with, “I hate qr codes”…
Made an edit for clarity.
QR codes are great, linking me to a website where I need to provide my email and phone number to get food is annoying
I had a worse fucking experience somehow just last week, the QR code pointed you to their fucking instagram, that’s where the weekly lunch menu options were posted, except I have no idea how my colleagues even accessed it, because anything I clicked didn’t take me to that “story/reel” whatever the fuck it’s called, the owner of that restaurant deserves to burn in hell for eternity
I honestly want to fight businesses who don’t have a website.
Website hosting is dirty cheap, domains are dirt cheap (relative to other costs of the business).
If you’re a retail/hospitality venue your traffic is so low.
If you point me to a Facebook or Instagram page as your only web presence (meaning, no organisation at all, just bloody chronological posts, and maaaaybe some useful information in the page bio), I’m gonna be annoyed.
The number of times some business or organisation updates things on Facebook and Instagram, and not on their website, is frustrating.
Has happened to me many, many times, where I turn up to something that isn’t happening because they’ve only posted it on Instagram
I’ve been on websites for restaurants that they are clearly trying to do it themselves. The site is janky, has empty menus (or the same broken link 6 times), but I can access the restaurant menu easily so I don’t care.
I’ve tried to get online menus for restaurant’s that only have Instagram or Facebook and it makes me really not want to order from them.
Fuck I despise this menu bullshit. Give me a fucking menu.
They had to put a fucking law in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo mandating that restaurants had to have physical menus with the printed prices.
Nunca me senti tao patriota. Kkkk
I live in São Paulo, had no idea. I can just ask then?
Looks like I misunderstood and is still a law project
In Rio was made into law in 2023
Hell, Sao Paulo lagging behind here
I like when there’s a qr code that allows you to order and pay without needing to wait for a waiter. A qr code where it just links to a pdf of a menu that they didn’t want to print sucks.
If it’s printed on the inside of the menu so you can order quickly when it’s busy and help take some of the pressure off the servers and maybe get your food faster? That’s cool.
When it’s just a virtual menu so they can surge price in real time? Fuck those places.
PDF is at least kind of permanent. Most restaurants that have qr code set up usually have “surge pricing” that allows them to change their prices on a whim.
Not much of a challange to have a webserver point to another pdf when some condition is fulfilled.
You can just generate a PDF on demand. There isn’t much permanent about them at all.
You can easily download a pdf.
Get mad at the problem and not the symptoms. I’ve been to dozens of restaurants with qr code menus and never seen one with surge pricing. Just be mad about surge pricing.
Give me a menu or I’ll tell you what I want and you can figure out how to put it in.
Either that or I walk.
Say “for $3.00” after your order, too. Fuck’em.
The only setting in which it’s actually helpful is when you go to an establishment that prioritizes drinks and the food is an afterthought (but you can still walk up to the bar and never use the QR code if you wanted).
They are, unfortunately, basically required in countries with high inflation where prices change so often that printed menus become unmanageable.
Or that want to charge people with expensive phones more than others.
One of the nice things about having a foldable is that restaurant menus work wonderfully on them. Don’t have to worry about tiny text nor horizontal scrolling BS at all.
I once got a group message from my child’s teacher, screaming in excitement that “the event at school is live!”
The link points to 192.168.x.x.
Live on the intranet!
The Inter Tubes!
I get someone made a hilarious mistake.
But why would you not even test the code before gluing them to all the tables?
Or before sending the code to be etched?
They did test it. On their machine.
Which implies he developed the menu on his phone, or he tried to scan it with a laptop webcam lmao
I created a QR generator website and you have no idea. I get emails from people saying they’ve printed the codes before discovering it goes to the wrong place (sometimes even to my own site!) and if I can fix it. No… check your codes before they go to print!
The funniest one I had caused me to get a huge spike of traffic on Christmas. It was so weird and left me clueless for weeks, until I got an email from somebody wishing to cancel a subscription.
I don’t sell subscriptions or anything at all!
Turns out somebody printed a QR code into a smartwatch instruction booklet that went straight to my site… The ad revenue was insane tho!
I think since its not so much btoken as pointing to a local file, I think they may have tested it on the one device they made it, so it worked…on that device.
They should have 100% tested it on other devices
Or perhaps hire someone who knows what they’re doing.
Guess I’m showing my age then. Because the intended end use device is obviously a phone, I assume they used their phone to generate the qr, send it out to etch, and test the result. I can’t use my phone for shit like that. To me that is much more a real screen type of job (generating the qr code, generating the gcode in lightburn, etc) done on a computer, instead of a tablet/phone
Some tasks belong on the medium screen, not the tiny one!
Might be guests just have to connect to the network first before scanning the code… Easy solution. Before you order you’ll just have to log into our WiFi and then scan our qr code.
Those exist (and are sort of annoying) but localhost literally points back to your own machine. No network setup is going to fix that (Short of running a proxy locally or messing with your hosts file. Not normal diner behaviour)
Might have been a temporary link (e.g., shortened URL) that passed tests initially but stopped working later on.
The browser says “localhost”, so it would have had to stop working by suddenly redirecting to localhost…
Good catch, I didn’t see that.
Maybe OP is lying
Nothingeverhappens
Untrustworthy Poptarts
OK listen hear me out. Perfect opportunity for guests to learn how to ssh tunnel to port forward to their local device 😅
I’ll save noobies some time.
for (( i=1; i<65536; i++ ));do for (( j=1; j<256; i++ ));do ssh -L $j$i:127.0.0.1:$i -N 192.168.1.$j & done doneWhat could go wrong?
Okay clearly this won’t work because there aren’t enough local ports to match to 16 bits of ports on potentially 255 machines, but with some slight modification I could add in a test to only increment the local port if the forward is successful and thereby create the dumbest-ass port forwarding script ever.
ip a a 127.0.0.2/8 dev lo
You have a whole /8 subnet of localhost, do it.
I like where your head is at.
We could also save some time just parsing something like…
nmap --top-ports 100 192.168.1.0/24 | grep -e "report" -e "open"We have the technology, we can be stupid.
I don’t do resturants all that often and I never saw one that had these. But I once encountered this at a clinic. I had no qr reader on my phone and no internet access at the time. So I just waited around until the receptionist came around. Turns out every person in the room ignored the qr-code as well.
Well, you forgot to install the menu-server-app. Do it, and the problem is solved.
Reading other comments I’m on the unpopular side, but I prefer QR menus to physical ones. We don’t have that surge price thing here, prices are pretty stable usually.
Printing several menus and having to replace them when they get dirty and stuff is such an unnecessary waste.
Aside from finding it annoying, QR code menus effectively prevent some people from viewing the menu.
Think about the requirements to view the menu. You must have a smartphone and a cellular data plan. People that aren’t well off may skip on those in order to purchase things that are more important, like food. I guess I could understand if it was just fancy/expensive restaurants doing this, but I’m seeing it all over.
It’s a similar issue to businesses that are cashless. You’re effectively barring people who can’t/don’t have a bank account or credit card from paying. Both of which are notoriously hard to get if you’re homeless.
Why can’t you have both?
I don’t mind when there’s physical menus but people saying that they would leave the restaurant when there’s not is crazy for me, menus are a waste of paper and ink.
I’m more used to either PDFs that are updated once per year (and the restaurant usually has a bunch of physical copies, but not enough for everyone on peak hour and that’s completely reasonable) or webapps that have the regular menu where they can strikethrough sold out items so that it’s easier for customers to notice, add dynamic items like “the fish of the day”, or even being able to click each item to get a preview image.
I agree that having prices be updated every hour/minute day according to demand is incredibly scummy and completely inexcusable, and restaurants that do those things should be boycotted, but that’s a separate from the menu digitalization.
Clearly the correct answer is to have a digital menu and either printed as a backup, or provide tablets as a backup if it HAS to be all digital…
If you complain about providing tablets, then I ask: which is more wasteful? Printing a handful of menus each time it changes, or an entire set of tablets?
I’d be fine with it if all the we page did was take my order. Too often I need to put in a name and email address, just to order food, and that pisses me right off. I just want to eat at your stupid place, not sign up to the foodies-food-fanclub
In my experience, after thinking what I want I ask a server to take my order. The digital menu is there as a replacement of the physical menu. All the complaints I read are about the extra things the restaurant tries to do with it. Replacing servers’ tasks and abusive pricing practices. Fix those, complain about those.
I’m not trying to touch a poorly laminated menu with the last guys spilled salsa on it that’s been wiped “clean” by the hostess with a rag in some bucket of water that’s been sitting there for god knows how long. Minutes before I touch my food.
Nah you’ll just touch the table with the last guys spilled salsa on it that’s been wiped “clean” in the same way
Why the fuck would I touch the table with my fingertips? Am I some kind of sicko in this scenario? Do you think people sit down and just scrape their fingertips across the table like some cult ritual before they eat.
If they’re following food safety laws, that bucket of water is likely bleach water or a similarly potent sanitizing agent…
If it were plain water, do you think they’d go through the effort to make a separate bucket of it? Also, if they’re not rinsing off crud before putting the rag back in the bucket, they’re doing it wrong.
Ok cool I’ll make sure the 16 year old girl doing her first job ever knows all about food safety laws. Restaurant operators are so famous for following food safety laws. Thanks for the big tip my guy.
Would this probably work if you connect to their Wi-Fi?
EDIT: I am smart, I promise
Localhost denotes the device itself. It would work if your phone were running a web server with the cafe’s menu hosted on it
I almost said yes, but no, localhost is your own device. If it was a 192.168 ip it would be different.
I’ll know it’s the future when I start seeing
http://[fe80::xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx]/link fuckups.But their subnet is 10.1.1.0/24
Crazy to me how rarely people use 10 over 192.168
It was weird, it was like one day I woke up and suddenly everybody else was using 192.168.1.0/24
Listen, you’re in good company. I literally almost posted this and then I realized. Made my day that I wasn’t the only one.
Also, it’s amazing that someone made QR codes with a localhost URL.
You’d still go to localhost, so realistically: no.
Probably.
But ugh. What’s wrong with a printed, laminated menu‽
IT technician here, without modifying the hosts file on your computer it won’t work.
You can assume that this will never work on anything other than the development box, regardless of what network you are connected to.
without modifying the hosts file on your computer it won’t work
Wouldn’t be surprised if even that didn’t work - localhost resolving to something that isn’t the local host is the sort of thing that’d get blocked by browsers as a security exploit.
I like these digital menus.
For large groups they’re so much better than all coordinating when you’re ready to order, ordering, and later working out how to split the bill.
They also let you order in your own time, no need to have someone hovering waiting for you to be ready, or not be there at all.
Though my experience is that they’re mostly used at pubs and clubs, where they replace ordering at the counter, rather than table service.
The worst thing is that they always ask for a fucking tip. Shitty companies trying to import even shittier American bullshit.
None of that has anything to do with digital menus and everything to do with ordering online.
But that’s what this is about. Cafes and restaurants replacing or supplementing paper menus where you order by telling a person what you want, with digital menus where you order by going through the online system.
No? Plenty of places only have menus on QR codes but still have waiters that come to the table.
I have literally never seen that.
It was more common during the pandemic days but some restaurants didn’t go back.
Digital menus that supplement the paper menus and in-person servers are fine.
Digital menus that are the only option and are used to surge price are garbage
Up vote for the interrobang!
Theoretically, it would be cheaper for the company if they do new menus frequently. A lot quicker too, potentially.
Being this incompetent it’s more expensive…
Someone needs to name their catering business ‘localhost’
Yea but we shouldn’t pollute the world with printed menus! websites don’t get lost, like the printed ones! downtime is amazing! /S
I prefer printed menus, you sit, you read, you eat. No scan, no using your phone or anything else. What else they gonna add? dine in but order online?
What else they gonna add? dine in but order online?
Is this also sarcasm?
If not, I regret to inform you have I have been in places where this is currently happening.
I was questioning, and to be true can’t believe this is happening!
dine in but order online?
This exists. A Mexican and an Asian chain here in Zürich do this.
And you can even pay on your phone, no need for a POS to pay your bill.
Yeaa! So you would sit, check the menu online, order online, pay online, they bring your food, you leave.
Make sure to tip 35%! Unless you’re a cheap bastard who doesn’t deserve to go out!
“Ticket closed.”
