Hacker News

Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.

I worked on a project where they replaced virtually all tier-1 customer service reps with an AI chatbot, which worked ok, because 90% of those calls are things like "what's my balance" and "I need a replacement credit card", which an AI can competently navigate. Phase 2, I was informed, was to replace Tier-2 with a chatbot, so the only time a human has to get involved was the most complicated problems. SO MUCH MONEY SAVED AMIRIGHT?!?

So I asked, in the middle of this giant kickoff meeting, "if you get rid of tier 1 & 2 reps, how are you going to train up the tier 3 reps who know enough about how things work to handle these most-complicated problems?". After an extended silence we got "we have a plan for that but we can't go into it just now". Sure you do.

> Management thinks they are absolutely replaceable. Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.

This is the way of the world. I want to bet on making myself replaceable, and move on to the next job to be done. It's fun. It's obviously valuable.

I'm good at my job. I crave new things to learn. My nature is to tune everything to work in as boring of a way as possible. I want to be the grandma with a single finger on the "creampuff" Cadillac steering wheel.

A grandmother driving down the road in a Cadillac doesn't look like someone who has conquered her world, but unless a manager looks deeper, they won't see it.

I firmly believe that companies who are smart about software, which is mostly "less is more", are about to use their new superpowers to out innovate the big boys. It will be like pg's writings on blowing away the online store competition with lisp-ninja-ism.

Good management values the people who align themselves with the company, and smile and help the customers. Bad managers manage software at surface level.

I also hadn't heard of it, but I feel like it's kind of a corollary of the whole, "what's measured is managed" idea or maybe the Streetlight effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect).

It's easy to measure a doorman's cost, but hard to measure their impact. Few, if any, guest are likely to mention the impact of a doorman on their stay except in the exceptional case. That means when budgets start to get tight (or an exec wants to drive the share price up), doormen become an easy target to cut because there's little hard data to justify their value.

> I think we are all programmed to respond well to any courtesy, no matter how indirect.

I once read a book called "The Media Equation" that argued humans' social cooperation/courtesy instincts are many thousands of years old, while computers are very new (the book was written in 1996). As academic HCI researchers they'd conducted many experiments, providing evidence for this, which is why it's a book, not a paragraph.

What I found fascinating about this book was you could see how their findings had directly translated into Clippy in Office 97. You close 'Clippy' and it waves goodbye instead of disappearing immediately? They had research findings saying that was perceived more favourably.

I've never heard it in terms of courtesy, more that a human employee is an entirely different category to some mechanical component of a business.

So the setup goes, if a doormans function is defined as opening the door, then he can be replaced by a cheap mechanical thing; this misses that he is both covering more incidental tasks, and providing a human interface to the business. These things are very valuable, but not captured in the "guy who operates the door" definition.

Probably true for humanity in general, but I would hate having a doorman and having to greet them every time I enter and leave. I've been in airbnbs where I had to do it, and I didn't like it. Same with the article's QR codes ... for an introvert, not interacting with the wait staff is great. Knowing that my order / payment is done precisely without fear of miscommunication is great. I don't need the hospitality.

Doormen keep vagrants away and prevent dirty things from accumulating in front of the venue. Plus the social benefits of interaction. It is a cost but offers not immediately obvious benefits.

Seinfeld did a whole episode literally about the doorman fallacy.

That’s such a benign vulnerability that it doesn’t even feel like one. Per your description, the worst thing an attacker can do is see the food ordered to a check number (in a public restaurant) and pay a bill that isn’t their own?

On the flip side, some services go absolutely overboard trying to secure low-blast-radius things, or don’t properly scale security to the risk of an activity. I have a service provider that requires an absurd login flow for their website, continually trying to force passkeys, short session timeouts, etc; when the worst an unauthorized attacker could do is pay my bill (the horror!).

I saw a team build some payment software a while ago that had a similar, if not exact, vulnerability. If someone had enough time / effort to figure out a not-super-unique ID (Something like 2456733), they could acccess the payment portal for an order.

I notified them and they said that this was noted, skipped, and they didn't believe it was an issue. Worst case scenario an attacker could... Pay for someone elses order, if this happened the attacker would be found by their payment details. Likewise on the payment screen they only see the order's total, nothing about the customer, nothing else about the order, just the total. So - I'm not sure. Maybe they're right?

I just shrugged. I would've patched it, feels like poor design and is easy enough to fix - but I couldn't really argue other than to say it felt sloppy.

This reminds me of how often "digital transformation" in hospitality introduces naive security architectures. ID enumeration vulnerabilities on restaurant QR codes are surprisingly common because these systems are often rushed to market by low-cost agencies.

While some might argue it's a "low-blast-radius" bug because an attacker can only view orders or pay someone else's bill, the data privacy implications are massive. Scraping that endpoint allows anyone to profile the restaurant's entire customer base, revenue flow, or busy hours. It's the classic side effect of replacing a robust human process with a poorly audited software layer.

Is it a Dubai thing that everyone's parking expires unexpectedly in 2 minutes? I didn't really understand that - perhaps a lack of local knowledge.

Right. Many restaurants won't do a split check beyond 3 or 5 people.

This place in Dubai doesn't sound that bad. It can get much worse. Two of us went to a restaurant in Cupertino, near Apple HQ, where the table had a QR code. But it didn't just bring up the menu in a browser. It wanted the customer to install their app. Then the customer could order through the app. That's going too far.

The restaurant was mostly cooking for pickup and delivery. Delivery people were going in and out constantly, but few people were eating on site. So on-site eating was made a special case of remote ordering, with a really short delivery trip.

Never went back there. The food was mediocre.

All this apparently works better in China, where WeChat took over and standardized customer interaction and payment. Of course, the Third Department knows where you ate dinner, and with whom.

In my experience, waiters tend to be quite good at splitting bills. I feel like many of them remember what people had, maybe they get good mental maps of seating or person <-> meal type just like taxi drivers used to get good mental maps of London before GPS.

(And printed menus tend to have allergy info too, just like online menus sometimes don't.)

The only times I've had splitting bills become a problem are with unreasonably large tables (10+), and at that point, you should be upfront about it before you place any orders, since that fixes the problem.

I assume it's a hard problem to solve if you don't have POS system keeping track though. If all you've got is pen and paper, it's probably better to just split the bill equally, assuming nobody had 6 40 USD cocktails. Or just have someone pay for the whole thing and settle it all in post.

> > But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued.

> Hasn't that been a fact of life ?

I remember having to split bar tabs at the end of the night before phones. No calculators. Drunk people trying to do math is a spectacle to behold. Everyone throwing random cash amounts in the centre of the table, taking their own change, and one person attempting to reconcile the total then asking for more contributions if we were short.

Electronic bill-splitting is superior in just about every way.

A good waiter by the time it comes to payment will know the dynamic of the group and help them organize quickly.

I was a bit surprised by the way the payment is being made here.

Do people pay it separately like this? In general, if it isn't a prepaid restaurant, then just one of us makes the whole payment, and we pay our share to that person.

Don't people follow that generally?

Such feature is designed to catch people who might not pay attention. Innocent looking money grab.

Some better parking apps simply let you start the meter and then stop when you get back to your car, so you don't have to worry you miss it and get a fine.

The prompt is a fix for an imaginary problem produced by senselessly aping physical limitations. A meter fed with quarters forces you to prepay a particular amount whereas a digital service which has at minimum your credit card could simply charge you the correct amount.

I find physical menus much easier to search personally - I can "time slice" switching my attention around different parts of the menu fairly easily and home in on which I might want.

It's clear how much menu there is to sort through. If I want to pick something for someone else (e.g. my daughter), there's clear sign posting to what's available.

Often the digital menus I get linked to are either just a PDF of the paper menu (in which case, I'm viewing it at phone window size rather than full A4) or it's a website with nesting in different ways, so you're not sure if you've seen everything or not.

I agree with a lot of this. Sometimes it is easier to scan a code, zoom until the text is at the desired level, and scroll around the menu rather than opening a large leather book with tiny writing in a dimly lit restaurant.

Going to PAY with the QR code feels a little worse. I went out with some friends and I planned to pay cash, the waitress came over to tell us all that we should pay using the QR code on our receipts - missed me, and I had to wait 5 minutes to let them know I was using cash. My friends didn't have much trouble, but we're all younger folks so we are used to pulling up Apple Pay or whatever. I imagine some people do not enjoy that experience.

I will say that there is this inherent disdain towards automated systems, and I feel it's warranted - to a degree. Some experiences are improved with automation, others are stifled. Sometimes we just want to talk to other people who understand our problems.

* the primary vector of contagion is unfiltered air circulation, not touching tables and menus (which are wiped down).

* I want you to go and tell another human being, in person, that paper menus cannot possibly 'scale'. Your brain has been deeply addled by SV culture.

* HUMAN TIME IS THE POINT AT A SIT DOWN PLACE, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

* YOU HAVE YOUR HUMAN EYES FOR 'SEARCH'

* QR CODE SCANNING IS NOT "GETTING BETTER" WHAT DO YOU EVEN MEAN BY THIS ASSERTION??

* OLDER PEOPLE AND PEOPLE WITHOUT SMARTPHONES WILL NOT "GET USED TO IT"

* "if demand is there" IT IS, HOW CAN YOU ACT LIKE IT IS NOT, DO YOU NOT HAVE DINNER WITH FRIENDS?? ARE YOU NEW TO THIS PLANET?

    An automated system is on 24/7 -- maybe not in the early days, technology isn't perfect, but how many people here remember the early days of cell phones, when you *called support to get refunds for dropped calls*?

    An automated system can add or remove people from the authorized list easily and remotely, and not make mistakes.

These are absurd positions, invented solely for the purpose of being contrarian and not because any of them make any sense or add any value to the conversation. I'm so tired of this thoughtless, tired crap passing as legitimate discussion.

> physical menus are hard to update

It is not hard to print a few sheets of paper off a word document.

> physical menus are often too simple, requiring asking the server questions they've answered a dozen times before already, hurting their efficiency, or they are book-sized and hard to navigate.

None of this is solved in an online menu, and no one is concerned about server "efficiency", whatever that means. Have you ever eaten out?

> physical menus aren't cleaned between uses, so you're touching everything the server touched, and the three people before you.

They are often wiped down, but it's interesting you think your phone is cleaner.

> physical menus don't scale: if the restaurant is busy, you might have to share.

Of course they do. You just... print more.

> physical menus require more human time for the host/server to provide them to you.

What? In a normal restaurant, someone is seating you, anyways. Putting 4 menus on the table is not adding time. If they are not seating you, you are ordering at a counter. If neither of those are true, leave a handful of menus with the napkins.

> physical menus aren't searchable.

The browser patten for finding things on my cell phone is so deeply unintuitive that this is as silly as pretending that a menu isn't literally designed to help you find what you want. Do you think menus are just a bunch of ingredients printed at random on the page? Do you think you are the only person who's ever considered UI?

> Does the author really think getting the server to split the bill is easier?

It is vastly easier for the user/customer. How is this a question?

You make some good points but some are, excuse me, cringey-wrong.

> physical menus are hard to update

How often does a restaurant update a menu? Those that need to update frequently already solved that by having a chalk board.

> physical menus are often too simple, requiring asking the server questions they've answered a dozen times before already, hurting their efficiency...

How does a digital menu solve this? All online menus I've used have basically the same amount of information as a printed menu, with some being marginally better. The marginally better ones are the online menus for food delivery because they have a bit more flavor text, pun intended. This is however offset by restaurant-owners' tendency to put unrepresentative stock photo to go with the item and they just put a disclaimer about the photos somewhere.

> physical menus aren't cleaned between uses, so you're touching everything the server touched, and the three people before you.

Ok but please wash your hands after you order at the earliest and before you touch your food at the latest.

> physical menus aren't searchable.

Fair but only thanks to `Ctrl + F`, the best menu search interface by a mile.

> Difficulty scanning the QR code will get better over time, obviously.

I'm starting a prediction market if this will happen before or after Tesla FSD.

> it ignores how QR codes work (you don't have to be that close)

Uhhh...what? The farthest I could scan a QR code is about two handspans away. This was from the original Google Pixel! It was remarkably good at catching QR codes, I have no idea why. I thought it was the moment scanning a QR code has finally gotten better(!) so imagine my disappointment when my subsequent phones (even one Google Pixel 3a) couldn't live up to it. The 3a was still better than others. Even with flagship models, you gotta be pretty close to scan QRs not to mention wait for the exposure and focus to adjust.

(Whoever tells me "cameras can zoom now dummy" has never actually scanned a QR code from afar with the camera zoom lens. When you zoom, the exposure changes AND it becomes _super_ motion sensitive which is, obviously, not great for scanning things.)

> Does the author really think getting the server to split the bill is easier?

I am not the author but yes I do think so. Server has the table's bill in front of him and a calculator, each tells him what they had and pay in turn. Et voila.

Splitting the bill inconveniences comes down to a couple of factors IME:

1. the customers know what they had but don't know the price so they have to leaf through the menu again to calculate.

2. the table is provided with only one copy of the bill so the group has to scramble over one measly piece of paper, talking over each other, to compute their share.

Both can be solved by centralizing all that complexity on the waiter.

To be fair, I think the author's bad experience was due to wanting to keep the apple crumble gesture a secret. That is such a bizarre complaint, bro. It doesn't make sense to me either! You're all in a restaurant, everyone knows all the food will be paid for by someone! Why keep it a secret that you paid for the apple crumble?

That's enough HN for the rest of the week.

These folks have patted themselves on the back for devising a solution to the last mile without then realizing that the hardest part of all was the last 20 feet.

They'll just ignore that problem, drop the package on my front lawn and then snap a picture for proof of delivery from 50 feet up before flying away. To be fair, at least one of the Chinese international carriers does that every time already -- pull into my driveway, open the window, chuck the package onto the lawn, and then drive away. At least Amazon still brings it to the front porch and 90% of the time even puts it in a spot where the rain does not reach.

if we had a standardized way to deliver packages like we do mail (the heavily regulated mailbox!) this would not be a problem, it's a phenomenal waste of human effort to navigate this uniquely for every location

it's not like a doorman where there's useful social interaction

Conversely the last step to the door is as complicated as it is since till recently there was no plausible middle ground. You would always be sending out couriers so no real improvements in cost could be made.

But if you can get a drone or a robot most of the way there, that changes incentives.

I would personally love there to be a regulated, standard design for parcel drop off: but there isn't one. Not yet, and no human delivery will use anything I devise properly.

But if nonhuman delivery would, well now everyone looking at new motivation.

last mile in software is real too!

I’d rather live in a place where waitstaff are comfortably compensated for their labor. Automating it will just lead to one kind of misery after another. Where does it end? Why do we want to go there? We can choose not to.

At least in the UK, Sonder also wasn’t cheap and some of their properties left a bit to be desired. Plus there were often people (staff) sat in the reception anyway, so I don’t really understand what they were doing or there for, or where the supposed benefit of their no-reception model comes from.

I’d far rather speak to a real person and have some interaction when I’m travelling than mindlessly do everything through my phone and an app. I actively seek that. What we perceive as “the future” in terms of our phones as the interface undoes the basic social fabric that has developed over thousands of years. I’ve had some of the best conversations with random hotel receptionists - and isn’t it these secondary connections over the course of our days with people we’re unlikely to meet or socialise with again that can really help us feel better connected to society?

A lot of hotels nowadays automate check-in and check-out completely. I stayed at Henna Hotel in Japan which genuinely has nobody at the front desk (although it does have an animatronic dinosaur which bows to you), and wondered how I would have them hold my luggage prior to check-in. They'd thought of that - they had a bunch of free lockers in reception.

Yeah. Usually I don't need the receptionist, but part of the value of a hotel is that I know I could go to the receptionist and get any problems sorted out, if I had to

If I wanted a no-touch experience with no other human in sight or on standby, I'd just get an airbnb

I've been to staffless hotels (numa) that were good and noticeably more affordable than their neighbors. I don't know if the housekeeping was outsourced though, I imagine that, without at least some local management staff, conditions would deteriorate rapidly.

I had a particularly bad experience with a hotel in Silicon Valley that had outsourced the front desk duties to remote workers. I was stuck outside in the rain, fighting a bad internet connection, trying to check-in. Probably saved them the space taken up by a front desk inside the hotel but I made a mental note never to use that hotel chain again.

Taking the restaurant ordering app, it’s certainly better than a server. Each individual picks what they want and pays for what they got on their own bill. It removes any chance of communication error between the customer and the kitchen. Appetizers to share easily split across who wanted them. No bill splitting discussions. OP just had to use a bad implementation.

> engineers are focusing on the monetary value

A friend of mine passionately believes engineers need an equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath to guide our morals and principles about what we should and shouldn’t build.

  > that money is saved for the company

This is the definition of "penny wise, pound foolish". Nothing is really "free"

Here's a good example: you know how every terminal begs for tips? And the percentage is increasing? (In San Jose I saw by middle number as 25%!!). It looks free, but guess what, I'm more likely to not come back and press "no tip" or enter a custom amount. The cost is the aggregation of these events but we just mindlessly set these values rather than testing. (Or just you know... caring about people and thinking about how you feel as a customer)

There's biases too and biases accumulate. Piss off enough people and they never come back. They tell people not to go there. This happens even if another restaurant goes too far. People just get fed up with "eating out" rather than just eating at one restaurant. That exhaustion accumulates, especially in times like this where money is getting tighter for most people

Don't forget self check out at the grocery store. I don't mind personally (I find ways to make it worth my while..) but it's a version of the same thing. Shifting labor under the guise of convenience. Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer. It's rare that the opposite happens.

> What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.

It doesn't miss it. The whole framing of the article is the Dooman Fallacy - an organisation trying to save money by shifting [apparently] menial work to the customer ends up losing more than they save.

> What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.

What? No, you're making the Doorman fallacy here, explicitly.

The company THINKS they're saving money by pushing the work to the customer/end user, but there's more to wait staff than just taking orders and payment - they provide the ability to smooth over any difficulties experienced during the meal, they signal status, etc, which would theoretically allow the restaurant to charge more than if they force customers to do all this work themselves.

Not to mention, if I had an experience this miserable at a restaurant, I wouldn't be back, which is a direct loss in revenue.

Restaurants aren't monopolies, except in really extreme cases.

> that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.

And somehow things are more expensive than ever. Self checkouts, order at the counter, bussing your own table, assembling your own furniture, filling out your or your pet’s medical history at a hospital, shipping labels (you mentioned this) and so much more. It’s a form of free labor that somehow society is okay with.

I never make the mistake to go to places with qr codes twice in my life.

I can live with giant tablets in fast foods, but there's no chance I go to qr code restaurants ever.

As the article points out, it's super inconvenient and absolutely breaks the mood for the night and cheapens and ruins the experience.

Even worse one of my favourite steak houses has removed phone booking and implemented a super slow and inconvenient form.

Another place that will never get my money again.

I don’t know which country you’re in (and don’t disagree with you) but even if the estimate of 30 minutes to shipping labels were accurate, that would still be a net win where I am in Texas - the line at the post office is regularly longer than that.

The moment i read the word Dubai, my empathy levels dropped to zero.

At first I thought you meant QR for payment, which is weird because most people (at least in SEA, where I lived) consider less friction and more convenient than cash or cards.

But it turns out you meant QR for menu, yes, hate them. Flipping through the menu is better experience overall. Opening menu on a phone is a chore, not to mention most menu web/app is crap. Lots of them are just link to pdf on google drive.

I enjoy the codes. It skips that whole dance we do in the US of waiting for the server to return - twice! - to pick up payment and then drop off the card and receipts. I can sit there as long as I want, pay once, then walk out. And the card has never left my hand.

What's more nonsense is the author of the article trying to split a check 6 ways and stressing over the fact two people shared a dessert. Sack up, split it roughly or better yet don't split it at all. Good friends return the favor sooner or later. Unless you're a cheapskate.

It feels a bit like you didn't apply the lesson of the article - these "doormen" have often different functions (theft prevention or at least reduction, information provision, support for those that need help, some minor cleaning or caretaking roles, and the greeting/visibility/we-are-a-fancy-place vibe ;-)

In countries where labour is cheap it is common to have staff for less essential things as humans are just more flexible (but also less reliable) than machines.

> QR ordering

In the story, even though people used the QR code separately to see the menu, the bill was combined. Either the order itself was done via a human, or the bill was charged against the table rather than the unique user.

When the whole ordering and paying happens as a single event, none of the problems presented in the story occur, other than the initial problem of scanning the QR code.

Upselling me is not a thing.

That is not a situation likely to continue beyond the next moment.

I agree, but that's mostly just a reason to have the option, while also having the option of using paper menus.

You're describing an interaction with a good server at a good business. (Off of peak hours, if you can take hours and they don'thave anything to say about it.) What do QR codes add except for technical issues?

I honestly cannot recall the last time a server tried to upsell me with even as much as a "do you want a dessert?". But... I suppose that's selection bias. I only go to restaurants that don't require servers to do that BS. They don't want to do it either, you know?

I'm unclear how getting used to QR code menus will alleviate the author's primary complaint that he would rather not use his phone during the meal and instead be present with the people there.

> Once people get used to QR code menus we will see its benefits over traditional menus.

Au contraire, mon ami. Once people see the benefits of anything they will keep using it and naturally get used to it. Not the other way around.

Really enough HN now. Goodness, the discussion here is ridiculous.

> Is there any part of the world you can have a six top with individual checks when you didn't tell them up front to split the bill?

Most restaurant point of sales systems in the US handle that pretty well. They put down what seat an item was ordered from, and it covers everything except shared items like appetizers. That's been pretty common for a couple decades, and not just at chains, also at local places (if they had a POS system and weren't doing it with paper still, but good servers know how to notate that well, too).

I’ve seen rare places where the server has a handheld and every single item is always individually charged. Then they can keep things separate or combine it however you want.

But, I’ve seen that maybe twice in my entire life. Once might have been in Vegas. Everywhere else is as you say; it’s just not a reasonable post-meal request.

Before electronic POS systems accounted for this, we'd just split the bill evenly. I didn't like that solution either though because it rewarded people who ordered expensive food or lots of food, and that was never me. I even quit going to lunch with big groups of coworkers because of that.

Yes, this is quite standard outside the US. In Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia etc. this is more the standard practice than the opposite.

It's because we are Americans yes. When I was in Europe the server would give us the handheld payment device and we select which items we ordered and then they'd charge us. The author seems to not have this, the waiter should've gone through themselves. It was simply the wrong technology, not that technology was at fault.

In Germany (where this happens frequently and many people expect to be able to pay separately – I don’t like it and we generally don’t handle it that way with friends, but when I’m in the restaurant with coworkers even I wouldn’t dare to stray from orthodoxy) the payment systems seem to be set up for it and enable this in a relatively frictionless way. I remember it being more complicated for everyone involved.

Basically, waiters have a list with all the items in front of them and you tell them what you had and they pick them. They can then just initiate a normal payment process and leave the rest of the table as is.

More time consuming and finicky than just someone paying everything all at once, sure, but a well worn and designed user journey you seemingly don’t have to torture those devices into making possible.

In fact, I will often be extremely apologetic when saying I want to split the bill but have noticed no eye rolls or complaints from waiters. It’s just smooth sailing. I do honestly think that was different when waiters had to do math and cross out things on bills and stuff (which I distinctly remember from my childhood/youth in the 2000s).

Europe. You just walk to the register and point out the items you want to pay for. I've never seen a place where paying for a group of 6 separately would be a problem, it's the default and expected.

>Is there any part of the world you can have a six top with individual checks when you didn't tell them up front to split the bill?

Not uncommon here in Norway. I had payday beers with well over ten people where there was a shared tab with people paying for their stuff as they leave.

As long as demand remains high they have no reason to change their course.

Yeah, they exist. I’ve also been to places where they take your order in the conventional way, but then allow you to scan a QR code to pay and go.

Sure, the process of asking for the bill and doing the dance where you check it, they come back with the card machine etc. can be mightily inconvenient especially if you’re in a rush. But I can just walk up to someone and pay there and then.

Whenever I’ve tried to use them, these QR code payment flows normally try to charge me, the patron, a service fee for the convenience, so I’ve never actually gone through with it.

I’ve mostly seen it at Asian cuisine restaurants where you normally order several dishes and order more as the meal progresses. So it builds up a tab and then you pay at the end.

> How did these people live through COVID and never encounter a QR code they had to scan with a phone?

Was that a requirement? I got through it without scanning a single QR code. I had my vaccination status available as a QR code (on paper when travelling in order not to depend on just a smartphone), but not the other way around.

We just ignored restaurants without paper menus, as we always do. It wasn't the time to eat out in any case.

Alamo Draft House recently-ish lost the plot. They were famous for being very anti-phone. They have now switched their food/drink service to on your device which means you have to use your phone during the movie which is precisely why I preferred to go there. You also report someone using their phone by using your phone. They even acknowledge this with a "we recognize the irony" slide during their "this is a phone free environment" segment.

Agreed.

Generally, with QR menus I'm used to paying when we order. No need for secondary processes or worrying about something not being paid for.

A popular solution in my country, at least for less formal restaurants and bars (and even nightclubs) is for each customer to have their own tab, which gets marked by waiters and stays with the customer. In those places, it's also the norm that you pay your tab at the cashier prior to leaving, and waiters don't have to handle with money.

Isn’t it a hotel in the original version? Doormen for nicer hotels seem very common

I am curious to hear why you believe those roles don't provide any value.

Have you ever used a travel agent?

I absolutely love waiters in any decent restaurant.

You can ask they waiter what's good on the menu, or what's the restaurant specialty or just what was delivered in the day and thus fresh, and it's a completely different experience.

Or the place could go to the extraordinary expense of putting multiple cards on the table with the codes.

This article doesn't land for me. The author complains about having to scan the code in sequence, but overlooks the fact that a waiter/waitress/till can only serve one person at time. And as you say, multiple people can scan a QR code, _and_ it would be trivial to print more.

Maybe I missed the point, but the aside about parking metres seems irrelevant. Just makes me think this is an anti-technology rant.

And again, the gripe about splitting up the bill. Not only is that a problem with existing systems, it's a problem that is solved by QR codes (if implemented correctly).

> multiple people can scan a QR code simultaneously

If it's large enough, and posted in a place where people sitting around a table can all see it clearly.