The Restaurant Industry’s Worst Idea

 Thinking of my earliest trips to restaurants, in the 1980s, I faintly remember waiters taking my grandfather’s credit card and using a manual flatbed imprinter to make an impression of its raised numbers. My nephew, born early in the coronavirus pandemic, may come of age with similar memories of physical menus as a childhood relic. Recalling them dimly when a dining scene in an old movie jogs his memory, he might ask, “Why did they stop using those?”

Read more | Should I use a static or dynamic QR code?

If that happens, I’ll recount the pestilence that raged as he entered the world; the shutdown of bars and restaurants; the push to reopen in the summer of 2020; the persistent if mistaken belief that high-touch surfaces, like restaurant menus, would be a meaningful vector of infection; the counsel of the CDC that July. “Avoid using or sharing items that are reusable, such as menus,” the federal agency advised. “Use disposable or digital menus.”

Read more | Do QR Codes Expire?

The QR-code menu—which you access by scanning a black-and-white square with your smartphone—has taken off ever since. It may dominate going forward. But I hope not, because I detest those digital menus. Never mind dying peacefully in my sleep; I want to go out while sitting in a restaurant on my 100th birthday, an aperitif in my left hand and a paper menu in my right. And as eager as I’ll be for heaven if I’m lucky enough to stand on its threshold, I want one last downward glance at a paramedic prying the menu from my fist. In that better future, where old-school menus endure, I’ll go to my urn happy that coming generations will still begin meals meeting one another’s eyes across a table instead of staring at a screen.

QR-code menus are not really an advance. Even when everything goes just right––when everyone’s phone battery is charged, when the Wi-Fi is strong enough to connect, when the link works––they force a distraction that lingers through dessert and digestifs. “You may just be checking to see what you want your next drink to be,” Jaya Saxena observed in Eater late last year, “but from there it’s easy to start checking texts and emails.” And wasn’t it already too easy?

Read more | Why QR Codes Are the Next Cybersecurity Battlefield

Research conducted before the pandemic suggests that, even if everyone resists the temptation to check an incoming text message, merely having a phone out on the table makes a meal less fun for all involved. In the 2018 study “Smartphone Use Undermines Enjoyment of Face-to-Face Social Interactions,” the social-psychology researcher Ryan Dwyer and his colleagues randomly assigned some people to keep their phone out when dining with friends and others to put it away. “We found that groups assigned to use their phones enjoyed the experience less than groups that did not use their phones,” Dwyer told me by email, “primarily due to the fact that participants with phones were more distracted.” The research team directed members of the phone group to use their device just once at the beginning of the meal—a setup “very similar to the nudge provided by QR codes,” Dwyer notes—and these subjects were free to use their phone as much or as little as they wanted thereafter. The control group kept their phone in a box.

Source | https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/qr-code-menus-restaurants-pandemic/671888/