Culinary (Q)Arts
Pushing Back on a Needless Annoyance
Like every television executive last decade, I spent 2022 obsessed with serialization. It’s not a weekly newsletter, it’s a 52-chapter non-fiction book! Among the many reasons I’ve abandoned that idea is that there’s big topics that I’m not capable of exploring all at once. Big questions.
And there may be no bigger question than the one I want to start with. Anyone interested in technology, society, business, culture, humanity, or pretty much anything other than themselves should be asking this question. Is technology killing community and can we change that?
The first part of that question has an easy answer: “no, of course modern technology – i.e., the internet – did not kill community. Bowling Alone – which tackles the death of community – came out in 1995. Compuserve didn’t do that much damage, folks.” But the question is deeper than that. We all understand that the modern world is different, and for all of us, no matter our age, we probably have less human interaction now than we once did.
As I struggled to find an eloquent way to describe this, fate smiled on me. Although I disagree with him on a great many things, one thing both Freddie de Boer and I would agree on – even though he’s never read my writing – is that he’s a better writer than I am. And this opening paragraph of his recent essay1 is a beautiful description of the problem we’re facing.
I’m on record as fearing a future where nobody ever sees each other - where there are no interactions between strangers. Where the only people we ever interact with are people we consciously choose to interact with. It looks like we’re getting there. We don’t see other people at restaurants because we get food ordered in. We don’t see people at the grocery store because we get our groceries delivered. We don’t see people on public transit because we get around with Uber. We don’t see people in hotels because we stay in Airbnbs. We don’t see people at GameStop because we download all our games. We don’t see people at video stores because they were destroyed by Netflix. Increasingly, we can tour housing for rental or buying without ever actually stepping inside, and services to remove the dealership visit from the car buying process are growing. We have dating apps to reduce the amount of real-world mingling we have to do and online courses to avoid meeting fellow students. Even when we go places physically, we minimize interaction; at the local Starbucks, hardly anyone seems to order at the counter, with almost everyone ordering on their phone, picking up their drink with their head down, then scurrying off. And, of course, there’s remote work, where you only see some of your colleagues over Zoom, and many of your coworkers never at all. In a decade or two, we’ve created myriad services to reduce our exposure to other human beings, which people apparently will pay a premium for.
Where’s the lie? I can’t disagree with anything in there. And despite my belief that the digital revolution has not been as revolutionary as presented, it’s certainly accelerated the move away from human interaction that far predates the positing of Moore’s law. The causes and effects of this movement can be discussed at length in the future. Today I want to look at a very specific, very minor, and yet very pernicious phenomenon: QR Code Menus at restaurants.
For those of you who don’t live where these are a thing, I need to take you back to a minor year you may have forgotten: 2020. America – like most of the world – was in the grips of a global pandemic. One which we then thought was transmitted through big droplets that we’d touch. Thus was born a feverish trade in hand sanitizer and lysol wipes. People were wiping down their groceries and businesses were deep cleaning every surface. When restaurants slowly began to reopen, there was a problem: people in restaurants would constantly touch the same thing that everyone else did. This led to a push to remove so-called “high touch” items, and few things are higher touch than a menu. And that’s how we arrived at the QR Code menu. If you’ve never used one before, or want to see what they’d look like in a world that was a promotional video scored to jaunty little tunes, enjoy:
Wow, these must be super popular! Are they? Well, to put that answer in perspective, I need to explain my concept of the Wolf Fighting Threshold. Do you think you could defeat a wolf in hand to hand unarmed combat? Of course you don’t, they’re vicious killing machines.2 But look at this chart which explains everything you need to know in terms of understanding American public opinion:
The entire thing is worth reading.3 But just this chart alone is perplexing. Six percent of people think they can defeat a grizzly bear? I’m not even sure how, unarmed, those eight percent think they’ll defeat an elephant. Annoy it to death? No matter what question you ask, whether it be through mischievous answers, error, or just old fashioned American ridiculousness, 12% of people’s opinions should be discarded. And according to a (paywalled) survey by Technomic, guess what percentage of Americans prefer QR code menus to paper. That’s right, the same amount who thinks they can beat a wolf.4
But why does only a laughably small amount of people like them? I decided to reach out to a focus group made up of some of the finest Substackers I know.5 No one was positive, and all but one were negative. The negative opinions could be split into three categories. First, the practical:
Despite being a professional software developer and otherwise quite technically literate, I still can't remember how the hell to read QR codes with my phone half the time.
QR code menus are an exercise in neck-twinging frustration, and it’s incredible how many restaurants with QR menus do not have websites optimized for mobile!
We went to a restaurant with a QR menu, and there was no cell service for Verizon. So we had to request a paper menu, but it wasn’t up to date because they were only maintaining the online version.
It can take a huge amount of time to access the online menu if broadband is not good.
Phones are three inches, menus are generally not.
It’s hard to disagree. QR code menus are not enjoyable to use. We make concessions to using small screens because sometimes there’s a benefit. Reading a book on my Kindle is not as pleasant as a physical book, but that’s outweighed by the convenience, and not cluttering my home with endless books - a major benefit for someone paying Austin rents. But what benefit do I receive as a consumer for this trade with a menu? And although the restaurant has an easier time updating the menu, it’s not all positive for them. Menu science is not something Jon Taffer made up for a television show. It’s a real tool that businesses use to increase profitability, much of which is lost when you’re scrolling on a five-inch screen.
My focus group didn’t stop there. The author of one of my favorite Substacks raised a wonderful point:
I often like to leave my phone in the car or fully at home when I go out to eat. I continue to chafe at the idea that everything in the world should be built around the assumption that we are all carrying a phone at all times.
I could – and someday will – write an entire piece just on that second sentence. But it highlights another problem: smartphones aren’t universal. Odds are that almost everyone reading this owns a smartphone. But that’s also because most of the people reading this are college graduates under 50 making at least $75,000 a year, groups were smartphone penetration is around 95%. But according to the latest data – admittedly two years old – for the population as a whole it drops to 85%, and for certain groups it drops much lower, including seniors, over a third of whom don’t own a smartphone. For us it’s a minor inconvenience, for many people it’s a major one.
But the most interesting responses from my focus group take us back to where we started: human interaction.
Part of the pleasure of going to a restaurant is interacting with the server, asking for recommendations, and maybe learning something about the offerings. With QR code menus, we lose all that.
Mostly, when I go out to eat, I enjoy human interaction with the server and other staff. Having to QR code to a menu page just makes the whole experience feel less personal and immediate. I don't feel "served" I guess you could say. It detracts from the experience of hospitality and feeling taken care of.
I think it's very rude to fiddle around on your phone while out to dinner with someone, and I hate that these force you to do that-especially when you're getting a second drink or something mid-meal and it might not be obvious to your company that that's what you're doing. So then I'm like "Don't worry, I'm not ignoring you, just scrolling through the list of 30 IPAs!" when if you had a regular menu and server stopping by everything would be more normal and graceful.
And this is the heart of the matter. Restaurants and bars have always been not merely a place to get food and drink, but a place for human interaction. Cell phones have certainly worked to diminish that aspect.
But the perniciousness of QR codes is related to why I’m spending so much time discussing them.6 The tradeoffs we’ve made between human interaction and convenience are just that, tradeoffs. Look at Freddie’s list earlier. All of those have pros and cons. Or think about when you walk into a bank and it’s empty but for two employees, that’s weighed against how helpful it is to avoid going into banks. But QR code menus? The only benefit is the savings to restaurants in the difference between printing paper menus and operating QR code menus. That’s it.
If we can’t stop this, what are we going to stop? Humans are the most exquisitely social animals the world has ever known.7 Even you extroverts should understand turning that train around isn’t going to end well. We could use new technologies to bring people together, or we can use them to push us further apart. The tradeoffs we make between convenience and human interaction are things that need to be discussed. But let’s start with the easy one, the one that provides no real benefits and just makes going out a little bit worse. QR code menus need to go.
Uhh, not so recent. From about the time of writing that sentence until last weekend I was without a fully functioning computer. I’m glad to be back and I hope y’all didn’t miss me too much. But that you did miss me a little.
This video was too disturbing for me to embed.
There’s great stuff in there, including the breakdown between men and women. Men are more confident in defeating any animal – ludicrously so with dogs, geese, and snakes – except for one animal: lions. Ladies, is there something you’re not telling us?
I’d be remiss in failing to note that other surveys find less hatred – usually ones tied to the people who supply these. But I couldn’t find any that show people prefer these.
Although these are incredibly uncontroversial statements, because I didn’t get permission to quote anyone and I care about journalistic ethics, I will keep them anonymous. Take credit for yours if you wish!
The other reason, which I offer as a free article suggestion for one of the Substackers out there: changes done as a Covid-19 response that are now permanent annoyances to consumers.
I mean, I’m guessing. Dinosaurs could’ve been telepathic, who knows?
I live in San Francisco. It is February 2023. If you call for any City departments, you are still greeted with a recording that says due to COVID we are not scheduling any meetings in person. Like taking off your shoes at the airport, this seems to be a permanent, annoying thing.
I didn’t know I was one of your favorites! Thank you!
Also thanks for this eminently correct post. I can’t wait for the followup. This assumption that anything that can be done on a phone is better if done on a phone makes me feel like we have all swallowed a lot of propaganda fed us by companies who are unhappy when we do anything they can’t observe.
By the way, do you get those endless ads for the Google Pixel phone where the only feature they advertise is the ability to magically erase other people from the backgrounds of your photos? Because then you can pretend you were the only tourist at the tourist attraction? What the fuck!