151–160 of 403 posts
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Part of the motivation is to avoid having to produce Braille menus. Force your customers to use a device with built in accessibility features and you don't pay extra for ADA compliance.
How does a blind person use a QR code? Not like they can see where the camera is pointing, let alone locate the code in the first place.....
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Print shops. Restaurants already source their materials and equipment from other suppliers. They don't grow their own food; they don't need to print their own menus.
Sure, the same is true of anything written. But much of that has shifted to digital media because it's more convenient. A print shop has much higher latency and change costs. The newer restaurants in my neighborhood mostly use flexible ways of conveying prices. QR codes, menus on big screens, chalkboards, or computer-printed paper menus on disposable paper.
This defeats the whole purpose of a restaurant, which is to be convenient. If I wanted to be inconvenienced I would just buy groceries and cook them at home.
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It’s a Trojan Horse pattern, really. They give away the service for free membership with billions of VC until their competitors collapse or fade away, then they start becoming more aggressive with ads and/or charging for premium access which used to be free.
This is not new, Gillette used to give out free razors to get people used to their ecosystem and get recurring revenue. It’s just more “in your face” now.
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> presumably they'll have some paper menus Increasingly commonly, that's a "nope". If I don't have an internet-connected device capable of dealing with a QR code about my person, eating out is no longer for me. Perhaps it's time to go back to the old people's home, the nurse has been searching for hours.
> If I don't have an internet-connected device capable of dealing with a QR code about my person, eating out is no longer for me. What kind of dystopian city do you live in? QR codes are on the decline again¹, fortunately. 1: https://www.theguardian.com/food/2023/may/23/off-the-menu-wh...
I’m really hating the signin with google on nearly every website. I don’t want you to know who I am, I might never even return to the site. Stop asking me to login so you can data mine me.
Turn it off at https://myaccount.google.com/connections/settings
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You don't know how the restaurant business works, for one thing. For another, acting like an asshole to waitstaff just makes you look like an asshole, and gratifying yourself in public over your supposedly principled stand in acting like an asshole doubly so. QR code links to menus are bad, sure. I'd still rather eat at ten places that have those than one place that has you.
> I'd still rather eat at ten places that have those than one place that has you. If my making a scene makes other customers upset, then it's working. I know businesses hate it when people do this, and that's why I know it's an effective tactic. The whole point of the protest is to sabotage the business by making everybody else in the room upset.
I feel the same burning hate like a thousand suns for FB/Meta, Google/YT and other platforms that monetize their users. But, let's be frank here: They monetize you and me, us, the users because 1 they can and, 2, they have to. Yes, they have to. Imagine they provided access to their platforms for free. How would the shareholders (your retirement funds included) respond when less profit was made? You see, we view them…
And generally users of the web want things to be free / don't want to pay directly for these utilities. I feel like we as internet users are a big part of the math here.
With very few exceptions (mostly arising out of expedience), I do not pay for software. I honestly do wish the dynamics of the software ecosystem were different, so that there would be any software worth paying for. But the harsh reality is that there is a stark divide between software that represents my interests aka Libre software, and proprietary software for which it's only a matter of time of when it will betray my interests, if it isn't already doing so out of the gate. And if I'm using software that is set up to betray me, such that I have to sandbox it to mitigate it (isolated VMs etc), then why the hell should I also be paying for the privilege of that hostile relationship?
This is the underlying divide that the user surveillance industry attempts to arbitrage. Startups offer what appears to be convenient software that mostly represents users, but then once users become dependent on it, cranks up the abuse and extraction. Instead of the shareware nag screen, it's a nag dopamine drip of habituated dependency.
One of the things that really needs to happen is anti-trust enforcement to stop this bundling of hosted services with software. Any company offering a service should be required to make that service available in a programmatic way to every authorized user, such that users can always use "third party" clients. This would drastically curtail the current bait and switch dynamic.