9 ms·

> Is this what the peak ordering experience looks like? Call me old-fashioned, but to me the peak experience is a paper menu to choose from, and a waiter that

by rapnie 2y ago

> Is this what the peak ordering experience looks like? Call me old-fashioned, but to me the peak experience is a paper menu to choose from, and a waiter that patiently takes the order. Far prefer that to everyone at the table fiddling on their phones in some weird-ass website or even god forbid custom app.

globular-toast 2y ago
As a fully capable person I can't stand being waited on. For me the peak ordering experience is I choose an item from some written menu with prices on it, ask for said item and pay exactly the price written on the menu. Then I either take item immediately or come to collect it later to take it to the table myself. When I want to leave I just get up and go without the stupid ask to know how much I need to pay then ask again to actually pay with expectation that I pay more than what was asked like it's my choice to pay but really it isn't.
gibolt 2y ago
Even worse when the weird ass website has links to multiple PDF documents to download. Then you find out all the items you looked at aren't available when the waiter stares blankly at you about your order. Turns out the dinner menu requires horizontal scrolling on the page to find.
- rapnie 2y ago
  For me peak worse is tables where you get dealt with a single iPad, even when visiting with six people. Which you then get to pass along. And then the 'tech experts' take care of ordering for those who don't get computers, like many elderly folks.
- OvbiousError 2y ago
  I prefer the pdfs. Most of the time you can zoom out enough to actually have a sizeable part of the menu visitble instead of 3 items at a time.
PUSH_AX 2y ago
I’m not sure if this could be considered “peak”. The ratio of waiting staff to customers is an obvious bottleneck. This inefficiency is simply accepted and not even really thought about, it’s just the way things are. But one thing I can say for this tech is it fixed it and the difference is noticeable.
- digitalengineer 2y ago
  inefficiency? It's part of the experience. I'm not in a restaurant or café to drink as fast as possible. I'm there to socialize as well. Waiting a bit is not a bottleneck, but a feature. (If I wanted speed, I'd take the drive-through).
  - consp 2y ago
    Might be nice to have but its also expensive in a low margin business. Maybe waiters get paid like crap enough for it to not matter in the US but other parts of the world have labour laws to abide to making it the biggest expenditure (and thus the one to save on by cutting out staff and replacing it with an app)
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Low-margin businesses have you order by the counter and then the food is either delivered, or you pick it up yourself. The app isn't there to improve on this. The app is there to maaaybe cut a little bit of hassle with replacing paper menus, but mostly promises to improve the business analytics site and creates many marketing opportunities, including but not limited to screwing with (er, personalizing) recommendations, creating incentive structures, and better tracking thanks to tricking the user into giving the vendor their phone number and bunch of other data. And, whatever else on top it is, one thing the app is not is an improvement in convenience or experience to the user.
    - austinjp 2y ago
      This highlights the underpinning problem: wages are so low that people cannot afford to live. Restaurant margins are so low they cannot afford staff. Why contribute to that system?
com2kid 2y ago
Many people like being able to see what they are ordering. I've seen people order by pointing to pictures on Yelp instead of using the paper menu. Online menus with pictures of every dish are desired by plenty of customers.
- grishka 2y ago
  Some restaurants in my city use a middle-ground solution: there's a tablet on each table (running Android, of course) on which you can order and pay (but that part is full of dark patterns, unfortunately). But you also still get a paper menu. And paper menus with pictures are great.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > Online menus with pictures of every dish The invention of color photography, and large and small format color printing, make it unnecessary for the whole thing to be online. You can have pictures without all the issues of online - like small, low-resolution screens (relative to paper all screens are low-res screens), and being coerced to give away personal data.
  - hot_gril 2y ago
    If it were this easy, they would've printed images on menus long ago. Which a few restaurants actually do, but usually only a few dishes. That said, I refuse to go to any restaurant that has a QR code menu,
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      It's not hard. It's just a bit more work - enough that it starts requiring a professional to be involved (graphics design, photography, coordinating print), whereas traditional menus can be half-assed[0] by anyone with passing familiarity with Word and access to the office printer. In contrast, the digital menus usually come as a solution, packaged with a promise of some juicy business analytics, so the restaurant only needs to sign the contract and send over some files - that's even less work than regular paper menus. So no surprise they're jumping to "high tech" - they're really outsourcing menus to a marketing company. -- [0] - I don't know how things are at the very highest tier of restaurants for the rich, but for those accessible to less rich, it seems the higher-end the restaurant is, the worse the menu is. Bad design, typos, etc. I suppose having an established reputation allows them to get careless about the minor details.
sebtron 2y ago
In this case, a weird-ass website that immediately demands your personal data.
_yoyko 2y ago
[flagged]
- guappa 2y ago
  Ah yes, everyone who has a different opinion than yourself must have dementia. Of course.
AStonesThrow 2y ago
A good server is an emissary from the kitchen, who knows the menu, and helps you find the best dishes. A great server establishes rapport with the regulars, anticipates their needs, makes them feel welcome and comfortable. Unfortunately "server" is not considered a respectable career but something you put up with before your film career takes off, or how you pay your college tuition for that juicy psychiatric nurse degree. So nobody can be paid enough, or retained long enough, to care about customers or the food. So 25 years from now, the best server will be a Roomba with a prominent QR on its back.
- GJim 2y ago
  > "server" is not considered a respectable career In the USA maybe. I can assure you, being a waiter is taken quite seriously by much of the civilised world. A good waiter is an important part of the dining experience.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Wytwwww 2y ago
    > In the USA maybe. Yet in the US, due to tipping, it can be (and generally is in most more affluent areas) considerably better paid and lucrative than pretty much anywhere else. Also I'm not sure what are you saying is generally true at all in most places (unless we're talking about a specific subset of restaurants).
  - astura 2y ago
    Only in fine dining establishments, certainly not in casual/family restaurants, which are most restaurants.
    - austinjp 2y ago
      There are many casual/family restaurants in France, Italy, Germany, Spain and other European countries with high-quality waiting staff.
LightBug1 2y ago
OMG .... 1000 upvotes ... Even worse are the restaurants who require one table to be all ordered on one phone ... so one lemon ends up effectively being the waiter for the table and doing the ordering for everyone. Ask me how I know.
mytailorisrich 2y ago
I have been to restaurants where they bring you a tablet that you keep at your table. It has the menu and everything on it. You order what you want from it, food or drinks, at any time and a waiter brings it to you. I found the experience better than ordering from a waiter and better than using your own phone. I've told that chains in China have now replaced this last bit "a waiter brings it" by a little robot.
ktosobcy 2y ago
> waiter that patiently takes the order. Ah yes... superiority complex?
glandium 2y ago
In Japan, many chains are using tablets for their menu, and you can order through that. That's much better than having to pull whatever from a QR code.
- eleveriven 2y ago
  A nice middle ground yet that tablets can be costly for restaurants to implement and maintain
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    An even nicer and cheaper middle ground is a color-printed menu with photos, and/or a larger menu with photos over the counter. For customer, it's all the benefit of a digital menu with none of the downsides. Of course, all the downsides are the very reason restaurants are switching to digital menus in the first place, which is something people need to be reminded of. In cases of "I can't believe they replaced a perfectly good X with inferior but 'modern tech' Y", the surprise is usually the person not realizing the vendor is adversarial, and Y is giving some extra benefit to them at the expense of the customer.
    - nickthegreek 2y ago
      and of course, weekend, daily or hourly price changes. You cant surge on a printed menu.
- xandrius 2y ago
  Yep but many many more have handwritten menus in kanji on the walls, I can read many kanjis by now and I'm still pretty swamped by trying to interpret every shop's different handwriting. At least once you start decoding the drink section (much more consistent) then you can go back and try to interpret the rest.
- atoav 2y ago
  This might be the best of both worlds. The advantages of digital ordering for both customers and restaurants are: - staff can keep the menu up to date, basically realtime (they have to do it tho) - orders can directly land in the kitchen instead of through the waiting staff, which may or may not be coming - payment can also be done thst way Of course there are more advantages for the restaurants that may or may not go counter to the interests (or rights!) of their customers. E.g. the ability to easily build profiles and sell that data to the highest bidder. There are downsides too: - digital menus can fail more easily than paper menus - congrats you are a waiter, and now IT-support as well - customers without phones, no/sucky internet or devices that fail to display the menu are out of luck, so you have to provide offline alternatives/own devices that need their own maintenance - options that are not in the menu and fields that are not offered cannot be filled, e.g. can be a problem if you are allergic rtc. - unpersonal. Most people prefer not having to jump through hoops. Using a tablet that is provided by the restaurant can aleviate many (but not all) of these issues.
hyperbolablabla 2y ago
Agreed. I've been to restaurants that only had a QR code but were also a Faraday cage so I couldn't access it. Was absolutely ridiculous.
throwaway4233 2y ago
One of the restuarant chains mentioned in the author's post (Social), is an extremely crowded pub during the night and for the rest of the time, a place where freelancers or remote workers come in to work and socialize. At least that was the case in Bengaluru,India before Covid. I would say that from the restuarant's point of view, having the order-from-app experience works out since the freelancers can order via their laptops whenever they want, without having to flag down a waiter. And during rush hours, tables could order what they want without having to spot and call a waiter among a very drunk dancing crowd.
frereubu 2y ago
My main beef with these menus is that I can't see the entire menu on my phone screen, and end up scrolling up and down multiple times before I can decide what I want to order. With a paper menu my eyes can flick up and down much faster. It's like trying to edit spreadsheets on a phone - technically possible but a real pain in the arse.
- eleveriven 2y ago
  Scrolling back and forth on a small screen is tedious
- coisnepe 2y ago
  Reminds me of how some people mocked me for having O'Reilly and such massive reference books when I started learning Python and Ruby. "But everything's online!" they claimed. Sure, but nothing's faster than browsing the index for what you're looking for and then skimming the section you're interested in, as opposed to going back and forth StackOverflow threads and random blogs. Currently renovating my house and I again bought 400+ pages reference books of plumbing and electricity, largely sparring me the need to endure endless YouTube videos littered with skits, sponsorships etc. Just straight to the point, factual information.
  - Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
    Online documentation is good if you already know what you're looking for. It is shit if you want to discover what is available. I am specifically thinking of the python docs and the time I, as a not-python programmer, wanted to see the various "grouping" types (lists, arrays, sets, dicts, tuples, whatever).
    - paledot 2y ago
      The Python core docs are uniquely terrible, though.
- mihaaly 2y ago
  At least the screen is only touced by you. My peril are the touch screen ordering places (practically all fast food places nowadays) where based on their outlook hygienically challanged persons swipe their fingers up and down for long before you have a chance following them. There is an icecream place opened nearby I had no chance trying because they only have touchscreen order. Guys at the till only serve icecream and all orders must go through the touch screen. They put the icecream into a cone - if you dared to ordered so - and put into the fingers of the customer who just swiped the same finger over a screen swiped by dozens of unknow people before. Oi!
eleveriven 2y ago
I'm with you on that. There's something special about a personal interaction with a waiter and a paper menu
- IshKebab 2y ago
  People will find a way to be nostalgic about anything I guess. "There's something special about having a wire attached to your phone." "There's something special about greeting a lift operator." "There's something special about hand-washing clothes."
  - oefrha 2y ago
    There’s indeed something special about a waiter pretending to be my best friend — the discomfort is quite special.
    - IshKebab 2y ago
      Yeah fortunately that's pretty unique to the US. I will never forget when I asked a waiter in Chicago where the loo was and he led me to it. Super weird.
jonathantf2 2y ago
Some apps are brilliant though - Wetherspoon pubs in the UK (despite not at all being the height of dining) have an app that works really well, I don't think I've ordered at a person there for at least 5 years.
IshKebab 2y ago
Ah yes the peak experience is having to wait 10 minutes and catch an extremely busy person's attention just so you can order. Most of these ordering systems (at least the ones that have survived COVID) are pretty good websites now. I don't remember ever having to use a custom app. It's a far superior experience. (Oh yeah and I guess you may be American and have a very different eating experience to the rest of the world where waiters don't live off the arbitrary generosity of customers.)
bjarneh 2y ago
> custom app. That is always the worst experience. The most painful apps always require you to spend another 7 minutes after installation; typing in and verifying your credit card information... That has to be the most convoluted paying experience. I was almost shocked when I rented a Hertz car (via IKEA), that everything was done through a website. The website asked for permission to use the phone camera to take pictures of the car etc. and off we went. Such a good experience compared to fiddling with a new app..
falconertc 2y ago
You're right, you are old-fashioned. I love order by phone. Any amount of time I'm sitting at a table trying to get a waiter to notice me and come by just feels like agony. Let me tell you exactly what I want, exactly when I want it.
megablast 2y ago
Peak is to me where we can sit and order and pay, and do not get interrupted so we can actually talk.
elric 2y ago
Similarly old fashioned here. If there's no menu and/or no table (or bar) staff to take an order, I simply walk out.
mihaaly 2y ago
Same here. I am even reluctant scanning any QR code and taking me to random web pages connecting my phone - and since phone is an extremely personal device, pratically an ID, so myself - to that place and time. I am not a fan of being traced, surveillanced more than avoidable, especially not fan of triggering it myslef. Giving away additional dat on myself on top of that. No thank you. And this is before considering the system exploiting the vulnerabilities of my device, insted of the other way around shown in the writing. I left a place because of their QR code primary order system. Waiters came around taking order the old fasioned way, but only in the gaps of serving the QR orders. No thank you.
noufalibrahim 2y ago
Completely agree. And it also allows opportunities for customization. Custom paper, cutting, presentation etc. Whereas on the phone, it's usually just a PDF or some responsive website. A real waiter also allows for a human connection to be created. Experienced waiters (rather than part timers) can really help you make an order, give you recommendations etc. which makes the experience of dining out much nicer.
tjbiddle 2y ago
Completely agree with you. If a restaurant has a QR-code menu, I ask for a physical one. If they don't have a physical one, I walk out. I've done that many, many, many times.
matheusmoreira 2y ago
Completely agree. I'll tolerate PDF menus if it's a really good restaurant, chances are I already know what I want anyway. If they ask me to install apps on my phone I walk out.
swah 2y ago
And a little button to call the waiter... I hate trying to make eye contact with a waiter in a big and busy place.
infecto 2y ago
Unfortunately the implementation that most Western countries took is pretty terrible. One of the highlights for me in China is the lack of menus in restaurants, I can still ask the staff questions if there are any but its nice being able to order add-ons throughout the meal without having to wave someone down.
giarc 2y ago
The best implementation of QR code menu I've seen was as followed. There was a paper menu but could also order from QR. It was a well designed page to choose from, but the wait staff was still there and took order. We had the option to order from QR if we wanted. When they entered our order, the page (linked to our table through custom QR code) updated with our order. We could add items at any point or we could "call our wait staff" who would then come to our table. At any point we could just pay our bill and walk away. It was the same feeling of using an uber for the first time and just walking out of the car and not worrying about paying the driver.
gloosx 2y ago
This is cheap restaurant experience, in good ones you always get the good old paper
dumpHero2 2y ago
Will call you old fashioned for that. I recently went to a restaurant with a large group of friends and they used toast tab for online ordering. The experience was much better than ordering in person. Each family was able to order and pay for themselves. We could add extra items to our order whenever we wanted. Without the app I would've had to keep an eye for a roaming waiter, call them out and then place an order. This takes away from the dining experience. I also don't like to wait for the server to clear plates, take the card, swipe it and get it back. The old fashioned ways will disappear for good.

by rapnie 2y ago

globular-toast 2y ago

As a fully capable person I can't stand being waited on. For me the peak ordering experience is I choose an item from some written menu with prices on it, ask for said item and pay exactly the price written on the menu. Then I either take item immediately or come to collect it later to take it to the table myself. When I want to leave I just get up and go without the stupid ask to know how much I need to pay then ask again to actually pay with expectation that I pay more than what was asked like it's my choice to pay but really it isn't.

gibolt 2y ago

Even worse when the weird ass website has links to multiple PDF documents to download. Then you find out all the items you looked at aren't available when the waiter stares blankly at you about your order. Turns out the dinner menu requires horizontal scrolling on the page to find.

rapnie 2y ago
For me peak worse is tables where you get dealt with a single iPad, even when visiting with six people. Which you then get to pass along. And then the 'tech experts' take care of ordering for those who don't get computers, like many elderly folks.
OvbiousError 2y ago
I prefer the pdfs. Most of the time you can zoom out enough to actually have a sizeable part of the menu visitble instead of 3 items at a time.

PUSH_AX 2y ago

I’m not sure if this could be considered “peak”. The ratio of waiting staff to customers is an obvious bottleneck. This inefficiency is simply accepted and not even really thought about, it’s just the way things are. But one thing I can say for this tech is it fixed it and the difference is noticeable.

digitalengineer 2y ago
inefficiency? It's part of the experience. I'm not in a restaurant or café to drink as fast as possible. I'm there to socialize as well. Waiting a bit is not a bottleneck, but a feature. (If I wanted speed, I'd take the drive-through).
- consp 2y ago
  Might be nice to have but its also expensive in a low margin business. Maybe waiters get paid like crap enough for it to not matter in the US but other parts of the world have labour laws to abide to making it the biggest expenditure (and thus the one to save on by cutting out staff and replacing it with an app)
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Low-margin businesses have you order by the counter and then the food is either delivered, or you pick it up yourself. The app isn't there to improve on this. The app is there to maaaybe cut a little bit of hassle with replacing paper menus, but mostly promises to improve the business analytics site and creates many marketing opportunities, including but not limited to screwing with (er, personalizing) recommendations, creating incentive structures, and better tracking thanks to tricking the user into giving the vendor their phone number and bunch of other data. And, whatever else on top it is, one thing the app is not is an improvement in convenience or experience to the user.
  - austinjp 2y ago
    This highlights the underpinning problem: wages are so low that people cannot afford to live. Restaurant margins are so low they cannot afford staff. Why contribute to that system?

com2kid 2y ago

Many people like being able to see what they are ordering. I've seen people order by pointing to pictures on Yelp instead of using the paper menu. Online menus with pictures of every dish are desired by plenty of customers.

grishka 2y ago
Some restaurants in my city use a middle-ground solution: there's a tablet on each table (running Android, of course) on which you can order and pay (but that part is full of dark patterns, unfortunately). But you also still get a paper menu. And paper menus with pictures are great.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> Online menus with pictures of every dish The invention of color photography, and large and small format color printing, make it unnecessary for the whole thing to be online. You can have pictures without all the issues of online - like small, low-resolution screens (relative to paper all screens are low-res screens), and being coerced to give away personal data.
- hot_gril 2y ago
  If it were this easy, they would've printed images on menus long ago. Which a few restaurants actually do, but usually only a few dishes. That said, I refuse to go to any restaurant that has a QR code menu,
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    It's not hard. It's just a bit more work - enough that it starts requiring a professional to be involved (graphics design, photography, coordinating print), whereas traditional menus can be half-assed[0] by anyone with passing familiarity with Word and access to the office printer. In contrast, the digital menus usually come as a solution, packaged with a promise of some juicy business analytics, so the restaurant only needs to sign the contract and send over some files - that's even less work than regular paper menus. So no surprise they're jumping to "high tech" - they're really outsourcing menus to a marketing company. -- [0] - I don't know how things are at the very highest tier of restaurants for the rich, but for those accessible to less rich, it seems the higher-end the restaurant is, the worse the menu is. Bad design, typos, etc. I suppose having an established reputation allows them to get careless about the minor details.

sebtron 2y ago

In this case, a weird-ass website that immediately demands your personal data.

_yoyko 2y ago

[flagged]

guappa 2y ago
Ah yes, everyone who has a different opinion than yourself must have dementia. Of course.

AStonesThrow 2y ago

A good server is an emissary from the kitchen, who knows the menu, and helps you find the best dishes. A great server establishes rapport with the regulars, anticipates their needs, makes them feel welcome and comfortable. Unfortunately "server" is not considered a respectable career but something you put up with before your film career takes off, or how you pay your college tuition for that juicy psychiatric nurse degree. So nobody can be paid enough, or retained long enough, to care about customers or the food. So 25 years from now, the best server will be a Roomba with a prominent QR on its back.

GJim 2y ago
> "server" is not considered a respectable career In the USA maybe. I can assure you, being a waiter is taken quite seriously by much of the civilised world. A good waiter is an important part of the dining experience.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Wytwwww 2y ago
  > In the USA maybe. Yet in the US, due to tipping, it can be (and generally is in most more affluent areas) considerably better paid and lucrative than pretty much anywhere else. Also I'm not sure what are you saying is generally true at all in most places (unless we're talking about a specific subset of restaurants).
- astura 2y ago
  Only in fine dining establishments, certainly not in casual/family restaurants, which are most restaurants.
  - austinjp 2y ago
    There are many casual/family restaurants in France, Italy, Germany, Spain and other European countries with high-quality waiting staff.

LightBug1 2y ago

OMG .... 1000 upvotes ... Even worse are the restaurants who require one table to be all ordered on one phone ... so one lemon ends up effectively being the waiter for the table and doing the ordering for everyone. Ask me how I know.

mytailorisrich 2y ago

I have been to restaurants where they bring you a tablet that you keep at your table. It has the menu and everything on it. You order what you want from it, food or drinks, at any time and a waiter brings it to you. I found the experience better than ordering from a waiter and better than using your own phone. I've told that chains in China have now replaced this last bit "a waiter brings it" by a little robot.

ktosobcy 2y ago

> waiter that patiently takes the order. Ah yes... superiority complex?

glandium 2y ago

In Japan, many chains are using tablets for their menu, and you can order through that. That's much better than having to pull whatever from a QR code.

eleveriven 2y ago
A nice middle ground yet that tablets can be costly for restaurants to implement and maintain
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  An even nicer and cheaper middle ground is a color-printed menu with photos, and/or a larger menu with photos over the counter. For customer, it's all the benefit of a digital menu with none of the downsides. Of course, all the downsides are the very reason restaurants are switching to digital menus in the first place, which is something people need to be reminded of. In cases of "I can't believe they replaced a perfectly good X with inferior but 'modern tech' Y", the surprise is usually the person not realizing the vendor is adversarial, and Y is giving some extra benefit to them at the expense of the customer.
  - nickthegreek 2y ago
    and of course, weekend, daily or hourly price changes. You cant surge on a printed menu.
xandrius 2y ago
Yep but many many more have handwritten menus in kanji on the walls, I can read many kanjis by now and I'm still pretty swamped by trying to interpret every shop's different handwriting. At least once you start decoding the drink section (much more consistent) then you can go back and try to interpret the rest.
atoav 2y ago
This might be the best of both worlds. The advantages of digital ordering for both customers and restaurants are: - staff can keep the menu up to date, basically realtime (they have to do it tho) - orders can directly land in the kitchen instead of through the waiting staff, which may or may not be coming - payment can also be done thst way Of course there are more advantages for the restaurants that may or may not go counter to the interests (or rights!) of their customers. E.g. the ability to easily build profiles and sell that data to the highest bidder. There are downsides too: - digital menus can fail more easily than paper menus - congrats you are a waiter, and now IT-support as well - customers without phones, no/sucky internet or devices that fail to display the menu are out of luck, so you have to provide offline alternatives/own devices that need their own maintenance - options that are not in the menu and fields that are not offered cannot be filled, e.g. can be a problem if you are allergic rtc. - unpersonal. Most people prefer not having to jump through hoops. Using a tablet that is provided by the restaurant can aleviate many (but not all) of these issues.

hyperbolablabla 2y ago

Agreed. I've been to restaurants that only had a QR code but were also a Faraday cage so I couldn't access it. Was absolutely ridiculous.

throwaway4233 2y ago

One of the restuarant chains mentioned in the author's post (Social), is an extremely crowded pub during the night and for the rest of the time, a place where freelancers or remote workers come in to work and socialize. At least that was the case in Bengaluru,India before Covid. I would say that from the restuarant's point of view, having the order-from-app experience works out since the freelancers can order via their laptops whenever they want, without having to flag down a waiter. And during rush hours, tables could order what they want without having to spot and call a waiter among a very drunk dancing crowd.

frereubu 2y ago

My main beef with these menus is that I can't see the entire menu on my phone screen, and end up scrolling up and down multiple times before I can decide what I want to order. With a paper menu my eyes can flick up and down much faster. It's like trying to edit spreadsheets on a phone - technically possible but a real pain in the arse.

eleveriven 2y ago
Scrolling back and forth on a small screen is tedious
coisnepe 2y ago
Reminds me of how some people mocked me for having O'Reilly and such massive reference books when I started learning Python and Ruby. "But everything's online!" they claimed. Sure, but nothing's faster than browsing the index for what you're looking for and then skimming the section you're interested in, as opposed to going back and forth StackOverflow threads and random blogs. Currently renovating my house and I again bought 400+ pages reference books of plumbing and electricity, largely sparring me the need to endure endless YouTube videos littered with skits, sponsorships etc. Just straight to the point, factual information.
- Am4TIfIsER0ppos 2y ago
  Online documentation is good if you already know what you're looking for. It is shit if you want to discover what is available. I am specifically thinking of the python docs and the time I, as a not-python programmer, wanted to see the various "grouping" types (lists, arrays, sets, dicts, tuples, whatever).
  - paledot 2y ago
    The Python core docs are uniquely terrible, though.
mihaaly 2y ago
At least the screen is only touced by you. My peril are the touch screen ordering places (practically all fast food places nowadays) where based on their outlook hygienically challanged persons swipe their fingers up and down for long before you have a chance following them. There is an icecream place opened nearby I had no chance trying because they only have touchscreen order. Guys at the till only serve icecream and all orders must go through the touch screen. They put the icecream into a cone - if you dared to ordered so - and put into the fingers of the customer who just swiped the same finger over a screen swiped by dozens of unknow people before. Oi!

eleveriven 2y ago

I'm with you on that. There's something special about a personal interaction with a waiter and a paper menu

IshKebab 2y ago
People will find a way to be nostalgic about anything I guess. "There's something special about having a wire attached to your phone." "There's something special about greeting a lift operator." "There's something special about hand-washing clothes."
- oefrha 2y ago
  There’s indeed something special about a waiter pretending to be my best friend — the discomfort is quite special.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    Yeah fortunately that's pretty unique to the US. I will never forget when I asked a waiter in Chicago where the loo was and he led me to it. Super weird.

jonathantf2 2y ago

Some apps are brilliant though - Wetherspoon pubs in the UK (despite not at all being the height of dining) have an app that works really well, I don't think I've ordered at a person there for at least 5 years.

IshKebab 2y ago

Ah yes the peak experience is having to wait 10 minutes and catch an extremely busy person's attention just so you can order. Most of these ordering systems (at least the ones that have survived COVID) are pretty good websites now. I don't remember ever having to use a custom app. It's a far superior experience. (Oh yeah and I guess you may be American and have a very different eating experience to the rest of the world where waiters don't live off the arbitrary generosity of customers.)

bjarneh 2y ago

> custom app. That is always the worst experience. The most painful apps always require you to spend another 7 minutes after installation; typing in and verifying your credit card information... That has to be the most convoluted paying experience. I was almost shocked when I rented a Hertz car (via IKEA), that everything was done through a website. The website asked for permission to use the phone camera to take pictures of the car etc. and off we went. Such a good experience compared to fiddling with a new app..

falconertc 2y ago

You're right, you are old-fashioned. I love order by phone. Any amount of time I'm sitting at a table trying to get a waiter to notice me and come by just feels like agony. Let me tell you exactly what I want, exactly when I want it.

megablast 2y ago

Peak is to me where we can sit and order and pay, and do not get interrupted so we can actually talk.

elric 2y ago

Similarly old fashioned here. If there's no menu and/or no table (or bar) staff to take an order, I simply walk out.

mihaaly 2y ago

Same here. I am even reluctant scanning any QR code and taking me to random web pages connecting my phone - and since phone is an extremely personal device, pratically an ID, so myself - to that place and time. I am not a fan of being traced, surveillanced more than avoidable, especially not fan of triggering it myslef. Giving away additional dat on myself on top of that. No thank you. And this is before considering the system exploiting the vulnerabilities of my device, insted of the other way around shown in the writing. I left a place because of their QR code primary order system. Waiters came around taking order the old fasioned way, but only in the gaps of serving the QR orders. No thank you.

noufalibrahim 2y ago

Completely agree. And it also allows opportunities for customization. Custom paper, cutting, presentation etc. Whereas on the phone, it's usually just a PDF or some responsive website. A real waiter also allows for a human connection to be created. Experienced waiters (rather than part timers) can really help you make an order, give you recommendations etc. which makes the experience of dining out much nicer.

tjbiddle 2y ago

Completely agree with you. If a restaurant has a QR-code menu, I ask for a physical one. If they don't have a physical one, I walk out. I've done that many, many, many times.

matheusmoreira 2y ago

Completely agree. I'll tolerate PDF menus if it's a really good restaurant, chances are I already know what I want anyway. If they ask me to install apps on my phone I walk out.

swah 2y ago

And a little button to call the waiter... I hate trying to make eye contact with a waiter in a big and busy place.

infecto 2y ago

Unfortunately the implementation that most Western countries took is pretty terrible. One of the highlights for me in China is the lack of menus in restaurants, I can still ask the staff questions if there are any but its nice being able to order add-ons throughout the meal without having to wave someone down.

giarc 2y ago

The best implementation of QR code menu I've seen was as followed. There was a paper menu but could also order from QR. It was a well designed page to choose from, but the wait staff was still there and took order. We had the option to order from QR if we wanted. When they entered our order, the page (linked to our table through custom QR code) updated with our order. We could add items at any point or we could "call our wait staff" who would then come to our table. At any point we could just pay our bill and walk away. It was the same feeling of using an uber for the first time and just walking out of the car and not worrying about paying the driver.

gloosx 2y ago

This is cheap restaurant experience, in good ones you always get the good old paper

dumpHero2 2y ago

Will call you old fashioned for that. I recently went to a restaurant with a large group of friends and they used toast tab for online ordering. The experience was much better than ordering in person. Each family was able to order and pay for themselves. We could add extra items to our order whenever we wanted. Without the app I would've had to keep an eye for a roaming waiter, call them out and then place an order. This takes away from the dining experience. I also don't like to wait for the server to clear plates, take the card, swipe it and get it back. The old fashioned ways will disappear for good.