Name: QR-code menus.
Age: Around for decades, mainstream for three years.
Appearance: A big square full of smaller squares that your cameraphone consistently fails to recognise.
Oh, you’re giving me Covid nostalgia. I know, right? Nothing says Covid-era dining like a QR-code menu, other than giant Perspex partitions and the unremitting fear of infecting yourself by touching the cutlery.
Simpler times. No. Stop that. Covid was awful. We need to firmly reject all the old Covid tropes, including QR-code menus.
But I like QR-code menus. No, you don’t. What you like is getting to order and pay for your food without having to endure human interaction.
Same thing. No, it isn’t. Anyway, you’re in a rapidly diminishing minority, because it has been reported that the QR-code menu is on the way out.
No! I’m afraid so. A report in the New York Times says that scans of restaurant QR codes have fallen by 27% in a year. Plus, fewer restaurants are creating new QR-code menus and about 75% of all restaurant QR-code menus were scanned fewer than 90 times in the past 12 months.
But why? Maybe people want to experience the tactile comfort of a paper menu when they go out. Maybe they want to talk through their options with a flesh-and-blood waiter. Maybe they want something more glamorous than repeatedly trying to aim their smeary phone at a peeling, ketchup-stained sticker on the corner of their table.
But QR codes were the future. They were. But they were a future designed by a Japanese components manufacturer for the purpose of tracking automotive parts. We can probably go back to holding menus in our hands.
This is a tragedy. It isn’t. Did you ever pop out to eat without your phone and find yourself being treated like a second-class citizen? Did you ever experience the chest-thumping terror of a dinner out with 3% of your battery left? Did you ever watch as a moment of potential romance evaporated because you had to get your phones out to try to navigate an impossible ordering system?
No. Well, it sucked. Good riddance, QR codes, you gussied-up barcodes. You were slightly too impractical to incorporate into our daily lives.
Wow. Maybe we were wrong back in 2020. Maybe Covid didn’t change the world after all. I know. We’ve learned nothing. Hooray for humans!
Do say: “Can I see a menu? A real one?”
Don’t say: “What am I supposed to use my phone for now?”