QR codes were the tech darlings of the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, emerging from semi-obscurity to offer restaurants a safe way to display their menus.
Now, the quirky tabletop codes appear to have overstayed their welcome with at least a portion of consumers who miss old-fashioned menus.
QR codes for menus stink. Just give me a menu.
— Jay Yarow (@jyarow) October 12, 2021
Some restaurants are returning to physical bills of fare, while others say the benefits QR codes offer are too good to let go of.
And those benefits are many. QR-code-based menus allow restaurants to more easily update menu items and prices—two variables that have been especially volatile amid recent inflation and supply chain problems. They also eliminate the cost of having to print menus. And they free staff from having to sanitize physical menus after each use as a safety measure.
Some restaurants also use the codes to allow guests to order and pay on their smartphones, eliminating the need for a traditional server altogether. That is helpful for the many restaurants that are understaffed, and guests can order and pay at their leisure.
But being able to order and pay on an app at the table is the best!
— Peter Gorenstein (@PeterGorenstein) October 12, 2021
And yet, some customers aren’t having it.
In a recent piece for New York Magazine’s Grub Street blog, writer Megan Paetzhold lamented the creep of QR codes into even more upscale establishments.
“At the kinds of restaurants with candles and wine lists and servers who earnestly ask, ‘Is this your first time dining with us?’, the practical benefits of QR menus need to be weighed against the aesthetic and experiential drawbacks,” she wrote.
Others say they don’t want to have their phone out during a meal, regardless of where they’re dining—and then there are customers who don’t have a smartphone at all.
It also excludes those who don’t have phone to read QR code’s.
— Dharma (@dharma_junkie) October 12, 2021
I purposefully don’t bring my phone to the table when I go out to eat.
Still others simply prefer the feel of the physical object.
At Coolgreens, an 11-unit salad chain, “We thought for sure [QR codes] were going to be here forever,” said COO Todd Madlener during last month’s FSTEC conference. But as soon as guests started returning to his restaurants, the first thing they wanted, he said, was the real thing. “Give me the tactile sensation of holding a menu,” he said.
Casual-dining chain BJ’s Restaurants heard the same from guests, and has decided to ditch QR codes and return to physical menus.
“We are all really excited in this business to get to HTML menus because everybody is thinking we're going to eliminate printing costs and so forth,” said CEO Greg Levin on an earnings call with analysts last week. “But we've seen our guests like a physical menu. … There’s a sense of normalcy.”
Not only do BJ’s guests like those menus, but they actually order more from them, too. Levin revealed that physical menus equate to a bump of about 70 cents per average check.
Over the summer, Restaurant Business sister company Technomic asked consumers what pandemic-era restaurant practices they’d like to see stick around. QR code menus were one of the less popular choices, with 14% of the 1,000 people surveyed expressing hope that they would stay. Meanwhile, 21% said they wanted restaurants to bring back paper menus.
Respondents could select multiple options, which suggests that a big chunk of them are at the very least indifferent to the codes.
Consumers aged 18-24 showed the most interest in them: 26% of that group said they wanted restaurants to keep offering them.
I actually like it…but I was a bit of a germaphobe even before the pandemic, so not feeling like I need to disinfect my hands after looking at the menu is a nice thing in my eyes.
— Marie (@mariepsyphd) October 13, 2021
And restaurants that are sticking to QR codes say their advantages outweigh some customers’ distaste.
At P.F. Chang’s, QR codes have simplified both the ordering and payment process, said CEO Damola Adamolekun. Physical drink menus have a code that guests can scan to view the food menu, and QR codes also appear on receipts, which guests can use to pay the bill if they want.
“I don't think they’re going away,” said Adamolekun. But he added that the chain will always provide a physical menu if the guest prefers that.
“I don’t think you can get away with forcing people who don’t want to do it to do it,” he said.
And technology companies say QR codes are still in the early days of what they can do.
“I think QR codes are here to stay,” said Aman Narang, co-founder and COO of Toast, which started in 2012 with a simple QR code payment product. It now offers QR codes to enable menus as well as ordering and payment.
“The digital interaction will continue to grow, because as people learn the experience across environments where it’s delightful, you learn that behavior and get familiar,” Narang said.
Olo is also rolling out a QR code-enabled ordering product.
“I think we’re not even in the first inning of this yet,” said Olo Chief Customer Officer Marty Hahnfeld. QR code-based ordering and payment have the potential to ease diner pain points, he said, like having to flag down a server to order another drink or pay the bill. But he acknowledged that the technology itself may have some catching up to do.
“I don’t doubt that all of those experiences could be better than they are today,” he said.
Ultimately, the industry will probably settle into a mix of physical and digital menus depending on what works best for individual operations, said Steven Simoni, CEO of Bbot, which offers QR code ordering and payment.
“Based on service style, menu complexity, etc., it is inevitable that some restaurants will return to paper menus,” he said in a tweet. “Other restaurants have added ordering and payment onto QR codes and now run a different service model.
“The future looks like more variety and more choice.”