@Irelephant a few years ago I went to São Paulo and brough two phones, my main phone and a burner one
I went out with my friends with the burner one and we ended up in a bar that did not had any physical menu and the QR code only lead to Instagram. while I do use Instagram, I did not had it installed on the burner and they added the menu in the fixed stories, so it required logging in to look them (which I could not do since I had 2FA enabled)
Fuck I despise this menu bullshit. Give me a fucking menu.
They had to put a fucking law in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo mandating that restaurants had to have physical menus with the printed prices.
Give me a menu or I’ll tell you what I want and you can figure out how to put it in.
Either that or I walk.
Say “for $3.00” after your order, too. Fuck’em.
The only setting in which it’s actually helpful is when you go to an establishment that prioritizes drinks and the food is an afterthought (but you can still walk up to the bar and never use the QR code if you wanted).
They are, unfortunately, basically required in countries with high inflation where prices change so often that printed menus become unmanageable.
Or that want to charge people with expensive phones more than others.
One of the nice things about having a foldable is that restaurant menus work wonderfully on them. Don’t have to worry about tiny text nor horizontal scrolling BS at all.
I like when there’s a qr code that allows you to order and pay without needing to wait for a waiter. A qr code where it just links to a pdf of a menu that they didn’t want to print sucks.
PDF is at least kind of permanent. Most restaurants that have qr code set up usually have “surge pricing” that allows them to change their prices on a whim.
Not much of a challange to have a webserver point to another pdf when some condition is fulfilled.
You can just generate a PDF on demand. There isn’t much permanent about them at all.
Get mad at the problem and not the symptoms. I’ve been to dozens of restaurants with qr code menus and never seen one with surge pricing. Just be mad about surge pricing.
If it’s printed on the inside of the menu so you can order quickly when it’s busy and help take some of the pressure off the servers and maybe get your food faster? That’s cool.
When it’s just a virtual menu so they can surge price in real time? Fuck those places.
I get someone made a hilarious mistake.
But why would you not even test the code before gluing them to all the tables?
Or before sending the code to be etched?
Might have been a temporary link (e.g., shortened URL) that passed tests initially but stopped working later on.
The browser says “localhost”, so it would have had to stop working by suddenly redirecting to localhost…
I created a QR generator website and you have no idea. I get emails from people saying they’ve printed the codes before discovering it goes to the wrong place (sometimes even to my own site!) and if I can fix it. No… check your codes before they go to print!
The funniest one I had caused me to get a huge spike of traffic on Christmas. It was so weird and left me clueless for weeks, until I got an email from somebody wishing to cancel a subscription.
I don’t sell subscriptions or anything at all!
Turns out somebody printed a QR code into a smartwatch instruction booklet that went straight to my site… The ad revenue was insane tho!
I think since its not so much btoken as pointing to a local file, I think they may have tested it on the one device they made it, so it worked…on that device.
They should have 100% tested it on other devices
Guess I’m showing my age then. Because the intended end use device is obviously a phone, I assume they used their phone to generate the qr, send it out to etch, and test the result. I can’t use my phone for shit like that. To me that is much more a real screen type of job (generating the qr code, generating the gcode in lightburn, etc) done on a computer, instead of a tablet/phone
I once got a group message from my child’s teacher, screaming in excitement that “the event at school is live!”
The link points to 192.168.x.x.