The pandemic inspired a lot of institutions to adopt cost-saving processes that make life worse for their customers while reducing their payroll.
Hotels cut back on housekeeping as a supposed “safety measure” in 2020 and 2021, and many of them fell so in love with the cost savings that they have tried to come up with new excuses for this practice. This doesn’t really bug me (except for the dishonesty) because I don’t place that much value on hotel room housekeeping.
SHADOW OF DOUBT: FBI 'KEENLY FOCUSED' ON 'ELEVATED' RISK OF OUTSIDE INFLUENCE IN 2024 ELECTION
But here’s what does bug me and should bug you: the lack of physical menus at restaurants.
Early in the pandemic, everyone became afraid of touching surfaces that other people had touched. Very soon, it became clear that COVID wasn’t spread through surfaces like that, and so this fear was grounded in superstition rather than science. Slightly less silly was the desire to limit waiter-customer conversations.
Combining these two motivations, restaurants shifted away from physical menus and into directing customers to online menus, often offering a QR code on the table.
Last night, I took my children and my nephew out to a local casual restaurant/bar in Falls Church, and soon, I saw the QR codes on the table and the cards directing me to get on the Wi-Fi and order that way.
Ordering on an app is an incredibly family-unfriendly process. We had two smartphones at the table, and scrolling through a long menu on a phone takes a long time. It was like having one very poorly laid-out menu to pass around. Passing my phone around to all my kids so that each had to make his or her decision one at a time took forever.
Also, the whole low-labor-high-tech setup was simply less welcoming. There was nobody we could ask questions. There was no way in the app for my nephew to ask for his burger without onions, and there was no waitress to whom we could make that request. There was self-serve water in the bar area, but we didn’t know that until my daughter finally flagged down the waitress.
This will, of course, be a trend — tech replacing human labor. It will become more necessary as the working-age population shrinks, thanks to the baby bust that started more than 15 years ago.
But as eating out becomes more of a self-service operation, it becomes basically a food-delivery service to a table. This has some value, but a lot less than an actual restaurant does.