Using QR Codes to Order at Restaurants is Convenient….Or is it?
Here is the new version of having food at a Chinese restaurant. First, you will be served water. This has not changed. But then it’s not the waiters taking your order, instead they simply say “please scan the QR code on the table and order yourself”. And then, the waiter is gone.
While this is kind of nice… you don’t have to deal with surly wait staff and you can take your time ordering, there are some downsides.
Sometimes, the restaurant has poor signal so you have to call the waiter again to ask him/her the Wifi password. After trying one to two times, you still can’t correctly type the long and complicated password so you hand your cellphone to the waiter and let him/her type the password for you.
And if you happen to get a WeChat message during the ordering process and accidentally hit the notification and go back to the WeChat home page, on most occasions, you’ll have to redo the order all over again.
What does this sound like to you? It kind of seems just like the same process you would go through when you order takeout at home or at the office, except the fact that you are sitting in the restaurant and you can save a few RMB on delivery fee by eating there.
After you’ve ordered, you click “place the order”, and you will be guided to a page where it asks you to open the access to your WeChat account or ask you to register as a member of the store, or to follow the Official Account in order for the order to be fully placed.
Several days after, when you think someone has texted you on WeChat, you find out it’s the new article published by the restaurant’s Official Account that you were forced to follow when ordering food.
The use of QR codes to order was already pretty common in restaurants around China prior to Covid, but now it seems like it’s everywhere.
At first, diners welcomed the idea of being able to place the order themselves – especially during the height of Covid, it could decrease contact with other people, thereby decreasing the spread of the virus. But as the threat of Covid declined, many people started thinking, why am I still paying the service fee that is added into the price of the dishes, when I’m really not getting much service and I’m being forced to give away my personal data or follow this account?
The Good Side
Despite these annoyances, it is definitely beneficial for restaurants and streamlines the ordering process. It also means that diners can’t get angry at the wait staff for forgetting a dish or ordering the wrong thing – now they can only blame themselves.
In China, we love paying for lunch or dinner for friends, so this method also avoids “arguing” with your friends over who will pay the order today, you can do it on phones!
Our Take
For me, I prefer to order on my own with QR codes. Waiters don’t have to stand there waiting for me while I decide what to get. And I often think I want one dish and then see something else and change my mind, so it’s kind of annoying to have them take my order and then have to keep asking them to change it.
The thing I don’t like though is that, most of the time, I have to follow the restaurant’s Official Account to place the order, and I then start receiving the notifications. I already have so many messages on WeChat, I don’t need messages coming in from every restaurant I go to.
This is something brands should keep in mind, no matter if they are restaurant brands, or any other type of brand in China. While you want to leverage QR codes to drive traffic to your WeChat mini programs and Official Account, ideally don’t make it mandatory for the user to follow your account in order to do something, because then they might start to associate annoying, unwanted notifications with your brand, and they will likely unfollow it very quickly.
Read more: 扫码点餐，是怎么让我们失去选择权的？
