Maybe that shows a lack of critical thinking in the general population? I.e.: people must be using FB/IG because it’s the only thing they know, and never questioned themselves if there are other avenues?
All restaurants have an "analog plan B", it's called walking in and asking for a menu. These are tiny businesses run by people who love food, not tech. It really is asking too much to expect them to work at and understand the ideas behind digital freedom, at least if you want them to serve you good food.
Notably Google Maps curates a photo set of the physical menu of basically every restaurant in the urban USA, if not everywhere. I find a lot of people don't actually know this. I never bother looking at restaurant sites anymore except for places where I know they're likely to have changed the menu (and even then it's a crapshoot, per your original point).
At least every second month I walk out of a new restaurant I’ve discovered because they don’t even care to have it.
Employees treat you like it’s your fault that you can’t see the prices behind a Meta auth wall. They won’t even offer to read it out to you or show in a device of their own.
Nowadays, if I see a triangle-shaped cardboard with a QR code on top of each table, I’m 95% sure I will walk out of there hungry. And angry.
Even if they have QR codes, they have some paper menus or tablets.
And it's not even for people without devices or logins -- it's because phone batteries run out and they run out all the time. Restaurants don't generally make a lot of profit, and they need every customer they can get.
Do you bother to ask? Or do you just assume?
I get why that is useful for them (looks cool, no having to reprint the physical hours stickers, less ugly than a paper version I guess) but the assumption that it is easier for me to pull out my phone and scan the code versus just... trying the door... whew.
Reminds me of working in restaurants ages ago. Credit card swiper down? Cool, pull out the "knuckle buster" for your "analog Plan B" -- all's well, though the manager's probably pissed at staying late to manually enter the transactions. We probably could not even do that anymore because many cards have gone to non-imprintable numbers.
That's idiotic. Really, reaaaally idiotic. Like, "talk to the manager and tell them they are doing a very stupid thing" levels of idiotic. </Rant>
This "we're too modern and digital to get out heads out of our asses" attitude towards adopting "cool technology" with complete disregard for an analog Plan B gets to my nerves.
Here, since Covid, lots of places stopped offering physical menus, instead they put a QR code to some webpage or gigantic PDF file that contains the menu (and can be updated every day to push prices up if needed, heh).
I hate that services assume you must have a hundreds-dollar device on your pocket at all times to even be able to access the basic service they provide. I just power off my phone and tell them "look I ran out of battery, what should we do?". They usually do have a physical menu, thankfully.
But other things aren't so nice. My employer offers a restaurant card, and because now we live in a "digital era", they don't issue physical cards any more, only digital ones to be used with Google Wallet on Android. Turns out I'd like to install GrapheneOS on my Pixel, and you got it: Wallet doesn't work on GrapheneOS for payments! I'd want my physical restaurant card, please.