Hit an innovative new low, last night, at a mid-to-high-end New York City restaurant (Hav & Mar).
When it came time to pay the bill, we were presented with a plastic tablet emblazoned with a QR code and the restaurant’s logo. Scanning the QR code with a phone led to a web site for reviewing and paying the bill. Making the payment with a credit card went smoothly and predictably enough, and led to a “rate your experience” widget with a row of five stars to tap on.
It gets much worse, but right off the bat, I would say this is a problem. I could insert an essay here as to why, but the sort of it is that as soon as you outsource this source of question to an automatic form, you have significantly shifted the nature of the customer relationship and colored the experience up to that point.
Dutifully—but with new misgivings—tapping five stars immediately produced… a new fucking survey form with many questions scrolling right off the bottom of the screen of the phone. A (hopefully) enjoyable social meal has now literally concluded with bureaucratic paperwork. This is not nothing. Sure, as POS systems (point-of-sale, also piece of shit) try to collect customer feedback at every retail opportunity on the planet, we learn to compartmentalize it, but that only works to a point. Moreover, a good restaurant is different from a hardware store or even a coffee kiosk: all that work to design and cultivate a rewarding customer experience is risked or even squandered for this?
Wait, it gets worse.
After hunting for, and eventually finding, a way to bypass this unwelcome new intrusion, the transaction is concluded. And then we realize that we have just been charged a $5 service fee for paying our bill by the vendor that is handling this payment system on behalf of the restaurant.
Everything about this is not just unnecessary, stupid, and insulting, but suicidal. There will be blowback, but I wanted to document this experience here, because (at least to me) it represents a new frontier that is upon us. Parasites have been draining the hospitality from the industry for years, and it’s obvious that the restaurants are worse off. We’re all losing. Double down!
edit: the parasite at the heart of this fiasco is https://sundayapp.io
