Sometimes I wonder how many dumbass small businesses Google Maps has kept afloat by the mere fact that they surface user photos of the menus on their business listings.
Pizza place nearby in college had a wrong number listed on their website. Fortunately the site’s header was a photo of the restaurant which included a neon sign of the correct phone number.
Delivery services like Doordash, GrubHub, etc. hijack restaurants’ google listings, inserting their own number that forwarded to the restaurant’s actual number.
Whenever a customer called into the delivery service number, the restaurant would get charged as if they had placed the order through the service.
Also, they hijack the google listing and direct orders to their own ghost kitchens.
This was 2010 on their actual personally hosted website.
It’s a double edged sword though because hours of operation are pretty unreliable if you don’t go to the business’ own website. I’ve been burned a bunch of times discovering that hours have changed since the last time that site was updated. Sometimes you can even see multiple different closing times for the same business (from like google, yelp, yellow pages, AI search response) and every single one is wrong.
I miss the days when the future looked promising.
I’ve been burned by that, too. My wife and I went to visit an historic house, and they clarified that they are actually only open in the summer - they only happened to be there because someone was looking at using it for a wedding. Google gave me the correct hours but didn’t take the season into account.
Would be better if the average human knew how to fucking take photos.
I would love if most restaurants had pdfs.
Lately it seems almost every restaurant’s “menu” button takes you to an online ordering site where you have to pretend like you’re ordering to view the menu.
That is very much not what I asked for when I clicked “menu”. I clicked menu because I want to see a god damn menu.
My favourite restaurant has an online store, and the menu is also just their online store. And it’s a mess to navigate. They hardly have any customers and i feel like i keep them afloat by dragging new people in there whenever i go. Everyone of them said: man, the food is great, but the ordering…
It could be worse. A “more information” button that automatically starts a voice/video call to the restaurant.
Thanks, Satan.
How to traumatise an introvert. 😄
Lol imagine the poor staff at the kebab shop when I video-call in after my third whiskey sour to order my sloppy kapsalon.
Sorry, best I can do is pictures of the decor and attractive people with drinks smiling and laughing, take it or leave it
And don’t expect a phone number or an address. That’s hidden in tiny text as a png link at the bottom. Why would anyone need to know the address of the restaurant? Look at our sliding animations!
What, you want to find the hours of operation too? What are you, some kind of commie?
Here’s an outdated menu with items we no longer make and prices that were already inaccurate in 2019, with an update in 2020 that they can do alcohol for pickup orders (but no mention that they stopped in 2021).
Stock photos of people with drinks, smiling and laughing.
FTFY
AS LONG AS IT CONTAINS THE PRICES HOW HARD IS IT TO PUT PRICES IN YOUR MENU DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND NO PRICES = WON’T VISIT
If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
If I have to ask I lose interest, especially if it is affordable.
PSA: Android Firefox can show PDFs without throwing it into your Downloads folder.
Interesting, I was a bit confused about the problem here, considering I’ve used Firefox for years.
It’s the only reason I started to use Firefox on Android, then stayed for the noscript
I really don’t mind a pdf menu
What’s wrong with a pdf menu
They’re usually the same PDF that’s designed for a giant paper menu, so I feel like I’m reading a huge document through a peephole.
A “responsive” website that reshapes the document to fit your screen size is usually a better experience. But I’ve certainly seen it done poorly and wished they hadn’t tried to be clever.
they’re a restaurant, not a Web developer, the important thing is if the food is good lol
I wish dynamic support for user preferences was more of a thing. I like really dense displays of information with small text. Basically, the more a UI resembles a spreadsheet the better. Mobile interfaces almost universally have far too much white space for my taste, so I’m one of those people that’s pretty much always going to want the PDF even on a phone screen. I recognize why that would suck for a lot of people though.
Also, PDFs exported for printing are full-quality without lossy compression. I once downloaded a 150 MB menu because the graphic designer exported the PDF with images without any compression or resizing whatsoever.
Which is funny because the quality you want for print is usually like ~75dpi whereas web viewing you want more like ~300dpi so if anything the print version of the menu should be smaller
Online menus: dumb
Print PDF accessible online: great!
On mobile? A lot.
just pinch to zoom in… what’s the problem ?
Usability, see only part of the text, must scroll a lot.
the fact that they embedded it inline so it downloads instead of rendering on the page.
it’s because most of these sites are hosted from vendors that charge per “change” and small businesses will point their dynamic stuff to google drive which doesn’t always allow stuff to be embedded and rendered within HTML. google does this to combat abuse like this where companies will host their entire website from a Google drive for “free”.
My assumption would’ve been they do PDFs, because they have the same menu printed out in their restaurant. They’re gonna need an A4/letter size format either way, so PDF is the simplest way of putting that same format onto their webpage.
you’re correct.
also, PDFs aren’t limited to A4. I have PDFs that span thousands of A4 pages that is meant for a large format plotter printer.
Still better than blurry pictures of outdated menu cards, usually only one or two pages of them.
Plot twist: Low resolution, highly compressed raster image in PDF
Yep. Bad photographs of the menu turned into a PDF…
Better than menu.exe
I have walked out of two restaurants that had no menus, but QR codes that did this exact thing. Fuck the QR code, but damn, at least make it work
So far the only restaurant I’ve been to that does this was a small one in the center of Naples Italy (they also had absolutely fantastic food!) and it worked out because I could translate the webpage to english (it also was kinda inconvenient because most menu items did not have pictures nor descriptions, so when I ordered some chicken it came breaded which I didn’t expect and wasn’t hoping for, but was still fantastic)
WHY us this a thing? Are people really to lazy to copypaste the text of the PDF they use to print their menus into their website?
Nothing ruins the mood faster than a PDF menu on mobile 😭 just let me scroll like a normal person.
I really wish they would pass a law that you have not sent a statement unless you physically deliver one or deliver one as a pdf.
I really wish they would pass a law that you have not sent a statement unless you physically deliver one
or deliver one as a pdf.I have told every company attempting to collect debt from me to send me a physical bill.
it took a hospital six months to finally send me a fucking paper bill.
their office literally printed out the invoice on an inkjet and mailed it to me with a handwritten addressed envelope.
guess what? I sent a check that day because I didn’t have to sign in anywhere or download some fucking app.
fuck em. they want to inconvenience me? I’m going to make it as legally difficult to collect debt from me out of spite. there’s no court that wouldn’t be convinced that it’s safer to pay physical invoices over digital.
oh I do the same but the thing is in general I want an emailed pdf. Don’t give me the insecure bs line as the statements don’t need to have account numbers and such on them. Heck my bank texts me stuff with parts of my account numbers (which is kina annoying given I specifically set a nickname on the accounts. use the nickname I recognize them better and they are less sensitive). so my bank thinks its to dangerous to email me a pdf but will text me infor with parts of my account number on it. ugh.
I get why they have PDFs of their menu, but just transcribe that to a page on the site. It’s really not hard. My phone downloads folder is full of these.
Yeah I hate that. But I understand the non-techies which already struggle at generating a PDF file. I see the error with the mobile devices. There is no reason not to just open the PDF straight away.
