Either it will negatively affect the bottom line and stop, or diners will get used to it and it'll continue.
Or it'll actually boost profits from people having the menu on their phone for dine-out ordering, allow the restaurant to update pricing more easily matching their costs, and of course the savings from not having to print physical menus.
I just play dumb and ask for a physical menu, claiming that my phone broke this morning. Adapt the experiment for the number of people. With 2, the other one might say "and I'm out of battery". 3 could be "mine I forgot at home". And 4+ people are already too many to reasonably expect customers to share a single phone between them all.
It's all just a social experiment which hopefully ends up trickling up and making owners aware how stupid it is to expect everyone to bring a phone in their pockets in order to being able to order food.
Some times it's not even a lie: as part of mentally cleaning up from an intense addiction to social media, I've forced myself into offline mode and purposely leave the phone at home from time to time.
One time my phone was getting terrible reception in the restaurant, and couldn't download the way-too-big menu file. I ask the server for a paper menu, and apparently they'd went all-in on paper-free, so no menu for me. Instead, the server had to present their iPad to me so I could see all the software buttons for the items I could choose from as they scrolled through. Ridiculous. The next time I went they had paper menus.
It's for fun. I just want to have them making the effort to realize that they shouldn't drop physical menus altogether.
Also some times I didn't feel like doing the theatrics, and upon asking for a menu, they'd say "it's there in the QR code, please scan it" and leave me to it, as if they had done a good job. Not on my watch!
As a counterpoint, most people use their phones daily while sitting on the toilet and very rarely sanitize it. You may be diligent in keeping it sanitary but the past 50 people who kept their phones on the table while reading the menu probably didn’t (and the wet rag the bus person wipes the table down with probably doesn’t do much either).
I do not believe that most people use their phones on the toilet at all, much less daily. It would be incredibly stupid to risk dropping your phone in the toilet just so you have something to look at for the <1 min it takes to do your business.
I just dealt with this the other day. One of my favorite restaurants kept the menu "books" but when you opened it up it just had a QR code. Tease... So I went to the counter and asked for a paper menu, which they provided. While my friends are struggling to figure out the online ordering system, I ordered directly through the waiter. All seems to be well and I'm feeling smug. Then my friend comments that they can't figure out why there is another item on their order, an item that just happens to coincide with what I ordered. facepalm So I ask the server to put it on a separate tab, to which they responded "I already did." Ok... So we'll have to figure this out later. After I eat, I walk up to the counter since I don't expect to receive a paper bill from the server as everything seems to be online now. I ask to pay for my meal, and they say they don't have any such item open on the tab. facepalm I walk back to table, and later my friend and I go back to the counter so they can show the staff that my item is on their tab. We can't figure it out with the staff, so we decide I'll just pay my friend for my portion. Except my friend's tab is already closed apparently and my item wasn't on it? Gah... Third time's the charm, I ask the server for my check, which they bring out. It has a QR code to pay online, no chance I'm messing with that. I walk to the counter, present the bill, and the server is able to ring up my tab. Way too much hassle associated with just ordering and paying for food. I suppose next time I know all the dance moves required for things to go smoothly, but I came to eat, not dance. Grrr....
So? 25% doesn't mean it can't happen. I wouldn't cross the road if there was a 25% of being hit by a car.
The real way to measure predictive accuracy is to find _all_ the times they gave something a 25% chance of happening. If the predictions are accurate then roughly 25% of those things should have happened.
If I am asked to predict whether it will rain every day for a year, and every day I blindly predict 30% because on average it rains 30% of days in this location, am I correct? Maybe, but I’m not a very useful forecaster.
What you should optimise instead is something like log loss between the given probability and the true outcome (0 or 1). That way you’re rewarded not only for being right, but for being confident and right.
Why do you say it's not working out in Portugal or Amsterdam? I frequently hear those two places cited as an example of where drug liberalisation has been a big success. Is that not true? I ask from ignorance.
The programme in Portugal requires people to check in with the authorities, seek treatment and move off the street corner. It by most accounts worked ok for a while, but downtown Lisbon started to look pretty bad recently, and I think they’ve been backpedaling a bit.
In Amsterdam, the drug tourism made the city hard to live in, and the authorities have largely cleaned it up now. Weed is a special case, but using anything else on the street will warrant a check-in from the cops.
I live in Lisbon and I don't see how "downtown Lisbon started to look pretty badly recently". Street drug users, seemingly mostly/wholly homeless, seem to be concentrated in an area I wouldn't call downtown. I don't really know what they do to keep it that way though. Also Porto seems to be an entirely different story from what I've seen there.
In any case, Portugal's strategy was supposed to be diverting funds from the narcotics police to rehabilitation efforts. But those funds have steadily eroded over the years with cost-cutting measures such as the merger of the autonomous drug agency into the main healthcare service. It's not too surprising if it is falling short of its initial success.
Another thing to consider is the inseparability of homelessness and drug abuse issues. It doesn't seem to be possible address one without the other, rising homelessness will inevitably bring more drug abuse. (Still I see fewer homeless people in downtown Lisbon than in Barcelona that won't even let you have a beer in the park).
Fair enough, my knowledge of the situation in Lisbon is mostly second hand from some friends there. When I visited them, there were definitely areas that were pretty dodgy in what seemed to me to be the downtown. Now, I’ve been to places that are actually dangerous, and I’ve never felt unsafe in Portugal, but I definitely did get accosted by a clammy, pale looking gentleman with a nervous tick who tried to steal my phone.
It's only dodgy compared to Ponta Delgada or the well groomed areas of London, which are well groomed thanks to immigrant labour. Pickpockets and annoying sodium bicarbonate or basilic 'drug dealers' are quite common in Lisbon, but then evey major tourist destination has pickpockets. The novelty in Lisbon is the fake drug dealers. I don't know about drugs as I haven't seen any needles or addicts or even stoners on the street.
I don’t know about Portugal. But Amsterdam’s drug toleration (it’s still illegal mind you) happens against a background of pretty intense anti-drug culture. As that culture has become more permissive, drug policy has become more punitive: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/681551
As dang explains in one of the linked posts, it's because if they don't do it, the discussion usually becomes "how is this on the front page when it's 2 days old?" instead of discussing the topic at hand.
Of course in this case we're now discussing the opposite question and still not discussing the topic at hand.
