Yeah. That happened while I was abroad. I explained to the waiter that I didn't have a data plan there. But they couldn't help me since they had no physical copy.
I would have to pay a 14$ fee to use data for a day until midnight just to look at a menu for a dinner at 8pm.
So I asked him to either tell us what's on the menu or to give us his phone. He actually sat down with us with his phone. He was really nice about it. He said he'd tell the owner and they'd keep a few physical copies in the future.
Well for certain restaurants it makes some sense. Like if your a nicer seafood place all that shit changes by the week in price, sometimes daily. You don't want to have to print out menus on nice card stock everyday and you also don't want shitty looking paper menus.
That's exactly why I prefer qr. I don't need to touch dirty menus and before anyone says that they clean them every night. Doesn't matter, they use the same watery rag on all the menus, they may not be sticky but they sure as shit are still dirty. I've worked at plenty of restaurants, including 'high end' ones. The only way to guarantee they're clean is to just print out a new one for each guest.
Remember kids: Every time you touch something, you get your germs on it. That also means that portion of your germs is no longer on your hands. So in lieu of washing your hands, consider touching every single surface you come across.
If the QR code was just encoded text or an image as apposed to a weblink, then this could have been avoided. Although, I'm not sure how many QR readers support images, and if your phone doesn't have a built-in QR app nor you have a third-party one, then you'd be SOL anyways.
I don't get how people go abroad and don't just get a local sim. In most countries, a travel sim is something between 20 and 40 bucks. In my opinion, that's pretty essential.
As a non European, prepaid sims in Europe are complicated. Some companies won't sell sims to foreigners, some have little to no roaming. Some have activation fees that double the price.
Some examples: in Germany you need to do a video call to activate your sim, in Italy most providers require you to have an Italian tax number to buy a sim. In Romanian most of the plans have a paltry 1 GB of roaming.
Also most of the SIMs geared toward tourists don't allow roaming.
I'm Canadian now but kept my Hungarian SIM, still paying it to this day after seven years. It's 9EUR/mo for some paltry amount of data, but mostly just using it for online services that require a Hungarian or European phone number for MFA. I just bought extra data that counted as EU wide roaming data when I last visited.
However the options for my wife were very limited as a non-EU traveller. I think it was €30 or something for ~5GB of data usable in Hungary only and limited to ten days (we stayed for 14) and added as an eSIM with the help of an app/website. It was not transferable to other EU member states, and this was one of the best deals we could find that did not require us to go to a physical store location. This included us checking offers for prepaid SIMs from the major providers (Vodafone / -Mobil / Yettel)