Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Maybe Not a Bug, But Definitely Not a Feature

The usual warning: Stand back, I'm about to gripe.

When I'm sitting at home and thinking about food from out, I almost never want to order for delivery, or even order online for pickup. I'm just thinking, OK? If I buy from your restaurant, one of three  things will happen:

  1. I and/or my wife plan to dine in, and will order when we get there; or
  2. I and/or my wife plan to take out, and will order when we get there; or
  3. I'm wanting takeout and it will be ordered online or via app, but usually my end of the deal is to tell my wife what I want and she places the order because she and/or the kids probably want something too, and because she is probably picking it up on her way home from work.
I can understand why you want to know my location, in case your menu differs from store to store.

But why, after choosing a location/store, can't I just see the menu instead of having to pretend I'm placing an order right now?

Most restaurants with an online ordering mechanism seem to want to force the "place an order" thing. In some cases, the menu is tied up in third-party delivery ordering to boot.

It doesn't seem like 133t hacker league stuff to design a web site that just lets me browse the fucking menu. And that maybe loads reliably instead of churning for 15 minutes trying to run all your fancy-schmancy scripts and stuff half the time.

Since I see you're charging eleven bucks for a sandwich that already seemed kind of steep when I paid $7.xx for it a year ago, but was craving and considering paying $7.xx for again, I have to assume you could afford a well-designed, working web site. If you wanted to. Apparently you don't.

Guess I'll just make my own damn sandwich instead.

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