The QR Code and the Death of Customer Service

At first the QR code seemed innocent enough. A restaurant stopped supplying menus and put a little black square on the table instead. We pointed our phones at it, waited for a website to load, enlarged the appetizers with two fingers, and congratulated ourselves on living in the future.

That was the moment they knew they had us. We supplied the phone, the battery, the Internet connection, and the labor. The restaurant saved twelve cents and called it convenient.

Soon the QR code had slipped the surly bonds of restaurants. Parking meters stopped accepting money and told us to download an app. Instruction manuals disappeared because anyone capable of assembling a ceiling fan must be capable of locating a PDF on a manufacturer’s website.

Concert tickets moved onto phones. Receipts became emails. Medical offices replaced clipboards with portals requiring passwords containing one capital letter, one number, one symbol, and evidence that you still remember your mother’s maiden name.

Each change was too small to resist. Nobody organizes a march because the owner’s manual for a toaster is online. There are no candlelight vigils for the paper parking receipt. You do not call your congressman because the steakhouse wants you to scan the drink menu. So we kept surrendering, twelve cents at a time.

The remarkable part is that companies managed to eliminate things they once provided while persuading customers that doing the missing work themselves was progress. We scan. We download. We register. We verify. We create accounts. We retrieve confirmation codes. We accept cookies. We reset passwords. We hold our phones over mysterious black squares and wait obediently.

Someday we will enter a restaurant, cook our own dinner, wash the dishes, update the restaurant’s website, and receive an email asking us to rate our experience.

There will be a QR code for that.

Want more digital blasphemy? Fill your boots at technological mayhem.