Do you remember the good-old days, when you had to walk into a restaurant, sit down and wait for a real-life human being to come over and take your order?
The anguish of making eye contact, the ignominy of waving a hand in the air, and being ignored. The horror of trying out some freshly-learned term in Mandarin, only to be greeted by a bored “Shen-me (什么)?”
And that is just here in The Middle Kingdom. In certain parts of the South of France, you could actually die of starvation waiting for a waiter to submit to the indignity of taking your order.
Yet ever since the Great Pandemic of 2021, something magical has happened in the world of the service industry; something so breathtaking and groundbreaking, so delightful and divine, it is enough to leave a person speechless. Because, speech in this case, is no longer necessary. The QR Code! These Quick Response Codes sound urgent and stressful, but they are quite the opposite.
Once the purview of factory-inventory tools, the humble QR code was invented in 1994 by a Japanese company called Denso Wave for labelling automobile parts. A younger sibling of the barcode, the QR code allowed for vast information storage and retrieval through the nifty arrangement of pixelated squares.
The pandemic years released the humble QR code from factory floors, and now, it is as ubiquitous as it is useful.
Not only can I scan a menu upon entering an establishment, but I can do so on my phone camera, without downloading any additional software, like we had to do back in the good old days when the internet still made noise.
This ease and efficiency means that nasty, germ-spreading printed menus are becoming a thing of the past. It also frees up time for the wait staff to actually engage in front-of-house pleasantries such as bringing hot water or the tableware, or maybe even smiling.
What’s more, having taken care of the business of ordering via my pixelated digi friend, the whole interaction seems more friendly and positive. We’ve all been there when, salivating at the edge of endurance, the waiter utters those fatal words, “Yeah, we’re out of that”. Not fun for anyone. Taking umbridge with a screen tends to be far less dramatic; the scroll must go on.
Apart from streamlining the dining-out experience, QR Codes have revolutionised much of 21st century life. From business cards to resumes, bus timetables to building permits, the QR code now mediates much of what used to be face-to-face or paper-based interactions. The other stalworth QR code use is paying for stuff. I cannot remember the last time I made a payment with actual cash in The Middle Kingdom.
In fact, the last time we went to Ireland, I was at the cashier with a trolley full of festive treats when I realised that my phone was of no use in this land.
Never mind the inconvenience of even having to go to a supermarket in the first place, the absurdity of having to return home to retrieve a wallet full of paper currency and go there once again was almost more than I could bear. How I longed for our beloved blue and green QR codes for Alipay or WeChat. No purchase is too big or too small. And what’s more, it also reduces The Pain of Paying!
This rather delightful and hyperbolic term means exactly what it says; the psychological and emotional pain caused by paying for things.
According the The Decision Lab, “as humans, we are loss averse; we want to avoid losses whenever possible, and losses are perceived to be more powerful than equal gains”.
Coined by Ofer Zellermayer in his 1996 PhD dissertation at the University of Carnegie Mellon, the pain of paying has become regular dinner table conversation for behavioural economists. Neuroimaging confirms that when splashing the cash, the same areas of the brain light up as when paying for things with an electric shock (Dault, 2018).
If you, like me, enjoy chasing the dopamine by purchasing stuff on Taobao, you might already instinctively know that the pain of paying is significantly reduced by not physically forking over a wad of cash. Indeed, Zellermayer’s study indicated just this; the pain of paying is significantly lower when paying by card than by gold bullion or cash.
This “opaque” form of payment softens the edges of the cold, hard reality of parting with the guap.
The dawn of the QR code makes the act of paying even more painless. Just point and scan and there you have it. This is known as the cashless effect. After all, your phone weighs the same after you have scanned and paid. There is no physical depletion of your pouch of coins or wallet of bills. This uncoupling is psychologically liberating, for you are what Zellermayer refers to as a “spendthrift”. It certainly did not feel as satisfying to hand over a chunk of money to the cashier upon my return to the supermarket, wallet in hand. I would have much preferred to point and scan and skip the pain of paying.
So clearly, I am not what Zellermayer colourfully refers to as a “tightwad”. Whatever pain is associated with the parting of cold, hard cash, it has become a thing of the past with the rise of the QR code.
What began as a means to avoid horrid, yucky germs has in fact, become one of the smartest, most unintended boosts to the post-COVID economy.
By hijacking the neural synapsis that makes us wince when paying for bits and bobs, the QR code has unwittingly unleashed our inner spendthrifts.
Blessings and applause then, for the little box of squares that allows us to speak nicely to waiters, and them to speak nicely to us. Gratitude for eliminating the shocking torment of emptying the coffers for every single transaction. QR codes might make us poorer, but they allow us to still identify as rich.
