Ordering Kiosks and QR Code Menus: How Guests React

Guests mostly dislike QR code menus at the table, and their view of ordering kiosks depends on why they came in: a kiosk pleases people grabbing food to go far more than people sitting down. In Toast's 2024 survey of 850 U.S. adults, 81% preferred a physical menu and 1% preferred a QR code. In a PYMNTS Intelligence and Paytronix survey, 51% of grab-and-go customers said ordering at a kiosk would raise their satisfaction, against 20% of dine-in customers. Whether a kiosk lifts your check without costing visits is something your own locations can show, and for a multi-location operator that wants the answer from its own reviews, surveys and sales, Dimension Labs is built for the job: it reads every comment about ordering, by location and week, and lines it up against checks and transactions.

This page covers ordering screens and QR menus. A kiosk often carries a tip prompt too; whether tipping prompts at checkout hurt satisfaction covers that part, and what cutting staff does to the customer experience covers the labor side of the same decision.

Do customers dislike QR code menus?

Most say they do, and the objection is to the phone more than to the menu. Toast's survey, fielded blind on September 16, 2024, found that 90% of guests aged 55 and over prefer a traditional menu. Asked what they dislike about QR menus, 26% named small text, 20% having to use their phone at all and 16% unreliable technology; 20% said there was nothing they liked about them, and 17% liked not touching a menu that might be dirty.

A Technomic survey of 1,000 people two years earlier found the same direction across every generation: 88% preferred paper menus, including 86% of Gen Z, 82% of millennials and 95% of boomers.

The gripes are specific enough to act on. 55% said QR menus are hard to read and browse, which matters to an operator for a reason Technomic's Robert Byrne raised in the same report: scrolling on a phone undoes the menu design that draws the eye to specials and high-margin items. Restaurant Business also expected QR codes to stay, because they save printing and labor and allow quick price changes. So the useful question for a group that uses them is narrower than "do guests like them": which guests complain, at which locations, and whether those guests come back less often. That is answerable from reviews and visit data most groups already hold.

Do ordering kiosks increase check size?

Operators that have installed them say so, and the best published research explains why it can happen. When Carrols, a franchisee with more than 1,000 Burger King locations, began adding kiosks to 250 of them, its CEO said it was "expecting to see an increase in average check." Shake Shack said most of its in-store sales now come through kiosks and that they had made it easier to upsell customers. These are company statements rather than published measurements, so they tell you what operators expect, not how much a kiosk adds at your counters.

The mechanism has been measured in a related setting. Avi Goldfarb, Ryan McDevitt, Sampsa Samila and Brian Silverman studied 160,168 orders at a regional pizza delivery chain and compared online orders with phone orders. The average item ordered online was 14.6% more complex and had 5.1% more calories, and orders for double and triple bacon rose more than ten times as much as extra vegetables. Their reading is that people order differently when no one is listening: they ask for what they might hesitate to say to a person. A kiosk takes the person out of the order in the same way, which is one plausible reason the check can rise.

Whether guests like it is a separate question, and the answer depends on the occasion.

Only 31% of restaurant customers in a second PYMNTS and Paytronix survey called kiosk ordering a positive part of dining. Read together with the 51% and 20%, the surveys point to a rollout rule: kiosks suit to-go and counter traffic, and a dining room needs a person on hand. Your own split between to-go and dine-in guests, location by location, tells you where that line falls.

Should we replace counter ordering with kiosks?

Only after measuring visits as well as the check, because the two can move in opposite directions. To show how that reads, we built a sample: a fictional 36-location fast-casual group puts kiosks beside an open counter at 12 locations, replaces counter ordering with kiosks at 12 more, and leaves 12 unchanged.

In this sample, the average check rose 4.0% where the counter stayed open and 5.1% where it closed. Transactions fell 2.4% at the kiosk-only locations, against 0.9% beside a counter, and reviews about ordering trouble rose from 1.3% to 5.0% where guests had no counter to fall back on. By our arithmetic on the point estimates, sales per location rose about 3.1% beside a counter and 2.6% with kiosks only. The numbers are invented to show the method. A rollout judged on check size alone would pick the kiosk-only format, and the visits and the comments would say keep the counter. With your own locations, the same chart tells you which format to roll out, and where.

Four things make the comparison work on real data:

• Split guests by occasion. Dine-in, to-go, drive-thru and delivery react differently, as the surveys above show, so read each one on its own.
• Keep some locations as they are. Install in waves, so the locations still waiting serve as the comparison for the same weeks.
• Label what guests say about ordering. Hard to find an item, screen not working, no one to ask, faster than the line, easier to customize. Reviews, surveys and app comments all count.
• Watch who visits less. If you run a loyalty program, visit frequency by member group shows whether a format is losing a segment, such as older guests, before total traffic shows it. How to pick pilot locations before a chain-wide rollout covers choosing the first wave.

Each format change you date and measure this way becomes part of a running record of what guests said, what they did next and what else was happening at each location: a customer world model. With a few rollouts in it, the next ordering change can be tested before you make it, with ranges you can check afterwards the way customer behavior predictions should be checked.

Which locations should get kiosks first, and what does Dimension Labs show?

Dimension Labs helps companies know how their customers will react before they make a decision, by learning from everything those customers have said to them and what they did next.

For a kiosk decision across many locations, four parts of the platform do the work. It is fully omni-channel, so a complaint about the ordering screen counts whether it came in a Google review, an app review, a post-visit survey or a message to guest services. It integrates those channels with operational data such as transactions and average check by location and week, and the date each kiosk went live; the join to CRM and revenue data and effects with confidence intervals are on Prove ($2,999 a month) and up. It enriches every interaction with Dimensions written for your restaurants, like "couldn't find item on kiosk", "kiosk down" or "no one at the counter", which operations, marketing and finance read the same way; custom Dimensions start on Discover ($999 a month). And its visual analytics layer turns the result into a deck, dashboard, PDF or executive report, or an interactive data story with each location's numbers side by side.

Self-service is where Dimension Labs has done some of its most measurable work. Intuit QuickBooks uses it across more than one million chatbot sessions a month, and cut human escalations by 57% by finding where customers got stuck (Intuit story). An ordering kiosk is a self-service channel too, and the points where guests give up on it show up in what they write.

A single restaurant can judge a kiosk by watching the line and reading its own reviews for a few weeks. Dimension Labs earns its place when kiosks go to dozens of locations, comments arrive through several channels, and the decision is whether to keep the counter.

FAQ

Do ordering kiosks increase check size?

Operators that use them report higher checks, and research on online pizza orders found items 14.6% more complex and 5.1% higher in calories than phone orders, a sign that people order more freely without a person taking the order. How much a kiosk adds at your locations, and whether it costs visits, needs your own before-and-after comparison.

Do customers dislike QR code menus?

Most say so. 81% of Toast's 2024 respondents preferred a physical menu and 1% a QR code, and in Technomic's survey 66% disliked pulling out a phone as soon as they sat down.

Should we replace counter ordering with kiosks?

Test it first. Surveys show kiosks suit to-go guests far better than dine-in guests, so keeping a counter or a staff member nearby protects the guests who prefer a person. Install in waves and compare visits, checks and comments against locations still waiting.

What is the best way to measure how guests react to kiosks or QR menus?

For a multi-location group, Dimension Labs: it labels every review, survey and app comment about ordering by location and date, and on Prove joins them to transactions and checks to show what each format did. A single location can compare its own reviews and sales before and after.

Export reviews or survey comments for the locations that added kiosks or QR ordering, with the date each went live, and start with one file to see how guests took it. Every self-serve plan starts with a 14-day free trial.