This stuff is infuriating on multiple levels
TL;DR:
- Restaurant only accepts orders made from the app
- Restaurant “mini” app is 200 mb and I had a sim card with 500mb/day
- When you finally get to pay, they must “verify you’re a human” with an otp code sent to your phone number
- For saving money they don’t send the otp code via SMS but via WhatsApp, which is blocked in the country
- Restaurant doesn’t accept cash
- Restaurant doesn’t accept credit cards
- Restaurant only accepts payments from a local app that requires id verification with passport scanning
- Taxis need to be called with an app
- In order to use the taxi app you need to register with the phone number and scan the passport and so on
Full story:
I went to china, first thing I went out for a walk and after a couple hours of walking I wanted to eat, so I went to KFC as I was intrigued by an ad showing a shrimp burger and a nori seaweed flavored fried chicken. (Yes, they looked tasty in the pictures, although by typing this, it doesn’t look like it’s actually tasty. Probably the “shrimp” burger is just surimi made with the cheapest shit gathered from the oceans and then just slushed in a patty. No, I could not try them, for the reason written below)
I went inside and I saw no self ordering kiosk. Oh no, I have to do social interaction with my poor Chinese proficiency. I go to the cashier and… there’s only a order pickup point. I ask and they say need to order from their app, just scan the qr code.
Now, luckily I ordered a travel esim with 500mb/day, as the store didn’t have public WiFi
I scan the qr code and it doesn’t work. It’s a proprietary version of qr code developed by tencent, need to use WeChat to scan.
I already had WeChat installed, I scanned it. It needed to download a KFC “mini app” and I agreed. 200 FUCKING MEGABYTES??? What does it contains, 4k movies of fried chicken???
After burning the whole data plan on that “mini” app I do the order and before paying: WAIT, YOU MUST LOGIN!
WTF? I thought the point of using WeChat is that I was already logged in a platform? Ok, let’s login. WAIT! HOW DO WE KNOW THAT YOU’RE NOT A BOT? Please verify your phone number!
WTF??? I just need my weird seafood flavored chicken, why do you need my phone number??
At that point I was already 20 minutes in, and due to the fallacy of sunk cost I agreed to let them “verify” my phone number. Which for some reason they sent via WhatsApp instead of texting it. Luckily the travel esims are somehow exonerated from the gfw so I could receive it.
Ok, identity “verified”, now need to pay. Oh, can’t pay in cash??? Can’t pay with credit card??? Only weixin pay. I try to check, needs passport verification.
At this point I just flip the table and I give up, I want to go back to my hotel room.
I’m tired boss, I don’t want to walk another 2 hours, let’s take a taxi. Last time I went to China it was pre-covid. In order to take a taxi you just needed to go on the side of the road, wait 30 seconds and a taxi would stop. Now there are no taxis at all??? I call my friend and he says it’s normal, everyone orders a Didi now from the phone. I see it’s another 200 mb app and I even don’t try it, as I’m 100% sure it will ask phone verification and pay with weixin pay.
I give up and just start to walk…
Luckily I see taxi dropping someone on the side of the road so I run there to ask get me home. When we arrive he directly shows me a laminated card for paying with weixin. I give him a 20 yuan bill for the 14 yuan ride. He probably tells me that he doesn’t have change. I don’t understand. It’s ok buddy, keep the change.
you have been banned from lemmy.ml
If I had to make a guess, not handling cash is a way of helping tamp down on crime, and the benefit is probably relatively-larger in poorer countries. Like, it’s hard to rob a store if the guy at the counter has no access to the money that the customers have been dropping off.
'course, cash is good for privacy, and especially when compared to a smartphone app, but…
I spent three weeks in China this year, had a blast. It’s true you need an app for nearly everything, and while it’s too late for this advice, I’d recommend before you go:
- download/install alipay (skip wechat, it’s less prevalent)
- add and set up your CC from your home country before you arrive in china
- have a VPN ready to go, setup before you leave (mullvad worked perfectly for me)
- get a physical SIM in China, and get one with high data caps; they’re cheap, you might as well
- be sure to have a translator app installed and ready to go, with downloaded chinese (simplified) packs that don’t require internet connection
Once you’ve got the physical sim, you’ll have fewer issues with phone verification (obviously). The eSIMs I found (I also had one) were based out of hong-kong, and there are regional weirdness/connectivity issues with it. It worked, kind of, but was less reliable than the real deal. Good luck, god speed.
For wechat verification, I had to have a third-party (i.e. one of my chinese friends) perform a verification for me before all options unlocked. If you don’t know anyone there, this is obviously challenging.
My experience with esims is fantastic. I loaded 5 of them on my phone (bought cheap plans with low data tiers) and switch them accordingly. High speed, no censorship at all, decent lag to western sites, I’m not detected as a VPN user.
Arrived in the airport, toggled, worked.
Physical SIM… Didn’t try this year but even 6 years ago it was extremely problematic to get one as a foreigner, no store would accept my form of identification, I was offline for three days until I caved in and finally paid 200 yuan extra for a preactivated one (on someone else’s id , I guess) on the grey market. And then there’s the problem that even if the plans are cheap (I’m seeing $1/month for 5gb), it’s rendered useless by the gfw. What’s the point of having 200 Mbits of 5g bandwidth if any website that you can think of (including hexbear and .ml surprisingly, I wouldn’t expect that they would block tankies), is banned? Better using a HK esim at 30mbits in 4g but with the full internet unlocked…
VPNs it’s a cat and mouse game that I don’t want to play anymore. You never know if the website isn’t loading because the VPN has been blocked, or the website blocked the VPN, or it’s a temporary connection issue, or today the server is overloaded…
Phones are starting to drop physical sims in the US. I was surprised to find out that my pixel 10 doesn’t have one.
I ask and they say need to order from their app, just scan the qr code
Yeah, that’s the point I would have turned around and walked out.
I hate regular sit down restaurants today that do that.
I’ve walked out if they don’t have a printed menu. Why the fuck would I want to order from my phone?
Just curious, why not?
For one, they are probably harvesting the fuck out of your data…
‘I went to China’… Ahh see, there’s the root issue.
if you lived in china long term you wouldn’t have these problems because you would have already given up all your personal data and privacy to the state. but hey, you’d get some convenience out of it, so not so bad, right?
Actually it gives no convenience, only incovenience. When I lived there for 2 years about 20 years ago and everything was cash and you could at any moment just hail a taxi, a minibus, one these bycicle guys, tell where you want to go, give cash, it was very convenient.
The app:
It just has thumbnails of food shown at 200*150 pixels, how it can be 200 mb???
Well for starters it’s probably an embedded browser made to look like an app so there you go, 100mb for that. The google / apple libraries, 20mb, telemetry, 50mb… Then don’t forget the image cache on the device that they will never clear.
Keep (image) cache forever sounds OK if you can clear it manually in some way. The worse offender will be the one w/o cache (or broken implemention), so you keep using the mobile data when you flip through the menu for the same dishes images 😱
You have to put the telemetry and spyware somewhere, and do you expect them to just not package every single NPM library into the app as statically linked libraries? We don’t do logic or consumer protections around here, now scan your passport and proceed to the booth for your butthole size verification so we know exactly how big of a fist we can get in there.
Probably bundled a whole chromium like every other app.
That chicken at the bottom, they knew.
I feel like the most horrific thing about it all is that the government can just deactivate your account at any moment. Happened to a friend when they were visiting, maybe some connections on the phone they did not like it. They didn’t tell them and it happened automatically after connecting with two locals.
Welcome to the future, where everything is a stupid 200MB phone app which doesn’t even work properly. At least here in Germany you can still eat without any. But you definitely have to download some fat BurgerKing app with lots of 4k fire animations to get an 1€ coupon. Of course it’ll also ask for all kinds of stuff.
It doesn’t have to be, fires cool
Not accepting cash should be illegal. What am I talking about they don’t even accept card.
You can’t track cash. Also, the proprietary internet connected payment methods mean that they can ban you from society for wrongthink.
Same thing will happen in America in the next couple of decades, and it will be used to destroy the lives of whoever the fascists deem woke/dei/trans/communist/antifa this week.
The problem is that a lot of large places don’t want to accept cash. It is easy for small places to use cash because the owner is likely running the register. When you get to mega corporations, it is easier and cheaper for them to pay the credit card fees.
WeChat is like Facebook and Venmo combined into one app. I understand that it pretty much replaced cash entirely in China.
Basically yes. It’s THE app. Now it looks like it also integrates meituan (≈ Groupon) and JD (≈amazon)
And it looks like if your social score goes over 500 points, you can activate buy now pay later like klarna
Chat, social media feed (both in TikTok style and also in Twitter/Instagram mashup style), it has everything. It takes 7gb of space on my phone and I only have like 3 chats. I’m guessing for heavy users it takes over the full storage of the phone
Yes, this is normal in China; it’s only a problem for tourists at the start. Not saying it’s a good system, just that this is how it’s done over there. “When in Rome” and all that. For example, there’s toilets you can only access by using the WeChat app, and if you make a mess, they can track you down and fine you. It’s more like “your entire digital existence” rather than"just an app."
When I visited Japan, I thought it was cool that you could buy food, drink, and pretty much anything with your train card. The down side is that I now have a bunch of money permanently trapped in that card lol
This app must have been designed by devil to torture digital minimalists and UNIX philosophy people in the afterlife
WeChat is not a whole lot different to a browser/os at that point. It’s basically THE government mandated iOS, which contains THE government mandated app store. A way of forcing everyone to use their walled garden surveillance system even if they have a computer not under the control of the regime, like the entire Chinese diaspora and any foreigner dumb enough to install it.
This is a reason I’ll never go to China unless it’s with thousands of others who also don’t want to be there and professional logisticians taking care of the food problem.
That’s life in a horrific authoritarian state.
We need to stop that from happening in the USA. Bring back the penny.
Bring back the penny.
The penny going away is not cash going away.
Trying to even find some estimate of inflation going back that far is a pain, but it looks like the smallest federally-issued denomination was the half-cent coin, in 1793.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half_cent
https://www.in2013dollars.com/
Based on the above, a half-cent would be 17¢ today. The dime today is worth less than the half cent.
I’d be more-concerned about whether new bills of sufficiently-large denominations are available to make using cash practical, not coins of very small denomination.
The issue with the penny is that the handling costs are significant. Like, getting rid of it means that businesses don’t need to pay the costs of processing it. (It is not, I might add, the issue that Trump gave as justification for ending minting it, which is that it costs more to manufacture than the face value of the coin.)
Its honestly so weird to me that Musk did not already do that with him buying himself so deep into politics, owning X and PayPal. It would be so fucking easy, he did say that it would be the plan but somehow he is even bad at being evil.
He’s been out of PayPal for a while, but he does want to make twitter the American WeChat.
That’s life currently in the US. Aren’t there plenty of restaurants currently going mobile only or kiosk only where you need an app to interact with the restaurant?
Plenty? I have never been to any restaurant that didn’t take cash or credit card, and especially not one that FORCES you to use Whatsapp to get a code so you can pay through their shitty app.
Have YOU been to a restaurant like that in the US? Not saying they can’t exist, but I just imagine it’d be extremely rare.
Sounds like a failed restaurant to me.
Reads like cautionary tale of high-modernism, seemed like a real pain, sorry you went through that. Hope you got a good meal afterwards!
