My coworker mentioned that QR codes were basically abandoned by most businesses around 2016-2018, but then COVID happened and suddenly every restaurant had them for menus. What changed that made everyone suddenly embrace them again after years of ignoring them?
The perception of QR codes being "dead" in the West was partly genuine - businesses killed them off because adoption rates here were low, people found them clunky, and NFC/mobile payments seemed like the future instead. What actually changed in 2020 wasn't the technology itself but the urgency: suddenly contactless interaction became essential, and QR codes were already proven to work at scale in Asia, so restaurants didn't have to invent anything new. They just finally had a compelling reason to use what was sitting there the whole time.
Did your coworker actually see them disappear, or just assume they weren't being used much? QR codes weren't really dead - they just weren't being pushed by Western businesses as aggressively after the initial hype around 2010-2012, partly because smartphone adoption wasn't universal yet and touchscreen scanning felt clunky compared to just typing a URL. What changed before 2020 was that scanning became built into standard camera apps (Apple added it natively in iOS 11 around 2017), making the friction almost invisible, plus better marketing by companies like WeChat in Asia kept the format alive and relevant. When restaurants needed contactless solutions during lockdowns, QR codes were suddenly the obvious choice - the tech had matured quietly in the background while everyone thought it was gone.
QR codes weren't so much abandoned as they were never really adopted in the first place across most of the West - they'd always been huge in Asia, especially Japan and China. The real shift in 2020 wasn't technology changing but necessity: contactless interaction became urgent overnight, and suddenly every restaurant needed a way to share menus without handing people paper or devices, which made QR codes the obvious solution when smartphones could already scan them. One thing worth noting is that the "dead" perception came partly from tech blogs and Western media declaring them failures around 2014-2016, which created a narrative that overshadowed the fact they were quietly being used everywhere else. The pitfall is confusing "unpopular in our market" with actually being dead technology - QR codes were thriving, just not where Western tech writers were looking.
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