The Consumerist ran a story about how Michigan’s Office of Highway Safety Planning is passing out coasters with QR codes to a bunch of bars. When patrons scan the code in their smartphone, a list of local taxi services will come up. As long as everybody agrees that this is a gimmick and won’t actually help anybody then I have no objection. But srsly.
Now, I’m all for calling a taxi when you need it, but this doesn’t seem very well planned. The Consumerist linked to a study that shows most college students don’t really know what to do with QR codes. That may certainly hamper their plans but that’s not my main gripe. If you are targeting a tech-savvy young crowd equipped with smartphones, don’t you think this audience can figure out how to call a taxi? We already have things called Google and Siri that can take care of this type of stuff for us.