With all due respect, people are totally missing the point here; it's not about about "being old" in itself,
but it's disingenuous to think that people on low incomes, especially pensioners, can afford the not
insignificant purchase and 'running' costs' of a smartphone that they don't even want in the first place
(as per my comment above).
Some seem to be saying that to visit a pub to enjoy their £9.95 steak and ale pie, it's entirely reasonable
to insist that pensioners should splurge £100+ on a phone (and more on an ongoing contract); if that is the
case, people on here must have wealthy parents/grandparents compared to most OAPs I know!
MARK
Again though - the point is that each place needs to work out what makes sense when taking into account the demographic of customers they get.
If a place has customers who are say generally between 20-40 with disposable income (e.g. Craft beer places), then the vast vast majority will have a smartphone. Hell they may well not get anyone trying to come in who doesn't have one.
But if you have a place that is popular with OAP's or is maybe in a less affluent place (say a Spoons), then yeah of course just going down the app route doesn't make any sense.
It is the same as places that decided to go card only before the pandemic - many did, especially in London and other cities, just because of the nature of their customer base (I think one bar near me said that before going card only cash only made up something like 5% of their takings, so going card only made perfect sense as they only "lost" 5% of custom, but got rid of costs related to cash use that more than made up for that).
In this case, if a business thinks they will not lose any revenue, or will only lose a small % of revenue, by limiting themselves to Smartphone users only, then why wouldn't they do that if it means they can offload something they currently have to deal with?