I’d not heard of this fallacy* but it makes perfect sense. Well executed human greeting is such a killer asset if you get it right. There’s a few million years of genetic programming inside us all that responds unreasonably positively to hospitality. If someone enters my home and is not drinking their desired beverage in under four minutes, I have brought shame on me and my family!
I think we are all programmed to respond well to any courtesy, no matter how indirect. When a computer game level has a nice tutorial “level 0” then I feel good. When my dishwasher has color coded component to help me clean it, I feel good. When I click a text area containing an order number and it auto selects the number, I feel good. Great design is about the same kind of warm fuzzies as great hospitality. Maybe we should even call industrial design “passive hospitality”?
*No apostrophe btw. It ought to be The Doorman Fallacy. If you want an apostrophe then call it The Hotel Manager’s Fallacy :)
I also hadn't heard of it, but I feel like it's kind of a corollary of the whole, "what's measured is managed" idea or maybe the Streetlight effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect).
It's easy to measure a doorman's cost, but hard to measure their impact. Few, if any, guest are likely to mention the impact of a doorman on their stay except in the exceptional case. That means when budgets start to get tight (or an exec wants to drive the share price up), doormen become an easy target to cut because there's little hard data to justify their value.
Isn't the hard data the loss of the hotel a few years down the road due to being noncompetitive due to declining customers caused by the penny pinching?
That's the heart of the issue: insufficient accounting.
You can't plan any better than your models, and if your models are insufficient then your decision making will be inherently flawed. Penny pinching is good until it's not, and the data to see when the transition occurred isn't on the balance sheet until maybe it's too late. At the point you're pinching the penny of the doorman, you don't have the data about the impending customer decline.
Labour was cheaper back then. Even valuable jobs can stop making sense if the costs outweigh them. That's the difficulty with automation making other sectors more efficient, wages get driven up while your productivity stays the same.
It still seems to me designing applications or web services is so hard that it's just easier to hire thousands of people to do customer service and having people to come physically to do things. The average corporation's business application or web page is absolutely terrible and a lot of non-technical users simply can not do business with it. Ie it is a hindrance for the businesses core reason of existence. Do the QR code things show up in revenue tracking? Do they do A/B testing? I think I prefer to choose another restaurant if I see that, or not come again.
I think some small pizza shops have had proper simple web pages, probably because it's do-or-die for them and the person contracting the web page is the person also knowing very well how the business is doing. Also phone interactions are very fast and straightforward. It's sad to see them having to struggle with terrible card payment terminals and everybody trying to take a cut (credit card and delivery companies).
> It still seems to me designing applications or web services is so hard that it's just easier to hire thousands of people to do customer service and having people to come physically to do things.
I'd love for this to be true, but every business nowadays sees employees (except maybe whatever group is core to their business) as a giant cost centre. Every employee cut is money saved. Hence customer service consistently being shit, since it's an easy place to skimp on. Now, the doorman's fallacy could be applicable here; good customer service will create repeat buyers and good word of mouth, but I doubt you need to put that many people into it to make it good. Thousands has to be well past diminishing returns. Even if only 20% of people find the happy path in some stupid web app, that's potentially thousands of man-hours that customer service didn't have to provide, and thus a lot less employees you don't really need.
True. But automation also pushes up wealth. Starbucks drivethrus aren't a thing because we need iced sweet nominally coffee stuff. It exists because we have the disposable income to pay someone else to make the coffee.
Yes a doorman is a cost, and a greater cost than previously, but we've also got more money to waste on such fripperies.
> That's the difficulty with automation making other sectors more efficient, wages get driven up while your productivity stays the same.
The root cause of that is minimum wage - if you raise it then automation becomes important, and where you can't automate it drives up prices of essential goods. So a doorman is either automated away or needs a raise to afford to live.
It's not just minimum wages. If productive sector employees' demand for goods causes inflation, prices will rise. If you want to keep your nurses/doormen/teachers you'll have to increase their wages regardless of what the minimum wage is.
It's difficult to tie changes in customer retention to not having a doorman in a "hard data" way. Ideally you'd want to do an A/B test of doorman vs non-doorman, but you'd need multiple hotels for that to work.
1) Failing can be (mis)attributed to many things particularly if the cause and effect are separated significantly by time, and 2) most businesses want to stay way ahead of the realization they're noncompetitive as by that point often the barn door is open and the horse is gone.
How do you map the exact reason, though. A hotel could have gone down years down the road due to Covid, some war that influenced existing clientele, general drop of tourism, change in weather patterns that made summer less attractive, competition from AirBnb, being bought by someone totally inept, spread of remote work instead of business trips, aging population that does not like to travel anymore, or combination of all those factors etc.
> I think we are all programmed to respond well to any courtesy, no matter how indirect.
I once read a book called "The Media Equation" that argued humans' social cooperation/courtesy instincts are many thousands of years old, while computers are very new (the book was written in 1996). As academic HCI researchers they'd conducted many experiments, providing evidence for this, which is why it's a book, not a paragraph.
What I found fascinating about this book was you could see how their findings had directly translated into Clippy in Office 97. You close 'Clippy' and it waves goodbye instead of disappearing immediately? They had research findings saying that was perceived more favourably.
Clippy became infamous because it couldn't actually do anything it claimed to do. It also seemingly broke the courtesy guidelines by appearing uninvited and stealing focus.
And I would say in its case, there was great synergy between not doing anything and appearing uninvited. Two negatives combining to produce an overwhelmingly greater negative.
Doormen keep vagrants away and prevent dirty things from accumulating in front of the venue. Plus the social benefits of interaction. It is a cost but offers not immediately obvious benefits.
I've never heard it in terms of courtesy, more that a human employee is an entirely different category to some mechanical component of a business.
So the setup goes, if a doormans function is defined as opening the door, then he can be replaced by a cheap mechanical thing; this misses that he is both covering more incidental tasks, and providing a human interface to the business. These things are very valuable, but not captured in the "guy who operates the door" definition.
The doorman of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore was so iconic that he was written into the textbooks of my time. I’ve often wondered if he’s well paid considering his significance to that institution.
Probably true for humanity in general, but I would hate having a doorman and having to greet them every time I enter and leave. I've been in airbnbs where I had to do it, and I didn't like it. Same with the article's QR codes ... for an introvert, not interacting with the wait staff is great. Knowing that my order / payment is done precisely without fear of miscommunication is great. I don't need the hospitality.
I've seen it worse: A team of employees have an entry level engineering job, and work as a bridge between support and the "core" engineering team. They just talk to customers when an issue is escalated, and maybe it will submit a hotfix PR but when the issue must be escalated further the instructions are to send it to the higher-ranked team who will make it part of the next sprint.
At every all-hands meetings, core team gets to present, gets to showcase the new features, gets celebrated for "going the extra mile" for customers.
But the real extra mile, is the patience, empathy and thoughtful communication (which is a rare talent, really) of the entry level engineers, who are also humble and nice to be around with, being the only ones who contribute positively to the company culture, as opposed to the ego-tripping 10x engineers.
Management thinks they are absolutely replaceable. Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.
But the real reason to replace them is to please investors who don't wanna be behind the AI-efficiency-hype. They can't be promoted to a core team, because where's the efficiency in that?
Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.
I worked on a project where they replaced virtually all tier-1 customer service reps with an AI chatbot, which worked ok, because 90% of those calls are things like "what's my balance" and "I need a replacement credit card", which an AI can competently navigate. Phase 2, I was informed, was to replace Tier-2 with a chatbot, so the only time a human has to get involved was the most complicated problems. SO MUCH MONEY SAVED AMIRIGHT?!?
So I asked, in the middle of this giant kickoff meeting, "if you get rid of tier 1 & 2 reps, how are you going to train up the tier 3 reps who know enough about how things work to handle these most-complicated problems?". After an extended silence we got "we have a plan for that but we can't go into it just now". Sure you do.
Do you need to do tier 1 and 2 work before tier 3?
If they are structurally different, and there’s a way to train people directly into tier 3, then it doesn’t seem unreasonable to automate t1 and t2 as from my experience the vast majority of the tickets are either simple or repeated workflows. Taking the idea to the limit, you’d automate all tiers, and have the ai escalate to the individual teams within the company for any truly meaningful edge cases
I feel sort of the same about SWE, which is much more complex, but juniors can ostensibly grow into seniors with AI
Where are the feedback loops for customer issues that haven't arisen before, or happen very infrequently. The existence of a tier 3 is for problems that aren't an everyday occurrence. Further, these are often all or partially 'people problems', not 'technology problems'.
> Management thinks they are absolutely replaceable. Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.
This is the way of the world. I want to bet on making myself replaceable, and move on to the next job to be done. It's fun. It's obviously valuable.
I'm good at my job. I crave new things to learn. My nature is to tune everything to work in as boring of a way as possible. I want to be the grandma with a single finger on the "creampuff" Cadillac steering wheel.
A grandmother driving down the road in a Cadillac doesn't look like someone who has conquered her world, but unless a manager looks deeper, they won't see it.
I firmly believe that companies who are smart about software, which is mostly "less is more", are about to use their new superpowers to out innovate the big boys. It will be like pg's writings on blowing away the online store competition with lisp-ninja-ism.
Good management values the people who align themselves with the company, and smile and help the customers. Bad managers manage software at surface level.
In a restaurant a year ago with "pay via your phone" service. Server gave us a receipt w/ a QR code. I scanned the code, copied the URL to my clipboard, and looked it over. There was a base64 blob on the URL. I decoded it (because Termux and I'm a nerd) and saw obvious parameters I could fuzz. I changed the check ID (incremented it), left the store ID alone, re-encoded it, and found I could access somebody else's check. Not a super exciting vulnerability (since all I could do was see what they ordered and pay their check) but I thought it was still pretty rotten that I could even do that.
That’s such a benign vulnerability that it doesn’t even feel like one. Per your description, the worst thing an attacker can do is see the food ordered to a check number (in a public restaurant) and pay a bill that isn’t their own?
On the flip side, some services go absolutely overboard trying to secure low-blast-radius things, or don’t properly scale security to the risk of an activity. I have a service provider that requires an absurd login flow for their website, continually trying to force passkeys, short session timeouts, etc; when the worst an unauthorized attacker could do is pay my bill (the horror!).
But that’s my point: not all risks are the same. A cache issue that serves you someone else’s crossword puzzle is an inconvenience, but a cache issue that serves you someone’s credit report is way worse.
It's not benign. An attacker could surf multiple IDs until they find one lowrr than their own and pay it instead. It's a viable attack. If the store disputes it, you can demonstrate that you paid and produce a receipt.
Eh, there could be privacy implications. E.g. you see someone in the restaurant whom you know, and you know he is not supposed to be drinking alcohol (for whatever reason: maybe his religion forbids it, maybe there's a medical reason for it such as a prescription drug he's on that really should not be mixed with alcohol, the reason doesn't really matter in this example). You see that he was served a pork chop with a side salad, so you scan through the check numbers and find out that only one order contained a pork chop and a side salad that day, and that order also included a glass of red wine. Congratulations, you have spied on your acquaintance and obtained potential blackmail material on him. What will you do with it? How good or evil a person are you?
And although that's a low-probability scenario, it's also something that could be solved pretty easily, by either using a GUID or at least random numeric IDs with 8 digits.
True; a more realistic scenario would have to include "covert surveillance" (where you don't want to let him know you're watching), and even there I'm not sure much could be gleaned about any individual. In theory you could use that to build up a picture of someone's habits, in practice other techniques are better. Though... you could use that to spy on the store, actually. If you're a tax auditor making sure they aren't underreporting their sales, that could be useful.
But yeah, any idea I come up with to exploit that is always a bit of a stretch.
And before someone comments about the hypothetical religious person eating pork, I was actually thinking of a Mormon acquaintance of mine when I wrote that. Mormons are not supposed to drink alcohol, but pork is perfectly okay. If you were thinking of some other religion that forbids both alcohol and pork, well, that's not what I was thinking about.
Living in a nation where ones religion gives you protection under the law and allows you to do things others can't, I don't think you can defend covering up instances of people not living up to the standards they themselves set, and therefore give them special privileges.
How is it different to a police officer doing something slightly illegal. Should we respect their privacy or should we hold them to the high standards they supposedly hold?
I saw a team build some payment software a while ago that had a similar, if not exact, vulnerability. If someone had enough time / effort to figure out a not-super-unique ID (Something like 2456733), they could acccess the payment portal for an order.
I notified them and they said that this was noted, skipped, and they didn't believe it was an issue. Worst case scenario an attacker could... Pay for someone elses order, if this happened the attacker would be found by their payment details. Likewise on the payment screen they only see the order's total, nothing about the customer, nothing else about the order, just the total. So - I'm not sure. Maybe they're right?
I just shrugged. I would've patched it, feels like poor design and is easy enough to fix - but I couldn't really argue other than to say it felt sloppy.
But it's such an easy vulnerability to avoid, that if they're not avoiding it you have to ask what else did they gloss over in their system? "Felt sloppy" is exactly right, and the assumption should therefore be that the entire system is sloppy.
This reminds me of how often "digital transformation" in hospitality introduces naive security architectures. ID enumeration vulnerabilities on restaurant QR codes are surprisingly common because these systems are often rushed to market by low-cost agencies.
While some might argue it's a "low-blast-radius" bug because an attacker can only view orders or pay someone else's bill, the data privacy implications are massive. Scraping that endpoint allows anyone to profile the restaurant's entire customer base, revenue flow, or busy hours. It's the classic side effect of replacing a robust human process with a poorly audited software layer.
I live in Dubai and in my experience the main reason why they want you to pay with QR is because the QR company pushes a service fee on guests and some times even a default tip (tipping is not common here, but I’m sure staff is underpaid because every service company that uses an app pushes you to leave a tip) that they can’t charge if you pay directly to the restaurant.
Just ask the staff to bring the CC machine.
As for the parking. Sure technology got in the way of the conversation. It also got in the way of a $100 fine. I’d say that’s a win, not a loss.
I think the setting is that they are a group of people who paid for parking to go to yoga and now they are also having a meal, so everyone in the group stayed longer than planned.
Public parking is prepaid, usually via the official RTA app.
If anything the prompt from your phone that your meter is expiring is a huge plus against forgetting about it and getting dinged with an outrageous parking ticket. I'd much rather go through the brief stress of that reminder than a ticket any day. A parking ticket will put me in a sour mood for the rest of the day easily.
Such feature is designed to catch people who might not pay attention. Innocent looking money grab.
Some better parking apps simply let you start the meter and then stop when you get back to your car, so you don't have to worry you miss it and get a fine.
Yep. Our city had that system, you started a timer in the app when you parked and had to remember to stop it when you left the parking spot. Appeals of "I forgot to stop the meter" were routinely denied (I think there was still a max like 24 hours, so that you could not accrue an arbitrary amount... or maybe it stopped the next time someone else started paying for that spot. I never used the app so I'm not sure how it worked, I always just paid for a fixed block of time using a card).
I have nostalgia for the coin operated meters I grew up with. It was always a little thrill to park and then find there was still an hour or more left on the meter from the previous person.
The prompt is a fix for an imaginary problem produced by senselessly aping physical limitations. A meter fed with quarters forces you to prepay a particular amount whereas a digital service which has at minimum your credit card could simply charge you the correct amount.
It's not exactly "senselessly" but rather "shrewdly" ensuring that you're incentivized to pay for more time than you'll actually need so that you don't risk getting a ticket or needing to make a trip back to the meter.
> But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued.
Hasn't that been a fact of life ?
If anything, apps made it barely made easier through splitting either the whole bill equally or offer a bit by bit checking interface.
Otherwise on the role of QR codes and online menu, it actually helps a lot for allergies as everyone can check their for each individual item and adjust accordingly.
Of course one can ask the waiters, but many aren't just competent (ask for wallnut allergy, and they'll come back explaining there's no peanuts). And doing the back and forth on which menu has what allergy is also a PITA, with all the other guests just waiting for it to end.
Right. Many restaurants won't do a split check beyond 3 or 5 people.
This place in Dubai doesn't sound that bad. It can get much worse. Two of us went to a restaurant in Cupertino, near Apple HQ, where the table had a QR code. But it didn't just bring up the menu in a browser. It wanted the customer to install their app. Then the customer could order through the app. That's going too far.
The restaurant was mostly cooking for pickup and delivery.
Delivery people were going in and out constantly, but few people were eating on site.
So on-site eating was made a special case of remote ordering, with a really short delivery trip.
Never went back there. The food was mediocre.
All this apparently works better in China, where WeChat took over and standardized customer interaction and payment. Of course, the Third Department knows where you ate dinner, and with whom.
In my experience, waiters tend to be quite good at splitting bills. I feel like many of them remember what people had, maybe they get good mental maps of seating or person <-> meal type just like taxi drivers used to get good mental maps of London before GPS.
(And printed menus tend to have allergy info too, just like online menus sometimes don't.)
The only times I've had splitting bills become a problem are with unreasonably large tables (10+), and at that point, you should be upfront about it before you place any orders, since that fixes the problem.
I assume it's a hard problem to solve if you don't have POS system keeping track though. If all you've got is pen and paper, it's probably better to just split the bill equally, assuming nobody had 6 40 USD cocktails. Or just have someone pay for the whole thing and settle it all in post.
> > But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued.
> Hasn't that been a fact of life ?
I remember having to split bar tabs at the end of the night before phones. No calculators. Drunk people trying to do math is a spectacle to behold. Everyone throwing random cash amounts in the centre of the table, taking their own change, and one person attempting to reconcile the total then asking for more contributions if we were short.
Electronic bill-splitting is superior in just about every way.
I was a bit surprised by the way the payment is being made here.
Do people pay it separately like this? In general, if it isn't a prepaid restaurant, then just one of us makes the whole payment, and we pay our share to that person.
It varies, culturally and based on what the group is. In the UK if I'm out for a meal with family or close friends then one of us will probably pay the bill and then people will offer to transfer their share to the person who did (which may or may not be refused depending on circumstances), if I'm out with colleagues or a group of looser acquaintances then its more likely we'll each pay our share separately, which the server is generally happy to accommodate.
In college I used to go out to eat from time to time with a group of friends to a midnight pancake house.
This was a very nerdy group! In our "culture," everyone wrote down on their paper placemat the exact cost of each item ordered, and at the end of the meal calculated the exact amount of tax plus the canonical 15% tip, and put the correct amount on the table, making change as necessary.
For example in Germany, splitting the bill is pretty normal, to the point where restaurants are adapted to it. Since this process adds some friction it is, however, also the case that someone will pay for everything and split afterwards (or variations on that theme).
Newer payment systems seem to have made that easier (e.g. mobile devices that allow waiters to initiate the payment for a subset of what a table had and allow for contactless payment). The older variant of that is the waiter going with you to the cash register that basically allows them to do the same bill splitting. The even older variant is the waiter breaking out paper and pencil and doing some addition (though I seem to remember waiters actually being annoyed if they had to do that, not so with the new solutions).
My company recently hired a concierge. At first I thought it was unnecessary and just meant to give someone's friend a job.
But the guy is really good at it. He organises groups of people who show up; he knows everybody, so he can quickly point people to where they should go; and overall he just makes the reception a welcoming place.
I cannot recommend Rory Sutherland's book Alchemy enough.
It is up there with great book for me like Taleb's Incerto series when it comes to deeply interesting ideas I would not have noticed if they hadn't been pointed out to me.
My favorite version of this is robotic and drone-based package delivery. In many ways it could be useful and add efficiency to a congested system. But then you find out just what it is that delivery people actually do, the variety of security systems, steps and walkways, exceptions to rules, and so on and realize that what drones and robots automate is not really "the job" at all.
The last mile, in logistics, hospitality, retail or elsewhere is not just a mile, it's an interdependent series of several distances each with its own rules and restrictions. Tech-based solutions tend to solve an idealized, abstracted version of these and end up being only a very limited solution if they solve anything at all.
These folks have patted themselves on the back for devising a solution to the last mile without then realizing that the hardest part of all was the last 20 feet.
They'll just ignore that problem, drop the package on my front lawn and then snap a picture for proof of delivery from 50 feet up before flying away. To be fair, at least one of the Chinese international carriers does that every time already -- pull into my driveway, open the window, chuck the package onto the lawn, and then drive away. At least Amazon still brings it to the front porch and 90% of the time even puts it in a spot where the rain does not reach.
if we had a standardized way to deliver packages like we do mail (the heavily regulated mailbox!) this would not be a problem, it's a phenomenal waste of human effort to navigate this uniquely for every location
it's not like a doorman where there's useful social interaction
I have a PO Box (I do not have a mailbox so the city gives me a PO box for free). A kind human gets my packages from the back and hands them to me. It's great and efficient. The only inconvenience is the hours are a little narrow.
Conversely the last step to the door is as complicated as it is since till recently there was no plausible middle ground. You would always be sending out couriers so no real improvements in cost could be made.
But if you can get a drone or a robot most of the way there, that changes incentives.
I would personally love there to be a regulated, standard design for parcel drop off: but there isn't one. Not yet, and no human delivery will use anything I devise properly.
But if nonhuman delivery would, well now everyone looking at new motivation.
If you remember that hotel chain Sonder which went bankrupt last year, they had a zero-local-employees model: no front-desk, outsourced maintenance and housekeeping. I think they made the same mistake. Your typical interaction with the hotel receptionist is extremely formulaic. Many other hotels have replaced the sign-in process at least with a machine. That's most prominent in your mind, so its easy to assume that's where most of the value comes from.
At least in the UK, Sonder also wasn’t cheap and some of their properties left a bit to be desired. Plus there were often people (staff) sat in the reception anyway, so I don’t really understand what they were doing or there for, or where the supposed benefit of their no-reception model comes from.
I’d far rather speak to a real person and have some interaction when I’m travelling than mindlessly do everything through my phone and an app. I actively seek that. What we perceive as “the future” in terms of our phones as the interface undoes the basic social fabric that has developed over thousands of years. I’ve had some of the best conversations with random hotel receptionists - and isn’t it these secondary connections over the course of our days with people we’re unlikely to meet or socialise with again that can really help us feel better connected to society?
Yeah. Usually I don't need the receptionist, but part of the value of a hotel is that I know I could go to the receptionist and get any problems sorted out, if I had to
If I wanted a no-touch experience with no other human in sight or on standby, I'd just get an airbnb
Agreed, that's the single biggest discriminator between the two (now that airbnbs are no longer cheaper than hotels). You can automate check-in/check-out but you NEED a front desk with at least one person.
A lot of hotels nowadays automate check-in and check-out completely. I stayed at Henna Hotel in Japan which genuinely has nobody at the front desk (although it does have an animatronic dinosaur which bows to you), and wondered how I would have them hold my luggage prior to check-in. They'd thought of that - they had a bunch of free lockers in reception.
I've been to staffless hotels (numa) that were good and noticeably more affordable than their neighbors. I don't know if the housekeeping was outsourced though, I imagine that, without at least some local management staff, conditions would deteriorate rapidly.
I had a particularly bad experience with a hotel in Silicon Valley that had outsourced the front desk duties to remote workers. I was stuck outside in the rain, fighting a bad internet connection, trying to check-in. Probably saved them the space taken up by a front desk inside the hotel but I made a mental note never to use that hotel chain again.
I'll be the contrarian and take the opposing position: this story -- the doorman fallacy itself, ignores the obvious counter-narrative:
- physical menus are hard to update
- physical menus are often too simple, requiring asking the server questions they've answered a dozen times before already, hurting their efficiency, or they are book-sized and hard to navigate.
- physical menus aren't cleaned between uses, so you're touching everything the server touched, and the three people before you.
- physical menus don't scale: if the restaurant is busy, you might have to share.
- physical menus require more human time for the host/server to provide them to you.
- physical menus aren't searchable.
- Difficulty scanning the QR code *will* get better over time, obviously.
- Having to take turns is a user issue: it ignores how QR codes work (you don't have to be that close) and people will get used to it.
- (edit to add) issues with divvying up the bill are software issues that will get better over time if demand is there. Does the author really think getting the server to split the bill is easier?
The Doorman Fallacy in general presents only one side of the issue, which is perfectly reasonable for the creator of the fallacy to do, but puts on us the requirement of considering the other side:
- Having "a doorman" means having someone less than 1/4th of the time, or staffing 5 people (more like 6 since with 5 someone has to schedule/supervise).
- When the doorman takes a break, no one gets in?
- Some doormen go above and beyond, and are truly a joy to have around. Others are less so. Counting on the doorman being awesome is unfair to doormen in general.
- An automated system is on 24/7 -- maybe not in the early days, technology isn't perfect, but how many people here remember the early days of cell phones, when you *called support to get refunds for dropped calls*?
- An automated system can add or remove people from the authorized list easily and remotely, and not make mistakes.
I find physical menus much easier to search personally - I can "time slice" switching my attention around different parts of the menu fairly easily and home in on which I might want.
It's clear how much menu there is to sort through. If I want to pick something for someone else (e.g. my daughter), there's clear sign posting to what's available.
Often the digital menus I get linked to are either just a PDF of the paper menu (in which case, I'm viewing it at phone window size rather than full A4) or it's a website with nesting in different ways, so you're not sure if you've seen everything or not.
I agree with a lot of this. Sometimes it is easier to scan a code, zoom until the text is at the desired level, and scroll around the menu rather than opening a large leather book with tiny writing in a dimly lit restaurant.
Going to PAY with the QR code feels a little worse. I went out with some friends and I planned to pay cash, the waitress came over to tell us all that we should pay using the QR code on our receipts - missed me, and I had to wait 5 minutes to let them know I was using cash. My friends didn't have much trouble, but we're all younger folks so we are used to pulling up Apple Pay or whatever. I imagine some people do not enjoy that experience.
I will say that there is this inherent disdain towards automated systems, and I feel it's warranted - to a degree. Some experiences are improved with automation, others are stifled. Sometimes we just want to talk to other people who understand our problems.
* the primary vector of contagion is unfiltered air circulation, not touching tables and menus (which are wiped down).
* I want you to go and tell another human being, in person, that paper menus cannot possibly 'scale'. Your brain has been deeply addled by SV culture.
* HUMAN TIME IS THE POINT AT A SIT DOWN PLACE, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
* YOU HAVE YOUR HUMAN EYES FOR 'SEARCH'
* QR CODE SCANNING IS NOT "GETTING BETTER" WHAT DO YOU EVEN MEAN BY THIS ASSERTION??
* OLDER PEOPLE AND PEOPLE WITHOUT SMARTPHONES WILL NOT "GET USED TO IT"
* "if demand is there" IT IS, HOW CAN YOU ACT LIKE IT IS NOT, DO YOU NOT HAVE DINNER WITH FRIENDS?? ARE YOU NEW TO THIS PLANET?
An automated system is on 24/7 -- maybe not in the early days, technology isn't perfect, but how many people here remember the early days of cell phones, when you *called support to get refunds for dropped calls*?
Are you daft? I've entered hundreds of buildings in NYC with varieties of automated systems from the 70's to the 2020's and 95% of them are dogshit and there's no sign they are 'getting better'. Most are nigh impossible to use on bright sunny days because of the glare obscuring the addresses. Many are broken. Your 'contrarian' arguments are just counterfactual to anyone who has lived on this planet for a number of years.
An automated system can add or remove people from the authorized list easily and remotely, and not make mistakes.
Deeply, hilariously fallacious. Tell someone you love that 'automated' systems 'never makes mistakes' and see how much traction that argument gets.
These are absurd positions, invented solely for the purpose of being contrarian and not because any of them make any sense or add any value to the conversation. I'm so tired of this thoughtless, tired crap passing as legitimate discussion.
> physical menus are hard to update
It is not hard to print a few sheets of paper off a word document.
> physical menus are often too simple, requiring asking the server questions they've answered a dozen times before already, hurting their efficiency, or they are book-sized and hard to navigate.
None of this is solved in an online menu, and no one is concerned about server "efficiency", whatever that means. Have you ever eaten out?
> physical menus aren't cleaned between uses, so you're touching everything the server touched, and the three people before you.
They are often wiped down, but it's interesting you think your phone is cleaner.
> physical menus don't scale: if the restaurant is busy, you might have to share.
Of course they do. You just... print more.
> physical menus require more human time for the host/server to provide them to you.
What? In a normal restaurant, someone is seating you, anyways. Putting 4 menus on the table is not adding time. If they are not seating you, you are ordering at a counter. If neither of those are true, leave a handful of menus with the napkins.
> physical menus aren't searchable.
The browser patten for finding things on my cell phone is so deeply unintuitive that this is as silly as pretending that a menu isn't literally designed to help you find what you want. Do you think menus are just a bunch of ingredients printed at random on the page? Do you think you are the only person who's ever considered UI?
> Does the author really think getting the server to split the bill is easier?
It is vastly easier for the user/customer. How is this a question?
The assumption that I'm just being contrarian is inaccurate and a bit rude.
To respond to just one or two items:
Printing is no longer as easy as it once was. I bought an ink jet printer a few weeks back because my wife needs to print. Setting it up took an hour, and it had streaks out of the box. I spent fifteen minutes figuring out how to clean the print heads, we'll see if that worked.
I don't understand your comment on searching. It is literally true there is no "search" for physical menus -- only human scanning. And browsers do have a search function. If it's unintuitive, that's a universal problem that can be improved.
I didn't say splitting the bill is not easier for the customer. I said it's not easier, because I was including the server's effort. And your discounting of the server's effort is unfortunate. In a world where the orders are placed through a QR-code/web site, individual payment can be easy and accurate. If it isn't, it will improve.
You make some good points but some are, excuse me, cringey-wrong.
> physical menus are hard to update
How often does a restaurant update a menu? Those that need to update frequently already solved that by having a chalk board.
> physical menus are often too simple, requiring asking the server questions they've answered a dozen times before already, hurting their efficiency...
How does a digital menu solve this? All online menus I've used have basically the same amount of information as a printed menu, with some being marginally better. The marginally better ones are the online menus for food delivery because they have a bit more flavor text, pun intended. This is however offset by restaurant-owners' tendency to put unrepresentative stock photo to go with the item and they just put a disclaimer about the photos somewhere.
> physical menus aren't cleaned between uses, so you're touching everything the server touched, and the three people before you.
Ok but please wash your hands after you order at the earliest and before you touch your food at the latest.
> physical menus aren't searchable.
Fair but only thanks to `Ctrl + F`, the best menu search interface by a mile.
> Difficulty scanning the QR code will get better over time, obviously.
I'm starting a prediction market if this will happen before or after Tesla FSD.
> it ignores how QR codes work (you don't have to be that close)
Uhhh...what? The farthest I could scan a QR code is about two handspans away. This was from the original Google Pixel! It was remarkably good at catching QR codes, I have no idea why. I thought it was the moment scanning a QR code has finally gotten better(!) so imagine my disappointment when my subsequent phones (even one Google Pixel 3a) couldn't live up to it. The 3a was still better than others. Even with flagship models, you gotta be pretty close to scan QRs not to mention wait for the exposure and focus to adjust.
(Whoever tells me "cameras can zoom now dummy" has never actually scanned a QR code from afar with the camera zoom lens. When you zoom, the exposure changes AND it becomes _super_ motion sensitive which is, obviously, not great for scanning things.)
> Does the author really think getting the server to split the bill is easier?
I am not the author but yes I do think so. Server has the table's bill in front of him and a calculator, each tells him what they had and pay in turn. Et voila.
Splitting the bill inconveniences comes down to a couple of factors IME:
1. the customers know what they had but don't know the price so they have to leaf through the menu again to calculate.
2. the table is provided with only one copy of the bill so the group has to scramble over one measly piece of paper, talking over each other, to compute their share.
Both can be solved by centralizing all that complexity on the waiter.
To be fair, I think the author's bad experience was due to wanting to keep the apple crumble gesture a secret. That is such a bizarre complaint, bro. It doesn't make sense to me either! You're all in a restaurant, everyone knows all the food will be paid for by someone! Why keep it a secret that you paid for the apple crumble?
> How often does a restaurant update a menu? Those that need to update frequently already solved that by having a chalk board.
One advantage of a digital ordering system: it can track inventory and mark a dish as unavailable after N have been ordered.
Some restaurants might have menu updates in the middle of service quite frequently, if they have a daily special with a fixed quantity. Most restaurants probably have an unavailable dish occasionally. Or if a beverage choice becomes unavailable, or a new beer is put on tap.
I don’t think ease of menu updates would be the deciding factor for any restaurant, I think it’s more likely to be based on the experience they want their customers to have
There’s a pub near me that offers dozens of different craft beers. If you ask them for a menu, they will literally print a new, updated menu on the spot, reflecting what they have available at that exact moment.
Does this really demonstrate what the author thinks it does? Other than menus, none of this was really easier before technology.
- Parking meters: you'd have to remember when yours would expire and manually check your watch (if you brought one!) regularly. If you needed more time, you'd have to leave the table to go to the meter to extend it... or leave your event early.
- Splitting a bill: this is notoriously difficult with medium groups [0]. Servers generally dislike split bills, even if you go to the trouble of listing the exact amounts to charge per card. It's also not just a tech problem, but a social problem as well.
Yes the technology involved could be better -- ideally you can easily extend a parking meter from your phone, ideally the app for splitting the bill works well and supports more complicated (but common) scenarios.
To clarify, the Doorman Fallacy is about the Doorman doing more than their job actually seems. The Doorman isn't just a greeter, but they are checking that the right people are coming in, they are going to report issues that patrons pass onto them, they check that the UPS guy is actually from UPS, they're the first to notice damage to the property, they call the police if they see a crime happening in the area, and so on. These are things that aren't obviously in their job but things the doorman will actually do.
But I generally agree with the OP here. We have these "high tech" solutions that actually just complicate things. I'm upset that our community pushes for "good enough" and "no elegance". Everyone's definition of these things are different so they're just thought terminating cliches, not some beneficial insights. They're just mindless parroting.
I think part of the problem is engineers aren't being engineers. For some reason engineers are focusing on the monetary value of the thing being built rather than the actual utility to the user. There needs to be a firewall between marketing and engineering. Engineers focus on utility (utility over value) while marketers focus on the inverse. The contention is a feature, not a bug. But now we don't implement single line solutions that solve annoyances that millions of people have because "what's the value?" People are just being killed by a million paper cuts. It's unbearable. We seem to have forgotten that one is the great beauties of computing is scale. This action might cost a customer 1 second, but if you have a million users that's sure a lot of seconds. Seconds they're using on your servers and devices. Those seconds add up, especially as it's not just one program that's adding an extra second, it is a hundred.
We waste a lot of time and money because we don't look at the whole picture
Taking the restaurant ordering app, it’s certainly better than a server. Each individual picks what they want and pays for what they got on their own bill. It removes any chance of communication error between the customer and the kitchen. Appetizers to share easily split across who wanted them. No bill splitting discussions. OP just had to use a bad implementation.
You act like machines are perfect. Machines glitch and have all sorts of problems. They're usually inflexible because programmed by the lowest bidder. You could argue about implementation but that is also true for human servers too
The article does not clarity whether the OP ordered via the app. Only that the menus were accessible via a QR code.
OP either ordered in person after looking at the online menu (no app) or ordered via the app/website but the system bundled together the bill for the whole table despite receiving separate orders (bad implementation).
In theory yes, though as time has gone on I've found they're becoming increasingly aggravating for one reason or another. Either broken pages and functions for no discernible reason, ever more aggressive marketing and behavior manipulation, or other things that maybe other people like but I do not (for example, forcing me to log in with a "magic link" that magically seems to fail half the time), which has made me just give up instead of finishing and not go back.
A friend of mine passionately believes engineers need an equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath to guide our morals and principles about what we should and shouldn’t build.
I get the QR code menu thing, that’s a solid example imo (though there ARE benefits to QR code menus), but the people hassling with their phones to extend their parking, or paying for their portion of the meal via QR code doesn’t sound at all like the doorman fallacy, just a shitty UI.
Without tech, these people would not have been notified that their parking would expire in the first place, and would have all had to leave the restaurant to extend their parking. Is that really better?
And splitting the bill among six people is an age old hassle that definitely has gotten better with tech at places who have a good UI for handling it.
A popular solution in my country, at least for less formal restaurants and bars (and even nightclubs) is for each customer to have their own tab, which gets marked by waiters and stays with the customer. In those places, it's also the norm that you pay your tab at the cashier prior to leaving, and waiters don't have to handle with money.
What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.
It's the same thing with sending parcels, where I must now sit on my computer at home filling in a complicated online form and printing out my own labels. This takes me like 30 minutes, but saves time and money for the Post Office (not for me!)
There's no downside for the company here, especially when they are monopolies so we have no choice.
Sure, but you're not taking into account how much it costs the company.
This is the definition of "penny wise, pound foolish". Nothing is really "free"
Here's a good example: you know how every terminal begs for tips? And the percentage is increasing? (In San Jose I saw by middle number as 25%!!). It looks free, but guess what, I'm more likely to not come back and press "no tip" or enter a custom amount. The cost is the aggregation of these events but we just mindlessly set these values rather than testing. (Or just you know... caring about people and thinking about how you feel as a customer)
There's biases too and biases accumulate. Piss off enough people and they never come back. They tell people not to go there. This happens even if another restaurant goes too far. People just get fed up with "eating out" rather than just eating at one restaurant. That exhaustion accumulates, especially in times like this where money is getting tighter for most people
Or the supermarkets who replaced checkouts with customer self-service under the guise of convenience, and now subject us to more surveillance capitalism to try to protect their losses given people don’t feel so bad about stealing from a machine than a human.
Don't forget self check out at the grocery store. I don't mind personally (I find ways to make it worth my while..) but it's a version of the same thing. Shifting labor under the guise of convenience. Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer. It's rare that the opposite happens.
My supermarket has the handheld scanners and they are a game changer. They fit handily into the trolley if you want and you just scan stuff as you go. If you want 8 of something, you can just tap the item and increase the quantity, none of the having to scan each one and add it carefully to the bagging area, etc... And best of all, at the end you just scan a self checkout screen (and they have special ones as well with no bagging area and no queue, but you can use the normal ones if the queue is shorter), so you scan the screen, click pay, click pay by card and hold your card on the machine. Done. Takes about 15 seconds all in, and the queues on those machines are basically non-existant as a result.
Best of all is that you put your stuff directly into your bags as you're shopping so there's no frantic packing stage.
Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.
> you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.
Well, not exactly. I saved a bundle of money inadvertently in a Decathlon in São Paulo. I read the instructions, but didn't understand the Portuguese completely. I dumped a ton of purchases into the bin, watched the screen scroll through the items, and paid the bill. When I got home I realized that I'd only been billed for about half the items. Next time I was there, I read the instructions more carefully and discovered that they said to put the items in the bin one by one
> Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.
Uniqlo too. I guess it helps that they own their entire manufacturing and retail process.
And usually they have a dedicated checkout aisle so you don’t have to wait for the Boomers in front of you to pay in pennies or whatever it is they do to snarl a queue up.
Eh. This "Boomer" uses his Apple Watch, usually. I tend to blow through in about five seconds. I usually have the stuff paid for, before the cashier stops ringing them up.
I deliberately use the manned checkout, because I'm human, and I believe in helping out other humans. That seems to be a "quaint anachronism," these days, but it's the way this old fogey was raised.
I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human.
Sometimes, I chuckle, as I go through fairly quickly, and see the long line, waiting for the auto-cashiers.
It's obvious that the only benefit comes to the company. If you aren't just getting a candy bar, then the auto-cashier tends to be slower (mainly because I am a lot slower at that stuff, than the cashier).
It's actually not possible to close the transaction before finalizing the items to be added to it. Generally as far as tap is concerned the pinpad won't go into the mode where it can collect money until the cashier totals it. It is actually possible depending on the software to go back to a prior screen after the pinpad has registered a tap and make a change and depending on timing have the original tap still go through but this is a weird edge case not the expected flow.
Drives me crazy watching people ahead of me try to do this. If the transaction hasn't been completed what precisely do they or indeed you think you are paying for again like handing the store an electronic blank check? I agree to pay...whatever the total ends up being!
No, it's often quite possible to scan the watch while the transaction is still open (depends on the store; not all of them support that). The payment method is still open, and is closed by the cashier.
Yeah, it's "trusting" the store, but it has never resulted in unwanted charges. I do it for the person in line behind me. I can afford it, if there was to be an issue, and the service desk is about ten feet away.
In Japan, they make a ceremony of giving you your goods before accepting payment.
It's an edge case most hardware doesn't expose the ability to start charging you until the cashier totals it.
The only exception is that with some hardware/software is that within a narrow window it may be possible to go back and make a change after putting the pinpad in payment mode.
Remember the pinpad is a second computer not a peripheral.
I have never in decades of paying for things ever seen a checkout where you can tap right away.
> I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human.
Just hit the 'I need help' button on the self-checkout and an employee will show up and you can ask them to ring up your items.
Yeah, I wouldn't do that. The self-checkout actually works fairly well.
The reason that I insist on using the manned lanes, has nothing to do with being uncomfortable with the automated process (I know that it may seem that way, with my gray pompadour, but I'm actually fairly comfortable with tech). It's just because I know that the reason the store uses them, is to fire cashiers, and it's sort of a "stay with them until the end" kind of thing, in my mind.
Like I said, not really the way people think, these days. We tend to be extremely selfish. I participate in an organization that encourages us to adopt a mindset that takes other peoples' existence into account. It's really just symbolic, I know, but I do it for myself; not for others. I feel that symbols are important.
Home Depot self checkouts are large touch screens with a nice wireless gun. It doesn't even check weight. It is one of the least shitty SCO experiences unless you have a bunch of bolts and shit in which case why are you even in self checkout when they always have at least one physical register open?
Agree. Home Depot ones are quite effective. The only sand in the gears, is that, if I use my business card, it always asks me for a job number. It's possible that this is something that contractors appreciate, but they have separate, manned, lanes for them.
The ones that truly suck (in my area) are the CVS ones. They have a glass jaw, and it's quite easy to make a mistake that requires the exasperated attendant to come over, and get it unstuck.
That has nothing at all to do with the person using the machine, and everything to do with the geeks that wrote the software. Whenever I see someone (regardless of their age or "digital native" status) struggling with tech, I blame the designers; not the user.
In my experience, if we want to design stuff to be used by humans, then it starts with getting comfortable with our own humanity. Empathy is useful, when designing stuff.
If we don't like people, then we're unlikely to design stuff that people like to use.
For those who might be curious, The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman, is an excellent book for getting in touch with empathetic design.
We don't have home depot, but most self-checkout tills in the UK have scales and a separate bag weighing area. You can usually do everything at the till, but they also have scales and barcode printers around the loose fruit and veg areas too (and you have to print a barcode to scan if you're using the portable scan gun thing I mentioned earlier).
> Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer.
Grocery stores (at least here in the UK) are notoriously low margin and have been for a long time. I think this is the one sector where savings are indeed passed on to the customer.
I'm not sure what labour is being shifted onto me that I wasn't already doing here. I already had to bag my groceries and swipe my card. Scanning items can be done in a single motion while bagging, so the overhead is non-existent to me.
Meanwhile, self-checkout removes a bottleneck in that there are now more places to check out, meaning I have to wait less and thus spend less time shopping. So all in all, no more labour done, and yet my time is saved. I call that a win-win.
If you sample the supermarkets around you, you'll notice some will focus more on customer service. They will have all cash registers staffed and no lines or small lines. Other super markets will have few registers staffed and big self-checkout areas.
The supermarkets focusing on self checkout do so because their owners have calculated that the increase in theft is offset by their savings on salaries. They consider honest customers to be suckers who will pay for what the thieves steal. With time, these supermarkets start seeing an increase in thieving customers and a decrease in higher value honest customers. And it starts the downward spiral with worse and worse clientele and just becoming unkept in general. Once this has started, owners will just try to squeeze out as much as possible before selling the property.
> If you sample the supermarkets around you, you'll notice some will focus more on customer service. They will have all cash registers staffed and no lines or small lines. Other super markets will have few registers staffed and big self-checkout areas.
There are at least 20 grocery stores within a 3 km radius of me. I think one has more than 2 checkout lines if you don't count self-checkouts (and I've never seen more than two of them be staffed at any one time). The next closest one one I can think of is at a big shopping centre 5 km away, and even then, it used to have 8, 4 of which have been converted to 18(?) self-checkouts.
Not to mention that whatever this customer service supposedly provided to me in a normal checkout is something I don't want. I see no labour saved by going that route, but I see time saved in many cases when I opt for the self-checkout. Not to mention the bonus of not having to talk to a human.
It's like customer service in anything else. If I need it, something has gone wrong, and I direct my business somewhere else next time. Before self-checkout, customer service was mandatory to do anything. Now I don't need it. I fail to see any disadvantages (to me at least).
> Not to mention the bonus of not having to talk to a human.
This you will have in due time when you enter the eternal sleep. In the meanwhile, life is to be enjoyed.
Regarding supermarkets I guess I'm lucky then, because I have supermarkets nearby focusing on customer service with many cashiers. And they are absolutely ten times faster at scanning my groceries than I would be, since it's their job and they do it all day. Usually they have baggers as well, even though I don't mind bagging my groceries.
So to me as a customer it's quicker, more pleasant, and the biggest bonus of all is that it provides jobs for the local community, including jobs for young people as grocery baggers. That's something I'm very glad to support with my grocery buying buck. Instead of having that money go to pay for the groceries that other people steal in the self checkout.
> This you will have in due time when you enter the eternal sleep.
I already look forward to that a lot more than most people think I should.
> life is to be enjoyed.
I never really figured out how to do that reliably.
> Usually they have baggers as well, even though I don't mind bagging my groceries.
If they have baggers, that would be a genuine advantage. I've literally only seen them in films though (unless you want to count really tiny stores where the cashier will also bag for you).
As things are though, I have to bag myself, and that's the main bottleneck, so even if the cashier can scan more quickly than me, that doesn't actually make the whole process go any faster. Scanning at the self-checkout is marginally slower than just bagging, but in my case at least, it's usually just a case of swiping an item past the scanner, hearing the beep, and putting it a bag. Some items have barcodes in weird places, but if they're items you frequently buy, you quickly figure that out.
> and the biggest bonus of all is that it provides jobs for the local community, including jobs for young people as grocery baggers.
I'm not sure this really should be as much of an advantage as it might be. Sure, them bagging groceries is better than nothing, but the fact that the alternative is nothing is what should be fixed in that case, rather than having them do jobs that are mindless busywork, or just barely above that (not that I have anything against them. If you want to be a bagger, go for it, good for you, but I'd quickly become even more suicidal than I already am). Sadly, we're apparently not quite ready to have that conversation yet.
A job is not a persons identity or destiny. The world has long ago moved on from the paradigm that the first job you do is where you stay for the rest of your life.
The baggers in my local supermarket are high schoolers getting some extra money, while probably studying. It's good for them to learn the basics of what it means to do a job, and be exposed to other people in the community except for psychotic screeching teachers or TikTok brain rot. It's still good that these jobs exist, even if grown ups are doing them. It might be somebody who is between other stuff, or needs some extra cash because of changes in life situation, or for some reason isn't at the moment capable to do another job.
More jobs are always more better, no matter what the jobs are, because it puts firm upwards pressure on other salaries. Bagging groceries is an easy job, so it pressures every other job which is worse to pay better. Otherwise your potential employee will say "I'll just bag groceries instead, if you don't pay me better".
Yeah. It's just the place you spend 8 hours every day.
Imagine the job instead was digging holes (not for any actual purpose. Just digging and filling in holes so that people could 'have a job'). Would you be saying the same things?
Bagging is at least an actual service, but it's not far away in my mind.
I've had worse jobs which were 16 hour days. But then the pay was better. Anyway, these are high school kids, so I don't think they're working full days, with school and everything.
By the way: If you'd like some cheering up, shoot me an e-mail (from my profile). Things don't have to be hard, and most of the times solutions to our problems is much easier than they seem, but gets ignored because we think it has to be hard.
Blaming this individual for 'accelerating the descent' is like blaming a hobo for catching a ride on a runaway train going downhill. The ensuing trainwreck is already inevitable, at least you can get part of a ride out of it!
The trainwreck is only "inevitable" (which, incidentally, it isn't, but put that aside for now) because of individuals making choices that benefit them personally at the expense of the common good.
I agree with everything you're saying, except it's a handful of individuals. The top .000001% are responsible for 90% of the acceleration of the train. You can hardly blame someone for not paying for a tomato.
I don’t believe there’s any evidence whatsoever for that, and I refuse to adopt that kind of loser mindset, where the agency of 99.999999% of people don’t matter at all to how our culture and civilization develops.
so, essentially, you and the other commenter are arguing whether it is everyone that has a little fault for being naughty, or is it just a couple of psychos who are fucking everyone else over.
but even if it was just a couple of psychos that were responsible, it'd be hard to justify stealing from the grocery store, because you are not guaranteed to do damage to the psychos directly -- maybe what'll happen instead is that the grocery store employees will not get a nice raise due to the decreased revenue.
and this is why i think actions of this type are so dangerous to society. it's hard to find who is the victim and who is the criminal. so people feel like they are a victim a little, and then justified in being the criminal in a crime with invisible victims anyway. and so society degrades more and more in a vicious cycle and more people give up. it's disgraceful.
Those grocery store employees [at a national chain supermarket] were not going to get a nice raise regardless, and petty theft is either already accounted for or covered by insurance.
One outcome I can see though, is that if enough is skimmed off the top through self-checkout, then maybe the beancounters will realize that self-checkout isn't as 'efficient' as they thought, and will reinstitute human checkers.
Just like how we hope that the hotel that laid off the doorman eventually realizes their mistake and hires him back.
Using this alleged “pattern recognition” as an excuse for learned helplessness, and justifying theft from other victims of these top 0.000001% (if you believe that) is absolutely a loser mindset, yes.
You're confused. Either the world is one way or it isn't. Simply deciding it isn't might make you feel like a Chad but it doesn't make you any less of a fucking idiot. I know you think you can will meritocracy and the glorious principles of Democracy into existence and that's really cute, I'm sure it helps you get through each day, but recognizing that it's cope doesn't make you a loser.
It seems like you're saying that it's fine to steal and otherwise victimize people because "meritocracy and the glorious principles of democracy" are, in your view, dead. What a sad worldview. I hope you find some peace.
It's people being dishonest that makes self checkout slower, with it having to verify the weight of everything. Some stores are higher trust and lack this, which makes it so much faster and smoother.
You don’t need a deep dive to see supermarket consolidation that keeps happening year after year. When there is less competition to drive down prices, it is very safe to say to assume that consumers will get less and less surplus for any change a grocery makes.
I love self checkout, let me scan what I want, not stand in a line with people who seemingly don't know what they're doing or don't have cash or their credit card declines etc.
Depends on the store. The one I go to, most people don't seem to want to use the self-checkout lanes, meaning I benefit from using it because I don't have to spend 5 minutes waiting in line behind three or four people. (Three or four people at each of the dozen checkout lanes, that is; it's a largish store). So instead, I go to the self-checkout lanes and get out of the store faster. Shifting labor to the customer? Perhaps, but the convenience is real, and I'm quite willing to do that small amount of work because what I get in return is five extra minutes at home with my wife and kids.
I actively refuse to use self checkout. A number of stores have reported customers to the police for incorrect scanning. These are honest mistakes and you're now "a know shoplifter". I primarily work with companies that require a clean record, that includes "No shoplifting".
Self checkout is taking away cashier jobs, annoying to use and comes with an uacceptable risk to me as the customer.
> A number of stores have reported customers to the police for incorrect scanning. These are honest mistakes and you're now "a know shoplifter". I primarily work with companies that require a clean record, that includes "No shoplifting".
This sounds more like a 'horrible store' and 'authoritarian police' problem than a self-checkout problem.
Sadly it's happening in a number of stores, so I'm not taking the chance. One issue might be that so many are actually using the self checkouts to steal, that the stores just assume that's the reason and not leaving much rooms for honest mistakes.
It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway, because of items that fail to scan or discounts not being applied.
> It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway
I don't think I've needed to call staff for when using the self-checkout in years (ignoring the random spot checks, but those are rare and very quick), so this also sounds like 'horrible store' to me, with them opting to use dogshit hardware or software that makes it so people need help all the time. Then again, I don't buy tobacco or alcohol, and outside of that I probably end up in a happy median with my shopping, where I don't trigger any safety and security limits, so my experience might be overly positive just because the system never suspects me.
I understand that somewhere is Australia is a supermarket which appears to be generating its own carrots in that it sells far more carrots than ever arrive, but is a black hole for parsnips; the store should be exploding with parsnips given the difference between amount delivered and amount sold, yet mysteriously there's just the one bin of parsnips visible.
I love self checkout. It's usually significantly faster and I can keep busy rather than waiting (I still bag when I use a cashier). I can do shenanigans like do three transactions so I can use a coupon three times separately, without bothering anyone. They're an example of the benefits going to both parties.
Not in my experience, because the self-checkouts have to be designed for untrusted users instead of trusted employees. So I spend more time reacting to "please scan item" -> "place item in bagging area" -> "unexpected item in bagging area" -> wait for employee to notice that my checkout needs an override.
Whereas a manned checkout lane gives me a proper belt to put my items on and someone who can usually operate a terminal fairly quickly.
> No web form can ever be worse than doing stuff over the phone like we’re still in the 19th Century.
Yes, it can. Last year I challenged a Zoomer to try to order from the local ramen place for pickup. They were in and out in well under a minute, including looking up the phone number on Google Maps, whereas Uber Eats would still be loading... and scrolling... Sorry, updating, please stay tuned... Would you like to sign up for Uber Unlimited? ... [do I need to keep doing the gag] ... selecting... wait where did the list go... wait did the one selection take ... ordering ... you have rewards! ... confirmation ... etc They were shocked how much better the experience was. As compared to [paste number, wait 10s] 'Hello?' 'X Ramen, how can I help you?' 'I'd like A ramen and B ramen and C to go, please, name, Alice and Bob.' 'OK. Goodbye.' Even counting the register swipe on pickup to pay, it's night and day. And that is how a web form can be way worse than doing stuff over the phone, because a web form can just get worse and worse and worse - and they do.
> What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.
It doesn't miss it. The whole framing of the article is the Dooman Fallacy - an organisation trying to save money by shifting [apparently] menial work to the customer ends up losing more than they save.
> What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.
What? No, you're making the Doorman fallacy here, explicitly.
The company THINKS they're saving money by pushing the work to the customer/end user, but there's more to wait staff than just taking orders and payment - they provide the ability to smooth over any difficulties experienced during the meal, they signal status, etc, which would theoretically allow the restaurant to charge more than if they force customers to do all this work themselves.
Not to mention, if I had an experience this miserable at a restaurant, I wouldn't be back, which is a direct loss in revenue.
Restaurants aren't monopolies, except in really extreme cases.
I wouldn't go to a restaurant that used QR codes twice. But I can't go to a different supermarket as there's only one in a reasonable distance away, or use another train line, or avoid a government form.
Yes. If you create a straw man, you're very convincing. The real world isn't a static snapshot though. If people are unhappy enough with existing businesses, they will find alternatives or new businesses will see opportunities. Or you can move to a place with the type of businesses you prefer.
Someone giving a pretty basic idea a catchy name like the doorman fallacy doesn't mean that any replacement of humans with automation is a net loss for the company. Lots of automation can be very profitable, even if some positive things are lost in the bargain.
Incidentally, the vast, vast majority of residential buildings don't have doormen, and wouldn't be more profitable by the addition of one.
Isn't it named after the hypothetical scenario about a doorman? The doorman fallacy isn't even specifically aimed at what is more profitable, its just saying that there are softer roles that aren't well defined that aren't replicated when the role is automated away.
That fact doesn’t make it a fallacy. The fallacy part is the idea that the people choosing to automate that job are just stupid and ignorant, and don’t understand what the job really is. Which I’m sure is true for some automation, but doormen are a terrible example.
I don’t know which country you’re in (and don’t disagree with you) but even if the estimate of 30 minutes to shipping labels were accurate, that would still be a net win where I am in Texas - the line at the post office is regularly longer than that.
Because staffing can/has be/been reduced since they made it possible for people to print their own labels. They aren't interested in making the queues faster.
> that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.
And somehow things are more expensive than ever. Self checkouts, order at the counter, bussing your own table, assembling your own furniture, filling out your or your pet’s medical history at a hospital, shipping labels (you mentioned this) and so much more. It’s a form of free labor that somehow society is okay with.
When I hear arguments like this I feel compelled to point out that the people running these businesses live in the same world as you.
I don't know how old you are or if you remember, but the examples you gave used to be the most common sources of complaints, delays, refunds, etc. when the employee would do a shitty job (fairly often). The world of the past really was objectively worse.
Ahh yes, having someone to wait tables at a restaurant, someone to scan and bag groceries, someone to take your medical history, having furniture already assembled etc. was really objectively worse.
Also known as the person who mistook your order, put the eggs in the same bag as something heavy, or messed up your chart. Flat-pack furniture is a different topic since that's always been a budget product.
Unless you think sitcom writers of the past were part of a conspiracy, people clearly argued about this then just as we do now.
I think the only difference is that we have managed to weasel in politics somehow. It's worth questioning where you get these ideas about "free labor". Obsoleting a job is not necessarily nefarious nor did it even mean anyone got laid off. It's ultimately a tradeoff that has to be more than mere cost cutting for it to succeed.
You’re equating ocasional inconveniences to what the entire experience was. I could also point to the current setup and say the same.
The times I scan in self checkout and the machine malfunctions, needing a manager. The times I added the medical history myself but the nurse/doctor missed it because they themselves weren’t taking it. Every single time I have to walk back and forth during a meal because I now serve my own table.
I’ve had to wait for help at a self checkout more times than I’ve had my eggs broken. It’s worth questioning why you’re so eager to defend corporations making you work for free.
A lot of this reads like you don’t like to deal with people because you think people, especially in the service industry are incompetent and are wrong majority of the time.
> equating ocasional inconveniences to what the entire experience was
This was highly dependent on the neighborhood you lived in. It still is to some extent. Full service is still around, but I wouldn't expect that in "the bad parts of town". You do not want those people doing those jobs, but now we're really heading somewhere politically incorrect and touching on systemic inequality.
What's the point of discussing this if you're going to insist on reading everything in bad faith? You know very well I'm speaking from experience. Go ask anyone else who lived in that kind of place at that time. It's where the run down Walmart and McDonald's still are. That's where self-checkout was born.
You are trying to advocate for the disadvantaged who might work those kinds of jobs longer term, yet you don't understand those people. You do not understand the valid concerns of the shoppers at those stores either who had little alternative. You're complaining about self-checkout, but it's the same machines they worked with for at or near minimum wage. The way you get angry is the way they'd get angry too after a full day of that every day. As I said, you do not want those people doing that job.
I don't regret any of what I said, but I regret adding to yet more of this noise on HN. I tried to have productive conflict by sharing my perspective, but there's no substance left here.
> It’s a form of free labor that somehow society is okay with.
It's very popular to say this in some places, but wouldn't you expect that the money that businesses are saving when they do this is passed along to the customer in lower prices? Since they're competing with other businesses?
When your grocery store gets a self checkout, do you see your grocery bills go down? What ends up happening is that the grocery store makes more profit, the other stores notice and they too get rid of self checkouts. Your grocery bill remains the same, you are more inconvenienced but all of their profits go up.
Yeah sure. That's the logic that elects Mamdani. Maybe you're confused because instead of going down, prices increased less than they otherwise would have.
Economics happens on the margins where the reality is that store A reduces its costs and lowers its prices to compete with Store B. Or are you paying $100 for a jar of peanut butter?
Ehh. Corporate profits are at all time highs. The idea that somehow if corporations replace workers or pay them less, will somehow ensure we see smaller price increases as consumers is the fallacy that’s brought us here in the first place. Trying to make this a political discussion is pointless.
In-n-out hires a large staff and pays people well, and somehow their hamburger is still $3 and top quality. The same time when every other fast food chain is charging restaurant prices. Costco hires plenty of staff and pays them well, their prices are some of the lowest in the country. Meanwhile Walmart, target etc. are always understaffed and somehow still more expensive.
We were told that $20 minimum wage would make our McDonalds burgers to be $100 (like your hyperbole about peanut butter). Our burgers are just marginally more expensive than the rest of the country.
I still remember when all the fast food chains raised their prices together even when they didn’t need to post pandemic. Makes me really skeptical of the claim about companies lowering prices to compete with each other.
Congratulations. You've identified different business models.
> I still remember when all the fast food chains raised their prices together
If this is true, what force are you imagining constrains all the fast food chains from not having n times their current prices? Adjust n to whatever value is lower than your hyperbole trigger.
> Congratulations. You've identified different business models.
So pointing out business models that don’t raise prices while not customer service, to counter the claim of “hiring more people will raise the prices for us”, is a problem how?
> If this is true, what force are you imagining constrains all the fast food chains from not having n times their current prices
You’re also responding to a partial statement of a sentence and not a complete argument. The argument being companies don’t necessarily lower prices to compete with one another even if they can.
And finally, why do companies don’t raise their prices infinitely? (A complete tangent to the discussion) Because well, business 101. Prices increases are a slow drip. And there is a limit after which price increases hurt the sales. And you always want an external excuse to point a finger at to make the prices palatable. Some companies can increase prices faster than the others. Apple made hundreds of billions in profits last year and they just increased the prices of MacBooks by hundreds of dollars. They could’ve easily not raised prices but why would you not when you have a loyal customer base that won’t mind paying a few hundred dollars extra?
> So pointing out business models that don’t raise prices while not customer service, to counter the claim of “hiring more people will raise the prices for us”, is a problem how?
It's a problem because the business models are providing alternatives of what their customers value. You're arguing that because Costco, one of, if not the most successful retailers in the world, can do it why can't all stores? I can assure you every business wants to be Costco.
But also, I've been to Costco. And they offer what they want in quantities that they want. And it's often not what I want no matter how well they treat their employees. Also the checkout lines were very long.
Business 101? Take a step back. What you're describing is the feedback mechanism of the competition that drives prices down. Supply, demand, price. Econ 101. The reason prices aren't infinite is not because the evil corporations are conspiring to increase them slowly enough that customers barely notice. It's because, if they increase them too much, they will lose business to their competitors.
Apple has the ability to raise prices because customers value its ecosystem. But, OK. Why didn't they raise the price by thousands? Do you think people didn't notice the few hundred dollar price increase drip? It looks to me like people did notice. It's because at a certain price, it's worthwhile to hold your nose and use a different operating system.
At some point you’re just picking items and responding to them. This is taking the discussion away from your core argument. You talk about Costco but conveniently leave out in-n-out because it doesn’t fit your narrative.
My core argument has been that corporations offload tasks onto customers and then use the money saved to boost their own profits.
Your argument is that the cost saved is passed on to the customers.
I’ve provided examples of why that doesn’t happen, and provided examples of companies that don’t sacrifice customer experience while maintaining lower prices to show that the rest of them are not doing the same.
I am yet to see any substantial evidence from your end to prove that savings are indeed getting passed on to customers. And unless that’s something you want to discuss, we should end it here.
You're the one who started talking about specific examples and I agree that that's irrelevant since different companies decide how to allocate the money they save by reducing labor costs. Which is actually a refutation of your general assertion that labor cost savings don't constrain prices.
Your argument is based on the conspiratorial belief that "corporations" are a monolith conspiring to allocate the savings from self checkout. You have not explained why each of them is not incentivized to use that savings to reduce costs to take more business from their competitors. Is your answer that the businesses are all colluding? You have also not explained why they are constrained at all in the amount they can raise prices. The drip theory makes no sense. This is all basic economics.
At first I thought you meant QR for payment, which is weird because most people (at least in SEA, where I lived) consider less friction and more convenient than cash or cards.
But it turns out you meant QR for menu, yes, hate them. Flipping through the menu is better experience overall. Opening menu on a phone is a chore, not to mention most menu web/app is crap. Lots of them are just link to pdf on google drive.
I enjoy the codes. It skips that whole dance we do in the US of waiting for the server to return - twice! - to pick up payment and then drop off the card and receipts. I can sit there as long as I want, pay once, then walk out. And the card has never left my hand.
What's more nonsense is the author of the article trying to split a check 6 ways and stressing over the fact two people shared a dessert. Sack up, split it roughly or better yet don't split it at all. Good friends return the favor sooner or later. Unless you're a cheapskate.
Gay Talese starts "The Kidnapping of Joe Bonanno" (Esquire, August 1971) with this:
Knowing that it is possible to see too much, most doormen in New York have
developed an extraordinary sense of selective vision: they know what to see
and what to ignore, when to be curious and when to be indolent—they are most
often standing indoors, unaware, when there are accidents or arguments in
front of their buildings, and they are usually in the street seeking taxicabs
when burglars are escaping through the lobby. Although a doorman may
disapprove of bribery and adultery, his back is invariably turned when the
superintendent is handing money to the fire inspector or when a tenant whose
wife is away escorts a young woman into the elevator—which is not to accuse
the doorman of hypocrisy or cowardice but merely to suggest that his instinct
for uninvolvement is very strong, and to speculate that doormen have perhaps
learned through experience that nothing is to be gained by serving as a
material witness to life’s unseemly sights or to the madness of the city. This
being so, it was not surprising that on the night when the reputed Mafia
chief, Joseph Bonanno, was grabbed by two gunmen in front of a luxury
apartment house on Park Avenue near Thirty-sixth Street, shortly after
midnight on a rainy Tuesday in October, the doorman was standing in the lobby
talking to the elevator man and saw nothing.
What failed was not the QR code because it was not a poor choice of technology. It was designed in such a way that it was good for one person to order but not for six people to negotiate.
And that is how replacement technology operates. You study the activities of a human, and then you build automation around that. What you don't get is all the context the human is handling along the way. The social reading, the handling of exceptions, the time when someone passes on the cake and gets it out of the way.
Replacement technology doesn't inherit any of this contextual intelligence. It can only handle the modal case. While, real life is mostly full of edge cases.
I would love to pay and manage parking from my phone if the apps actually worked intuitively, but they rarely do. It was easier when all I had to do was have a roll of quarters in my car.
I’d rather live in a place where waitstaff are comfortably compensated for their labor. Automating it will just lead to one kind of misery after another. Where does it end? Why do we want to go there? We can choose not to.
That sounds nice but falls apart when customers have to actually pay for it.
The most workable solution we've found is for employers to compete for employees, and employees to work for a wage that's acceptable to them. If you pay more than that, a competitor who pays less will take all your business.
But that’s not really what happens either because the employees are fundamentally at a disadvantage and don’t have perfect information.
Employers will generally take whomever will accept the least, and when bills are coming due, employees will take any job for some wage, not the best wage.
Would you rather be a waiter in America or Brazil?
The average waiter in America makes $40K per year, compared to $9K per year for a Brazilian water (adjusted for PPP).
Brazil does not have any of the labor-saving tech that we're complaining about because they don't need it--labor is cheap.
Let's say a restaurant in America got rid of its tech and instead hired more waiters. Would each waiter get paid more or less? Obviously, each waiter would get paid less. The restaurant still makes the same amount of money, so the same amount of money is divided among more people. Mathematically, each waiter will make less money with less tech.
So if you really want waitstaff to be well-paid, you should want more automation, not less.
The more I think about it, the more dumb the premise of this "fallacy" sounds.
I lived in a doorman building in NYC for almost a decade. It's great!
It's also really expensive to have your building entrance staffed 24/7, which is why the vast majority of buildings do not have a doorman, and you'll pay quite a bit more for one that does. It's a luxury.
And literally anyone who has ever lived in a doorman building knows that approximately 2% of the value is that they can open the door for you. No one who is deciding whether to employ doormen is making their decision based on whether there's a cheaper way to open the door.
There might be a fallacy here beyond "sometimes automation isn't worth it", but doormen are a terrible example of it, given that probably 99.999% of buildings do not have doormen, and wouldn't be better off financially if they did.
Fair point, but also an even dumber example. I promise you, the people running the kind of upscale hotels that have a doorman are under no illusion that the main job is opening the door.
I enjoy QR ordering. I dislike talking to people. Upselling me is not a thing. I can take as long as I want. I don't have to flag/bother someone. No one screws it up except me. I see exactly what's on my bill.
In the story, even though people used the QR code separately to see the menu, the bill was combined. Either the order itself was done via a human, or the bill was charged against the table rather than the unique user.
When the whole ordering and paying happens as a single event, none of the problems presented in the story occur, other than the initial problem of scanning the QR code.
You're describing an interaction with a good server at a good business. (Off of peak hours, if you can take hours and they don'thave anything to say about it.) What do QR codes add except for technical issues?
I honestly cannot recall the last time a server tried to upsell me with even as much as a "do you want a dessert?". But... I suppose that's selection bias. I only go to restaurants that don't require servers to do that BS. They don't want to do it either, you know?
I would not be at all comfortable, with a human server, making them wait while changing my selection multiple times (no I want it with the ginger sauce... no, without... no actually the sesame sauce... no actually I don't even want that dish, I'll take the other one), googling 10 different unusual ingredients while I make these changes, etc. And especially if I'm part of a larger party that shares food, or with kids, makes it all the more complicated. I just... am not ok with the social cost of it, even if a "good server" would be ok with it. (And who says you'll get a "good" one?). Whereas with digital ordering it's literally just zero-cost button clicks. And zero chance of error. I really don't see how it's even comparable, digital ordering is such a step forward. (Obviously not in all settings, like fancy dining, but for the mainstream).
> I would not be at all comfortable, with a human server, making them wait while changing my selection multiple times (no I want it with the ginger sauce... no, without... no actually the sesame sauce... no actually I don't even want that dish, I'll take the other one), googling 10 different unusual ingredients while I make these changes, etc.
You would have to do all of this anyways if you ordered via an app. It’s also not zero cost, especially if you’re having to look up ingredients. A good server could explain what ingredients are without you have to look them up, as well.
I agree that it can be convenient in that you don’t have to wait for a server to show up to put an order in, but the issues of indecision while ordering are all something you can do before that interaction…
> But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued.
I'm guessing the author has never worked as a server themselves... Is there any part of the world you can have a six top with individual checks when you didn't tell them up front to split the bill? As an American this just seems obvious to me but maybe the expectation is different in Dubai.
> Is there any part of the world you can have a six top with individual checks when you didn't tell them up front to split the bill?
Most restaurant point of sales systems in the US handle that pretty well. They put down what seat an item was ordered from, and it covers everything except shared items like appetizers. That's been pretty common for a couple decades, and not just at chains, also at local places (if they had a POS system and weren't doing it with paper still, but good servers know how to notate that well, too).
"They" being the waiter or waitress, of course. Good ones can navigate complex bill splitting arrangements and even better can manage awkward interactions like one person quietly paying for another's dessert or covering an appetizer for the table, know the menu not only by memory but also can recommend dishes that the guest may prefer, and generally make the dining and ordering and paying experience better.
Bad restaurants think they can replace those skills with a QR code on the table optimized for the lowest common denominator.
I’ve seen rare places where the server has a handheld and every single item is always individually charged. Then they can keep things separate or combine it however you want.
But, I’ve seen that maybe twice in my entire life. Once might have been in Vegas. Everywhere else is as you say; it’s just not a reasonable post-meal request.
Yeah there's a Pho place in Seattle I'd go to lunch at (iykyk) where we'd regularly have 20 people at a table and pay individually. But they didn't even use the check for that, they'd just ask what you had and ring that in as they went around the table with the handheld. Literally the only place I've ever seen that even offered to split a check at a table with more than 3-4 people.
Before electronic POS systems accounted for this, we'd just split the bill evenly. I didn't like that solution either though because it rewarded people who ordered expensive food or lots of food, and that was never me. I even quit going to lunch with big groups of coworkers because of that.
>Is there any part of the world you can have a six top with individual checks when you didn't tell them up front to split the bill?
Not uncommon here in Norway. I had payday beers with well over ten people where there was a shared tab with people paying for their stuff as they leave.
It's because we are Americans yes. When I was in Europe the server would give us the handheld payment device and we select which items we ordered and then they'd charge us. The author seems to not have this, the waiter should've gone through themselves. It was simply the wrong technology, not that technology was at fault.
In Germany (where this happens frequently and many people expect to be able to pay separately – I don’t like it and we generally don’t handle it that way with friends, but when I’m in the restaurant with coworkers even I wouldn’t dare to stray from orthodoxy) the payment systems seem to be set up for it and enable this in a relatively frictionless way. I remember it being more complicated for everyone involved.
Basically, waiters have a list with all the items in front of them and you tell them what you had and they pick them. They can then just initiate a normal payment process and leave the rest of the table as is.
More time consuming and finicky than just someone paying everything all at once, sure, but a well worn and designed user journey you seemingly don’t have to torture those devices into making possible.
In fact, I will often be extremely apologetic when saying I want to split the bill but have noticed no eye rolls or complaints from waiters. It’s just smooth sailing. I do honestly think that was different when waiters had to do math and cross out things on bills and stuff (which I distinctly remember from my childhood/youth in the 2000s).
Europe. You just walk to the register and point out the items you want to pay for. I've never seen a place where paying for a group of 6 separately would be a problem, it's the default and expected.
Europe is a continent. In all the countries I've been to in Europe, the service was indistinguishable from that in the US, where the bill is brought to the table and paid there. Can you be more specific as to what country's restaurants do people normally walk up to a register after eating?
This has happened to me twice in Norway and once in Germany, but only with large groups of people, so it's never 'normally'. If you're a smaller group or alone, the waiter will either remember who had what (or have kept track in their POS system?), or outright ask who will pay for what, since there are so few items to pay for that that's pretty manageable.
The more common way to settle this in my experience, if you're in a larger group, is to announce your intention to split the bill before ordering, and then the waiter can go through what groups or individuals will pay and can track them accordingly.
Yeah, this is the same in the US. If you tell them ahead of time, there's no issue in splitting the bill. I was doing that 20 years ago when I was a waiter at both higher-end and mid-range restaurants.
The restaurant seems to be trying real hard to externalize its costs, pushing its previous costs (menus/billing/staff) onto the diners, and hoping that the value of the experience hadn't been so diminished that the diner would baulk. I reckon the diner baulked, as I would have. The tradeoff just doesn't seem fair. Bad math. Bad business.
When I was in Bangkok a good while back, I was surprised how there’re doormen at shopping mall—humans to handle simple things which in many parts of the world would certainly not involve a person.
A bit later I thought that it makes sense: it improves customer experience and slightly reduces unemployment in local population—a doorman job is better than no job.
It feels a bit like you didn't apply the lesson of the article - these "doormen" have often different functions (theft prevention or at least reduction, information provision, support for those that need help, some minor cleaning or caretaking roles, and the greeting/visibility/we-are-a-fancy-place vibe ;-)
In countries where labour is cheap it is common to have staff for less essential things as humans are just more flexible (but also less reliable) than machines.
Personally I thought opening doors was about the only thing they did—never seen them engage in any other activity.
I am not sure you provide a counter-argument, IMO offering more people a way to earn money and do something useful (as opposed to delegating these duties to [generally foreign-made] equipment) as a way of maintaining a healthy society still holds.
It's weird to see someone present as novel what is like talking about the weather, at least for the average person in the U.S. (not in the Bay Area, in the U.S.).
It's fascinating to me that the large companies never did anything to break out of the experiences of someone in Dubai or SF or Singapore, etc. vs far more "average" places are not similar experiences and therefore product design suffers.
I get that other companies are the ones with the most money, but failing to expand into selling things people actually want (like Apple briefly did) is the most interesting problem to come out of Silicon Valley (no one sells anything people want, besides ads -- they give things away and then sell to companies).
I've never heard of the Doorman Fallacy before. I like it.
That said, not everything changes because some businessman wants to cut costs. Splitting bills has always been a pain, and while a lot of apps suck, at least it's consistent. I can't tell you how many times I got dirty looks from wait staff when asked to split a bill. In pretty much every story the author talks about I would rather fail forward than go backward.
"On paper, it looks like a smart decision. Reduce paper, reduce staff, reduce operating costs. But what gets overlooked is the hit to the customer experience."
As always.... this philosophy is basically killing any customer experiences these days. Hopefully some day profits will take enough of a hit to actually start resulting in more effort in the customer experience.
I've never been to a place where you order by QR code where somehow the bill is joined together in one order for the table. Everything I order on the phone I pay for before they bring the food.
A couple places near me have QR codes for seeing a menu, but you still place an order with a person. If I order via QR code, payment is tied to me as a person, not the group.
Yeah, they exist. I’ve also been to places where they take your order in the conventional way, but then allow you to scan a QR code to pay and go.
Sure, the process of asking for the bill and doing the dance where you check it, they come back with the card machine etc. can be mightily inconvenient especially if you’re in a rush. But I can just walk up to someone and pay there and then.
Whenever I’ve tried to use them, these QR code payment flows normally try to charge me, the patron, a service fee for the convenience, so I’ve never actually gone through with it.
I’ve mostly seen it at Asian cuisine restaurants where you normally order several dishes and order more as the meal progresses. So it builds up a tab and then you pay at the end.
But what if the automation could be seamless, like your AI agent adds more time to your parking by simply knowing that you're still sitting down at the restaurant.
This is also the "can be shit - will be shit" fallacy.
Everyone knows that digital restaurant experiences are crap and most people do not pick a restaurant based on the digital experience.
All restaurants use the same few white label solutions and the decision is based on cost. White labels rarely break new ground because despite having many clients to experiment / gather data on, they just can't get good being everything for everyone.
This of course doesn't count giants like McDonalds who have the incentive and position to be defined by that digital experience.
This feels like an AI narrative, transcribed by a human.
1) Impromptu yoga class brunch. No one says "oh, who needs to top up their parking since we'll be an extra hour"; so it's technology at fault that they got a notification half way through, not the people involved? The consequence was no one got ticketed?
2) 6 people with 6 phones, some of them the "latest iPhones" scanned a QR code once each, after struggling; chose their meals, didn't pay via the app, and it created a shared bill with complete loss of who ordered what.
I have never used a QR code ordering system this bad. The only way this makes sense is if they all told a staff member what they were having from reading an online menu.
Paper menus would not have changed this. A restaurant wouldn't typically use a solution so bad, it'd be gone in a few weeks if they have any kind of autonomy.
How did these people live through COVID and never encounter a QR code they had to scan with a phone? Is this elderly yoga? Or ultra rich kids with butlers their entire lives? It doesn't make sense that they are so technologically illiterate any other way.
3) They all paid, but the only information they could see was the remaining amount unpaid. At the end, the last person paid; and the staff told them there was 24Dh outstanding - and this was a surprise. The last person just left without mentioning this, or their eyes don't work? How is having the only piece of information visible to you the bit that causes the surprise?
None of this makes sense to me as internally consistent. Yes, the writing style doesn't look ChatGPT flavoured, there are mistakes in it to appear more human; but the cognitive model of how things work seems to be utterly inhuman.
> How did these people live through COVID and never encounter a QR code they had to scan with a phone?
Was that a requirement? I got through it without scanning a single QR code. I had my vaccination status available as a QR code (on paper when travelling in order not to depend on just a smartphone), but not the other way around.
We just ignored restaurants without paper menus, as we always do. It wasn't the time to eat out in any case.
The real fallacy is your assumption that the business doesn’t expect the hit in customer experience. In reality they have thought about the consequence and made the conscious decision to not care.
Alamo Draft House recently-ish lost the plot. They were famous for being very anti-phone. They have now switched their food/drink service to on your device which means you have to use your phone during the movie which is precisely why I preferred to go there. You also report someone using their phone by using your phone. They even acknowledge this with a "we recognize the irony" slide during their "this is a phone free environment" segment.
To me, this seems like a typical "how hard can it be" startup mentality. People, especially those "fast to the market" type, tend to vastly underestimate all the corner cases of the technology, mostly tending to the happy path and outsourcing the pain to their customers. The reason they still have customers is because most of the market has the same problems and a solution that covers those corner cases is way more expensive and also way more extensive in terms of infrastructure you'd need. You would have hoped there is middle-ground there, i.e. a startup on the cheaper side with a vision for corner cases, but knowing how markets and marketing works I'm not holding my breath for that.
A big part of those corner cases is the assumption of the user being an independent responsible adult without problems. Voice control is only acceptable if you don't startle anyone with or don't have anyone talking or screaming while you are talking. Booking tickets with "one ticket per smartphone" doesn't work when you have kids. Doing basically anything that's smartphone-only requires you to have it on you, charged and for the most part with an internet connection -- great for underground parking garages. God forbid you have lost your smartphone while drunk or have been robbed -- forget driving home with the virtual car key only being in your phone, forget paying for a taxi, forget entering your home protected by a smart lock. All of this assuming the tech works perfectly and durably, which we know is not the case for most of modern tech.
Going to "modernized" restaurants is just a drag. I don't want to touch your tablet or scan your code. I much prefer the restaurants which only accept cash
while i agree that this "doorman fallacy" happens, and i also agree that it can happen in the context of restaurant servers, i completely disagree that this is an example of it.
problems cited: people ordering at the same time (limited by presence of a single QR code). splitting the bill, knowing what was items were already paid for or who already paid for it (made difficult by interface).
these are examples of problems where the tech solution can easily be much better than the human solution.
for example, you'd just need a larger number of QR codes. or, i'm under the impression that nowadays some phones can read QR codes even at weird angles; in this way even a single QR code could be read by multiple people in parallel. meanwhile notice that human servers can only take one order at a time.
and obviously super simple modifications to the interface solve your problems with the bill. but it's more often than not an ordeal to arrange with other people and the server to pay for 1/4 of the fries and 1/2 of the salad or something like that (unless the server themselves has access to a tech solution).
ways that the server could be better than the tech solution would be, for example, explaining dishes (ingredients, size, taste) or making suggestions.
This may be Doormans fallacy, but it is a bad example. It just sounds like you're not used to using QR code menus. Once people get used to QR code menus we will see its benefits over traditional menus.
I'm unclear how getting used to QR code menus will alleviate the author's primary complaint that he would rather not use his phone during the meal and instead be present with the people there.
The subtle thing in all this is that it externalizes labor costs. You are the one doing the work. I was thrown by this a while ago checking into a hotel with kiosk. I was out of my time zone and literally half asleep. Typing my name was real labor at that point.
This seems like it has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the confusion that has always arisen when 6 people try and split a bill, it has always been like that. As for "secretly" trying to pay for an apple crumble, I have no idea how technology is supposed to help there. The way QR code scans usually work is you scan, order, and pay individually.
It really doesn't sound like a good example of the Doorman's Fallacy, which is about automation failing to provide the nonobvious benefits of a human doing the job.
It's just an example of automation done badly. Just have multiple QR codes to allow scanning in parallel. And if 6 people each paying for the own stuff creates a mess then sorry, that's just incredibly incompetent UX design. It should actually be easier to do it right when they're already ordering through separate devices!
>The worst was when it came time to pay. Naturally, everyone wanted to pay for what they ordered. The waitress pushed us to use the use the QR code again, saying it would be easier. Maybe that's true for 1 or 2 people. But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued. The human waiters just hung by, probably just as confused.
>Eventually, all the women went back to their busy lives and it was just us two guys left, continuing on. Suddenly, the waitress came up to us to say that 24 Dhs was still unpaid. I couldn't believe it. *Thankfully,* the other guy took care of it.
Is OP Dutch? Just split the bill evenly, have someone pay and send them your share.
I didn't interpret it as "automation bad". The invisible value, cancelled by automation, can also be negative.
Consider a doorman or a waiter in low-trust status based society: to get a service one must exaggerate status signaling and/or bribe the gatekeeper to be deemed worthy of a service. Kiosk doesn't accept bribes and you can trust "no vacancy" from kiosk more than from the doorman.
I'm just always surprised when people place their entire phone over the code, thinking it needs to fill the screen, when they scan pretty well from a couple feet away.
This article doesn't land for me. The author complains about having to scan the code in sequence, but overlooks the fact that a waiter/waitress/till can only serve one person at time. And as you say, multiple people can scan a QR code, _and_ it would be trivial to print more.
Maybe I missed the point, but the aside about parking metres seems irrelevant. Just makes me think this is an anti-technology rant.
And again, the gripe about splitting up the bill. Not only is that a problem with existing systems, it's a problem that is solved by QR codes (if implemented correctly).
People have now clung on to doorman's fallacy as a way to justify keeping outdated jobs around.
There should be a new fallacy named for this phenomenon otherwise we would have people justifying having travel agents jobs and translator jobs being protected.
A job can provide lots of value and still be worth automating overall. There's a reason almost no buildings have doorman, the only places where you can't pump your gas are because there's a legal prohibition, and essentially no elevator operators exist anymore.
I absolutely love waiters in any decent restaurant.
You can ask they waiter what's good on the menu, or what's the restaurant specialty or just what was delivered in the day and thus fresh, and it's a completely different experience.
I’d not heard of this fallacy* but it makes perfect sense. Well executed human greeting is such a killer asset if you get it right. There’s a few million years of genetic programming inside us all that responds unreasonably positively to hospitality. If someone enters my home and is not drinking their desired beverage in under four minutes, I have brought shame on me and my family!
I think we are all programmed to respond well to any courtesy, no matter how indirect. When a computer game level has a nice tutorial “level 0” then I feel good. When my dishwasher has color coded component to help me clean it, I feel good. When I click a text area containing an order number and it auto selects the number, I feel good. Great design is about the same kind of warm fuzzies as great hospitality. Maybe we should even call industrial design “passive hospitality”?
*No apostrophe btw. It ought to be The Doorman Fallacy. If you want an apostrophe then call it The Hotel Manager’s Fallacy :)
I also hadn't heard of it, but I feel like it's kind of a corollary of the whole, "what's measured is managed" idea or maybe the Streetlight effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect).
It's easy to measure a doorman's cost, but hard to measure their impact. Few, if any, guest are likely to mention the impact of a doorman on their stay except in the exceptional case. That means when budgets start to get tight (or an exec wants to drive the share price up), doormen become an easy target to cut because there's little hard data to justify their value.
Isn't the hard data the loss of the hotel a few years down the road due to being noncompetitive due to declining customers caused by the penny pinching?
That's the heart of the issue: insufficient accounting.
You can't plan any better than your models, and if your models are insufficient then your decision making will be inherently flawed. Penny pinching is good until it's not, and the data to see when the transition occurred isn't on the balance sheet until maybe it's too late. At the point you're pinching the penny of the doorman, you don't have the data about the impending customer decline.
But doormen became a thing, so the value was understood. We have now lost that knowledge.
I suppose it's like enshittification. It's presented as a progression to a new worse thing when it's more of a Dark Age of 'soft' knowledge.
Labour was cheaper back then. Even valuable jobs can stop making sense if the costs outweigh them. That's the difficulty with automation making other sectors more efficient, wages get driven up while your productivity stays the same.
It still seems to me designing applications or web services is so hard that it's just easier to hire thousands of people to do customer service and having people to come physically to do things. The average corporation's business application or web page is absolutely terrible and a lot of non-technical users simply can not do business with it. Ie it is a hindrance for the businesses core reason of existence. Do the QR code things show up in revenue tracking? Do they do A/B testing? I think I prefer to choose another restaurant if I see that, or not come again.
I think some small pizza shops have had proper simple web pages, probably because it's do-or-die for them and the person contracting the web page is the person also knowing very well how the business is doing. Also phone interactions are very fast and straightforward. It's sad to see them having to struggle with terrible card payment terminals and everybody trying to take a cut (credit card and delivery companies).
> It still seems to me designing applications or web services is so hard that it's just easier to hire thousands of people to do customer service and having people to come physically to do things.
I'd love for this to be true, but every business nowadays sees employees (except maybe whatever group is core to their business) as a giant cost centre. Every employee cut is money saved. Hence customer service consistently being shit, since it's an easy place to skimp on. Now, the doorman's fallacy could be applicable here; good customer service will create repeat buyers and good word of mouth, but I doubt you need to put that many people into it to make it good. Thousands has to be well past diminishing returns. Even if only 20% of people find the happy path in some stupid web app, that's potentially thousands of man-hours that customer service didn't have to provide, and thus a lot less employees you don't really need.
True. But automation also pushes up wealth. Starbucks drivethrus aren't a thing because we need iced sweet nominally coffee stuff. It exists because we have the disposable income to pay someone else to make the coffee.
Yes a doorman is a cost, and a greater cost than previously, but we've also got more money to waste on such fripperies.
> That's the difficulty with automation making other sectors more efficient, wages get driven up while your productivity stays the same.
The root cause of that is minimum wage - if you raise it then automation becomes important, and where you can't automate it drives up prices of essential goods. So a doorman is either automated away or needs a raise to afford to live.
It's not just minimum wages. If productive sector employees' demand for goods causes inflation, prices will rise. If you want to keep your nurses/doormen/teachers you'll have to increase their wages regardless of what the minimum wage is.
> If productive sector employees' demand for goods causes inflation, prices will rise.
I'm not sure what you mean. Prices rising is what we call 'inflation' - one doesn't cause the other. They're the same thing.
It's difficult to tie changes in customer retention to not having a doorman in a "hard data" way. Ideally you'd want to do an A/B test of doorman vs non-doorman, but you'd need multiple hotels for that to work.
1) Failing can be (mis)attributed to many things particularly if the cause and effect are separated significantly by time, and 2) most businesses want to stay way ahead of the realization they're noncompetitive as by that point often the barn door is open and the horse is gone.
How do you map the exact reason, though. A hotel could have gone down years down the road due to Covid, some war that influenced existing clientele, general drop of tourism, change in weather patterns that made summer less attractive, competition from AirBnb, being bought by someone totally inept, spread of remote work instead of business trips, aging population that does not like to travel anymore, or combination of all those factors etc.
> I think we are all programmed to respond well to any courtesy, no matter how indirect.
I once read a book called "The Media Equation" that argued humans' social cooperation/courtesy instincts are many thousands of years old, while computers are very new (the book was written in 1996). As academic HCI researchers they'd conducted many experiments, providing evidence for this, which is why it's a book, not a paragraph.
What I found fascinating about this book was you could see how their findings had directly translated into Clippy in Office 97. You close 'Clippy' and it waves goodbye instead of disappearing immediately? They had research findings saying that was perceived more favourably.
And everyone knows how well-received clippy was :D
Clippy became infamous because it couldn't actually do anything it claimed to do. It also seemingly broke the courtesy guidelines by appearing uninvited and stealing focus.
And I would say in its case, there was great synergy between not doing anything and appearing uninvited. Two negatives combining to produce an overwhelmingly greater negative.
Doormen keep vagrants away and prevent dirty things from accumulating in front of the venue. Plus the social benefits of interaction. It is a cost but offers not immediately obvious benefits.
Plus he can hail you a cab.
I've never heard it in terms of courtesy, more that a human employee is an entirely different category to some mechanical component of a business.
So the setup goes, if a doormans function is defined as opening the door, then he can be replaced by a cheap mechanical thing; this misses that he is both covering more incidental tasks, and providing a human interface to the business. These things are very valuable, but not captured in the "guy who operates the door" definition.
The doorman of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore was so iconic that he was written into the textbooks of my time. I’ve often wondered if he’s well paid considering his significance to that institution.
https://mothership.sg/2017/11/raffles-hotel-doorman/
Seinfeld did a whole episode literally about the doorman fallacy.
Probably true for humanity in general, but I would hate having a doorman and having to greet them every time I enter and leave. I've been in airbnbs where I had to do it, and I didn't like it. Same with the article's QR codes ... for an introvert, not interacting with the wait staff is great. Knowing that my order / payment is done precisely without fear of miscommunication is great. I don't need the hospitality.
a good doorman would know this about you and tune your greeting into an acknowledgement of a subtle nod, I think
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I've seen it worse: A team of employees have an entry level engineering job, and work as a bridge between support and the "core" engineering team. They just talk to customers when an issue is escalated, and maybe it will submit a hotfix PR but when the issue must be escalated further the instructions are to send it to the higher-ranked team who will make it part of the next sprint.
At every all-hands meetings, core team gets to present, gets to showcase the new features, gets celebrated for "going the extra mile" for customers.
But the real extra mile, is the patience, empathy and thoughtful communication (which is a rare talent, really) of the entry level engineers, who are also humble and nice to be around with, being the only ones who contribute positively to the company culture, as opposed to the ego-tripping 10x engineers.
Management thinks they are absolutely replaceable. Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.
But the real reason to replace them is to please investors who don't wanna be behind the AI-efficiency-hype. They can't be promoted to a core team, because where's the efficiency in that?
Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.
I worked on a project where they replaced virtually all tier-1 customer service reps with an AI chatbot, which worked ok, because 90% of those calls are things like "what's my balance" and "I need a replacement credit card", which an AI can competently navigate. Phase 2, I was informed, was to replace Tier-2 with a chatbot, so the only time a human has to get involved was the most complicated problems. SO MUCH MONEY SAVED AMIRIGHT?!?
So I asked, in the middle of this giant kickoff meeting, "if you get rid of tier 1 & 2 reps, how are you going to train up the tier 3 reps who know enough about how things work to handle these most-complicated problems?". After an extended silence we got "we have a plan for that but we can't go into it just now". Sure you do.
The plan is to replace the tier 3 reps too
Do you need to do tier 1 and 2 work before tier 3?
If they are structurally different, and there’s a way to train people directly into tier 3, then it doesn’t seem unreasonable to automate t1 and t2 as from my experience the vast majority of the tickets are either simple or repeated workflows. Taking the idea to the limit, you’d automate all tiers, and have the ai escalate to the individual teams within the company for any truly meaningful edge cases
I feel sort of the same about SWE, which is much more complex, but juniors can ostensibly grow into seniors with AI
If it wasn't clear, I'm talking about CSRs who deal with people, not computers.
> how are you going to train up the tier 3 reps
iterative feedback loops using memories for context, of course. just like they trained the first two tiers
Where are the feedback loops for customer issues that haven't arisen before, or happen very infrequently. The existence of a tier 3 is for problems that aren't an everyday occurrence. Further, these are often all or partially 'people problems', not 'technology problems'.
> Management thinks they are absolutely replaceable. Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace.
This is the way of the world. I want to bet on making myself replaceable, and move on to the next job to be done. It's fun. It's obviously valuable.
I'm good at my job. I crave new things to learn. My nature is to tune everything to work in as boring of a way as possible. I want to be the grandma with a single finger on the "creampuff" Cadillac steering wheel.
A grandmother driving down the road in a Cadillac doesn't look like someone who has conquered her world, but unless a manager looks deeper, they won't see it.
I firmly believe that companies who are smart about software, which is mostly "less is more", are about to use their new superpowers to out innovate the big boys. It will be like pg's writings on blowing away the online store competition with lisp-ninja-ism.
Good management values the people who align themselves with the company, and smile and help the customers. Bad managers manage software at surface level.
Aside re: restaurant technology:
In a restaurant a year ago with "pay via your phone" service. Server gave us a receipt w/ a QR code. I scanned the code, copied the URL to my clipboard, and looked it over. There was a base64 blob on the URL. I decoded it (because Termux and I'm a nerd) and saw obvious parameters I could fuzz. I changed the check ID (incremented it), left the store ID alone, re-encoded it, and found I could access somebody else's check. Not a super exciting vulnerability (since all I could do was see what they ordered and pay their check) but I thought it was still pretty rotten that I could even do that.
That’s such a benign vulnerability that it doesn’t even feel like one. Per your description, the worst thing an attacker can do is see the food ordered to a check number (in a public restaurant) and pay a bill that isn’t their own?
On the flip side, some services go absolutely overboard trying to secure low-blast-radius things, or don’t properly scale security to the risk of an activity. I have a service provider that requires an absurd login flow for their website, continually trying to force passkeys, short session timeouts, etc; when the worst an unauthorized attacker could do is pay my bill (the horror!).
> That’s such a benign vulnerability that it doesn’t even feel like one.
You could farm the data to see how the shop is doing.
Enumeration vulns are very serious, it’s just luck that this one appeared to be low risk.
A competitor of the restaurant could see everything that was ordered that night. Pretty serious imo.
Or profile the customers of every business, by changing both IDs.
But that’s my point: not all risks are the same. A cache issue that serves you someone else’s crossword puzzle is an inconvenience, but a cache issue that serves you someone’s credit report is way worse.
But what does it say about the payment app if it doesn't bother to secure the low hanging fruit?
It's not benign. An attacker could surf multiple IDs until they find one lowrr than their own and pay it instead. It's a viable attack. If the store disputes it, you can demonstrate that you paid and produce a receipt.
If you had a large stock of stolen CCs you could use this to pay a buck or two on everyone's bill and verify that the cards are valid.
Eh, there could be privacy implications. E.g. you see someone in the restaurant whom you know, and you know he is not supposed to be drinking alcohol (for whatever reason: maybe his religion forbids it, maybe there's a medical reason for it such as a prescription drug he's on that really should not be mixed with alcohol, the reason doesn't really matter in this example). You see that he was served a pork chop with a side salad, so you scan through the check numbers and find out that only one order contained a pork chop and a side salad that day, and that order also included a glass of red wine. Congratulations, you have spied on your acquaintance and obtained potential blackmail material on him. What will you do with it? How good or evil a person are you?
And although that's a low-probability scenario, it's also something that could be solved pretty easily, by either using a GUID or at least random numeric IDs with 8 digits.
I don't think you've got an expectation of privacy when it comes to what you're eating in a restaurant. You could just walk over to their table.
Isn’t it way easier and way more damaging to just take a photo of him? Receipts aren’t even associated by name unless you’re picking up food.
True; a more realistic scenario would have to include "covert surveillance" (where you don't want to let him know you're watching), and even there I'm not sure much could be gleaned about any individual. In theory you could use that to build up a picture of someone's habits, in practice other techniques are better. Though... you could use that to spy on the store, actually. If you're a tax auditor making sure they aren't underreporting their sales, that could be useful.
But yeah, any idea I come up with to exploit that is always a bit of a stretch.
This whole chain reminds me of https://xkcd.com/538/, in a good way. It’s interesting to hear what some people have come up with.
And before someone comments about the hypothetical religious person eating pork, I was actually thinking of a Mormon acquaintance of mine when I wrote that. Mormons are not supposed to drink alcohol, but pork is perfectly okay. If you were thinking of some other religion that forbids both alcohol and pork, well, that's not what I was thinking about.
Why should we be protecting hypocrisy though?
Living in a nation where ones religion gives you protection under the law and allows you to do things others can't, I don't think you can defend covering up instances of people not living up to the standards they themselves set, and therefore give them special privileges.
How is it different to a police officer doing something slightly illegal. Should we respect their privacy or should we hold them to the high standards they supposedly hold?
I mean I cloud just go over there and see it.
Normally I've not seen any bill that includes the identity of the customer, so it can't be even used as proof.
I saw a team build some payment software a while ago that had a similar, if not exact, vulnerability. If someone had enough time / effort to figure out a not-super-unique ID (Something like 2456733), they could acccess the payment portal for an order.
I notified them and they said that this was noted, skipped, and they didn't believe it was an issue. Worst case scenario an attacker could... Pay for someone elses order, if this happened the attacker would be found by their payment details. Likewise on the payment screen they only see the order's total, nothing about the customer, nothing else about the order, just the total. So - I'm not sure. Maybe they're right?
I just shrugged. I would've patched it, feels like poor design and is easy enough to fix - but I couldn't really argue other than to say it felt sloppy.
But it's such an easy vulnerability to avoid, that if they're not avoiding it you have to ask what else did they gloss over in their system? "Felt sloppy" is exactly right, and the assumption should therefore be that the entire system is sloppy.
This reminds me of how often "digital transformation" in hospitality introduces naive security architectures. ID enumeration vulnerabilities on restaurant QR codes are surprisingly common because these systems are often rushed to market by low-cost agencies.
While some might argue it's a "low-blast-radius" bug because an attacker can only view orders or pay someone else's bill, the data privacy implications are massive. Scraping that endpoint allows anyone to profile the restaurant's entire customer base, revenue flow, or busy hours. It's the classic side effect of replacing a robust human process with a poorly audited software layer.
I live in Dubai and in my experience the main reason why they want you to pay with QR is because the QR company pushes a service fee on guests and some times even a default tip (tipping is not common here, but I’m sure staff is underpaid because every service company that uses an app pushes you to leave a tip) that they can’t charge if you pay directly to the restaurant.
Just ask the staff to bring the CC machine.
As for the parking. Sure technology got in the way of the conversation. It also got in the way of a $100 fine. I’d say that’s a win, not a loss.
Is it a Dubai thing that everyone's parking expires unexpectedly in 2 minutes? I didn't really understand that - perhaps a lack of local knowledge.
I think the setting is that they are a group of people who paid for parking to go to yoga and now they are also having a meal, so everyone in the group stayed longer than planned.
Public parking is prepaid, usually via the official RTA app.
If anything the prompt from your phone that your meter is expiring is a huge plus against forgetting about it and getting dinged with an outrageous parking ticket. I'd much rather go through the brief stress of that reminder than a ticket any day. A parking ticket will put me in a sour mood for the rest of the day easily.
Such feature is designed to catch people who might not pay attention. Innocent looking money grab.
Some better parking apps simply let you start the meter and then stop when you get back to your car, so you don't have to worry you miss it and get a fine.
If you forget to pay when you get back to your car, are you charged the max? That's how it works with other systems like this that I've used.
Yep. Our city had that system, you started a timer in the app when you parked and had to remember to stop it when you left the parking spot. Appeals of "I forgot to stop the meter" were routinely denied (I think there was still a max like 24 hours, so that you could not accrue an arbitrary amount... or maybe it stopped the next time someone else started paying for that spot. I never used the app so I'm not sure how it worked, I always just paid for a fixed block of time using a card).
I have nostalgia for the coin operated meters I grew up with. It was always a little thrill to park and then find there was still an hour or more left on the meter from the previous person.
Yes it does that. Still, less than a fine would have been.
The prompt is a fix for an imaginary problem produced by senselessly aping physical limitations. A meter fed with quarters forces you to prepay a particular amount whereas a digital service which has at minimum your credit card could simply charge you the correct amount.
It's not exactly "senselessly" but rather "shrewdly" ensuring that you're incentivized to pay for more time than you'll actually need so that you don't risk getting a ticket or needing to make a trip back to the meter.
Probably also momentum in their previous meter systems to keep it mostly the same.
It also forces a spot to be freed, so that people with enough $ don't simply rent the most desirable cark parks forever.
> But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued.
Hasn't that been a fact of life ?
If anything, apps made it barely made easier through splitting either the whole bill equally or offer a bit by bit checking interface.
Otherwise on the role of QR codes and online menu, it actually helps a lot for allergies as everyone can check their for each individual item and adjust accordingly.
Of course one can ask the waiters, but many aren't just competent (ask for wallnut allergy, and they'll come back explaining there's no peanuts). And doing the back and forth on which menu has what allergy is also a PITA, with all the other guests just waiting for it to end.
Right. Many restaurants won't do a split check beyond 3 or 5 people.
This place in Dubai doesn't sound that bad. It can get much worse. Two of us went to a restaurant in Cupertino, near Apple HQ, where the table had a QR code. But it didn't just bring up the menu in a browser. It wanted the customer to install their app. Then the customer could order through the app. That's going too far.
The restaurant was mostly cooking for pickup and delivery. Delivery people were going in and out constantly, but few people were eating on site. So on-site eating was made a special case of remote ordering, with a really short delivery trip.
Never went back there. The food was mediocre.
All this apparently works better in China, where WeChat took over and standardized customer interaction and payment. Of course, the Third Department knows where you ate dinner, and with whom.
In my experience, waiters tend to be quite good at splitting bills. I feel like many of them remember what people had, maybe they get good mental maps of seating or person <-> meal type just like taxi drivers used to get good mental maps of London before GPS.
(And printed menus tend to have allergy info too, just like online menus sometimes don't.)
They have systems where at order time, they can enter the items each seat bought, and then print out separate checks at the end.
The only times I've had splitting bills become a problem are with unreasonably large tables (10+), and at that point, you should be upfront about it before you place any orders, since that fixes the problem.
I assume it's a hard problem to solve if you don't have POS system keeping track though. If all you've got is pen and paper, it's probably better to just split the bill equally, assuming nobody had 6 40 USD cocktails. Or just have someone pay for the whole thing and settle it all in post.
> > But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued.
> Hasn't that been a fact of life ?
I remember having to split bar tabs at the end of the night before phones. No calculators. Drunk people trying to do math is a spectacle to behold. Everyone throwing random cash amounts in the centre of the table, taking their own change, and one person attempting to reconcile the total then asking for more contributions if we were short.
Electronic bill-splitting is superior in just about every way.
A good waiter by the time it comes to payment will know the dynamic of the group and help them organize quickly.
I was a bit surprised by the way the payment is being made here.
Do people pay it separately like this? In general, if it isn't a prepaid restaurant, then just one of us makes the whole payment, and we pay our share to that person.
Don't people follow that generally?
It varies, culturally and based on what the group is. In the UK if I'm out for a meal with family or close friends then one of us will probably pay the bill and then people will offer to transfer their share to the person who did (which may or may not be refused depending on circumstances), if I'm out with colleagues or a group of looser acquaintances then its more likely we'll each pay our share separately, which the server is generally happy to accommodate.
In college I used to go out to eat from time to time with a group of friends to a midnight pancake house.
This was a very nerdy group! In our "culture," everyone wrote down on their paper placemat the exact cost of each item ordered, and at the end of the meal calculated the exact amount of tax plus the canonical 15% tip, and put the correct amount on the table, making change as necessary.
It was pretty fast and frictionless!
That’s not universally the case, no.
For example in Germany, splitting the bill is pretty normal, to the point where restaurants are adapted to it. Since this process adds some friction it is, however, also the case that someone will pay for everything and split afterwards (or variations on that theme).
Newer payment systems seem to have made that easier (e.g. mobile devices that allow waiters to initiate the payment for a subset of what a table had and allow for contactless payment). The older variant of that is the waiter going with you to the cash register that basically allows them to do the same bill splitting. The even older variant is the waiter breaking out paper and pencil and doing some addition (though I seem to remember waiters actually being annoyed if they had to do that, not so with the new solutions).
My company recently hired a concierge. At first I thought it was unnecessary and just meant to give someone's friend a job.
But the guy is really good at it. He organises groups of people who show up; he knows everybody, so he can quickly point people to where they should go; and overall he just makes the reception a welcoming place.
I cannot recommend Rory Sutherland's book Alchemy enough.
It is up there with great book for me like Taleb's Incerto series when it comes to deeply interesting ideas I would not have noticed if they hadn't been pointed out to me.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26210508-alchemy (the subtitle of this book seems to be different in different countries)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/INO/incerto/
My favorite version of this is robotic and drone-based package delivery. In many ways it could be useful and add efficiency to a congested system. But then you find out just what it is that delivery people actually do, the variety of security systems, steps and walkways, exceptions to rules, and so on and realize that what drones and robots automate is not really "the job" at all.
The last mile, in logistics, hospitality, retail or elsewhere is not just a mile, it's an interdependent series of several distances each with its own rules and restrictions. Tech-based solutions tend to solve an idealized, abstracted version of these and end up being only a very limited solution if they solve anything at all.
These folks have patted themselves on the back for devising a solution to the last mile without then realizing that the hardest part of all was the last 20 feet.
They'll just ignore that problem, drop the package on my front lawn and then snap a picture for proof of delivery from 50 feet up before flying away. To be fair, at least one of the Chinese international carriers does that every time already -- pull into my driveway, open the window, chuck the package onto the lawn, and then drive away. At least Amazon still brings it to the front porch and 90% of the time even puts it in a spot where the rain does not reach.
if we had a standardized way to deliver packages like we do mail (the heavily regulated mailbox!) this would not be a problem, it's a phenomenal waste of human effort to navigate this uniquely for every location
it's not like a doorman where there's useful social interaction
I have a PO Box (I do not have a mailbox so the city gives me a PO box for free). A kind human gets my packages from the back and hands them to me. It's great and efficient. The only inconvenience is the hours are a little narrow.
Conversely the last step to the door is as complicated as it is since till recently there was no plausible middle ground. You would always be sending out couriers so no real improvements in cost could be made.
But if you can get a drone or a robot most of the way there, that changes incentives.
I would personally love there to be a regulated, standard design for parcel drop off: but there isn't one. Not yet, and no human delivery will use anything I devise properly.
But if nonhuman delivery would, well now everyone looking at new motivation.
last mile in software is real too!
If you remember that hotel chain Sonder which went bankrupt last year, they had a zero-local-employees model: no front-desk, outsourced maintenance and housekeeping. I think they made the same mistake. Your typical interaction with the hotel receptionist is extremely formulaic. Many other hotels have replaced the sign-in process at least with a machine. That's most prominent in your mind, so its easy to assume that's where most of the value comes from.
At least in the UK, Sonder also wasn’t cheap and some of their properties left a bit to be desired. Plus there were often people (staff) sat in the reception anyway, so I don’t really understand what they were doing or there for, or where the supposed benefit of their no-reception model comes from.
I’d far rather speak to a real person and have some interaction when I’m travelling than mindlessly do everything through my phone and an app. I actively seek that. What we perceive as “the future” in terms of our phones as the interface undoes the basic social fabric that has developed over thousands of years. I’ve had some of the best conversations with random hotel receptionists - and isn’t it these secondary connections over the course of our days with people we’re unlikely to meet or socialise with again that can really help us feel better connected to society?
Yeah. Usually I don't need the receptionist, but part of the value of a hotel is that I know I could go to the receptionist and get any problems sorted out, if I had to
If I wanted a no-touch experience with no other human in sight or on standby, I'd just get an airbnb
Agreed, that's the single biggest discriminator between the two (now that airbnbs are no longer cheaper than hotels). You can automate check-in/check-out but you NEED a front desk with at least one person.
A lot of hotels nowadays automate check-in and check-out completely. I stayed at Henna Hotel in Japan which genuinely has nobody at the front desk (although it does have an animatronic dinosaur which bows to you), and wondered how I would have them hold my luggage prior to check-in. They'd thought of that - they had a bunch of free lockers in reception.
I've been to staffless hotels (numa) that were good and noticeably more affordable than their neighbors. I don't know if the housekeeping was outsourced though, I imagine that, without at least some local management staff, conditions would deteriorate rapidly.
I've stayed at the same Sonder hotel (in NYC) multiple times, and there was absolutely a front desk person.
I had a particularly bad experience with a hotel in Silicon Valley that had outsourced the front desk duties to remote workers. I was stuck outside in the rain, fighting a bad internet connection, trying to check-in. Probably saved them the space taken up by a front desk inside the hotel but I made a mental note never to use that hotel chain again.
I'll be the contrarian and take the opposing position: this story -- the doorman fallacy itself, ignores the obvious counter-narrative:
The Doorman Fallacy in general presents only one side of the issue, which is perfectly reasonable for the creator of the fallacy to do, but puts on us the requirement of considering the other side: That's enough contrarianism for this morning...I find physical menus much easier to search personally - I can "time slice" switching my attention around different parts of the menu fairly easily and home in on which I might want.
It's clear how much menu there is to sort through. If I want to pick something for someone else (e.g. my daughter), there's clear sign posting to what's available.
Often the digital menus I get linked to are either just a PDF of the paper menu (in which case, I'm viewing it at phone window size rather than full A4) or it's a website with nesting in different ways, so you're not sure if you've seen everything or not.
I agree with a lot of this. Sometimes it is easier to scan a code, zoom until the text is at the desired level, and scroll around the menu rather than opening a large leather book with tiny writing in a dimly lit restaurant.
Going to PAY with the QR code feels a little worse. I went out with some friends and I planned to pay cash, the waitress came over to tell us all that we should pay using the QR code on our receipts - missed me, and I had to wait 5 minutes to let them know I was using cash. My friends didn't have much trouble, but we're all younger folks so we are used to pulling up Apple Pay or whatever. I imagine some people do not enjoy that experience.
I will say that there is this inherent disdain towards automated systems, and I feel it's warranted - to a degree. Some experiences are improved with automation, others are stifled. Sometimes we just want to talk to other people who understand our problems.
Most of these points are never a real issue. Don't be contrarian just for the point of being contrarian. Have real contrary issues.
* the primary vector of contagion is unfiltered air circulation, not touching tables and menus (which are wiped down).
* I want you to go and tell another human being, in person, that paper menus cannot possibly 'scale'. Your brain has been deeply addled by SV culture.
* HUMAN TIME IS THE POINT AT A SIT DOWN PLACE, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
* YOU HAVE YOUR HUMAN EYES FOR 'SEARCH'
* QR CODE SCANNING IS NOT "GETTING BETTER" WHAT DO YOU EVEN MEAN BY THIS ASSERTION??
* OLDER PEOPLE AND PEOPLE WITHOUT SMARTPHONES WILL NOT "GET USED TO IT"
* "if demand is there" IT IS, HOW CAN YOU ACT LIKE IT IS NOT, DO YOU NOT HAVE DINNER WITH FRIENDS?? ARE YOU NEW TO THIS PLANET?
Are you daft? I've entered hundreds of buildings in NYC with varieties of automated systems from the 70's to the 2020's and 95% of them are dogshit and there's no sign they are 'getting better'. Most are nigh impossible to use on bright sunny days because of the glare obscuring the addresses. Many are broken. Your 'contrarian' arguments are just counterfactual to anyone who has lived on this planet for a number of years. Deeply, hilariously fallacious. Tell someone you love that 'automated' systems 'never makes mistakes' and see how much traction that argument gets.You're very rude.
These are absurd positions, invented solely for the purpose of being contrarian and not because any of them make any sense or add any value to the conversation. I'm so tired of this thoughtless, tired crap passing as legitimate discussion.
> physical menus are hard to update
It is not hard to print a few sheets of paper off a word document.
> physical menus are often too simple, requiring asking the server questions they've answered a dozen times before already, hurting their efficiency, or they are book-sized and hard to navigate.
None of this is solved in an online menu, and no one is concerned about server "efficiency", whatever that means. Have you ever eaten out?
> physical menus aren't cleaned between uses, so you're touching everything the server touched, and the three people before you.
They are often wiped down, but it's interesting you think your phone is cleaner.
> physical menus don't scale: if the restaurant is busy, you might have to share.
Of course they do. You just... print more.
> physical menus require more human time for the host/server to provide them to you.
What? In a normal restaurant, someone is seating you, anyways. Putting 4 menus on the table is not adding time. If they are not seating you, you are ordering at a counter. If neither of those are true, leave a handful of menus with the napkins.
> physical menus aren't searchable.
The browser patten for finding things on my cell phone is so deeply unintuitive that this is as silly as pretending that a menu isn't literally designed to help you find what you want. Do you think menus are just a bunch of ingredients printed at random on the page? Do you think you are the only person who's ever considered UI?
> Does the author really think getting the server to split the bill is easier?
It is vastly easier for the user/customer. How is this a question?
The assumption that I'm just being contrarian is inaccurate and a bit rude.
To respond to just one or two items:
Printing is no longer as easy as it once was. I bought an ink jet printer a few weeks back because my wife needs to print. Setting it up took an hour, and it had streaks out of the box. I spent fifteen minutes figuring out how to clean the print heads, we'll see if that worked.
I don't understand your comment on searching. It is literally true there is no "search" for physical menus -- only human scanning. And browsers do have a search function. If it's unintuitive, that's a universal problem that can be improved.
I didn't say splitting the bill is not easier for the customer. I said it's not easier, because I was including the server's effort. And your discounting of the server's effort is unfortunate. In a world where the orders are placed through a QR-code/web site, individual payment can be easy and accurate. If it isn't, it will improve.
You make some good points but some are, excuse me, cringey-wrong.
> physical menus are hard to update
How often does a restaurant update a menu? Those that need to update frequently already solved that by having a chalk board.
> physical menus are often too simple, requiring asking the server questions they've answered a dozen times before already, hurting their efficiency...
How does a digital menu solve this? All online menus I've used have basically the same amount of information as a printed menu, with some being marginally better. The marginally better ones are the online menus for food delivery because they have a bit more flavor text, pun intended. This is however offset by restaurant-owners' tendency to put unrepresentative stock photo to go with the item and they just put a disclaimer about the photos somewhere.
> physical menus aren't cleaned between uses, so you're touching everything the server touched, and the three people before you.
Ok but please wash your hands after you order at the earliest and before you touch your food at the latest.
> physical menus aren't searchable.
Fair but only thanks to `Ctrl + F`, the best menu search interface by a mile.
> Difficulty scanning the QR code will get better over time, obviously.
I'm starting a prediction market if this will happen before or after Tesla FSD.
> it ignores how QR codes work (you don't have to be that close)
Uhhh...what? The farthest I could scan a QR code is about two handspans away. This was from the original Google Pixel! It was remarkably good at catching QR codes, I have no idea why. I thought it was the moment scanning a QR code has finally gotten better(!) so imagine my disappointment when my subsequent phones (even one Google Pixel 3a) couldn't live up to it. The 3a was still better than others. Even with flagship models, you gotta be pretty close to scan QRs not to mention wait for the exposure and focus to adjust.
(Whoever tells me "cameras can zoom now dummy" has never actually scanned a QR code from afar with the camera zoom lens. When you zoom, the exposure changes AND it becomes _super_ motion sensitive which is, obviously, not great for scanning things.)
> Does the author really think getting the server to split the bill is easier?
I am not the author but yes I do think so. Server has the table's bill in front of him and a calculator, each tells him what they had and pay in turn. Et voila.
Splitting the bill inconveniences comes down to a couple of factors IME:
1. the customers know what they had but don't know the price so they have to leaf through the menu again to calculate.
2. the table is provided with only one copy of the bill so the group has to scramble over one measly piece of paper, talking over each other, to compute their share.
Both can be solved by centralizing all that complexity on the waiter.
To be fair, I think the author's bad experience was due to wanting to keep the apple crumble gesture a secret. That is such a bizarre complaint, bro. It doesn't make sense to me either! You're all in a restaurant, everyone knows all the food will be paid for by someone! Why keep it a secret that you paid for the apple crumble?
That's enough HN for the rest of the week.
I'm not sure why "cringey" has to enter the conversation. People seem to be taking this personally.
QR codes work across a conference room (personal experience) how old is your phone, exactly?
QR codes have gotten easier to use over the past ten-ish years, I've seen it.
The point isn't that there aren't ways to make physical menus easier; it's that the objections to the digital experience are weak.
>> physical menus are hard to update
> How often does a restaurant update a menu? Those that need to update frequently already solved that by having a chalk board.
One advantage of a digital ordering system: it can track inventory and mark a dish as unavailable after N have been ordered.
Some restaurants might have menu updates in the middle of service quite frequently, if they have a daily special with a fixed quantity. Most restaurants probably have an unavailable dish occasionally. Or if a beverage choice becomes unavailable, or a new beer is put on tap.
I don’t think ease of menu updates would be the deciding factor for any restaurant, I think it’s more likely to be based on the experience they want their customers to have
Or they can just get a printer.
There’s a pub near me that offers dozens of different craft beers. If you ask them for a menu, they will literally print a new, updated menu on the spot, reflecting what they have available at that exact moment.
Does this really demonstrate what the author thinks it does? Other than menus, none of this was really easier before technology.
- Parking meters: you'd have to remember when yours would expire and manually check your watch (if you brought one!) regularly. If you needed more time, you'd have to leave the table to go to the meter to extend it... or leave your event early.
- Splitting a bill: this is notoriously difficult with medium groups [0]. Servers generally dislike split bills, even if you go to the trouble of listing the exact amounts to charge per card. It's also not just a tech problem, but a social problem as well.
Yes the technology involved could be better -- ideally you can easily extend a parking meter from your phone, ideally the app for splitting the bill works well and supports more complicated (but common) scenarios.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p8mhQ9wINI
To clarify, the Doorman Fallacy is about the Doorman doing more than their job actually seems. The Doorman isn't just a greeter, but they are checking that the right people are coming in, they are going to report issues that patrons pass onto them, they check that the UPS guy is actually from UPS, they're the first to notice damage to the property, they call the police if they see a crime happening in the area, and so on. These are things that aren't obviously in their job but things the doorman will actually do.
But I generally agree with the OP here. We have these "high tech" solutions that actually just complicate things. I'm upset that our community pushes for "good enough" and "no elegance". Everyone's definition of these things are different so they're just thought terminating cliches, not some beneficial insights. They're just mindless parroting.
I think part of the problem is engineers aren't being engineers. For some reason engineers are focusing on the monetary value of the thing being built rather than the actual utility to the user. There needs to be a firewall between marketing and engineering. Engineers focus on utility (utility over value) while marketers focus on the inverse. The contention is a feature, not a bug. But now we don't implement single line solutions that solve annoyances that millions of people have because "what's the value?" People are just being killed by a million paper cuts. It's unbearable. We seem to have forgotten that one is the great beauties of computing is scale. This action might cost a customer 1 second, but if you have a million users that's sure a lot of seconds. Seconds they're using on your servers and devices. Those seconds add up, especially as it's not just one program that's adding an extra second, it is a hundred.
We waste a lot of time and money because we don't look at the whole picture
Taking the restaurant ordering app, it’s certainly better than a server. Each individual picks what they want and pays for what they got on their own bill. It removes any chance of communication error between the customer and the kitchen. Appetizers to share easily split across who wanted them. No bill splitting discussions. OP just had to use a bad implementation.
You act like machines are perfect. Machines glitch and have all sorts of problems. They're usually inflexible because programmed by the lowest bidder. You could argue about implementation but that is also true for human servers too
The article does not clarity whether the OP ordered via the app. Only that the menus were accessible via a QR code.
OP either ordered in person after looking at the online menu (no app) or ordered via the app/website but the system bundled together the bill for the whole table despite receiving separate orders (bad implementation).
In theory yes, though as time has gone on I've found they're becoming increasingly aggravating for one reason or another. Either broken pages and functions for no discernible reason, ever more aggressive marketing and behavior manipulation, or other things that maybe other people like but I do not (for example, forcing me to log in with a "magic link" that magically seems to fail half the time), which has made me just give up instead of finishing and not go back.
In my experience, anywhere using an app/QR code is better served by me walking up to the counter and ordering.
> engineers are focusing on the monetary value
A friend of mine passionately believes engineers need an equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath to guide our morals and principles about what we should and shouldn’t build.
I get the QR code menu thing, that’s a solid example imo (though there ARE benefits to QR code menus), but the people hassling with their phones to extend their parking, or paying for their portion of the meal via QR code doesn’t sound at all like the doorman fallacy, just a shitty UI.
Without tech, these people would not have been notified that their parking would expire in the first place, and would have all had to leave the restaurant to extend their parking. Is that really better?
And splitting the bill among six people is an age old hassle that definitely has gotten better with tech at places who have a good UI for handling it.
Agreed.
Generally, with QR menus I'm used to paying when we order. No need for secondary processes or worrying about something not being paid for.
A popular solution in my country, at least for less formal restaurants and bars (and even nightclubs) is for each customer to have their own tab, which gets marked by waiters and stays with the customer. In those places, it's also the norm that you pay your tab at the cashier prior to leaving, and waiters don't have to handle with money.
What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.
It's the same thing with sending parcels, where I must now sit on my computer at home filling in a complicated online form and printing out my own labels. This takes me like 30 minutes, but saves time and money for the Post Office (not for me!)
There's no downside for the company here, especially when they are monopolies so we have no choice.
This is the definition of "penny wise, pound foolish". Nothing is really "free"
Here's a good example: you know how every terminal begs for tips? And the percentage is increasing? (In San Jose I saw by middle number as 25%!!). It looks free, but guess what, I'm more likely to not come back and press "no tip" or enter a custom amount. The cost is the aggregation of these events but we just mindlessly set these values rather than testing. (Or just you know... caring about people and thinking about how you feel as a customer)
There's biases too and biases accumulate. Piss off enough people and they never come back. They tell people not to go there. This happens even if another restaurant goes too far. People just get fed up with "eating out" rather than just eating at one restaurant. That exhaustion accumulates, especially in times like this where money is getting tighter for most people
Or the supermarkets who replaced checkouts with customer self-service under the guise of convenience, and now subject us to more surveillance capitalism to try to protect their losses given people don’t feel so bad about stealing from a machine than a human.
> Nothing is really "free".
There are economies of scale though, plus expertise. That's why we normally buy clothes instead of spinning, cutting, and sewing textiles ourselves.
Don't forget self check out at the grocery store. I don't mind personally (I find ways to make it worth my while..) but it's a version of the same thing. Shifting labor under the guise of convenience. Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer. It's rare that the opposite happens.
My supermarket has the handheld scanners and they are a game changer. They fit handily into the trolley if you want and you just scan stuff as you go. If you want 8 of something, you can just tap the item and increase the quantity, none of the having to scan each one and add it carefully to the bagging area, etc... And best of all, at the end you just scan a self checkout screen (and they have special ones as well with no bagging area and no queue, but you can use the normal ones if the queue is shorter), so you scan the screen, click pay, click pay by card and hold your card on the machine. Done. Takes about 15 seconds all in, and the queues on those machines are basically non-existant as a result.
Best of all is that you put your stuff directly into your bags as you're shopping so there's no frantic packing stage.
Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.
> you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.
Well, not exactly. I saved a bundle of money inadvertently in a Decathlon in São Paulo. I read the instructions, but didn't understand the Portuguese completely. I dumped a ton of purchases into the bin, watched the screen scroll through the items, and paid the bill. When I got home I realized that I'd only been billed for about half the items. Next time I was there, I read the instructions more carefully and discovered that they said to put the items in the bin one by one
> Oh, and maybe Decathlon deserve a special mention here for their self-service checkouts. Every item has an RFID price tag usually sown into the care labels of their own-brand products. They don't have a self-scan machine, handheld or otherwise, you just drop everything you picked up into the box, it scans all the RFID tags and makes sure the weight is correct, and it's all done.
Uniqlo too. I guess it helps that they own their entire manufacturing and retail process.
And usually they have a dedicated checkout aisle so you don’t have to wait for the Boomers in front of you to pay in pennies or whatever it is they do to snarl a queue up.
Eh. This "Boomer" uses his Apple Watch, usually. I tend to blow through in about five seconds. I usually have the stuff paid for, before the cashier stops ringing them up.
I deliberately use the manned checkout, because I'm human, and I believe in helping out other humans. That seems to be a "quaint anachronism," these days, but it's the way this old fogey was raised.
I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human.
Sometimes, I chuckle, as I go through fairly quickly, and see the long line, waiting for the auto-cashiers.
It's obvious that the only benefit comes to the company. If you aren't just getting a candy bar, then the auto-cashier tends to be slower (mainly because I am a lot slower at that stuff, than the cashier).
It's actually not possible to close the transaction before finalizing the items to be added to it. Generally as far as tap is concerned the pinpad won't go into the mode where it can collect money until the cashier totals it. It is actually possible depending on the software to go back to a prior screen after the pinpad has registered a tap and make a change and depending on timing have the original tap still go through but this is a weird edge case not the expected flow.
Drives me crazy watching people ahead of me try to do this. If the transaction hasn't been completed what precisely do they or indeed you think you are paying for again like handing the store an electronic blank check? I agree to pay...whatever the total ends up being!
No, it's often quite possible to scan the watch while the transaction is still open (depends on the store; not all of them support that). The payment method is still open, and is closed by the cashier.
Yeah, it's "trusting" the store, but it has never resulted in unwanted charges. I do it for the person in line behind me. I can afford it, if there was to be an issue, and the service desk is about ten feet away.
In Japan, they make a ceremony of giving you your goods before accepting payment.
It's an edge case most hardware doesn't expose the ability to start charging you until the cashier totals it.
The only exception is that with some hardware/software is that within a narrow window it may be possible to go back and make a change after putting the pinpad in payment mode.
Remember the pinpad is a second computer not a peripheral.
I have never in decades of paying for things ever seen a checkout where you can tap right away.
I suspect that you may be in Europe.
The US has systems that make it easy to take the money away.
Giving it back...'nother story...
> I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human.
Just hit the 'I need help' button on the self-checkout and an employee will show up and you can ask them to ring up your items.
Yeah, I wouldn't do that. The self-checkout actually works fairly well.
The reason that I insist on using the manned lanes, has nothing to do with being uncomfortable with the automated process (I know that it may seem that way, with my gray pompadour, but I'm actually fairly comfortable with tech). It's just because I know that the reason the store uses them, is to fire cashiers, and it's sort of a "stay with them until the end" kind of thing, in my mind.
Like I said, not really the way people think, these days. We tend to be extremely selfish. I participate in an organization that encourages us to adopt a mindset that takes other peoples' existence into account. It's really just symbolic, I know, but I do it for myself; not for others. I feel that symbols are important.
Home Depot self checkouts are large touch screens with a nice wireless gun. It doesn't even check weight. It is one of the least shitty SCO experiences unless you have a bunch of bolts and shit in which case why are you even in self checkout when they always have at least one physical register open?
I don't understand why people do this.
Agree. Home Depot ones are quite effective. The only sand in the gears, is that, if I use my business card, it always asks me for a job number. It's possible that this is something that contractors appreciate, but they have separate, manned, lanes for them.
The ones that truly suck (in my area) are the CVS ones. They have a glass jaw, and it's quite easy to make a mistake that requires the exasperated attendant to come over, and get it unstuck.
That has nothing at all to do with the person using the machine, and everything to do with the geeks that wrote the software. Whenever I see someone (regardless of their age or "digital native" status) struggling with tech, I blame the designers; not the user.
In my experience, if we want to design stuff to be used by humans, then it starts with getting comfortable with our own humanity. Empathy is useful, when designing stuff.
If we don't like people, then we're unlikely to design stuff that people like to use.
For those who might be curious, The Design of Everyday Things, by Don Norman, is an excellent book for getting in touch with empathetic design.
Designing things that people like to use is a mechanical skill that has little to do with liking others but much to do with understanding others
I'm not so sure about that.
It really depends on what we are designing, and who we are designing for.
> little to do with liking others
Sounds pretty bleak. I've come to understand what a profound disadvantage misanthropy is.
We don't have home depot, but most self-checkout tills in the UK have scales and a separate bag weighing area. You can usually do everything at the till, but they also have scales and barcode printers around the loose fruit and veg areas too (and you have to print a barcode to scan if you're using the portable scan gun thing I mentioned earlier).
Why would you need a barcode printer? either it has one or it doesn't in which case you look it up and it's added negating any need to print
> Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer.
Grocery stores (at least here in the UK) are notoriously low margin and have been for a long time. I think this is the one sector where savings are indeed passed on to the customer.
Tesco (largest U.K. supermarket chain) has a razor-thin 2.23% profit margin.
It's a whopping (!) 4.3% according to [0] though maybe in the 90s/10s it was lower
[0] https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-prese...
I'm not sure what labour is being shifted onto me that I wasn't already doing here. I already had to bag my groceries and swipe my card. Scanning items can be done in a single motion while bagging, so the overhead is non-existent to me.
Meanwhile, self-checkout removes a bottleneck in that there are now more places to check out, meaning I have to wait less and thus spend less time shopping. So all in all, no more labour done, and yet my time is saved. I call that a win-win.
Or you can go to a good supermarket with plenty of cashiers and no lines instead.
I'm yet to see one. There have always been lines at supermarkets, even when I was a kid.
It's hard to pick an alternative that doesn't exist.
If you sample the supermarkets around you, you'll notice some will focus more on customer service. They will have all cash registers staffed and no lines or small lines. Other super markets will have few registers staffed and big self-checkout areas.
The supermarkets focusing on self checkout do so because their owners have calculated that the increase in theft is offset by their savings on salaries. They consider honest customers to be suckers who will pay for what the thieves steal. With time, these supermarkets start seeing an increase in thieving customers and a decrease in higher value honest customers. And it starts the downward spiral with worse and worse clientele and just becoming unkept in general. Once this has started, owners will just try to squeeze out as much as possible before selling the property.
> If you sample the supermarkets around you, you'll notice some will focus more on customer service. They will have all cash registers staffed and no lines or small lines. Other super markets will have few registers staffed and big self-checkout areas.
There are at least 20 grocery stores within a 3 km radius of me. I think one has more than 2 checkout lines if you don't count self-checkouts (and I've never seen more than two of them be staffed at any one time). The next closest one one I can think of is at a big shopping centre 5 km away, and even then, it used to have 8, 4 of which have been converted to 18(?) self-checkouts.
Not to mention that whatever this customer service supposedly provided to me in a normal checkout is something I don't want. I see no labour saved by going that route, but I see time saved in many cases when I opt for the self-checkout. Not to mention the bonus of not having to talk to a human.
It's like customer service in anything else. If I need it, something has gone wrong, and I direct my business somewhere else next time. Before self-checkout, customer service was mandatory to do anything. Now I don't need it. I fail to see any disadvantages (to me at least).
> Not to mention the bonus of not having to talk to a human.
This you will have in due time when you enter the eternal sleep. In the meanwhile, life is to be enjoyed.
Regarding supermarkets I guess I'm lucky then, because I have supermarkets nearby focusing on customer service with many cashiers. And they are absolutely ten times faster at scanning my groceries than I would be, since it's their job and they do it all day. Usually they have baggers as well, even though I don't mind bagging my groceries.
So to me as a customer it's quicker, more pleasant, and the biggest bonus of all is that it provides jobs for the local community, including jobs for young people as grocery baggers. That's something I'm very glad to support with my grocery buying buck. Instead of having that money go to pay for the groceries that other people steal in the self checkout.
> This you will have in due time when you enter the eternal sleep.
I already look forward to that a lot more than most people think I should.
> life is to be enjoyed.
I never really figured out how to do that reliably.
> Usually they have baggers as well, even though I don't mind bagging my groceries.
If they have baggers, that would be a genuine advantage. I've literally only seen them in films though (unless you want to count really tiny stores where the cashier will also bag for you).
As things are though, I have to bag myself, and that's the main bottleneck, so even if the cashier can scan more quickly than me, that doesn't actually make the whole process go any faster. Scanning at the self-checkout is marginally slower than just bagging, but in my case at least, it's usually just a case of swiping an item past the scanner, hearing the beep, and putting it a bag. Some items have barcodes in weird places, but if they're items you frequently buy, you quickly figure that out.
> and the biggest bonus of all is that it provides jobs for the local community, including jobs for young people as grocery baggers.
I'm not sure this really should be as much of an advantage as it might be. Sure, them bagging groceries is better than nothing, but the fact that the alternative is nothing is what should be fixed in that case, rather than having them do jobs that are mindless busywork, or just barely above that (not that I have anything against them. If you want to be a bagger, go for it, good for you, but I'd quickly become even more suicidal than I already am). Sadly, we're apparently not quite ready to have that conversation yet.
A job is not a persons identity or destiny. The world has long ago moved on from the paradigm that the first job you do is where you stay for the rest of your life.
The baggers in my local supermarket are high schoolers getting some extra money, while probably studying. It's good for them to learn the basics of what it means to do a job, and be exposed to other people in the community except for psychotic screeching teachers or TikTok brain rot. It's still good that these jobs exist, even if grown ups are doing them. It might be somebody who is between other stuff, or needs some extra cash because of changes in life situation, or for some reason isn't at the moment capable to do another job.
More jobs are always more better, no matter what the jobs are, because it puts firm upwards pressure on other salaries. Bagging groceries is an easy job, so it pressures every other job which is worse to pay better. Otherwise your potential employee will say "I'll just bag groceries instead, if you don't pay me better".
> A job is not a persons identity or destiny.
Yeah. It's just the place you spend 8 hours every day.
Imagine the job instead was digging holes (not for any actual purpose. Just digging and filling in holes so that people could 'have a job'). Would you be saying the same things?
Bagging is at least an actual service, but it's not far away in my mind.
I've had worse jobs which were 16 hour days. But then the pay was better. Anyway, these are high school kids, so I don't think they're working full days, with school and everything.
By the way: If you'd like some cheering up, shoot me an e-mail (from my profile). Things don't have to be hard, and most of the times solutions to our problems is much easier than they seem, but gets ignored because we think it has to be hard.
Self checkout is absolutely more convenient if you're not buying a lot.
(I find ways to make it worth my while..)
If that means what it sounds like, congratulations on accelerating the descent to a low-trust society.
Blaming this individual for 'accelerating the descent' is like blaming a hobo for catching a ride on a runaway train going downhill. The ensuing trainwreck is already inevitable, at least you can get part of a ride out of it!
The trainwreck is only "inevitable" (which, incidentally, it isn't, but put that aside for now) because of individuals making choices that benefit them personally at the expense of the common good.
I agree with everything you're saying, except it's a handful of individuals. The top .000001% are responsible for 90% of the acceleration of the train. You can hardly blame someone for not paying for a tomato.
I don’t believe there’s any evidence whatsoever for that, and I refuse to adopt that kind of loser mindset, where the agency of 99.999999% of people don’t matter at all to how our culture and civilization develops.
so, essentially, you and the other commenter are arguing whether it is everyone that has a little fault for being naughty, or is it just a couple of psychos who are fucking everyone else over.
but even if it was just a couple of psychos that were responsible, it'd be hard to justify stealing from the grocery store, because you are not guaranteed to do damage to the psychos directly -- maybe what'll happen instead is that the grocery store employees will not get a nice raise due to the decreased revenue.
and this is why i think actions of this type are so dangerous to society. it's hard to find who is the victim and who is the criminal. so people feel like they are a victim a little, and then justified in being the criminal in a crime with invisible victims anyway. and so society degrades more and more in a vicious cycle and more people give up. it's disgraceful.
Those grocery store employees [at a national chain supermarket] were not going to get a nice raise regardless, and petty theft is either already accounted for or covered by insurance.
One outcome I can see though, is that if enough is skimmed off the top through self-checkout, then maybe the beancounters will realize that self-checkout isn't as 'efficient' as they thought, and will reinstitute human checkers.
Just like how we hope that the hotel that laid off the doorman eventually realizes their mistake and hires him back.
Pattern recognition is now a loser mindset
Using this alleged “pattern recognition” as an excuse for learned helplessness, and justifying theft from other victims of these top 0.000001% (if you believe that) is absolutely a loser mindset, yes.
You're confused. Either the world is one way or it isn't. Simply deciding it isn't might make you feel like a Chad but it doesn't make you any less of a fucking idiot. I know you think you can will meritocracy and the glorious principles of Democracy into existence and that's really cute, I'm sure it helps you get through each day, but recognizing that it's cope doesn't make you a loser.
It seems like you're saying that it's fine to steal and otherwise victimize people because "meritocracy and the glorious principles of democracy" are, in your view, dead. What a sad worldview. I hope you find some peace.
The trainwreck isn't inevitable, though it's caused by mass theft, or in your analogy too many hobos on the train.
It's not at all caused by the train company hiking their fees while neglecting maintenance to increase profit margins to railway shareholders
It's people being dishonest that makes self checkout slower, with it having to verify the weight of everything. Some stores are higher trust and lack this, which makes it so much faster and smoother.
> the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer
How do you come to this conclusion without a deep dive into a supermarket's finances?
You don’t need a deep dive to see supermarket consolidation that keeps happening year after year. When there is less competition to drive down prices, it is very safe to say to assume that consumers will get less and less surplus for any change a grocery makes.
So what constrains the prices in supermarkets?
I love self checkout, let me scan what I want, not stand in a line with people who seemingly don't know what they're doing or don't have cash or their credit card declines etc.
Depends on the store. The one I go to, most people don't seem to want to use the self-checkout lanes, meaning I benefit from using it because I don't have to spend 5 minutes waiting in line behind three or four people. (Three or four people at each of the dozen checkout lanes, that is; it's a largish store). So instead, I go to the self-checkout lanes and get out of the store faster. Shifting labor to the customer? Perhaps, but the convenience is real, and I'm quite willing to do that small amount of work because what I get in return is five extra minutes at home with my wife and kids.
I actively refuse to use self checkout. A number of stores have reported customers to the police for incorrect scanning. These are honest mistakes and you're now "a know shoplifter". I primarily work with companies that require a clean record, that includes "No shoplifting".
Self checkout is taking away cashier jobs, annoying to use and comes with an uacceptable risk to me as the customer.
> A number of stores have reported customers to the police for incorrect scanning. These are honest mistakes and you're now "a know shoplifter". I primarily work with companies that require a clean record, that includes "No shoplifting".
This sounds more like a 'horrible store' and 'authoritarian police' problem than a self-checkout problem.
Sadly it's happening in a number of stores, so I'm not taking the chance. One issue might be that so many are actually using the self checkouts to steal, that the stores just assume that's the reason and not leaving much rooms for honest mistakes.
It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway, because of items that fail to scan or discounts not being applied.
Understandable in your situation.
> It's not a great lose, almost every time I see someone try to use the self checkout, they need to get a hold of staff anyway
I don't think I've needed to call staff for when using the self-checkout in years (ignoring the random spot checks, but those are rare and very quick), so this also sounds like 'horrible store' to me, with them opting to use dogshit hardware or software that makes it so people need help all the time. Then again, I don't buy tobacco or alcohol, and outside of that I probably end up in a happy median with my shopping, where I don't trigger any safety and security limits, so my experience might be overly positive just because the system never suspects me.
(I find ways to make it worth my while..)
I understand that somewhere is Australia is a supermarket which appears to be generating its own carrots in that it sells far more carrots than ever arrive, but is a black hole for parsnips; the store should be exploding with parsnips given the difference between amount delivered and amount sold, yet mysteriously there's just the one bin of parsnips visible.
I love self checkout. It's usually significantly faster and I can keep busy rather than waiting (I still bag when I use a cashier). I can do shenanigans like do three transactions so I can use a coupon three times separately, without bothering anyone. They're an example of the benefits going to both parties.
I used to get paid to scan groceries. I have no intention of doing it for the same companies for free.
So you spend more time checking out and more time being idle waiting for it.
Not in my experience, because the self-checkouts have to be designed for untrusted users instead of trusted employees. So I spend more time reacting to "please scan item" -> "place item in bagging area" -> "unexpected item in bagging area" -> wait for employee to notice that my checkout needs an override.
Whereas a manned checkout lane gives me a proper belt to put my items on and someone who can usually operate a terminal fairly quickly.
Sorry, I was including time waiting in line at a cashier checkout. If there's no line, then it's faster if you've got a lot of items.
I never make the mistake to go to places with qr codes twice in my life.
I can live with giant tablets in fast foods, but there's no chance I go to qr code restaurants ever.
As the article points out, it's super inconvenient and absolutely breaks the mood for the night and cheapens and ruins the experience.
Even worse one of my favourite steak houses has removed phone booking and implemented a super slow and inconvenient form.
Another place that will never get my money again.
No web form can ever be worse than doing stuff over the phone like we’re still in the 19th Century.
I had a Korean colleague who remarked how backward the US is, you have to do everything over the phone, and you lose signal in elevators.
> No web form can ever be worse than doing stuff over the phone like we’re still in the 19th Century.
Yes, it can. Last year I challenged a Zoomer to try to order from the local ramen place for pickup. They were in and out in well under a minute, including looking up the phone number on Google Maps, whereas Uber Eats would still be loading... and scrolling... Sorry, updating, please stay tuned... Would you like to sign up for Uber Unlimited? ... [do I need to keep doing the gag] ... selecting... wait where did the list go... wait did the one selection take ... ordering ... you have rewards! ... confirmation ... etc They were shocked how much better the experience was. As compared to [paste number, wait 10s] 'Hello?' 'X Ramen, how can I help you?' 'I'd like A ramen and B ramen and C to go, please, name, Alice and Bob.' 'OK. Goodbye.' Even counting the register swipe on pickup to pay, it's night and day. And that is how a web form can be way worse than doing stuff over the phone, because a web form can just get worse and worse and worse - and they do.
> What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.
It doesn't miss it. The whole framing of the article is the Dooman Fallacy - an organisation trying to save money by shifting [apparently] menial work to the customer ends up losing more than they save.
> What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.
What? No, you're making the Doorman fallacy here, explicitly.
The company THINKS they're saving money by pushing the work to the customer/end user, but there's more to wait staff than just taking orders and payment - they provide the ability to smooth over any difficulties experienced during the meal, they signal status, etc, which would theoretically allow the restaurant to charge more than if they force customers to do all this work themselves.
Not to mention, if I had an experience this miserable at a restaurant, I wouldn't be back, which is a direct loss in revenue.
Restaurants aren't monopolies, except in really extreme cases.
I wouldn't go to a restaurant that used QR codes twice. But I can't go to a different supermarket as there's only one in a reasonable distance away, or use another train line, or avoid a government form.
Yes. If you create a straw man, you're very convincing. The real world isn't a static snapshot though. If people are unhappy enough with existing businesses, they will find alternatives or new businesses will see opportunities. Or you can move to a place with the type of businesses you prefer.
Someone giving a pretty basic idea a catchy name like the doorman fallacy doesn't mean that any replacement of humans with automation is a net loss for the company. Lots of automation can be very profitable, even if some positive things are lost in the bargain.
Incidentally, the vast, vast majority of residential buildings don't have doormen, and wouldn't be more profitable by the addition of one.
Isn't it named after the hypothetical scenario about a doorman? The doorman fallacy isn't even specifically aimed at what is more profitable, its just saying that there are softer roles that aren't well defined that aren't replicated when the role is automated away.
That fact doesn’t make it a fallacy. The fallacy part is the idea that the people choosing to automate that job are just stupid and ignorant, and don’t understand what the job really is. Which I’m sure is true for some automation, but doormen are a terrible example.
I don’t know which country you’re in (and don’t disagree with you) but even if the estimate of 30 minutes to shipping labels were accurate, that would still be a net win where I am in Texas - the line at the post office is regularly longer than that.
Because staffing can/has be/been reduced since they made it possible for people to print their own labels. They aren't interested in making the queues faster.
Uh, the queues at the post office have never exactly been fast.
Unless they're rebuilt the post office (they haven't, unless they went with "70s retro" as the design aesthetic!), every counter is normally manned.
You still have to wait in line even with the shipping label because they have to scan it into the system.
> that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.
And somehow things are more expensive than ever. Self checkouts, order at the counter, bussing your own table, assembling your own furniture, filling out your or your pet’s medical history at a hospital, shipping labels (you mentioned this) and so much more. It’s a form of free labor that somehow society is okay with.
When I hear arguments like this I feel compelled to point out that the people running these businesses live in the same world as you.
I don't know how old you are or if you remember, but the examples you gave used to be the most common sources of complaints, delays, refunds, etc. when the employee would do a shitty job (fairly often). The world of the past really was objectively worse.
Ahh yes, having someone to wait tables at a restaurant, someone to scan and bag groceries, someone to take your medical history, having furniture already assembled etc. was really objectively worse.
Also known as the person who mistook your order, put the eggs in the same bag as something heavy, or messed up your chart. Flat-pack furniture is a different topic since that's always been a budget product.
Unless you think sitcom writers of the past were part of a conspiracy, people clearly argued about this then just as we do now.
I think the only difference is that we have managed to weasel in politics somehow. It's worth questioning where you get these ideas about "free labor". Obsoleting a job is not necessarily nefarious nor did it even mean anyone got laid off. It's ultimately a tradeoff that has to be more than mere cost cutting for it to succeed.
You’re equating ocasional inconveniences to what the entire experience was. I could also point to the current setup and say the same.
The times I scan in self checkout and the machine malfunctions, needing a manager. The times I added the medical history myself but the nurse/doctor missed it because they themselves weren’t taking it. Every single time I have to walk back and forth during a meal because I now serve my own table.
I’ve had to wait for help at a self checkout more times than I’ve had my eggs broken. It’s worth questioning why you’re so eager to defend corporations making you work for free.
A lot of this reads like you don’t like to deal with people because you think people, especially in the service industry are incompetent and are wrong majority of the time.
> equating ocasional inconveniences to what the entire experience was
This was highly dependent on the neighborhood you lived in. It still is to some extent. Full service is still around, but I wouldn't expect that in "the bad parts of town". You do not want those people doing those jobs, but now we're really heading somewhere politically incorrect and touching on systemic inequality.
> those people
I had assumed you have certain views about people in the service industry. This sounds a whole lot worse.
What's the point of discussing this if you're going to insist on reading everything in bad faith? You know very well I'm speaking from experience. Go ask anyone else who lived in that kind of place at that time. It's where the run down Walmart and McDonald's still are. That's where self-checkout was born.
You are trying to advocate for the disadvantaged who might work those kinds of jobs longer term, yet you don't understand those people. You do not understand the valid concerns of the shoppers at those stores either who had little alternative. You're complaining about self-checkout, but it's the same machines they worked with for at or near minimum wage. The way you get angry is the way they'd get angry too after a full day of that every day. As I said, you do not want those people doing that job.
I don't regret any of what I said, but I regret adding to yet more of this noise on HN. I tried to have productive conflict by sharing my perspective, but there's no substance left here.
Which people shouldn't do which jobs?
> It’s a form of free labor that somehow society is okay with.
It's very popular to say this in some places, but wouldn't you expect that the money that businesses are saving when they do this is passed along to the customer in lower prices? Since they're competing with other businesses?
When your grocery store gets a self checkout, do you see your grocery bills go down? What ends up happening is that the grocery store makes more profit, the other stores notice and they too get rid of self checkouts. Your grocery bill remains the same, you are more inconvenienced but all of their profits go up.
Yeah sure. That's the logic that elects Mamdani. Maybe you're confused because instead of going down, prices increased less than they otherwise would have.
Economics happens on the margins where the reality is that store A reduces its costs and lowers its prices to compete with Store B. Or are you paying $100 for a jar of peanut butter?
Ehh. Corporate profits are at all time highs. The idea that somehow if corporations replace workers or pay them less, will somehow ensure we see smaller price increases as consumers is the fallacy that’s brought us here in the first place. Trying to make this a political discussion is pointless.
In-n-out hires a large staff and pays people well, and somehow their hamburger is still $3 and top quality. The same time when every other fast food chain is charging restaurant prices. Costco hires plenty of staff and pays them well, their prices are some of the lowest in the country. Meanwhile Walmart, target etc. are always understaffed and somehow still more expensive.
We were told that $20 minimum wage would make our McDonalds burgers to be $100 (like your hyperbole about peanut butter). Our burgers are just marginally more expensive than the rest of the country.
I still remember when all the fast food chains raised their prices together even when they didn’t need to post pandemic. Makes me really skeptical of the claim about companies lowering prices to compete with each other.
>In-n-out, Costco, Walmart
Congratulations. You've identified different business models.
> I still remember when all the fast food chains raised their prices together
If this is true, what force are you imagining constrains all the fast food chains from not having n times their current prices? Adjust n to whatever value is lower than your hyperbole trigger.
> Congratulations. You've identified different business models.
So pointing out business models that don’t raise prices while not customer service, to counter the claim of “hiring more people will raise the prices for us”, is a problem how?
> If this is true, what force are you imagining constrains all the fast food chains from not having n times their current prices
It is true. https://financebuzz.com/fast-food-prices-vs-inflation
You’re also responding to a partial statement of a sentence and not a complete argument. The argument being companies don’t necessarily lower prices to compete with one another even if they can.
And finally, why do companies don’t raise their prices infinitely? (A complete tangent to the discussion) Because well, business 101. Prices increases are a slow drip. And there is a limit after which price increases hurt the sales. And you always want an external excuse to point a finger at to make the prices palatable. Some companies can increase prices faster than the others. Apple made hundreds of billions in profits last year and they just increased the prices of MacBooks by hundreds of dollars. They could’ve easily not raised prices but why would you not when you have a loyal customer base that won’t mind paying a few hundred dollars extra?
> So pointing out business models that don’t raise prices while not customer service, to counter the claim of “hiring more people will raise the prices for us”, is a problem how?
It's a problem because the business models are providing alternatives of what their customers value. You're arguing that because Costco, one of, if not the most successful retailers in the world, can do it why can't all stores? I can assure you every business wants to be Costco.
But also, I've been to Costco. And they offer what they want in quantities that they want. And it's often not what I want no matter how well they treat their employees. Also the checkout lines were very long.
Business 101? Take a step back. What you're describing is the feedback mechanism of the competition that drives prices down. Supply, demand, price. Econ 101. The reason prices aren't infinite is not because the evil corporations are conspiring to increase them slowly enough that customers barely notice. It's because, if they increase them too much, they will lose business to their competitors.
Apple has the ability to raise prices because customers value its ecosystem. But, OK. Why didn't they raise the price by thousands? Do you think people didn't notice the few hundred dollar price increase drip? It looks to me like people did notice. It's because at a certain price, it's worthwhile to hold your nose and use a different operating system.
At some point you’re just picking items and responding to them. This is taking the discussion away from your core argument. You talk about Costco but conveniently leave out in-n-out because it doesn’t fit your narrative.
My core argument has been that corporations offload tasks onto customers and then use the money saved to boost their own profits.
Your argument is that the cost saved is passed on to the customers.
I’ve provided examples of why that doesn’t happen, and provided examples of companies that don’t sacrifice customer experience while maintaining lower prices to show that the rest of them are not doing the same.
I am yet to see any substantial evidence from your end to prove that savings are indeed getting passed on to customers. And unless that’s something you want to discuss, we should end it here.
You're the one who started talking about specific examples and I agree that that's irrelevant since different companies decide how to allocate the money they save by reducing labor costs. Which is actually a refutation of your general assertion that labor cost savings don't constrain prices.
Your argument is based on the conspiratorial belief that "corporations" are a monolith conspiring to allocate the savings from self checkout. You have not explained why each of them is not incentivized to use that savings to reduce costs to take more business from their competitors. Is your answer that the businesses are all colluding? You have also not explained why they are constrained at all in the amount they can raise prices. The drip theory makes no sense. This is all basic economics.
> That's the logic that elects Mamdani
Correct and increasingly popular logic? I agree entirely!
When a restaurant pushes me to a QR code I now outright say that I find them "insulting."
Granted, where I live e-menus generally haven't taken off in sit-down restaurants, so it's very easy to push back on nonsense like this.
At first I thought you meant QR for payment, which is weird because most people (at least in SEA, where I lived) consider less friction and more convenient than cash or cards.
But it turns out you meant QR for menu, yes, hate them. Flipping through the menu is better experience overall. Opening menu on a phone is a chore, not to mention most menu web/app is crap. Lots of them are just link to pdf on google drive.
I enjoy the codes. It skips that whole dance we do in the US of waiting for the server to return - twice! - to pick up payment and then drop off the card and receipts. I can sit there as long as I want, pay once, then walk out. And the card has never left my hand.
What's more nonsense is the author of the article trying to split a check 6 ways and stressing over the fact two people shared a dessert. Sack up, split it roughly or better yet don't split it at all. Good friends return the favor sooner or later. Unless you're a cheapskate.
Gay Talese starts "The Kidnapping of Joe Bonanno" (Esquire, August 1971) with this:
Knowing that it is possible to see too much, most doormen in New York have developed an extraordinary sense of selective vision: they know what to see and what to ignore, when to be curious and when to be indolent—they are most often standing indoors, unaware, when there are accidents or arguments in front of their buildings, and they are usually in the street seeking taxicabs when burglars are escaping through the lobby. Although a doorman may disapprove of bribery and adultery, his back is invariably turned when the superintendent is handing money to the fire inspector or when a tenant whose wife is away escorts a young woman into the elevator—which is not to accuse the doorman of hypocrisy or cowardice but merely to suggest that his instinct for uninvolvement is very strong, and to speculate that doormen have perhaps learned through experience that nothing is to be gained by serving as a material witness to life’s unseemly sights or to the madness of the city. This being so, it was not surprising that on the night when the reputed Mafia chief, Joseph Bonanno, was grabbed by two gunmen in front of a luxury apartment house on Park Avenue near Thirty-sixth Street, shortly after midnight on a rainy Tuesday in October, the doorman was standing in the lobby talking to the elevator man and saw nothing.
What failed was not the QR code because it was not a poor choice of technology. It was designed in such a way that it was good for one person to order but not for six people to negotiate. And that is how replacement technology operates. You study the activities of a human, and then you build automation around that. What you don't get is all the context the human is handling along the way. The social reading, the handling of exceptions, the time when someone passes on the cake and gets it out of the way. Replacement technology doesn't inherit any of this contextual intelligence. It can only handle the modal case. While, real life is mostly full of edge cases.
I would love to pay and manage parking from my phone if the apps actually worked intuitively, but they rarely do. It was easier when all I had to do was have a roll of quarters in my car.
First world influencer problem. "This past Saturday, six of us had an impromptu brunch after our morning yoga class..." In Dubai.
The moment i read the word Dubai, my empathy levels dropped to zero.
This can be to generalized to map versus territory.
People have a particular lens they see things through. And they forget that there is detail there that matters.
The last 15 years of metrics driven decisions has hollowed out what made most things good.
It’s a fundamental problem of scale. Decision makers that have a large amount of power can only see the map.
The solution is to decentralize power. The more successful organization would either be smaller or allow more control for smaller participants.
This is good because humans also tend to be happier when they have more localized control.
> Is digital nomad
> Lives in Dubai
> Complains about businesses increasing profits
Ok, anyway…
Replacing humans with automation is common in wealthy societies because the cost of labor is high. That's a good thing!
I don't want to live in a place where labor is cheap. I'll either be paid poorly or there will be a great imbalance of wealth.
The only real solution is to create better automation.
I’d rather live in a place where waitstaff are comfortably compensated for their labor. Automating it will just lead to one kind of misery after another. Where does it end? Why do we want to go there? We can choose not to.
That sounds nice but falls apart when customers have to actually pay for it.
The most workable solution we've found is for employers to compete for employees, and employees to work for a wage that's acceptable to them. If you pay more than that, a competitor who pays less will take all your business.
But that’s not really what happens either because the employees are fundamentally at a disadvantage and don’t have perfect information.
Employers will generally take whomever will accept the least, and when bills are coming due, employees will take any job for some wage, not the best wage.
Would you rather be a waiter in America or Brazil?
The average waiter in America makes $40K per year, compared to $9K per year for a Brazilian water (adjusted for PPP).
Brazil does not have any of the labor-saving tech that we're complaining about because they don't need it--labor is cheap.
Let's say a restaurant in America got rid of its tech and instead hired more waiters. Would each waiter get paid more or less? Obviously, each waiter would get paid less. The restaurant still makes the same amount of money, so the same amount of money is divided among more people. Mathematically, each waiter will make less money with less tech.
So if you really want waitstaff to be well-paid, you should want more automation, not less.
The more I think about it, the more dumb the premise of this "fallacy" sounds.
I lived in a doorman building in NYC for almost a decade. It's great!
It's also really expensive to have your building entrance staffed 24/7, which is why the vast majority of buildings do not have a doorman, and you'll pay quite a bit more for one that does. It's a luxury.
And literally anyone who has ever lived in a doorman building knows that approximately 2% of the value is that they can open the door for you. No one who is deciding whether to employ doormen is making their decision based on whether there's a cheaper way to open the door.
There might be a fallacy here beyond "sometimes automation isn't worth it", but doormen are a terrible example of it, given that probably 99.999% of buildings do not have doormen, and wouldn't be better off financially if they did.
Isn’t it a hotel in the original version? Doormen for nicer hotels seem very common
Fair point, but also an even dumber example. I promise you, the people running the kind of upscale hotels that have a doorman are under no illusion that the main job is opening the door.
I am on the other end of the spectrum.
I enjoy QR ordering. I dislike talking to people. Upselling me is not a thing. I can take as long as I want. I don't have to flag/bother someone. No one screws it up except me. I see exactly what's on my bill.
> QR ordering
In the story, even though people used the QR code separately to see the menu, the bill was combined. Either the order itself was done via a human, or the bill was charged against the table rather than the unique user.
When the whole ordering and paying happens as a single event, none of the problems presented in the story occur, other than the initial problem of scanning the QR code.
I agree, but that's mostly just a reason to have the option, while also having the option of using paper menus.
Upselling me is not a thing.
That is not a situation likely to continue beyond the next moment.
You're describing an interaction with a good server at a good business. (Off of peak hours, if you can take hours and they don'thave anything to say about it.) What do QR codes add except for technical issues?
I honestly cannot recall the last time a server tried to upsell me with even as much as a "do you want a dessert?". But... I suppose that's selection bias. I only go to restaurants that don't require servers to do that BS. They don't want to do it either, you know?
I would not be at all comfortable, with a human server, making them wait while changing my selection multiple times (no I want it with the ginger sauce... no, without... no actually the sesame sauce... no actually I don't even want that dish, I'll take the other one), googling 10 different unusual ingredients while I make these changes, etc. And especially if I'm part of a larger party that shares food, or with kids, makes it all the more complicated. I just... am not ok with the social cost of it, even if a "good server" would be ok with it. (And who says you'll get a "good" one?). Whereas with digital ordering it's literally just zero-cost button clicks. And zero chance of error. I really don't see how it's even comparable, digital ordering is such a step forward. (Obviously not in all settings, like fancy dining, but for the mainstream).
> I would not be at all comfortable, with a human server, making them wait while changing my selection multiple times (no I want it with the ginger sauce... no, without... no actually the sesame sauce... no actually I don't even want that dish, I'll take the other one), googling 10 different unusual ingredients while I make these changes, etc.
You would have to do all of this anyways if you ordered via an app. It’s also not zero cost, especially if you’re having to look up ingredients. A good server could explain what ingredients are without you have to look them up, as well.
I agree that it can be convenient in that you don’t have to wait for a server to show up to put an order in, but the issues of indecision while ordering are all something you can do before that interaction…
I won't fall for it. Been down that road and I'm not going back.
> But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued.
I'm guessing the author has never worked as a server themselves... Is there any part of the world you can have a six top with individual checks when you didn't tell them up front to split the bill? As an American this just seems obvious to me but maybe the expectation is different in Dubai.
> Is there any part of the world you can have a six top with individual checks when you didn't tell them up front to split the bill?
Most restaurant point of sales systems in the US handle that pretty well. They put down what seat an item was ordered from, and it covers everything except shared items like appetizers. That's been pretty common for a couple decades, and not just at chains, also at local places (if they had a POS system and weren't doing it with paper still, but good servers know how to notate that well, too).
"They" being the waiter or waitress, of course. Good ones can navigate complex bill splitting arrangements and even better can manage awkward interactions like one person quietly paying for another's dessert or covering an appetizer for the table, know the menu not only by memory but also can recommend dishes that the guest may prefer, and generally make the dining and ordering and paying experience better.
Bad restaurants think they can replace those skills with a QR code on the table optimized for the lowest common denominator.
I’ve seen rare places where the server has a handheld and every single item is always individually charged. Then they can keep things separate or combine it however you want.
But, I’ve seen that maybe twice in my entire life. Once might have been in Vegas. Everywhere else is as you say; it’s just not a reasonable post-meal request.
Yeah there's a Pho place in Seattle I'd go to lunch at (iykyk) where we'd regularly have 20 people at a table and pay individually. But they didn't even use the check for that, they'd just ask what you had and ring that in as they went around the table with the handheld. Literally the only place I've ever seen that even offered to split a check at a table with more than 3-4 people.
Yes, this is quite standard outside the US. In Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia etc. this is more the standard practice than the opposite.
Before electronic POS systems accounted for this, we'd just split the bill evenly. I didn't like that solution either though because it rewarded people who ordered expensive food or lots of food, and that was never me. I even quit going to lunch with big groups of coworkers because of that.
>Is there any part of the world you can have a six top with individual checks when you didn't tell them up front to split the bill?
Not uncommon here in Norway. I had payday beers with well over ten people where there was a shared tab with people paying for their stuff as they leave.
It's because we are Americans yes. When I was in Europe the server would give us the handheld payment device and we select which items we ordered and then they'd charge us. The author seems to not have this, the waiter should've gone through themselves. It was simply the wrong technology, not that technology was at fault.
The place where I seen splitting the bill for a large table work the absolute best has been in the US, but it seems restaurant dependent.
the wrong technology was at fault.
In Germany (where this happens frequently and many people expect to be able to pay separately – I don’t like it and we generally don’t handle it that way with friends, but when I’m in the restaurant with coworkers even I wouldn’t dare to stray from orthodoxy) the payment systems seem to be set up for it and enable this in a relatively frictionless way. I remember it being more complicated for everyone involved.
Basically, waiters have a list with all the items in front of them and you tell them what you had and they pick them. They can then just initiate a normal payment process and leave the rest of the table as is.
More time consuming and finicky than just someone paying everything all at once, sure, but a well worn and designed user journey you seemingly don’t have to torture those devices into making possible.
In fact, I will often be extremely apologetic when saying I want to split the bill but have noticed no eye rolls or complaints from waiters. It’s just smooth sailing. I do honestly think that was different when waiters had to do math and cross out things on bills and stuff (which I distinctly remember from my childhood/youth in the 2000s).
Europe. You just walk to the register and point out the items you want to pay for. I've never seen a place where paying for a group of 6 separately would be a problem, it's the default and expected.
Europe is a continent. In all the countries I've been to in Europe, the service was indistinguishable from that in the US, where the bill is brought to the table and paid there. Can you be more specific as to what country's restaurants do people normally walk up to a register after eating?
This has happened to me twice in Norway and once in Germany, but only with large groups of people, so it's never 'normally'. If you're a smaller group or alone, the waiter will either remember who had what (or have kept track in their POS system?), or outright ask who will pay for what, since there are so few items to pay for that that's pretty manageable.
The more common way to settle this in my experience, if you're in a larger group, is to announce your intention to split the bill before ordering, and then the waiter can go through what groups or individuals will pay and can track them accordingly.
Yeah, this is the same in the US. If you tell them ahead of time, there's no issue in splitting the bill. I was doing that 20 years ago when I was a waiter at both higher-end and mid-range restaurants.
The restaurant seems to be trying real hard to externalize its costs, pushing its previous costs (menus/billing/staff) onto the diners, and hoping that the value of the experience hadn't been so diminished that the diner would baulk. I reckon the diner baulked, as I would have. The tradeoff just doesn't seem fair. Bad math. Bad business.
When I was in Bangkok a good while back, I was surprised how there’re doormen at shopping mall—humans to handle simple things which in many parts of the world would certainly not involve a person.
A bit later I thought that it makes sense: it improves customer experience and slightly reduces unemployment in local population—a doorman job is better than no job.
It feels a bit like you didn't apply the lesson of the article - these "doormen" have often different functions (theft prevention or at least reduction, information provision, support for those that need help, some minor cleaning or caretaking roles, and the greeting/visibility/we-are-a-fancy-place vibe ;-)
In countries where labour is cheap it is common to have staff for less essential things as humans are just more flexible (but also less reliable) than machines.
Personally I thought opening doors was about the only thing they did—never seen them engage in any other activity.
I am not sure you provide a counter-argument, IMO offering more people a way to earn money and do something useful (as opposed to delegating these duties to [generally foreign-made] equipment) as a way of maintaining a healthy society still holds.
It's weird to see someone present as novel what is like talking about the weather, at least for the average person in the U.S. (not in the Bay Area, in the U.S.).
It's fascinating to me that the large companies never did anything to break out of the experiences of someone in Dubai or SF or Singapore, etc. vs far more "average" places are not similar experiences and therefore product design suffers.
I get that other companies are the ones with the most money, but failing to expand into selling things people actually want (like Apple briefly did) is the most interesting problem to come out of Silicon Valley (no one sells anything people want, besides ads -- they give things away and then sell to companies).
I've never heard of the Doorman Fallacy before. I like it.
That said, not everything changes because some businessman wants to cut costs. Splitting bills has always been a pain, and while a lot of apps suck, at least it's consistent. I can't tell you how many times I got dirty looks from wait staff when asked to split a bill. In pretty much every story the author talks about I would rather fail forward than go backward.
"On paper, it looks like a smart decision. Reduce paper, reduce staff, reduce operating costs. But what gets overlooked is the hit to the customer experience." As always.... this philosophy is basically killing any customer experiences these days. Hopefully some day profits will take enough of a hit to actually start resulting in more effort in the customer experience.
As long as demand remains high they have no reason to change their course.
I've never been to a place where you order by QR code where somehow the bill is joined together in one order for the table. Everything I order on the phone I pay for before they bring the food.
A couple places near me have QR codes for seeing a menu, but you still place an order with a person. If I order via QR code, payment is tied to me as a person, not the group.
Never (yet?) seen it any other way.
Yeah, they exist. I’ve also been to places where they take your order in the conventional way, but then allow you to scan a QR code to pay and go.
Sure, the process of asking for the bill and doing the dance where you check it, they come back with the card machine etc. can be mightily inconvenient especially if you’re in a rush. But I can just walk up to someone and pay there and then.
Whenever I’ve tried to use them, these QR code payment flows normally try to charge me, the patron, a service fee for the convenience, so I’ve never actually gone through with it.
I’ve mostly seen it at Asian cuisine restaurants where you normally order several dishes and order more as the meal progresses. So it builds up a tab and then you pay at the end.
But what if the automation could be seamless, like your AI agent adds more time to your parking by simply knowing that you're still sitting down at the restaurant.
This is also the "can be shit - will be shit" fallacy.
Everyone knows that digital restaurant experiences are crap and most people do not pick a restaurant based on the digital experience.
All restaurants use the same few white label solutions and the decision is based on cost. White labels rarely break new ground because despite having many clients to experiment / gather data on, they just can't get good being everything for everyone.
This of course doesn't count giants like McDonalds who have the incentive and position to be defined by that digital experience.
This feels like an AI narrative, transcribed by a human.
1) Impromptu yoga class brunch. No one says "oh, who needs to top up their parking since we'll be an extra hour"; so it's technology at fault that they got a notification half way through, not the people involved? The consequence was no one got ticketed?
2) 6 people with 6 phones, some of them the "latest iPhones" scanned a QR code once each, after struggling; chose their meals, didn't pay via the app, and it created a shared bill with complete loss of who ordered what.
I have never used a QR code ordering system this bad. The only way this makes sense is if they all told a staff member what they were having from reading an online menu. Paper menus would not have changed this. A restaurant wouldn't typically use a solution so bad, it'd be gone in a few weeks if they have any kind of autonomy.
How did these people live through COVID and never encounter a QR code they had to scan with a phone? Is this elderly yoga? Or ultra rich kids with butlers their entire lives? It doesn't make sense that they are so technologically illiterate any other way.
3) They all paid, but the only information they could see was the remaining amount unpaid. At the end, the last person paid; and the staff told them there was 24Dh outstanding - and this was a surprise. The last person just left without mentioning this, or their eyes don't work? How is having the only piece of information visible to you the bit that causes the surprise?
None of this makes sense to me as internally consistent. Yes, the writing style doesn't look ChatGPT flavoured, there are mistakes in it to appear more human; but the cognitive model of how things work seems to be utterly inhuman.
> How did these people live through COVID and never encounter a QR code they had to scan with a phone?
Was that a requirement? I got through it without scanning a single QR code. I had my vaccination status available as a QR code (on paper when travelling in order not to depend on just a smartphone), but not the other way around.
We just ignored restaurants without paper menus, as we always do. It wasn't the time to eat out in any case.
The real fallacy is your assumption that the business doesn’t expect the hit in customer experience. In reality they have thought about the consequence and made the conscious decision to not care.
Alamo Draft House recently-ish lost the plot. They were famous for being very anti-phone. They have now switched their food/drink service to on your device which means you have to use your phone during the movie which is precisely why I preferred to go there. You also report someone using their phone by using your phone. They even acknowledge this with a "we recognize the irony" slide during their "this is a phone free environment" segment.
To me, this seems like a typical "how hard can it be" startup mentality. People, especially those "fast to the market" type, tend to vastly underestimate all the corner cases of the technology, mostly tending to the happy path and outsourcing the pain to their customers. The reason they still have customers is because most of the market has the same problems and a solution that covers those corner cases is way more expensive and also way more extensive in terms of infrastructure you'd need. You would have hoped there is middle-ground there, i.e. a startup on the cheaper side with a vision for corner cases, but knowing how markets and marketing works I'm not holding my breath for that.
A big part of those corner cases is the assumption of the user being an independent responsible adult without problems. Voice control is only acceptable if you don't startle anyone with or don't have anyone talking or screaming while you are talking. Booking tickets with "one ticket per smartphone" doesn't work when you have kids. Doing basically anything that's smartphone-only requires you to have it on you, charged and for the most part with an internet connection -- great for underground parking garages. God forbid you have lost your smartphone while drunk or have been robbed -- forget driving home with the virtual car key only being in your phone, forget paying for a taxi, forget entering your home protected by a smart lock. All of this assuming the tech works perfectly and durably, which we know is not the case for most of modern tech.
Going to "modernized" restaurants is just a drag. I don't want to touch your tablet or scan your code. I much prefer the restaurants which only accept cash
When I order from the app and my robot delivers the food and I pay with my QR code, what's the customary tip?
while i agree that this "doorman fallacy" happens, and i also agree that it can happen in the context of restaurant servers, i completely disagree that this is an example of it.
problems cited: people ordering at the same time (limited by presence of a single QR code). splitting the bill, knowing what was items were already paid for or who already paid for it (made difficult by interface).
these are examples of problems where the tech solution can easily be much better than the human solution.
for example, you'd just need a larger number of QR codes. or, i'm under the impression that nowadays some phones can read QR codes even at weird angles; in this way even a single QR code could be read by multiple people in parallel. meanwhile notice that human servers can only take one order at a time.
and obviously super simple modifications to the interface solve your problems with the bill. but it's more often than not an ordeal to arrange with other people and the server to pay for 1/4 of the fries and 1/2 of the salad or something like that (unless the server themselves has access to a tech solution).
ways that the server could be better than the tech solution would be, for example, explaining dishes (ingredients, size, taste) or making suggestions.
> This past Saturday, six of us had an impromptu brunch after our morning yoga class.
The jokes just write themselves.
Why I prefer Asuncion to Dubai in a nutshell.
Chauffeur / Valet > parking apps
Maids > dishwashers, laundry, roomba, cooking
Fixers > everything else
This may be Doormans fallacy, but it is a bad example. It just sounds like you're not used to using QR code menus. Once people get used to QR code menus we will see its benefits over traditional menus.
I'm unclear how getting used to QR code menus will alleviate the author's primary complaint that he would rather not use his phone during the meal and instead be present with the people there.
> Once people get used to QR code menus we will see its benefits over traditional menus.
Au contraire, mon ami. Once people see the benefits of anything they will keep using it and naturally get used to it. Not the other way around.
Really enough HN now. Goodness, the discussion here is ridiculous.
We underestimate how valuable and useful the "technology" of a human really is.
People automate things they don't value.
To me this sounds more like the Icarus Fallacy: "The lesson of isn't don't fly close to the sun, it's make better fucking wings."
The subtle thing in all this is that it externalizes labor costs. You are the one doing the work. I was thrown by this a while ago checking into a hotel with kiosk. I was out of my time zone and literally half asleep. Typing my name was real labor at that point.
Huh I've never understood doormen, but I sure do hate QR codes for restaurant menus.
This seems like it has nothing to do with the technology and everything to do with the confusion that has always arisen when 6 people try and split a bill, it has always been like that. As for "secretly" trying to pay for an apple crumble, I have no idea how technology is supposed to help there. The way QR code scans usually work is you scan, order, and pay individually.
It really doesn't sound like a good example of the Doorman's Fallacy, which is about automation failing to provide the nonobvious benefits of a human doing the job.
It's just an example of automation done badly. Just have multiple QR codes to allow scanning in parallel. And if 6 people each paying for the own stuff creates a mess then sorry, that's just incredibly incompetent UX design. It should actually be easier to do it right when they're already ordering through separate devices!
>The worst was when it came time to pay. Naturally, everyone wanted to pay for what they ordered. The waitress pushed us to use the use the QR code again, saying it would be easier. Maybe that's true for 1 or 2 people. But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued. The human waiters just hung by, probably just as confused.
>Eventually, all the women went back to their busy lives and it was just us two guys left, continuing on. Suddenly, the waitress came up to us to say that 24 Dhs was still unpaid. I couldn't believe it. *Thankfully,* the other guy took care of it.
Is OP Dutch? Just split the bill evenly, have someone pay and send them your share.
I didn't interpret it as "automation bad". The invisible value, cancelled by automation, can also be negative.
Consider a doorman or a waiter in low-trust status based society: to get a service one must exaggerate status signaling and/or bribe the gatekeeper to be deemed worthy of a service. Kiosk doesn't accept bribes and you can trust "no vacancy" from kiosk more than from the doorman.
“We each had to take turns scanning it” - seriously?
Soul-less money-oriented behavior in Dubai? Color me shocked.
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I agree, but multiple people can scan a QR code simultaneously.
> multiple people can scan a QR code simultaneously
If it's large enough, and posted in a place where people sitting around a table can all see it clearly.
I'm just always surprised when people place their entire phone over the code, thinking it needs to fill the screen, when they scan pretty well from a couple feet away.
Or the place could go to the extraordinary expense of putting multiple cards on the table with the codes.
This article doesn't land for me. The author complains about having to scan the code in sequence, but overlooks the fact that a waiter/waitress/till can only serve one person at time. And as you say, multiple people can scan a QR code, _and_ it would be trivial to print more.
Maybe I missed the point, but the aside about parking metres seems irrelevant. Just makes me think this is an anti-technology rant.
And again, the gripe about splitting up the bill. Not only is that a problem with existing systems, it's a problem that is solved by QR codes (if implemented correctly).
People have now clung on to doorman's fallacy as a way to justify keeping outdated jobs around.
There should be a new fallacy named for this phenomenon otherwise we would have people justifying having travel agents jobs and translator jobs being protected.
I am curious to hear why you believe those roles don't provide any value.
lol, they didn't say that!
A job can provide lots of value and still be worth automating overall. There's a reason almost no buildings have doorman, the only places where you can't pump your gas are because there's a legal prohibition, and essentially no elevator operators exist anymore.
I absolutely love waiters in any decent restaurant.
You can ask they waiter what's good on the menu, or what's the restaurant specialty or just what was delivered in the day and thus fresh, and it's a completely different experience.
Have you ever used a travel agent?
Not anymore because they are not worth the money
You’re the demo version of the ultimate tech:
You create worlds in your sleep, anything magically appears in front of you - it’s called imagination
The only limit is:
We cannot recall the whole NYC and our imagination is a single-player experience
You cannot invite your buddy for a tea party in your mind
The ultimate tech is the ethical sim multiverse (think BCI Airpods + growing multiversal Web) to have multiversal memories, imagination and dreams
And you are a walking demo version of it