The Doorman's Fallacy in action(rozumem.xyz) |
The Doorman's Fallacy in action(rozumem.xyz) |
If it's large enough, and posted in a place where people sitting around a table can all see it clearly.
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).
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.
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.
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
>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 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.
That is not a situation likely to continue beyond the next moment.
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'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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
Chauffeur / Valet > parking apps
Maids > dishwashers, laundry, roomba, cooking
Fixers > everything else
The jokes just write themselves.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Bad restaurants think they can replace those skills with a QR code on the table optimized for the lowest common denominator.
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.
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.
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).
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…
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Public parking is prepaid, usually via the official RTA app.
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.
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.
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.
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.
it's not like a doorman where there's useful social interaction
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.
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)
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.
- 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?
- 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.
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
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Lives in Dubai
> Complains about businesses increasing profits
Ok, anyway…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
You could farm the data to see how the shop is doing.
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 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.
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 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.
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
iterative feedback loops using memories for context, of course. just like they trained the first two tiers
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.
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.
(And printed menus tend to have allergy info too, just like online menus sometimes don't.)
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.
> 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.
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?
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).
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?
If I wanted a no-touch experience with no other human in sight or on standby, I'd just get an airbnb
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.
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.
* 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*?
An automated system can add or remove people from the authorized list easily and remotely, and not make mistakes.
> 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.
> 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
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
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?
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.
> it’s certainly better than a server.
> 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
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.
> that money is saved for 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
There are economies of scale though, plus expertise. That's why we normally buy clothes instead of spinning, cutting, and sewing textiles ourselves.
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.
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 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.
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.
How do you come to this conclusion without a deep dive into a supermarket's finances?
Self checkout is taking away cashier jobs, annoying to use and comes with an uacceptable risk to me as the customer.
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 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.
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.
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? 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.
Incidentally, the vast, vast majority of residential buildings don't have doormen, and wouldn't be more profitable by the addition of one.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 said, I have a _feeling_ (I cannot emphasize this enough) that some restaurants might actually relish telling some of their patrons that the _special_ item is no longer available. Makes it seem even more exclusive when there's more demand than supply. I'm not talking about Mc Donald's sundae ice cream but rather Sea Urchin Ceviche from Dorsia's. It's only ever happened to me once, so anecdotal.
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.
> QR codes work across a conference room (personal experience) how old is your phone, exactly?
See, here we go. Of course a conference room with good (if not necessarily aesthetic) lighting is conducive to scanning QR codes. I bet said QR code was also printed large or even projected. A _restaurant_ on the other hand, more often than not has (a) small QR code print-outs---remember these are put on a table!---and (b) often has mood diffuse lighting which makes getting a good exposure on an already small print-out more complicated. If someone had the genius idea to print it out on reflective glossy paper that complicates things. However, if someone lacked the foresight and printed it on normal matte paper, you might find it stained with three-week old sauce.
(EDIT: For the record, other than the aforementioned Pixels, my current phone is a Sony XPeria 1 V1, but IDK I can't even handle JSON files, maybe I'm also holding my phone doofusly.)
> QR codes have gotten easier to use over the past ten-ish years, I've seen it.
I'm not disputing this and yet they are still at a point where it's a PITA. They've plateaued. Soooo...Tesla FSD before or after it's a PITA no more?
My point isn't that you haven't scanned QR codes before; it's that it seems you haven't scanned QR codes to get a restaurant menu while eating out with a large group ever. Hence, (⸝⸝⸝>﹏<⸝⸝⸝) .
If it's not the case, then I would have expected like, some actual thought behind anything you posted, instead of just a random list of silly, nonsensical objections.
> 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'm not clear what you think you're saying here. If my business depended on a printer, do you think I'd maybe buy one before I opened it, and ensure I had menus printed? Do you think they're printing menus as they need them? Do you have any idea how a restaurant functions?
> 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.
Of course there isn't a "search", but what on earth do you think "human scanning actually is"? What a bizarre interpretation of reality. But that's also why, as I said, they've laid out the bloody menu in an intuitive way, so that you can find the pancakes in the breakfast section. Again, this is the kind of thing you only say when you're trying to be a contrarian, and not when you're trying to raise any actual objections or counter arguments.
> 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 given that you've clearly never used a restaurant POS system, this is another blindingly silly, childisih bit of contrarian nonsense.
If you were trying to raise real objections, it might behoove you to like... think about them in the future. You clearly did not, here.
> There are economies of scale though
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).
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://www.tescoplc.com/investors/reports-results-and-prese...
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?
But yeah, any idea I come up with to exploit that is always a bit of a stretch.
Normally I've not seen any bill that includes the identity of the customer, so it can't be even used as proof.
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.
This sounds more like a 'horrible store' and 'authoritarian police' problem than a self-checkout problem.
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.
It's hard to pick an alternative that doesn't exist.
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.
At this point, though, I mean if you don’t get it, you don’t get it.
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.
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.
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
Uniqlo too. I guess it helps that they own their entire manufacturing and retail process.
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).
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!
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.
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?
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.
Correct and increasingly popular logic? I agree entirely!
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).
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.
Yes a doorman is a cost, and a greater cost than previously, but we've also got more money to waste on such fripperies.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I had assumed you have certain views about people in the service industry. This sounds a whole lot worse.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The US has systems that make it easy to take the money away.
Giving it back...'nother story...
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.
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.
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.
I don't understand why people do this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you have no transaction what are you paying for
If the payment screen is up as soon as the first item is added how would you show any other screens e.g. loyalty number, donation prompts, ads and other BS.
If the customer taps then verbally says they would like to use a different card or pay cash how would that be implemented? The exact total will be oft unknown until the transaction is fully rung up and people make late transaction changes literally all the time.
People insert cards early all the time which is fine because it sits there doing nothing until the end they also tap early which does nothing but because they are extra stupid this doesn't hurt much
They don't tap long enough close enough or in the right place on their card or on the machine so to them thry are already just molesting the machine repeatedly with the card until it beeps anyway.
I can scan the phone (or a card), while the transaction is still in progress. It doesn't get charged, until the end, but it's entirely possible to scan it early.
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.
Software that is "correct," but not something that people "like" using. A "necessary evil."
Heck, I've written it myself. I have two shipping apps that basically do the same type of thing; but one is an app that I use, regularly, and the other, is to server those that want a different approach. That one is actually a lot more "powerful" than the one I use.
It's also a lot less popular. It's 100% "correct," and dead as a doornail.
Don Norman wrote a sequel to DOET, called Emotional Design, where he talks about this kind of thing.
Human emotions can't really be measured, and HN is full of "Inspector 34" types. They just can't grok emotions.
Ah, well... more for me to play with...
Have a great day!