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 :)
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 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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).
> > 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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?
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).
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.
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.
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 (now that I know that it might actually bother certain ones, that gives me more incentive). 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.
> 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
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.
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.
> 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 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 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 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
>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.
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).
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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'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).
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 :)
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 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
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.
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.
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'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.
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!).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
A good waiter by the time it comes to payment will know the dynamic of the group and help them organize quickly.
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.)
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.
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).
> > 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.
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.
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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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
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.
last mile in software is real too!
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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).
> 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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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 (now that I know that it might actually bother certain ones, that gives me more incentive). 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.
> 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
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 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
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.
Pattern recognition is now a loser mindset
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.
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.
> 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 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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
Which is explicitly what my comment is about
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Yes, this is quite standard outside the US. In Canada, Mexico, Europe, Asia etc. this is more the standard practice than the opposite.
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 wrong technology was at fault.
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?
>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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Is digital nomad
> Lives in Dubai
> Complains about businesses increasing profits
Ok, anyway…
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.
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.
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.
When I order from the app and my robot delivers the food and I pay with my QR code, what's the customary tip?
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
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.
We underestimate how valuable and useful the "technology" of a human really is.
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."
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.
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
Why I prefer Asuncion to Dubai in a nutshell.
Chauffeur / Valet > parking apps
Maids > dishwashers, laundry, roomba, cooking
Fixers > everything else
Soul-less money-oriented behavior in Dubai? Color me shocked.
> This past Saturday, six of us had an impromptu brunch after our morning yoga class.
The jokes just write themselves.
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
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).
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