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The Doorman's Fallacy in action

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Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#51

Post by ginko »

cactacea wrote: post #24

> But when 6 people simultaneously tried to pay their share of the bill, chaos ensued. I'm guessing the author has never worked as a server themselves... Is there any part of the world you can have a six top with individual checks when you didn't tell them up front to split the bill? As an American this just seems obvious to me but maybe the expectation is different in Dubai.

>Is there any part of the world you can have a six top with individual checks when you didn't tell them up front to split the bill?

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.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#52

Post by godelski »

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

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#53

Post by fmajid »

ralferoo wrote: post #19
devindotcom wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

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.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#54

Post by fmajid »

gib444 wrote: post #38
devindotcom wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#55

Post by fmajid »

epolanski wrote: post #31
rwmj wrote: post #5

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 ar…

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 inconven…

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.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#56

Post by margalabargala »

saulpw wrote: post #28
orangecat wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#57

Post by godelski »

rwmj wrote: post #5

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 ar…

  > that money is saved for the company
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

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#58

Post by cwnyth »

PufPufPuf wrote: post #45
cactacea wrote: post #24

> 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.

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?

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#59

Post by varispeed »

TheGRS wrote: post #41

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.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#60

Post by gorgoiler »

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 :)

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