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The Doorman's Fallacy in action

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Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#171

Post by arrrg »

shibaprasadb wrote: post #157
makeitdouble wrote: post #128

> 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…

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?

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).

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#172

Post by greengreengrass »

godelski wrote: post #57
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 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.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#173

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

michaelmrose wrote: post #147
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 thro…

No, it's often quite possible to scan the watch while the transaction is still open (depends on the store; not all of them support that). The payment method is still open, and is closed by the cashier.

Yeah, it's "trusting" the store, but it has never resulted in unwanted charges. I do it for the person in line behind me. I can afford it, if there was to be an issue, and the service desk is about ten feet away.

In Japan, they make a ceremony of giving you your goods before accepting payment.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#174

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

Eisenstein wrote: post #143
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human. Just hit the 'I need help' button on the self-checkout and an employee will show up and you can ask them to ring up your items.

Yeah, I wouldn't do that. The self-checkout actually works fairly well.

The reason that I insist on using the manned lanes, has nothing to do with being uncomfortable with the automated process (I know that it may seem that way, with my gray pompadour, but I'm actually fairly comfortable with tech). It's just because I know that the reason the store uses them, is to fire cashiers, and it's sort of a "stay with them until the end" kind of thing, in my mind.

Like I said, not really the way people think, these days. We tend to be extremely selfish. I participate in an organization that encourages us to adopt a mindset that takes other peoples' existence into account. It's really just symbolic, I know, but I do it for myself; not for others. I feel that symbols are important.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#175

Post by erehweb »

consp wrote: post #149
superfrank wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

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?

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.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#176

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

michaelmrose wrote: post #148
Eisenstein wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#177

Post by offby_one »

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.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#178

Post by mishellaneous »

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.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#179

Post by benj111 »

Tarq0n wrote: post #159
benj111 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: The Doorman's Fallacy in action

#180

Post by mishellaneous »

senordevnyc wrote: post #100
saulpw wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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