11 ms·

The Doorman's Fallacy in action

• senordevnyc 3mo ago
  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.
  • AndrewDucker 3mo ago
    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.
  • fmobus 3mo ago
    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.
• devindotcom 3mo ago
  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.
  • rootusrootus 3mo ago
    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.
  • whateveracct 3mo ago
    last mile in software is real too!
  • XorNot 3mo ago
    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.
  • Palomides 3mo ago
    if we had a standardized way to deliver packages like we do mail (the heavily regulated mailbox!) this would not be a problem, it's a phenomenal waste of human effort to navigate this uniquely for every location it's not like a doorman where there's useful social interaction
    • xgulfie 3mo ago
      I have a PO Box (I do not have a mailbox so the city gives me a PO box for free). A kind human gets my packages from the back and hands them to me. It's great and efficient. The only inconvenience is the hours are a little narrow.
• quantified 3mo ago
  We underestimate how valuable and useful the "technology" of a human really is.
• rwmj 3mo ago
  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.
  • devindotcom 3mo ago
    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.
    • ralferoo 3mo ago
      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.
      • ValentineC 3mo ago
• jcoletti 3mo ago
  I agree, but multiple people can scan a QR code simultaneously.
  • mcphage 3mo ago
    > 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.
    • jcoletti 3mo ago
      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.
  • mhb 3mo ago
    Or the place could go to the extraordinary expense of putting multiple cards on the table with the codes.
  • cyclotron3k 3mo ago
    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).
• MelonUsk 3mo ago
  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
• gwbas1c 3mo ago
  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.
  • joezydeco 3mo ago
    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.
  • aaulia 3mo ago
    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.
• simianwords 3mo ago
  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.
  • 3-cheese-sundae 3mo ago
    I am curious to hear why you believe those roles don't provide any value.
    • senordevnyc 3mo ago
      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.
  • epolanski 3mo ago
    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.
  • zeroonetwothree 3mo ago
    Have you ever used a travel agent?
    • simianwords 3mo ago
      Not anymore because they are not worth the money
• raldi 3mo ago
  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."
• thewillowcat 3mo ago
  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.
• cactacea 3mo ago
  > 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.
  • cobbzilla 3mo ago
    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.
    • cactacea 3mo ago
      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.
  • Jtsummers 3mo ago
    > 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).
    • LeifCarrotson 3mo ago
      "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.
• redsocksfan45 3mo ago
  [dead]
• ivan888 3mo ago
  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
• TheGRS 3mo ago
  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.
  • varispeed 3mo ago
    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.
    • hoherd 3mo ago
      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.
      • varispeed 3mo ago
        Yes it does that. Still, less than a fine would have been.
      • SoftTalker 3mo ago
        Yep. Our city had that system, you started a timer in the app when you parked and had to remember to stop it when you left the parking spot. Appeals of "I forgot to stop the meter" were routinely denied (I think there was still a max like 24 hours, so that you could not accrue an arbitrary amount... or maybe it stopped the next time someone else started paying for that spot. I never used the app so I'm not sure how it worked, I always just paid for a fixed block of time using a card). I have nostalgia for the coin operated meters I grew up with. It was always a little thrill to park and then find there was still an hour or more left on the meter from the previous person.
  • michaelmrose 3mo ago
• ambicapter 3mo ago
  Soul-less money-oriented behavior in Dubai? Color me shocked.
• _3u10 3mo ago
  Why I prefer Asuncion to Dubai in a nutshell. Chauffeur / Valet > parking apps Maids > dishwashers, laundry, roomba, cooking Fixers > everything else
• godelski 3mo ago
  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
  • greengreengrass 3mo ago
    > 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.
  • olsondv 3mo ago
    Taking the restaurant ordering app, it’s certainly better than a server. Each individual picks what they want and pays for what they got on their own bill. It removes any chance of communication error between the customer and the kitchen. Appetizers to share easily split across who wanted them. No bill splitting discussions. OP just had to use a bad implementation.
• gorgoiler 3mo ago
  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 :)
  • smallstepforman 3mo ago
    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.
    • Qwertious 3mo ago
      Plus he can hail you a cab.
  • michaelt 3mo ago
    > 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.
• debo_ 3mo ago
  > This past Saturday, six of us had an impromptu brunch after our morning yoga class. The jokes just write themselves.
• irjustin 3mo ago
  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.
  • dredmorbius 3mo ago
    Upselling me is not a thing. That is not a situation likely to continue beyond the next moment.
  • chowells 3mo ago
    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?
    • irjustin 3mo ago
      I won't fall for it. Been down that road and I'm not going back.
    • wdrw 3mo ago
      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).
• EvanAnderson 3mo ago
  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.
  • alex43578 3mo ago
    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!).
    • rmunn 3mo ago
      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.
• paxys 3mo ago
  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.
  • dylan604 3mo ago
    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.
• drpotato 3mo ago
  > Is digital nomad > Lives in Dubai > Complains about businesses increasing profits Ok, anyway…
• senordevnyc 3mo ago
  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.
  • zeroonetwothree 3mo ago
    Isn’t it a hotel in the original version? Doormen for nicer hotels seem very common
    • senordevnyc 3mo ago
      Fair point, but also an even dumber example. I promise you, the people running the kind of upscale hotels that have a doorman are under no illusion that the main job is opening the door.
• scoofy 3mo ago
  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 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/ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/INO/incerto/
• Ozzie-D 3mo ago
  [flagged]
• beej71 3mo ago
  When I order from the app and my robot delivers the food and I pay with my QR code, what's the customary tip?
• madrox 3mo ago
  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.
• mgkimsal 3mo ago
  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.
  • greengreengrass 3mo ago
    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.
  • stephen_g 3mo ago
    I’ve mostly seen it at Asian cuisine restaurants where you normally order several dishes and order more as the meal progresses. So it builds up a tab and then you pay at the end.
• hasteg 3mo ago
  "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.
  • zeroonetwothree 3mo ago
    As long as demand remains high they have no reason to change their course.
• wodenokoto 3mo ago
  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.
  • leoedin 3mo ago
    Is it a Dubai thing that everyone's parking expires unexpectedly in 2 minutes? I didn't really understand that - perhaps a lack of local knowledge.
    • wodenokoto 3mo ago
      I think the setting is that they are a group of people who paid for parking to go to yoga and now they are also having a meal, so everyone in the group stayed longer than planned. Public parking is prepaid, usually via the official RTA app.
• Animats 3mo ago
  First world influencer problem. "This past Saturday, six of us had an impromptu brunch after our morning yoga class..." In Dubai.
  • b3lvedere 3mo ago
    The moment i read the word Dubai, my empathy levels dropped to zero.
• __jf__ 3mo ago
  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.
• makeitdouble 3mo ago
  > 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.
  • NSUserDefaults 3mo ago
    A good waiter by the time it comes to payment will know the dynamic of the group and help them organize quickly.
  • internet_points 3mo ago
    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.)
    • duskdozer 3mo ago
      They have systems where at order time, they can enter the items each seat bought, and then print out separate checks at the end.
  • shibaprasadb 3mo ago
    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?
• recursivecaveat 3mo ago
  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.
  • Tarq0n 3mo ago
    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.
  • greengreengrass 3mo ago
    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?
  • wongarsu 3mo ago
    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
    • rjh29 3mo ago
• helge9210 3mo ago
  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.
• ta8903 3mo ago
  >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.
• brazzy 3mo ago
  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!
• florkbork 3mo ago
  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.
  • Freak_NL 3mo ago
    > How did these people live through COVID and never encounter a QR code they had to scan with a phone? Was that a requirement? I got through it without scanning a single QR code. I had my vaccination status available as a QR code (on paper when travelling in order not to depend on just a smartphone), but not the other way around. We just ignored restaurants without paper menus, as we always do. It wasn't the time to eat out in any case.
• offby_one 3mo ago
  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.
• mishellaneous 3mo ago
  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.
• adammarples 3mo ago
  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.
• strogonoff 3mo ago
  When I was in Bangkok a good while back, I was surprised how there’re doormen at shopping mall—humans to handle simple things which in many parts of the world would certainly not involve a person. A bit later I thought that it makes sense: it improves customer experience and slightly reduces unemployment in local population—a doorman job is better than no job.
  • goobatrooba 3mo ago
    It feels a bit like you didn't apply the lesson of the article - these "doormen" have often different functions (theft prevention or at least reduction, information provision, support for those that need help, some minor cleaning or caretaking roles, and the greeting/visibility/we-are-a-fancy-place vibe ;-) In countries where labour is cheap it is common to have staff for less essential things as humans are just more flexible (but also less reliable) than machines.
    • strogonoff 3mo ago
      Personally I thought opening doors was about the only thing they did—never seen them engage in any other activity. I am not sure you provide a counter-argument, IMO offering more people a way to earn money and do something useful (as opposed to delegating these duties to [generally foreign-made] equipment) as a way of maintaining a healthy society still holds.
• forinti 3mo ago
  My company recently hired a concierge. At first I thought it was unnecessary and just meant to give someone's friend a job. But the guy is really good at it. He organises groups of people who show up; he knows everybody, so he can quickly point people to where they should go; and overall he just makes the reception a welcoming place.
• mrkiouak 3mo ago
  It's weird to see someone present as novel what is like talking about the weather, at least for the average person in the U.S. (not in the Bay Area, in the U.S.). It's fascinating to me that the large companies never did anything to break out of the experiences of someone in Dubai or SF or Singapore, etc. vs far more "average" places are not similar experiences and therefore product design suffers. I get that other companies are the ones with the most money, but failing to expand into selling things people actually want (like Apple briefly did) is the most interesting problem to come out of Silicon Valley (no one sells anything people want, besides ads -- they give things away and then sell to companies).
• gcanyon 3mo ago
  I'll be the contrarian and take the opposing position: this story -- the doorman fallacy itself, ignores the obvious counter-narrative: - physical menus are hard to update - physical menus are often too simple, requiring asking the server questions they've answered a dozen times before already, hurting their efficiency, or they are book-sized and hard to navigate. - physical menus aren't cleaned between uses, so you're touching everything the server touched, and the three people before you. - physical menus don't scale: if the restaurant is busy, you might have to share. - physical menus require more human time for the host/server to provide them to you. - physical menus aren't searchable. - Difficulty scanning the QR code *will* get better over time, obviously. - Having to take turns is a user issue: it ignores how QR codes work (you don't have to be that close) and people will get used to it. - (edit to add) issues with divvying up the bill are software issues that will get better over time if demand is there. Does the author really think getting the server to split the bill is easier? The Doorman Fallacy in general presents only one side of the issue, which is perfectly reasonable for the creator of the fallacy to do, but puts on us the requirement of considering the other side: - Having "a doorman" means having someone less than 1/4th of the time, or staffing 5 people (more like 6 since with 5 someone has to schedule/supervise). - When the doorman takes a break, no one gets in? - Some doormen go above and beyond, and are truly a joy to have around. Others are less so. Counting on the doorman being awesome is unfair to doormen in general. - An automated system is on 24/7 -- maybe not in the early days, technology isn't perfect, but how many people here remember the early days of cell phones, when you *called support to get refunds for dropped calls*? - An automated system can add or remove people from the authorized list easily and remotely, and not make mistakes. That's enough contrarianism for this morning...
  • NichoPaolucci 3mo ago
    I agree with a lot of this. Sometimes it is easier to scan a code, zoom until the text is at the desired level, and scroll around the menu rather than opening a large leather book with tiny writing in a dimly lit restaurant. Going to PAY with the QR code feels a little worse. I went out with some friends and I planned to pay cash, the waitress came over to tell us all that we should pay using the QR code on our receipts - missed me, and I had to wait 5 minutes to let them know I was using cash. My friends didn't have much trouble, but we're all younger folks so we are used to pulling up Apple Pay or whatever. I imagine some people do not enjoy that experience. I will say that there is this inherent disdain towards automated systems, and I feel it's warranted - to a degree. Some experiences are improved with automation, others are stifled. Sometimes we just want to talk to other people who understand our problems.
• throwaway13337 3mo ago
  This can be to generalized to map versus territory. People have a particular lens they see things through. And they forget that there is detail there that matters. The last 15 years of metrics driven decisions has hollowed out what made most things good. It’s a fundamental problem of scale. Decision makers that have a large amount of power can only see the map. The solution is to decentralize power. The more successful organization would either be smaller or allow more control for smaller participants. This is good because humans also tend to be happier when they have more localized control.
• kayo_20211030 3mo ago
  The restaurant seems to be trying real hard to externalize its costs, pushing its previous costs (menus/billing/staff) onto the diners, and hoping that the value of the experience hadn't been so diminished that the diner would baulk. I reckon the diner baulked, as I would have. The tradeoff just doesn't seem fair. Bad math. Bad business.
• flerchin 3mo ago
  Huh I've never understood doormen, but I sure do hate QR codes for restaurant menus.
• phaser 3mo ago
  I've seen it worse: A team of employees have an entry level engineering job, and work as a bridge between support and the "core" engineering team. They just talk to customers when an issue is escalated, and maybe it will submit a hotfix PR but when the issue must be escalated further the instructions are to send it to the higher-ranked team who will make it part of the next sprint. At every all-hands meetings, core team gets to present, gets to showcase the new features, gets celebrated for "going the extra mile" for customers. But the real extra mile, is the patience, empathy and thoughtful communication (which is a rare talent, really) of the entry level engineers, who are also humble and nice to be around with, being the only ones who contribute positively to the company culture, as opposed to the ego-tripping 10x engineers. Management thinks they are absolutely replaceable. Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace. But the real reason to replace them is to please investors who don't wanna be behind the AI-efficiency-hype. They can't be promoted to a core team, because where's the efficiency in that?
  • kjs3 3mo ago
    Even more, when the concept of "AI agent" appeared on their radars, they were the first people who they thought they're gonna replace. I worked on a project where they replaced virtually all tier-1 customer service reps with an AI chatbot, which worked ok, because 90% of those calls are things like "what's my balance" and "I need a replacement credit card", which an AI can competently navigate. Phase 2, I was informed, was to replace Tier-2 with a chatbot, so the only time a human has to get involved was the most complicated problems. SO MUCH MONEY SAVED AMIRIGHT?!? So I asked, in the middle of this giant kickoff meeting, "if you get rid of tier 1 & 2 reps, how are you going to train up the tier 3 reps who know enough about how things work to handle these most-complicated problems?". After an extended silence we got "we have a plan for that but we can't go into it just now". Sure you do.
    • sceptic123 3mo ago
      The plan is to replace the tier 3 reps too
    • 3mo ago
• cryptoegorophy 3mo ago
  “We each had to take turns scanning it” - seriously?
• jiaosdjf 3mo ago
  This is also the "can be shit - will be shit" fallacy. Everyone knows that digital restaurant experiences are crap and most people do not pick a restaurant based on the digital experience. All restaurants use the same few white label solutions and the decision is based on cost. White labels rarely break new ground because despite having many clients to experiment / gather data on, they just can't get good being everything for everyone. This of course doesn't count giants like McDonalds who have the incentive and position to be defined by that digital experience.
• khernandezrt 3mo ago
  This may be Doormans fallacy, but it is a bad example. It just sounds like you're not used to using QR code menus. Once people get used to QR code menus we will see its benefits over traditional menus.
  • anticorporate 3mo ago
    I'm unclear how getting used to QR code menus will alleviate the author's primary complaint that he would rather not use his phone during the meal and instead be present with the people there.
  • JsonDemWitOster 3mo ago
    > Once people get used to QR code menus we will see its benefits over traditional menus. Au contraire, mon ami. Once people see the benefits of anything they will keep using it and naturally get used to it. Not the other way around. Really enough HN now. Goodness, the discussion here is ridiculous.
• GMoromisato 3mo ago
  Replacing humans with automation is common in wealthy societies because the cost of labor is high. That's a good thing! I don't want to live in a place where labor is cheap. I'll either be paid poorly or there will be a great imbalance of wealth. The only real solution is to create better automation.
  • nkrisc 3mo ago
    I’d rather live in a place where waitstaff are comfortably compensated for their labor. Automating it will just lead to one kind of misery after another. Where does it end? Why do we want to go there? We can choose not to.
    • SoftTalker 3mo ago
      That sounds nice but falls apart when customers have to actually pay for it. The most workable solution we've found is for employers to compete for employees, and employees to work for a wage that's acceptable to them. If you pay more than that, a competitor who pays less will take all your business.
      • nkrisc 3mo ago
        But that’s not really what happens either because the employees are fundamentally at a disadvantage and don’t have perfect information. Employers will generally take whomever will accept the least, and when bills are coming due, employees will take any job for some wage, not the best wage.
    • GMoromisato 3mo ago
      Would you rather be a waiter in America or Brazil? The average waiter in America makes $40K per year, compared to $9K per year for a Brazilian water (adjusted for PPP). Brazil does not have any of the labor-saving tech that we're complaining about because they don't need it--labor is cheap. Let's say a restaurant in America got rid of its tech and instead hired more waiters. Would each waiter get paid more or less? Obviously, each waiter would get paid less. The restaurant still makes the same amount of money, so the same amount of money is divided among more people. Mathematically, each waiter will make less money with less tech. So if you really want waitstaff to be well-paid, you should want more automation, not less.
• golemotron 3mo ago
  The subtle thing in all this is that it externalizes labor costs. You are the one doing the work. I was thrown by this a while ago checking into a hotel with kiosk. I was out of my time zone and literally half asleep. Typing my name was real labor at that point.
• MPSimmons 3mo ago
  People automate things they don't value.
• ant-kinesthetic 3mo ago
  But what if the automation could be seamless, like your AI agent adds more time to your parking by simply knowing that you're still sitting down at the restaurant.
• dividefuel 3mo ago
  Does this really demonstrate what the author thinks it does? Other than menus, none of this was really easier before technology. - Parking meters: you'd have to remember when yours would expire and manually check your watch (if you brought one!) regularly. If you needed more time, you'd have to leave the table to go to the meter to extend it... or leave your event early. - Splitting a bill: this is notoriously difficult with medium groups [0]. Servers generally dislike split bills, even if you go to the trouble of listing the exact amounts to charge per card. It's also not just a tech problem, but a social problem as well. Yes the technology involved could be better -- ideally you can easily extend a parking meter from your phone, ideally the app for splitting the bill works well and supports more complicated (but common) scenarios. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p8mhQ9wINI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4p8mhQ9wINI
• pronik 3mo ago
  To me, this seems like a typical "how hard can it be" startup mentality. People, especially those "fast to the market" type, tend to vastly underestimate all the corner cases of the technology, mostly tending to the happy path and outsourcing the pain to their customers. The reason they still have customers is because most of the market has the same problems and a solution that covers those corner cases is way more expensive and also way more extensive in terms of infrastructure you'd need. You would have hoped there is middle-ground there, i.e. a startup on the cheaper side with a vision for corner cases, but knowing how markets and marketing works I'm not holding my breath for that. A big part of those corner cases is the assumption of the user being an independent responsible adult without problems. Voice control is only acceptable if you don't startle anyone with or don't have anyone talking or screaming while you are talking. Booking tickets with "one ticket per smartphone" doesn't work when you have kids. Doing basically anything that's smartphone-only requires you to have it on you, charged and for the most part with an internet connection -- great for underground parking garages. God forbid you have lost your smartphone while drunk or have been robbed -- forget driving home with the virtual car key only being in your phone, forget paying for a taxi, forget entering your home protected by a smart lock. All of this assuming the tech works perfectly and durably, which we know is not the case for most of modern tech.