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Comments (137)

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  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 :)
• florkbork
  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.
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  EvanAnderson
  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.
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  makeitdouble
  > 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.
• wodenokoto
  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.
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  TheGRS
  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.
• scoofy
  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/
• recursivecaveat
  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.
• 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
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  devindotcom
  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.
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  rwmj
  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.
• mgkimsal
  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.
• thewillowcat
  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.
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  gwbas1c
  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.
• __jf__
  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.
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  hasteg
  "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.
• madrox
  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.
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  irjustin
  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.
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  cactacea
  > 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.
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  Animats
  First world influencer problem. "This past Saturday, six of us had an impromptu brunch after our morning yoga class..." In Dubai.
• brazzy
  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!
• ta8903
  >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.
• helge9210
  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.
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  paxys
  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.
• drpotato
  > Is digital nomad> Lives in Dubai> Complains about businesses increasing profitsOk, anyway…
• beej71
  When I order from the app and my robot delivers the food and I pay with my QR code, what's the customary tip?
• ivan888
  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
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  senordevnyc
  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.
• quantified
  We underestimate how valuable and useful the "technology" of a human really is.
• raldi
  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."
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  senordevnyc
  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.
• _3u10
  Why I prefer Asuncion to Dubai in a nutshell.Chauffeur / Valet > parking appsMaids > dishwashers, laundry, roomba, cookingFixers > everything else
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  simianwords
  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.
• ambicapter
  Soul-less money-oriented behavior in Dubai? Color me shocked.
• redsocksfan45
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• Ozzie-D
  [flagged]
• debo_
  > This past Saturday, six of us had an impromptu brunch after our morning yoga class.The jokes just write themselves.
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  jcoletti
  I agree, but multiple people can scan a QR code simultaneously.
• MelonUsk
  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 imaginationThe only limit is:We cannot recall the whole NYC and our imagination is a single-player experienceYou cannot invite your buddy for a tea party in your mindThe ultimate tech is the ethical sim multiverse (think BCI Airpods + growing multiversal Web) to have multiversal memories, imagination and dreamsAnd you are a walking demo version of it