The Doorman's Fallacy in action (opens in new tab)

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 :)

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.

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/

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

When I order from the app and my robot delivers the food and I pay with my QR code, what's the customary tip?

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.

> Is digital nomad

> Lives in Dubai

> Complains about businesses increasing profits

Ok, anyway…

Going to "modernized" restaurants is just a drag. I don't want to touch your tablet or scan your code. I much prefer the restaurants which only accept cash

I get the QR code menu thing, that’s a solid example imo (though there ARE benefits to QR code menus), but the people hassling with their phones to extend their parking, or paying for their portion of the meal via QR code doesn’t sound at all like the doorman fallacy, just a shitty UI.

Without tech, these people would not have been notified that their parking would expire in the first place, and would have all had to leave the restaurant to extend their parking. Is that really better?

And splitting the bill among six people is an age old hassle that definitely has gotten better with tech at places who have a good UI for handling it.

We underestimate how valuable and useful the "technology" of a human really is.

To me this sounds more like the Icarus Fallacy: "The lesson of isn't don't fly close to the sun, it's make better fucking wings."

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.

Why I prefer Asuncion to Dubai in a nutshell.

Chauffeur / Valet > parking apps

Maids > dishwashers, laundry, roomba, cooking

Fixers > everything else

Soul-less money-oriented behavior in Dubai? Color me shocked.

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.

> This past Saturday, six of us had an impromptu brunch after our morning yoga class.

The jokes just write themselves.

I agree, but multiple people can scan a QR code simultaneously.

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