[Someone1234]

I was recently at an events center, that has replaced all of their vending machines with machines that require me to install an app(!) to purchase a product. Literally, didn't take cash or credit - just via app.

Per the marketing on the side, this is meant to be for my benefit in order to earn "points" and get offered "deals." I don't think I have to tell you that I did NOT install the app, and just walked further to buy one from a vendor.

There is a massive arrogance problem within tech. Everyone thinks their product should be the center of everyone else's universe. The best products are invisible/get out of the way.

[clan]

The arrogance is not that they think they're the center of the universe. It is much worse.

I hear a lot of talk about how much pain you can inflict on people and how to extract the most value from that. Last I heard it was from a couple of media types discussing radio commercials. No care for their actual product for the end user - but an evaluation of how much people would suffer before tuning away.

Actual professional pride and care is sooo last century.

[svachalek]

Sadly. It's like how modern bridges can be built with less materials than old ones, now that we can calculate precisely the minimum we use pretty much exactly that. Things have gone exactly the same way with consumers over the past 30 years, businesses have learned exactly how badly they can treat you and step up to that line at every opportunity.

[throwaway48476]

Bridges are public goods. If the public spends less on material they can afford to build additional bridges and create value for more people.

[potato3732842]

>If the public spends less on material they can afford to build additional bridges

Except what happens is that now that we can build them cheaply they waste the same amount of money by turning what could have been simple I beams into a mirror finish exercise in "art" nobody asks for and was bike-shed into oblivion until the whole budget and more was used up. So the public doesn't actually reap any benefit. It just makes work for more parties on the dole. We don't actually get more bridges. We get a bigger racket.

[throwaway48476]

Its not the fault of the engineers, they just did a job. The parasites come from elsewhere. I read that in order to build a reactor in the UK they spent 350 pages in the plan discussing how jobs would be given to various minority groups. Everything government touches is a racket now.

[fragmede]

Thankfully (maybe) LLMs.ate great at generating text,which is believe will help streamline some of the more paperwork-generating processes.

[gruez]

Source? A section about how it benefits minorities seems plausible but 350 pages does not.

[kulahan]

Who even reads all of that? Is it just all in there so someone who says "I really care about <extremely rare ethnic minority>, so I want to make sure they're represented", or is someone actually sitting down and reading 350 pages of job allocations??? I can't imagine a worse punishment, honestly.

[ggreer]

Bridges are not public goods. Public goods are non-excludable and non-rivalrous. Bridges are both excludable (people can be prevented from crossing unless they pay a toll) and rivalrous (only so many people can use a bridge at once). This makes them a private good. Yes bridges are funded by governments with revenues collected from taxes, but that doesn't change their economic classification.

And the main cost of bridges is not materials, it's design, permitting, and construction. For example: Adjusted for inflation, the new San Francisco Bay Bridge span cost $8.6 billion. Its 450,000 cubic yards of concrete weigh around 1.3 million tons, for a cost of around $6,000 per ton. Concrete is $50-75 per ton, so that's 1% of the cost.

[clan]

That was a very narrow definition of a public good.

Not preventable? (Excludable)

Not limited in supply? (Rivalous)

What can even be defined as a public good. Can air even be a public good by this definition? Even arguing in good faith I cannot wrap my head around this.

A hospital? Limited capacity even with socialized medicine. Not a public good?

Is this just an (to me) alien and extreme libertarian viewpoint I cannot fathom or am I missing something deeper?

The concrete example stands. But a world in which we do not consider bridges a public good seems rather dystopian to me. I grant you that some of those might be private. But considering all to be private and just with a handwave acknowledge that most are publicly funded seems... Odd...

[ggreer]

I am using the Econ 101 definition.[1] Examples of public goods include lighthouses, knowledge, a common language, and national defense.

The reason for the different classification is because public goods obey different economic laws. For example: because public goods are non-excludable, they have the free rider problem.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

[_9ptr]

You're right. If the minimum amount is actually the minimum and not less than necessary, you don't need to exceed that.

What the poster before wanted to imply was that we sacrifice safety or sustainability or some value other than material/money (which may well be true).

[throwaway48476]

Usually something is sacrificed in the name of extractive profit. With public spending it's just less taxes.

[clan]

I sort of get your point. But it is not a given.

Everybody tries to maximize their budgets.

Less taxes is not the default. You will most likely get something else.

When extractive profits is involved you will never get a cheaper bridge unless there is fierce competition. Tenders are narrowly defined so you do not see the offers that you can build 2 bridges for the price of one.

In good markets governments keep the bridge building market hot enough so you have the supply ready for the next large projects. That is what keeps the price of big infrastructure projects down.

Hence there is a very good argument for not simply returning the tax dollars.

I do believe in Free markets. But I do believe in good governance as well.

A good example around here is that the knowledge and lessons learned from building the Storebælt Link[0] made the Oresund bridge[1] get in pretty much on budget. Whereas German political fuckery delayed the Fehmarn belt project[2] and will go hugely over budget both due to missing momentum but also due to inflation

[0] https://sundogbaelt.dk/en/about-us/finance-economics/constru... [1] https://sundogbaelt.dk/en/about-us/finance-economics/constru... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fehmarn_Belt_fixed_link

[lotsofpulp]

And

> businesses have learned exactly how badly they can treat you and step up to that line at every opportunity.

Will help numbers in your 401k or pension plan go up.

[m463]

it's like bridge constructor, real life entertainment...

https://www.gog.com/en/game/bridge_constructor

[HWR_14]

Those two discussing it probably felt a great deal of professional pride they can get the volume to within a tenth of a decibel of the maximum tolerable volume before someone changes the channel

[goda90]

>a couple of media types discussing radio commercials

Relevant Simpsons clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdMjqcjMVTc

[throwaway48476]

I call it the 3M strategy. Misery Makes Money

[m463]

I think of a friend who worked at a bank, and a colleage decided to show him "how the world really worked"

He got out a big printout and started showing the different demographics and their habits.

"<ethnic> woman, with a little bit of college" - she will get a credit card, charge it up to the limit, then make the minimum payment... forever.

"<ethnic> man, no college" - he will get a credit card, charge it up to the limit, might make one payment, never make another payment ever.

Then he went on to say, corporations will slant their advertising to target demographic #1 with credit card advertisements. They will make their advertisements disappear from view from demographic #2.

I kind of wonder if the whole vending system is slanted around these kinds of things. Sports fan, uses phone indiscriminately for everything, sell him an impulse snickers bar with an app, then load him down with ads for payday loans.

[mattgreenrocks]

Nothing against sports fans, but your comment made me wonder if all the grocery stores hopping on the “game day” wave for advertising campaigns are doing so bc their data shows that sports fans are easier to sell to.

[bombcar]

They’re certainly (stereotypically) much less likely to know the “normal” price for something than their (stereotypically) wives do.

So, yes, way easier to sell to.

[reaperducer]

replaced all of their vending machines with machines that require me to install an app(!) to purchase a product

I saw this at a Simon mall recently.

I took a picture of the machine. Across the front of the door is a banner which reads:

  1. Scan the QR code
  2. Create profile
  3. Scan again to unlock door
  4. Close the door
  5. You're one drink closer to a free drink!

I'm not going to jump through hoops like a circus animal for a Mr. Pibb. I used the water fountain instead.

[xdfgh1112]

In Japan they are also pushing an app for vending machines, but you immediately get three free drinks (then nothing after). It got me to sign up anyway.

[pjmlp]

In Germany this has gone much worse lately.

We had a card for earning points across multiple brands of supermarkets and other kinds of consumer shops.

One of those chains, Rewe, decided they didn't want to share the points with the others and went ahead, creating their own mobile app for consumer points.

The remaining chains, not wanting to stay behind, decided to do exactly the same.

Now almost every chain has withdrawn from the card program, moved into their own little app, and expect every customer to install all their apps.

I refuse to follow along, and get into interesting discussions, because employees naturally following orders that they have to nag everyone, cannot understand that I rather pay more than installing and giving my data to every chain in exchange for a few euros in discounts.

[OptionOfT]

It's all about the pop-ups & tracking. The same reason that McDonald's wants you to install their app.

[pants2]

I recently went into a McDonald's for the first time in years to just order a drink. The guy at the register informed me I couldn't place an order at the front and had to use the kiosk. The kiosk was full of dark patterns to try to get me to install their app. It took me around 5 mins between navigating the kiosk menus and waiting for my number to get called just to give me a medium drink. Something that would have been 20 seconds at the counter. I'll be avoiding McDonald's at all cost from here on out.

[nitwit005]

It's not tech related. Previously, they all did this with various cards. People were walking around with a giant stack of loyalty or store credit cards in their wallet with a rubber band wrapped around it.

There is a store I shop at where every purchase, they ask every single customer if they "have a phone number with them", which they can type in on the point of sale device. I've waited behind people trying to remember their old phone number.

[1718627440]

That didn't come with all the tracking and privacy implementations though.

[nitwit005]

But of course they do. A big part of those schemes is to track all people's purchases. They also sold that data.

[1718627440]

A paper card with a stamp doesn't even have a name on it and the only copy of it existing is owned by the costumer. The only information e.g. the baker has is what names he has in brain.

[nitwit005]

The cards I was referring to were plastic cards with magnetic strips.

[influx]

Lumen Field in Seattle just installed some Amazon Just Walk Out vendors this year. I'm happy to report you don't need to be logged into Amazon or have an app. I double clicked my phone to swipe my Apple Pay before I walked in, grabbed a beer and walked out.

It was fantastic.

[bgirard]

The big issue I have with this experience is that you don't get a clear charge price before you leave. So you have to check a page either some minutes or hours later and hope that the total is correct. Like the article said, I don't love the idea of being charged for 3 overpriced bottles of water when I only took two. I'd rather just settle my transactions in the moment than try to remember what my total was and dispute things later from memory on the occasional times it's wrong.

[teeray]

> you don't get a clear charge price before you leave. So you have to check a page either some minutes or hours later and hope that the total is correct

Oh, I’m very much sure this is a feature. Because, you see, only some percentage of people will actually look at the receipt. Some fraction of them will notice the error. Some fraction of those people will actually be motivated to spend their time on the phone clawing back an extra $8 water. The complement of that small percentage is a lucrative chance to sell the same overpriced water more than once.

[sleazebreeze]

Aren't all these transactions checked by a human after the fact? IIRC I interviewed someone who worked on this and thats what they said.

[canucker2016]

from https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/03/business/amazons-self-checkou...

   Amazon had used roughly 1,000 humans in India, according to some news reports, to help monitor accurate checkouts. The company told CNN it’s “reducing the number of human reviews” while developing the “Just Walk Out” technology. Amazon said besides data associates’ main role in working on the underlying technology, they also “validate a small minority” of shopping visits.

[vrighter]

So they released the product before they even developed it. The sad state of software nowadays

[tumnus]

Yes, it was the mechanical turk solution.

[robotnikman]

At the very least the is how it should be done. Having to download and install an app, then login, then connect payment info, etc... Sounds like such a pain I wouldn't even bother.

[kridsdale3]

Climate Pledge Arena has these too. I love them! No lines, no human interaction. Grab your M&M's and beer and GTFO.

[bombcar]

Any store is a Just Walk Out if you’re ballsy enough.

[frogperson]

I agree with the arrogance. I am just so tired of poor software consuming hours to troubleshoot. technology was supposed to makes things easier, not turn every interaction into a chore or a debug session.

[2ICofafireteam]

I believe vending machine operators that take card payment have to deal with a lot of charge-backs. Perhaps this is a workaround?

[fortran77]

How on earth can this be ADA compliant? That may the the best front to fight these abominations.