[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.

[godelski]

  > that money is saved for the company

Sure, but you're not taking into account how much it costs the company.

This is the definition of "penny wise, pound foolish". Nothing is really "free"

Here's a good example: you know how every terminal begs for tips? And the percentage is increasing? (In San Jose I saw by middle number as 25%!!). It looks free, but guess what, I'm more likely to not come back and press "no tip" or enter a custom amount. The cost is the aggregation of these events but we just mindlessly set these values rather than testing. (Or just you know... caring about people and thinking about how you feel as a customer)

There's biases too and biases accumulate. Piss off enough people and they never come back. They tell people not to go there. This happens even if another restaurant goes too far. People just get fed up with "eating out" rather than just eating at one restaurant. That exhaustion accumulates, especially in times like this where money is getting tighter for most people

[Joker_vD]

> Nothing is really "free".

There are economies of scale though, plus expertise. That's why we normally buy clothes instead of spinning, cutting, and sewing textiles ourselves.

[godelski]

  > There are economies of scale though

Which is explicitly what my comment is about

[devindotcom]

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]

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]

> 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.

Uniqlo too. I guess it helps that they own their entire manufacturing and retail process.

[dbdoug]

> 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.

Well, not exactly. I saved a bundle inadvertently in a Decathlon in São Paulo. I read the instructions, but didn't understand the Portuguese completely. I dumped a ton of purchases into the bin, watched the screen scroll through the items, and paid the bill. When I got home I realized that I'd only been billed for about half the items. Next time I was there, I read the instructions more carefully and discovered that they said to put the items in the bin one by one

[fmajid]

And usually they have a dedicated checkout aisle so you don’t have to wait for the Boomers in front of you to pay in pennies or whatever it is they do to snarl a queue up.

[ChrisMarshallNY]

Eh. This "Boomer" uses his Apple Watch, usually. I tend to blow through in about five seconds. I usually have the stuff paid for, before the cashier stops ringing them up.

I deliberately use the manned checkout, because I'm human, and I believe in helping out other humans. That seems to be a "quaint anachronism," these days, but it's the way this old fogey was raised.

I know that someday, I won't have a choice (Home Depot only has cashiers for contractors, nowadays, so I'm forced to use the auto-checkout), but, where one is given, I take the human.

Sometimes, I chuckle, as I go through fairly quickly, and see the long line, waiting for the auto-cashiers.

It's obvious that the only benefit comes to the company. If you aren't just getting a candy bar, then the auto-cashier tends to be slower (mainly because I am a lot slower at that stuff, than the cashier).

[orangecat]

Self checkout is absolutely more convenient if you're not buying a lot.

(I find ways to make it worth my while..)

If that means what it sounds like, congratulations on accelerating the descent to a low-trust society.

[saulpw]

Blaming this individual for 'accelerating the descent' is like blaming a hobo for catching a ride on a runaway train going downhill. The ensuing trainwreck is already inevitable, at least you can get part of a ride out of it!

[senordevnyc]

The trainwreck is only "inevitable" (which, incidentally, it isn't, but put that aside for now) because of individuals making choices that benefit them personally at the expense of the common good.

[margalabargala]

The trainwreck isn't inevitable, though it's caused by mass theft, or in your analogy too many hobos on the train.

[jordwest]

It's not at all caused by the train company hiking their fees while neglecting maintenance to increase profit margins to railway shareholders

[_jackdk_]

I used to get paid to scan groceries. I have no intention of doing it for the same companies for free.

[mhb]

> the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer

How do you come to this conclusion without a deep dive into a supermarket's finances?

[milesvp]

You don’t need a deep dive to see supermarket consolidation that keeps happening year after year. When there is less competition to drive down prices, it is very safe to say to assume that consumers will get less and less surplus for any change a grocery makes.

[gib444]

> Like all the other versions of this, the savings are absorbed by the company, not passed on to the consumer.

Grocery stores (at least here in the UK) are notoriously low margin and have been for a long time. I think this is the one sector where savings are indeed passed on to the customer.

[fmajid]

Tesco (largest U.K. supermarket chain) has a razor-thin 2.23% profit margin.

[satvikpendem]

I love self checkout, let me scan what I want, not stand in a line with people who seemingly don't know what they're doing or don't have cash or their credit card declines etc.

[cyclotron3k]

> What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.

It doesn't miss it. The whole framing of the article is the Dooman Fallacy - an organisation trying to save money by shifting [apparently] menial work to the customer ends up losing more than they save.

[DanHulton]

> What the article misses is that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.

What? No, you're making the Doorman fallacy here, explicitly.

The company THINKS they're saving money by pushing the work to the customer/end user, but there's more to wait staff than just taking orders and payment - they provide the ability to smooth over any difficulties experienced during the meal, they signal status, etc, which would theoretically allow the restaurant to charge more than if they force customers to do all this work themselves.

Not to mention, if I had an experience this miserable at a restaurant, I wouldn't be back, which is a direct loss in revenue.

Restaurants aren't monopolies, except in really extreme cases.

[senordevnyc]

Someone giving a pretty basic idea a catchy name like the doorman fallacy doesn't mean that any replacement of humans with automation is a net loss for the company. Lots of automation can be very profitable, even if some positive things are lost in the bargain.

Incidentally, the vast, vast majority of residential buildings don't have doormen, and wouldn't be more profitable by the addition of one.

[epolanski]

I never make the mistake to go to places with qr codes twice in my life.

I can live with giant tablets in fast foods, but there's no chance I go to qr code restaurants ever.

As the article points out, it's super inconvenient and absolutely breaks the mood for the night and cheapens and ruins the experience.

Even worse one of my favourite steak houses has removed phone booking and implemented a super slow and inconvenient form.

Another place that will never get my money again.

[fmajid]

No web form can ever be worse than doing stuff over the phone like we’re still in the 19th Century.

I had a Korean colleague who remarked how backward the US is, you have to do everything over the phone, and you lose signal in elevators.

[gwern]

> No web form can ever be worse than doing stuff over the phone like we’re still in the 19th Century.

Yes, it can. Last year I challenged a Zoomer to try to order from the local ramen place for pickup. They were in and out in well under a minute, including looking up the phone number on Google Maps, whereas Uber Eats would still be loading... and scrolling... Sorry, updating, please stay tuned... Would you like to sign up for Uber Unlimited? ... [do I need to keep doing the gag] ... selecting... wait where did the list go... wait did the one selection take ... ordering ... you have rewards! ... confirmation ... etc They were shocked how much better the experience was. As compared to [paste number, wait 10s] 'Hello?' 'X Ramen, how can I help you?' 'I'd like A ramen and B ramen and C to go, please, name, Alice and Bob.' 'OK. Goodbye.' Even counting the register swipe on pickup to pay, it's night and day. And that is how a web form can be way worse than doing stuff over the phone, because a web form can just get worse and worse and worse - and they do.

[jen20]

I don’t know which country you’re in (and don’t disagree with you) but even if the estimate of 30 minutes to shipping labels were accurate, that would still be a net win where I am in Texas - the line at the post office is regularly longer than that.

[xboxnolifes]

Because staffing can/has be/been reduced since they made it possible for people to print their own labels. They aren't interested in making the queues faster.

[mhb]

Uh, the queues at the post office have never exactly been fast.

[darth_avocado]

> that money is saved for the company by moving the work to the customer / end user.

And somehow things are more expensive than ever. Self checkouts, order at the counter, bussing your own table, assembling your own furniture, filling out your or your pet’s medical history at a hospital, shipping labels (you mentioned this) and so much more. It’s a form of free labor that somehow society is okay with.

[mhb]

> It’s a form of free labor that somehow society is okay with.

It's very popular to say this in some places, but wouldn't you expect that the money that businesses are saving when they do this is passed along to the customer in lower prices? Since they're competing with other businesses?

[darth_avocado]

When your grocery store gets a self checkout, do you see your grocery bills go down? What ends up happening is that the grocery store makes more profit, the other stores notice and they too get rid of self checkouts. Your grocery bill remains the same, you are more inconvenienced but all of their profits go up.

[sublinear]

When I hear arguments like this I feel compelled to point out that the people running these businesses live in the same world as you.

I don't know how old you are or if you remember, but the examples you gave used to be the most common sources of complaints, delays, refunds, etc. when the employee would do a shitty job (fairly often). The world of the past really was objectively worse.