Why don’t hotels use Roombas? | Hacker News Reader

Why don’t hotels use Roombas?

freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com

20 pointsbootload24 comments

This article was already discussed today, and then it was killed.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=264808

Incidentally, the discussion there is much more intelligent than what's here right now. It's a shame that article was killed.

Why was it killed? It definitely seems to fit the criteria of "stuff interesting to hackers". I mean, it's robots.

Let's play Ask Matt Maroon: http://mattmaroon.com/?p=416

Matt Maroon, you're a fun guy. (But your category links are all broken.)

The comments links are all broken too, at least for me.

Actually, all of his links are broken. Everything goes to the main page.

They seem to work for me. What browser are you using (FF3 here). Perhaps it was a temporary problem due to one of my plugins.

Also on FF3. If I click any link (say, "Twitter Revisited"), I just get your latest article. The URL bar changes, but the content doesn't.

Thanks for letting me know guys. I'll try to figure out what the hell is wrong with it. Everything works fine for me in both browsers and Safari on my Mac, even after clearing cache, switching to/from OpenDNS, etc.

I need to just hire someone to make me a custom theme anyway.

It's been that way for about a week. Using Webkit nightly.

Strange, this topic came up last night and I replied (as did a lot of other people) and it got deaded. Maybe despite being at the top of the front page, the one I found was the dupe?

Another couple of possibilities:

1. The cleaning staff management has their offices located in the 19th century.

2. Roombas are easy to steal. Even in the nicer hotels, the paintings are bolted to the walls. Free-roaming robots that can fit in a suitcase? I think not.

3. Durability may be a concern.

4. Room turnover needs to happen very, very quickly, and so hotels are waiting for the 'Roomba-SS', because they need supercharged V8 cleaning power.

The paintings are bolted to the wall so they don't fall, not for theft. There's an inventory taken when the room gets turned over, so if it's missing the customer is billed. Sort of like those $10 packs of cookies in the mini-bar.

My guess is that vacuuming a room just doesn't take that long and it would take forever to make a Roomba cost effective.

Theft is a huge problem, especially for the only inanimate object that could be plausibly said to have ran away on its own. The hotel can, of course, bill you, but you can just dispute the charges.

The guest only has to convince his credit card company that there was no Roomba when he got there. Given the state of charge backs in the industry today, that would be a shoe-in. You probably could convince them there was no painting if you stole that and tried.

Roombas are slow, fragile, and don't actually vacuum very well. They are costly to buy, maintain and replace.

Minimum wage labor is cheap, easy to find and easy to replace. Its usually fast and does a pretty good job of vacuuming.

Add to that that roombas need a lot of "support" to run. (Empty, charge, clean out when jammed with crud, send back when broken) and its WAY easier to point to an old hoover and make vacuuming motions and them point to the rooms than to explain to someone how to use a roomba. (Especially around a potential language barrier.)

The robots are coming, but not until they are tele-operated under contract (like ADT does for security) and the hotel staff doesn't even have to think about them. They just pay their "vacuum bill" and it happens.

Because Roombas don't work very well.

Bingo! Anyone who has seen room service in action knows housekeeping spends about 80 seconds spot vacuuming each room where Roomba wanders around aimlessly for about 30 minutes.

... because people would be stepping on them all the time.

I could list other reasons, but I guess Matt Maroon beat me too it.

#5 and #7 are the only items on the list that make good sense.

They are slow, that's why.

... because a Roomba can only vacuum and do nothing else.

immigrant labor is cheap, plentiful, and scrubs toilets too

I think this is the crucial point. Probably the people who clean hotels do not usually buy Roombas. If a lawyer buys a Roomba, they are saving time that is worth 100/hour (or whatever). If a hotel buys a Roomba, they are saving time worth 10/hour (or whatever). A very different calculation.

At the same time, even if you assume the lawyer could spend his vacuuming time working instead (not exactly a safe assumption, as I learned the hard way once) the hotel laborer easily spends more than 10x the amount of time vacuuming that the lawyer does.

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