Ask HN: What’s Up with Service Disruptions?

It seems to me that the big story in the economy is that services of all kinds are sporadically disrupted.

For instance the bus I am taking in the morning has been canceled because the bus company has insufficient mechanics. My doctor sends me a letter in October saying I should schedule a check-up in November but when I call the front desk they are booked until February. Pharmacies used to be open on the weekend but now they are not. The price of services at the hair salon keeps going up, stylists are leaving left and right, some of them make you book more than a month in advance.

I was at Dunkin Donuts the other day and the line of cars was stretched around the building. I went inside and got a coffee and a donut in a few minutes because they had everything ready. It was pretty obvious they used a Kanban system where people are sending signals upstream to maintain inventory. The manager is screaming “I need hash browns” the whole time I am there. I can just imagine there is one person in the drive-through line who ordered hash browns and everybody who wants a coffee and donut and could have been served quickly spent 20+ minutes waiting for hash browns.

At any given time there are some restaurants operating efficiently, certain problems fixed with band-aids. My morning bus will come back but I think the problem is roaming from place to place so there will be some other service screwed up somewhere else.

Compared to inflation I don’t hear a lot about this problem. When I do hear something the main theme is a labor shortage, maybe there are still ‘supply chain’ issues with parts and other inputs.

What I see from a process science perspective is queues that are way too long. People will defend the long queues to their death (“there is no alternative”) but long queues don’t increase the throughout a system can handle, they just cause customers and employees to explode and just increase the time frame in which another thing can go wrong like the customer not showing, the employee scheduled to do the service quit, etc. Most people think the long queues are a symptom of the disruptions, but I think the queues themselves are a cause of disruptions.

I’m concerned about how it can be managed economically. One way to think about it is that demand outruns supply and that is why we have inflation, so raising interest rates will slow down the economy, people will have less money to get haircuts, donuts, etc. and eventually the long queues will collapse.

The other is that businesses need to add supply, pay people better, train people, invest in process and technology so they can do more with less people, etc. in that case, trying to restrain the economy will prevent all of these adaptations from taking place. Prices will go up because all these things cost money, but it may be a one-time phenomenon instead of something that drags on for decades.

I’m afraid inflation fighting might perpetuate the ‘service chain’ crisis and paradoxically keep inflation high.

Any thoughts? How are service disruptions affecting you?