Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lqet | Hacker News Reader

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I once had a package delivered to a small local post office. App said it arrived there, and the next day I went to pick it up. The guy there couldn't find it and did not allow me to search the pile of packages myself, because "he had a system for ordering them", and it was impossible that my package was in there.

When I called customer support, they were overly supportive and outraged. It was very suspicious and obviously feigned. The guy there said that he would contact the post office immediately and get back to me! No worries! My package would turn up soon, it was clear that it was delivered to the post office! He could understand my frustration and would get to the bottom of this! Etc.

Nothing happened. A few days later I had an idea and went to the post office again. The same guy was there, remembering my case. He still insisted that the package never arrived there. Nobody from customer support or package tracking had ever contacted him, and the package wasn't even marked as missing. When I asked him to check if he had placed it in his "system" not based on my name, but on the name of the sender, he condescendingly laughed it off. But sure enough, that was exactly what happened.

I get the impression that post office staff quickly become jaded from being nagged about packages, especially by elderly people. After all, the elderly don’t have to work, so they can come to the post office every day and ask insistently for packages they know are on the way, but haven’t yet arrived. So, by the time you went there with your problem, any last bit of good customer service had been burnt out of the clerk.

Hopefully you're not saying this as an excuse or justification for runaway hubris and just awful customer support.

All we can hope to do is to understand.

When someone deals day in and day out with abusive customers who are sure of things that are just flat wrong it has a predictable effect on the persons handling of legitimate cases.

It's not good, it's not just, but it's understandable. Armed with that understanding we can at least try to self-help by making ourselves look as little like the bad customers as we can. Should we have to? Not according to how things should be. But how things should be isn't what counts in the world, how things are is what matters. And at the end of the day-- do you want your package or not?

Grinning and bearing abusive customers is not the default state of the world, there are societies where abusive customers are not tolerated at all and thus very rare.

An elderly person coming to the post office every day to check for a package may be annoying to the people working there, but they should tolerate it. What's the alternative, chewing out the old person? That's cruel. Banning them from the post office? Unconscionable.

How does this relate to the practices of other societies?

> I get the impression that post office staff quickly become jaded from being nagged about packages, especially by elderly people. After all, the elderly don’t have to work, so they can come to the post office every day and ask insistently for packages they know are on the way, but haven’t yet arrived. So, by the time you went there with your problem, any last bit of good customer service had been burnt out of the clerk.

Yes I read the parent comment when I replied. How exactly do your comments relate to my prior comment?

I probably shouldn't have even said abusive in my post-- it's not actually the operative part. It's sufficient that the customers are frequently wrong.

I think I'd also say that abusive from the perspective of the recipient isn't a bright line and you'd be hard pressed to find a culture in the developed world where the misguided interactions don't begin to feel somewhat abusive to the recipient after dealing with them day after day.

Of course, there is also outright abuse that is tolerated in the US and probably ought not be which only makes the matters worse.

What exactly is the point your trying to say?

i'm curious now, can you tell me specifically which societies are immune to basically the human equivalent of a DDoS?

'Immune' and 'human equivalent of a DDoS' are pretty extreme conditions, far from what I had in mind, but even in that case there's at least one well known example, North Korea.

I’m saying it as a force of nature that one just has to deal with. I’ve observed it in many post offices across many countries.

When I worked a low paying support job there were the coworkers that complained about the people coming in and there were the good coworkers and they rarely overlapped.

Same is true in retail or in this example imo - the worst employees are the ones that behave this way and rationalize their bad behavior.

This seems a bit ageist.

When I go to the post office it is filled with people shipping simple packages that could easily be handled by the machine directly next to the line, which I use then go drop off my package at the same counter.

So yeah. People are leeches and sheep and feel some odd need to interact on simple transactions.

In most western countries, there's a high amount of unemployment for people who do relatively unskilled jobs. When people use he automated check-out in shops or the machines in the post office instead of the human worker, usually what happens is that either people are fired or contracts are not renewed as there's less need for human employees. This then directly leads to more unemployment for unskilled workers.

Since I'd rather those unskilled workers be actually doing a job [1] rather than my taxes paying for them to be on welfare while being disgruntled that they don't have a job, I purposefully do not use automated check out or do not use the machines.

Of course you can keep thinking that everyone who doesn't do the same thing you do are leeches or sheep and don't actually have a clear reason for why they do it but maybe try and learn to keep an open mind and be more empathetic about the world.

[1] Assuming the shops passes the savings of having automated checkouts to their customers, I would be paying slightly more to subsidize their salary (of course, I'm rather doubtful that the shops would pass on the savings)

I suspect that the amount of people using self-checkout expressly to avoid human interaction (one can listen to music or a podcast without interruption, or one is simply unsocial) exceeds those who are avoiding self-checkout for your idealistic reasons.

In my view, just bring on UBI already.

Oh absolutely agreed for the UBI. Unfortunately I don't see it happening anytime soon. But there's also a question I've always had about UBI. If someone works as a cashier let's say, it might not be an amazing job, but there's still some feeling of fulfillment of being part of society, of working, of getting to know regulars at the small supermarket you work at (for the smaller city sized grocery stores, not talking about the huge american superstores). Would having UBI but not having a job be fulfilling, would people feel excluded from society even if they have enough to have a decent enough standard of living?

And yes, I know, plus self checkout is generally faster especially since a lot of supermarkets now only have less checkout lanes. So, most people will chose convenience and avoiding human interactions over ideals. I just wanted to explain to the OP that is assumption that people who decide not to use automated checkouts or automated shipping label creation might not be because they are sheeps or leeches.

Your concerns about UBI are very dependent on the region and culture. In many countries, socializing at the supermarket is not common. Trying to strike up even a limited polite conversation would be a faux pas or worse.

But with regard to how to preserve social opportunities under UBI, I think the Nordic countries suggest the best approach. There in places of terminal unemployment where quite a lot of people are already on the dole, the state also offers a large amount of social and cultural infrastructure: libraries, concerts, clubhouses, etc. Sure, some people choose nevertheless to drink their lives away, but there are productive ways to spend one’s time. Conversely, I think things would be a lot tougher in countries like the US where everything is privatized and the decline of “third places” has been a trend already for decades now.

> Your concerns about UBI are very dependent on the region and culture. In many countries, socializing at the supermarket is not common.

I mean I've lived in a few countries, I've socialized with the cashier from the local supermarket in France after seeing the same person 20+ more times. I currently live in Hong Kong and after going often enough to some restaurants I've socialized with the waiters, chef, etc. Including becoming friend with the owner. I've done the same while living in Japan where I became good friend with a cashier at my local supermarket who was a student working part time and was invited to her wedding and became friends with restaurants owners too by coming often enough (I'd say Japan makes it easier than in other countries because people expect to meet other in small restaurants when sitting around the counter, see Midnight Diner on netflix for an example of that culture). I've also had similar experience in Malaysia, especially with street sellers. I feel that once you keep seeing the same faces repeatedly, over time you can start making a connexion. And at least that's held true in every countries I've lived in.

I haven't lived long enough in the US to say if that would work and I do think that it works better with walkable cities where local supermarkets/grocery stores in the center of the city are tiny...

> Would having UBI but not having a job be fulfilling

Probably not; the whole point of UBI is to make it easier for people to have and transition jobs (compared to means-tested welfare) and to survive when the the valie of their labor in the economy is low, not to eliminate work.

UBI is conceived to enable more people to work, at better jobs on average, than not having UBI (by not penalizing people for work the way means-tested welfare does, and by enabling voluntary transitional breaks from work for retraining or taking a temporary downgrade to get on a career path that doesn't dead end as soon, etc.)

I go back and forth on this, and feel similarly about self checkout. Is it better to streamline the process and lean on the technology, where staff can watch their jobs slip away, or is it better to chose the human where possible?

I like a later analysis of the Butlerian Jihad from Leto II of Dune (https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad) that says

> "I point out to you […] a lesson learned from past over-machined societies which you appear not to have learned. The devices themselves condition the users to employ each other the way they employ machines."

The more we use machines for these “easily handled” use cases, the more we tend to expect machine interfaces for more interactions, and at some levels, I think that’s dangerous.

The way I see it, using those machines is labor that people usually get paid for. I don't want to do that labor for free. Furthermore, the professional cashiers are faster at it than the general public. They make fewer errors and are empowered to correct more errors themselves instead of waiting for somebody else to walk over and clear the error. Furthermore, checkout and bagging can be done in parallel which is faster than doing both yourself.

The only upside to self-checkout is lower labor expenses for the store. That turns into profit for the shareholders, not savings for the customers, so I don't care about that. And I guess maybe some people don't like the social interaction implied by human cashiers, but if you're not in the mood for that you can just keep your eyes down and grunt or something. Cashiers are used to people who don't want small-talk, they can generally take a hint.

Are you in the USA? I ask because that is mainly where I see complaints about having to do the cashier’s work. And I think that has to do with how grocery shopping is done in the USA: people drive up in their cars and buy a huge amount of groceries at once, so there is a lot to scan. Moreover, sometimes the bagging had been historically done by paid staff, so people weren’t used to doing it themselves.

But as someone shopping in Europe, I have never felt using self-checkout burdensome, because I’m usually just getting a few items for that evening or the next couple of days. Using the touchscreen is pure muscle memory, and the advantage of being able to listen to headphones or avoid social interaction outweighs the very slight inconvenience of ringing up my own purchases. Moreover, the queues for self-checkout are always shorter now than for the human cashiers.

I am in the USA but my grocery store trips are not at all like you describe. I walk to the grocery store, collect groceries in a single basket and have them loaded into one or two bags which I walk home with. I do this 1 to 3 times a week.

No matter the quantity of groceries, a professional can ring it up faster than I can.

> Moreover, sometimes the bagging had been historically done by paid staff, so people weren’t used to doing it themselves

Sometimes, but usually there is something like a 1:5 ratio (or lower) of baggers to cashiers so bagging your own while the cashier rings you up has always been common. The way I see it, bagging isn't really a real job, usually the store hires mentally disabled people to do it as a sort of charity to the community (also the feds pay half of their wages.) Anyway, bagging is easy. I don't have to deal with an obtuse machine to put some stuff in a bag.

So that if I wish to pay cash for shipping it's because I'm a leech and/or a sheep? I haven't used the machines since they went credit card only.

I ordered some stuff off Amazon many years ago, it never arrived. Contacted Amazon and they replaced my order. It arrived in about 1 week. 7 months later the original order arrived, box was beaten to hell. Dropped, torn, retaped multiple times.

Everything inside was intact and undamaged.

That's actually an amazing story.

I ordered some things some year ago, maybe 5-7 years ago now, and they never arrived. Amazon said they did, and they didn't reimburse me at all. I was pretty frustrated for quite some time about that, especially given my Amazon account goes back to 1996.

I did get invited to Vine about five months ago though, so I guess I can forgive them that $50 worth of stuff, given all the things I've ordered from Vine thus far.

I’ve only had to contact Amazon support twice in 20 years (my account is from 2003) both times they resolved the issue. But I’ve had friends who had terrible experiences with their support.

I just thought it was funny the package eventually showed up. I was very confused when it arrived.

Did he at least apologize after that? Sometimes being embarrassed like that can turn a person nice, but sometimes not.

Hopefully in the future he gives you less of a problem.

Yes, he seemed ashamed and offered a (thin) apology.

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