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Comment by Fiveplus | Hacker News Reader

The internet was originally promised as a way to disintermediate these kinds of supply chains, yet we often ignore these "boring" businesses for hype trains. The fact that he added a phone number and it sometimes out-sells the website is the cherry on top.

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I've found more and more often the last few years that a lot of the long time businesses I use still do most of their ordering by phone. Or some version that involves talking to actual person.

The restaurants I go to still generally do phone ordering because they care about the quality of their ingredients. They want to discuss and talk about it with someone before placing an order.

The engineering and consulting firms I work with are the same. The engineers I enjoy working with are all phone based, not a lot of emails unless there are details involved.

I'm a bit of the same way. There is a lot of peripheral information that we miss out on when everything is done via automation/email. Those dead moments when our brains wander, then we ask a silly question, tend to bear fruit.

It's gotten to the point where I generally don't order anything online anymore because I can't trust I'll get what I ordered. When I have to deal with support it's an automated system that only gives me 1 or 2 options, neither of which satisfy my needs so I have to make a compromise. I'm not interested.

can you elaborate on the phone basis with engineers? I can’t really imagine how that wouldn’t be much more hassle discussing details without written documents, so I’m intrigued

A picture paints a thousand words

A picture is worth a thousand words -- but only those to describe the picture. Hardly any sets of a thousand words can be adequately described with pictures.

A word is worth a thousand pictures.

— Jobs ?

The way NASA did it for decades was conference calls. Nowadays it's Teams meetings.

The outputs of the meetings are decisions that are later encoded in very many very long documents. It's just faster to hash out engineering details when the relevant engineers are able to talk to each other in real time and relevant decision makers are present to be able to unofficially bless or reject what the engineers come up with (formal acceptance of these decisions is of course a paperwork thing).

So, in this domain anyway, it's not a literal phone call. But it's what we see as the modern equivalent.

You do both, but I know at work for me the problem with written communication is we just talk past each other. Writing is, still, a very distilled and compressed medium. Meaning, a lot of the information is lost when translated to writing. I've spent weeks talking over email and on ticket just to solve it within 5 minutes on a zoom call.

re: the phone number

Businesses really underestimate how much having a human representative helps customers feel connected to a business. I see it in corporate sales (B2B) where accounts are pretty much tied to the account manager. When the manager leaves, the companies refuse to renew because the account was only good because of the manager.

I think of my favorite businesses I regularly visit and they all have a memorable face to them. I feel more than a consumer. They help me understand the product and guide my decision making. They tell me when my order doesn’t make sense. And they refer me to other places they recommend. Or they tell me my problem is real and a mess, but assure me they’ll fix it.

You don’t get that with AI chat bots.

This feels like the internet doing the thing it was supposed to do, not the thing it currently gets most of the attention for

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