Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gorgoiler | Hacker News Reader

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I’d not heard of this fallacy* but it makes perfect sense. Well executed human greeting is such a killer asset if you get it right. There’s a few million years of genetic programming inside us all that responds unreasonably positively to hospitality. If someone enters my home and is not drinking their desired beverage in under four minutes, I have brought shame on me and my family!

I think we are all programmed to respond well to any courtesy, no matter how indirect. When a computer game level has a nice tutorial “level 0” then I feel good. When my dishwasher has color coded component to help me clean it, I feel good. When I click a text area containing an order number and it auto selects the number, I feel good. Great design is about the same kind of warm fuzzies as great hospitality. Maybe we should even call industrial design “passive hospitality”?

*No apostrophe btw. It ought to be The Doorman Fallacy. If you want an apostrophe then call it The Hotel Manager’s Fallacy :)

I also hadn't heard of it, but I feel like it's kind of a corollary of the whole, "what's measured is managed" idea or maybe the Streetlight effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streetlight_effect).

It's easy to measure a doorman's cost, but hard to measure their impact. Few, if any, guest are likely to mention the impact of a doorman on their stay except in the exceptional case. That means when budgets start to get tight (or an exec wants to drive the share price up), doormen become an easy target to cut because there's little hard data to justify their value.

Isn't the hard data the loss of the hotel a few years down the road due to being noncompetitive due to declining customers caused by the penny pinching?

That's the heart of the issue: insufficient accounting.

You can't plan any better than your models, and if your models are insufficient then your decision making will be inherently flawed. Penny pinching is good until it's not, and the data to see when the transition occurred isn't on the balance sheet until maybe it's too late. At the point you're pinching the penny of the doorman, you don't have the data about the impending customer decline.

But doormen became a thing, so the value was understood. We have now lost that knowledge.

I suppose it's like enshittification. It's presented as a progression to a new worse thing when it's more of a Dark Age of 'soft' knowledge.

Labour was cheaper back then. Even valuable jobs can stop making sense if the costs outweigh them. That's the difficulty with automation making other sectors more efficient, wages get driven up while your productivity stays the same.

It still seems to me designing applications or web services is so hard that it's just easier to hire thousands of people to do customer service and having people to come physically to do things. The average corporation's business application or web page is absolutely terrible and a lot of non-technical users simply can not do business with it. Ie it is a hindrance for the businesses core reason of existence. Do the QR code things show up in revenue tracking? Do they do A/B testing? I think I prefer to choose another restaurant if I see that, or not come again.

I think some small pizza shops have had proper simple web pages, probably because it's do-or-die for them and the person contracting the web page is the person also knowing very well how the business is doing. Also phone interactions are very fast and straightforward. It's sad to see them having to struggle with terrible card payment terminals and everybody trying to take a cut (credit card and delivery companies).

> It still seems to me designing applications or web services is so hard that it's just easier to hire thousands of people to do customer service and having people to come physically to do things.

I'd love for this to be true, but every business nowadays sees employees (except maybe whatever group is core to their business) as a giant cost centre. Every employee cut is money saved. Hence customer service consistently being shit, since it's an easy place to skimp on. Now, the doorman's fallacy could be applicable here; good customer service will create repeat buyers and good word of mouth, but I doubt you need to put that many people into it to make it good. Thousands has to be well past diminishing returns. Even if only 20% of people find the happy path in some stupid web app, that's potentially thousands of man-hours that customer service didn't have to provide, and thus a lot less employees you don't really need.

True. But automation also pushes up wealth. Starbucks drivethrus aren't a thing because we need iced sweet nominally coffee stuff. It exists because we have the disposable income to pay someone else to make the coffee.

Yes a doorman is a cost, and a greater cost than previously, but we've also got more money to waste on such fripperies.

> That's the difficulty with automation making other sectors more efficient, wages get driven up while your productivity stays the same.

The root cause of that is minimum wage - if you raise it then automation becomes important, and where you can't automate it drives up prices of essential goods. So a doorman is either automated away or needs a raise to afford to live.

It's not just minimum wages. If productive sector employees' demand for goods causes inflation, prices will rise. If you want to keep your nurses/doormen/teachers you'll have to increase their wages regardless of what the minimum wage is.

> If productive sector employees' demand for goods causes inflation, prices will rise.

I'm not sure what you mean. Prices rising is what we call 'inflation' - one doesn't cause the other. They're the same thing.

Rising demand induces inflation because more money is chasing the same goods.

That might just mean more competition is created as there's a bigger market to chase. Minimum wage has the same risk as the one you mentioned, but also all but guarantees higher prices (particularly on labour-intensive goods such as food) as everyone's wage needs to go up to make the harder/worse jobs worth doing.

It's difficult to tie changes in customer retention to not having a doorman in a "hard data" way. Ideally you'd want to do an A/B test of doorman vs non-doorman, but you'd need multiple hotels for that to work.

How do you map the exact reason, though. A hotel could have gone down years down the road due to Covid, some war that influenced existing clientele, general drop of tourism, change in weather patterns that made summer less attractive, competition from AirBnb, being bought by someone totally inept, spread of remote work instead of business trips, aging population that does not like to travel anymore, or combination of all those factors etc.

1) Failing can be (mis)attributed to many things particularly if the cause and effect are separated significantly by time, and 2) most businesses want to stay way ahead of the realization they're noncompetitive as by that point often the barn door is open and the horse is gone.

> I think we are all programmed to respond well to any courtesy, no matter how indirect.

I once read a book called "The Media Equation" that argued humans' social cooperation/courtesy instincts are many thousands of years old, while computers are very new (the book was written in 1996). As academic HCI researchers they'd conducted many experiments, providing evidence for this, which is why it's a book, not a paragraph.

What I found fascinating about this book was you could see how their findings had directly translated into Clippy in Office 97. You close 'Clippy' and it waves goodbye instead of disappearing immediately? They had research findings saying that was perceived more favourably.

And everyone knows how well-received clippy was :D

Clippy became infamous because it couldn't actually do anything it claimed to do. It also seemingly broke the courtesy guidelines by appearing uninvited and stealing focus.

And I would say in its case, there was great synergy between not doing anything and appearing uninvited. Two negatives combining to produce an overwhelmingly greater negative.

Doormen keep vagrants away and prevent dirty things from accumulating in front of the venue. Plus the social benefits of interaction. It is a cost but offers not immediately obvious benefits.

Plus he can hail you a cab.

I've never heard it in terms of courtesy, more that a human employee is an entirely different category to some mechanical component of a business.

So the setup goes, if a doormans function is defined as opening the door, then he can be replaced by a cheap mechanical thing; this misses that he is both covering more incidental tasks, and providing a human interface to the business. These things are very valuable, but not captured in the "guy who operates the door" definition.

Seinfeld did a whole episode literally about the doorman fallacy.

Probably true for humanity in general, but I would hate having a doorman and having to greet them every time I enter and leave. I've been in airbnbs where I had to do it, and I didn't like it. Same with the article's QR codes ... for an introvert, not interacting with the wait staff is great. Knowing that my order / payment is done precisely without fear of miscommunication is great. I don't need the hospitality.

a good doorman would know this about you and tune your greeting into an acknowledgement of a subtle nod, I think

The doorman of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore was so iconic that he was written into the textbooks of my time. I’ve often wondered if he’s well paid considering his significance to that institution.

https://mothership.sg/2017/11/raffles-hotel-doorman/

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