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Comment by reasonish | Hacker News Reader

You know who's specialised in taking pizza orders and delivering them? Pizza delivery companies!

Arguably not as optimized as Magic, strangely.

Call your pizza company and see how much effort it takes you to order a pizza to your house. They don't know your card number, your address, etc.

Compare with magic: "I want a large pepperoni pizza". Confirm the price, you're done. About 20 seconds of time involved.

Assuming your time is worth, I don't know, $20/hour or more, this seems to be worth the money directly--not even accounting for less cognitive load, loss of focus, daily happiness, whatever.

The pizza company sucks at taking your pizza order. Magic doesn't suck at it.

BS. How does Magic magically know my address or payment details?

In any event, I usually order pizza online, and it takes a couple of clicks. Even on the phone it's less than a minute.

Do you really consider your time so important that you refuse to even spend one minute on the phone talking to another human being to order a pizza?

No, but I understand that there's plenty of people who do.

FWIW it's more like 5-10 minutes every time I've ever ordered pizza (admittedly not often, I'm sure my pizza skills could improve, if I worked on them. I don't want to.)

Magic doesn't magically know your address/payment, of course, but it remembers it in the future. For every service, including new ones. I'm sure you actually knew that already. Point is it's one-time, ever.

My Domino's Pizza online account remembers both my address and my last/favorite orders. (I could even let it remember my card number, but I don't.) Ordering pizza consists of visiting the website, selecting "Yep, that same thing again", and following through the order process.

Granted, Magic has that for all transactions, but pizza can already be pretty convenient.

I'm not wholeheartedly disagreeing, but there's so much more to consider:

1) You're not at home. 2) You don't always order Dominos. 3) You don't even know what's available for delivery (I'm in a less urban area than most--Pizza Hut just started delivering in the last 12 months, and doesn't deliver to the whole city)

Essentially, when things get complex, Magic's cognitive load hardly changes at all. If it's a matter of routine (same pizza, same company, same house), your way is probably worth saving the money they charge.

Anyway, my pizza place has none of that. Including "online account," my pizza guy would have a good laugh at that.

In my city, restaurants are typically very loud and staffed by someone who does not speak any of the languages that I do. There are ~ ten million people in my city with this problem, so Magic/Seamless/whatever is valuable because it prevents me from shouting, straining to hear, and repeating myself four times, only to find later that the order is wrong because I have no meaningful checksum to insure correctness.

I find it a little odd that the canonical use case for Magic in these examples seems to be ordering your favorite dish to your home. I would agree with you, the complexity/cognitive load of this is low and with e.g. Seamless you get more control over the order and timeframe for little to no extra overhead.

But I could see a huge value in having someone make these decisions for you when it's something that's far outside of your normal routine. The last time I went skiing for example, we landed in the small ski town at night and needed to get dinner, we ended up calling around to 4 different places and making a bunch of arbitrary decisions and still had no idea if the food would even be good. Someone else (or eventually software) could have done that just as effectively and it would have saved us a lot of stress, in that scenario it really would feel like magic.

From your post: "The pizza company sucks at taking your pizza order. Magic doesn't suck at it."

From the article: "I’ve never once actually gotten what I wanted from Magic."

Sure, rephrase to;

"The pizza company's UI for ordering a pizza is far inferior to Magic's."

Whether they get the product delivered or not is most important, of course, but not really what I was talking about.

If they can scale, it won't be an issue, by definition.

That's highly debatable.

One of the UI's is a piece of software. The other is an English speaking human required to be quick and accurate.

Last I checked the slogan wasn't "manually entered orders done by on-demand employees are eating the world"

>The pizza company sucks at taking your pizza order. Magic doesn't suck at it.

My regular pizza company is completely painless to order from, both on the phone or online. They know my address, don't need my credit card number because I pay via credit card at the door, and they even have my order history. This is 2015. Maybe you need a new pizza company?

FWIW my very favorite pizza company is a local place in my city that doesn't deliver. It probably goes without saying they also don't have a website, any way to store card data, etc. His register is a cashbox.

I have every expectation that Magic would handle that order for me, though. Probably slowly, if the article is any indication, but I'm assuming they'll get better.

I wasn't really talking about my local shop, though, so point taken. It'd be pretty enjoyable to get "hey mr. mod!" and I say "hey, give me what i got last time, please." and hang up.

I don't want to bother with paying at the door, but I'd tough it out, I guess.

I imagine I am not alone in wanting a pretty specific pizza order (the restaurant, the toppings, the crust, etc.), which greatly diminishes the value proposition of saving time.

"Okay, google. Send a text message to magic I'd like a hand-tossed pizza, supreme but without olives, with butter and marinara sauce on the side, and a 2 liter of coke."

I mean, you're going to have to tell someone the specifics of your order. It's all the rest of the details where you're saving time.

The major companies (Papa John's, Dominos, Pizza Hut) are exceptional at it. I've used all of their websites in the past year and have no complaints.

Local pizza delivery companies vary more widely.

If the Pizza company is doing it right, they do have my address and payment info just from the number that pops up on callerID.

There is some pain points (god I hate myself right now) that magic could solve, but ordering food isn't one of them.

Grubhub or seamless is just easier. It takes longer to tell someone your order correctly that to just to it yourself.

I also do wonder if a pay per use secretary will actually work. My secretary knows me so she can better make choices. Someone with just a chat log has a harder go of it.

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