The richest person I know talks to robots all the time.
It's cool that you can do something yourself with a computer, whether it's ordering food or picking clothes or booking a trip. But, market doing market things, that can quickly became a have to, which is much less cool.
It's a problem that's hard to see until you're certain age (and therefore easily dismissed as whining of old people yelling at cloud(s)) - it's because most people in the west start with no money and lots of free time to burn, and gradually become extremely time-poor as their start working and accrue responsibilities (and $deity forbid, start a family).
The smartest people in academia get promoted to positions that used to come with administrative staff.
Now they’re expected to do all of that with a computer, which is easy right?
So now they spend 30% or more of their time administrationating their position, rather than delegating those duties to their admin staff.
That’s less time teaching and innovating.
Meanwhile, the increase in administration costs of learning institutions has massively outpaced all other costs as a fraction of total.
Guys this isn’t an optional position. You don’t want your SWEs doing product work. They are not going to do a good job of it when they also need to, you know, do their actual job.
Is it cheaper now that you can swear at flight booking software yourself, and scream at the hotel when they cancel your rooms that you got from a third party site that went through some other intermediary that bought the rooms at a group rate they shouldn't have been allowed to buy it at? Sure, it's cheaper. Is it better? Well, they want you to believe that. You have unlimited choice now. Oh sure, all the web searches and ads are targeted in a way that you're going to end up at the same place a travel agent would have put you, but you can perceive the freedom of choice along the way!
And you can enjoy all the risk and liability for mistakes made along the way, too, which is where the actual optimization happened in the economy.
Now that you do it yourself if you mis scan organic tomatoes as regular tomatoes you are freaking going to jail.
Ok exaggerating a bit, but having shoplifting in your record can be life changing, specially for immigrants
No such privilege is granted to regular customers. Instead, the self-checkout station locks itself up, and the customer has to wait several minutes for the assigned employee (who, most of the time, is also working two other tasks at the store) to show up, analyze the situation, enter service mode, and do the undo steps.
My experience is that the assigned employee is always looking for something to do, because he can't leave the self-checkout area, but there isn't anything to actually do there. And well, the store better not accuse honest customers of anything, or else some stuff they really won't like will happen (and that applies to poor customers too).
Anyway, the experience is still so bad that I tend not to use it. But that's because the machines really suck.
I greatly prefer the single queue in self checkouts rather than betting on which cash register line will get stuck on someone that has a pricing issue or something. Obviously, this has nothing to do with self checkouts, but I find single queues far more ubiquitous after self checkouts came around than before.
For lots of stuff, a cashier is probably quicker. But I almost never have lots of stuff.
It's a classic false-positive problem. Most times when the self-checkout clerk has to give you attention, the problem is stupidly innocuous, so they blindly approve, as they have been trained by the system that it isn't a real problem.
I'm sure plenty of things get by them this way.
If this happens, it’s a problem with the judicial system, not self checkouts. I highly doubt it has ever happened, though.
Doing it yourself? Good luck! Hope you've got good service on your phone where ever you happen to be when things go wrong.
90% of travel is probably happening where mobile networks are available. Also, since most travel seems to happen without travel agents today, it appears that "luck" is not that necessary, otherwise people wouldn't be choosing to forego travel agents.
Travel agents were not outlawed. Most people just prefer to save money and do the work themselves (for most trips) rather than pay a travel agent.
Yes, but they're already one level up, so they can fix the problems in their company's immediate system, and then unlike the customer, they're a trusted party in the network of all other parties, so they can mail/call other parties directly and get people there to fix issues without too much delay.
And you can enjoy overpaying for a lower quality vacation if your travel agent is unscrupulous and getting kickbacks from vendors.
That is the actual optimization that happened, I can do more research and communicate directly with vendors.
Those that don’t want to are still free to pay extra for a travel agent.
Only if your time is worthless.
I've noticed this too, but I always thought of it as mostly people fooling themselves.
If you're rich (let's say anywhere above 10mil), it's practically guaranteed that you can allocate resources in such a way that more effective engineering, or science, or whatever, is done in less time than if you tried to do it yourself (rather than spending your time allocating capital). I've actually thought of this as a bit of a curse: the value of a rich person's labor output is inverse to their net worth. No matter how smart, you're not smarter than a crack team of Ukrainian/vietnamese/taiwanese/Indian scientists/engineers/whatever, and the more rich you get the more you can stack your crack teams, either paying higher salaries for higher skilled people or building bigger teams.
I think there's maybe 100 outliers to this rule in the world, people like John Carmack. I mean I assume he's rich.
Also the original saying used rich people but I think it better pertains to busy people in general.
Otherwise, totally agree.
When i was a kid, i couldn't afford to buy all of the toys and games i wanted to, but i had plenty of time with the toys and games i did have. Now as an adult i can afford to buy whatever i want (within reason), but life gets in the way of me enjoying those things. I think "time poor" is just the latter part of that transition.
Also, "rich enough to buy human labor" is a silly phrase as well. If you've ever stopped at a coffee shop instead of brewing coffee yourself, or if you've purchased bread instead of farming your own wheat, you've "bought human labor". Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil.
This is the framing I am talking about. Surely, the scarcity of time for a poor person who has to do shift work until they are probably dead is a little more scarce than a rich person who chooses to play the game longer than they have to to put food on the table.
I would have written cash rich to refer to people who can afford to buy other people’s services in the quantity/quality being referred to above.
>Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil.
I don’t know what you’re referring to, but obviously poor people can’t afford to buy anywhere near as much (or as high quality) human labor as rich people.
Half my comment was on readability. "Time-poor" reads better than "time poor" when no quotation marks are used. When using quotations like you did, either approach is fine.
They already do.
e.g. our landscaper's website is something like:
bobslandscaping.landscaper.com
It handles the invoices and hosts his basic contact information etc. Sounds like a great business to be in to be the hosting company for this.
Where I live in my part of Europe, most small restaurants, cafes, bakeries etc. only use a Facebook page and their Google maps entry to share their menu, phone number and interact with the customer base. They have no use to spend time and money owning and maintain a website, plus the advantage of even grandmas knowing how to update a Facebook page versus stuff like shopify or squarespace.
And restaurants very commonly have events, either private events closing the place for other guests, or public events with a lot of people wanting to book. In these cases an online platform is even more useful. Then you remove a whole lot of calls.
What makes you think old school restaurants care about that levels of efficiency and optimisations? If they did, they'd all optimize everything till they all become become mcdonalds.
Taking online orders helps them ease a bit of a burden without having any negative effect for the customer experience.
Would you like to have your work interrupted all the time by phone calls?
Today I consult for restaurants and help them get their web presence and the reservation systems they need on their websites. They are very happy for this.
A restaurant usually has their booking calendar open on a display that all the chefs and waiters can check when they walk by. The system doesn't need any human to "apply" reservations or cancellations.
And there is a big difference between being interrupted to take bookings, or checking bookings when you have down-time. But thank you for your hacker sarcasm.
Guests usually call during the day to book tables for the evening or for another evening. In the afternoon between lunch and dinner, there is more time for staff to check bookings. Instead of answering the phone in the middle of morning prep or lunch service.
Then there's events. A venue can have public events with hundreds or thousands of participants. Usually during high season. So now you'd have that additional burden of phone calls, which becomes completely impossible unless you hire additional staff to only take calls. Or you have your own online system which is available 24/7 for customers to make and even pay for their bookings.
Third party reservation systems take anything from 15%-25% to do it for you, which is not really great for the restaurant, compared to buying their own system.
Or if it's an online system for take-away orders or deliveries, these get sent directly to the kitchen ticket printer.
And it's the same for the other small business category: accommodation. The best thing they can do is have their own online booking systems. To increase sales, reduce burden on staff, and reduce expenses to third party providers. And give customers a better experience.
Restaurants don't even need a dedicated take-out ordering section since delivery apps cover that too.
I rarely see Squarespace or Wix.
Just because Flight Centre can automatically line up your flights for you, doesn't mean they want to. Time poor people still don't have time to go through that nor do they want to. They ask their assistant to do it, their assistant knows them well and fills in all the knowledge gaps.
Even in the age of AI chat assistants, I don't see a time poor person bothering to go through the process of building a website with a chat interface. There's too much knowledge asymmetry that needs to be closed and that's time cost again. Still much easier to ask a team member to do it.
Their assistant might have reached out to a digital agency in the past, maybe now they don't thanks to AI.