6 ms·

Tech crunch is up its own behind on this one. The first potential reason is "resentment" people have toward the rich and glamorous San Jose lifestyle or because

by zwkrt 8y ago

Tech crunch is up its own behind on this one. The first potential reason is "resentment" people have toward the rich and glamorous San Jose lifestyle or because technology is "like magic" to the simple lay-folk. People are distrustful of things that have a track record of losing their trust, and tech is very high on this list. The other day I was returning some umbrellas to a Target. I had bought them online and picked them up at a different store. When trying to return them the nice old woman at the customer service counter had issues receiving the inventory because Target's system was not accepting the return of inventory whith such circuitous provenance. We were both intelligent humans, I had a valid receipt, and in another era she could have just taken the umbrellas and the issue would have been resolved. But today we have software which contains all the rules, and often these rules extend out into the world and begin to govern our lives. My example is silly, but think about how often tech restricts you versus how often is frees you. People reading this on HN might feel the answer is about even, but most people not in tech would probably have a very different answer.

amelius 8y ago
> think about how often tech restricts you versus how often is frees you. Type systems restrict me every time :)
fnord123 8y ago
>I had a valid receipt, and in another era she could have just taken the umbrellas and the issue would have been resolved. I think you're looking back with rose tinted glasses. Making returns in previous eras was very difficult. It was very much caveat emptor or make an enormous fuss.
- jasode 8y ago
  >I think you're looking back with rose tinted glasses. Making returns in previous eras was very difficult. I agree. I remember 20 years ago when returns were much more of a hassle. For example, at Home Depot in the 1990s, to return something, you had to fill out a written form with a pen. The cumbersome pen & paper dance was repeated by the cashier as she had to analyze the receipt and manually circle which items were being returned. Today, their POS system just scans the UPC bar codes and immediately puts the refund amount back on the credit card. Literally 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes. Also, if I lost my receipt, the cashier justs ask for the card number I used. They can then find the transaction in their database and issue a refund back to the card. Container Store can also do this so I assume many retailers can do it. This convenience is all made possible by modern POS systems. Previously, the stores had a strict "no return without a receipt" policy. Overall, returns are easier today, not harder.
  - tomrod 8y ago
    > Overall, returns are easier today, not harder. On average, absolutely. In the long tail, maintaining a system that bypasses software blocks is rare, and perhaps prohibitively costly. Yet the need for overrides exists.
  - newnewpdro 8y ago
    You're just not going back far enough. It used to be very easy to return things, at least out in the midwest where I grew up. I had budding criminal friends in high school who were no doubt partially responsible for why it became so difficult, because they were exploiting the easy returns for personal gain. They would buy 56K USRobotics modems from Best Buy and return the boxes containing used 14K modems. Someone had found a large quantity of disused USR 14K modems, I think it was from an office building dumpster. Weekends were spent doing this across dozens of stores at scale, I never heard about any of them getting caught. Back then your average retail employee wouldn't know a modem from a sound card. All they verified was that a circuit board computer thing was in the box.
    - LaundroMat 8y ago
      With things becoming obsolete faster than ever before, I'm sure this scam could still work. I know plenty of stores where they only glance in the box when you return something, and if you bought it cash, you'll get cash back (no traceability).
- hoaw 8y ago
  We can probably agree on that situation, but I don't think that is the greater point so much as whether technology actually empowers you to make decisions. I might certainly also have rose tinted glasses, or was only exposed to certain things, but I remember quit clearly that 'back in the day' there was a strong narrative of having a choice, not technology making the choice for you. I think to some extent that was why the early Internet felt free. Not because it was necessarily that free, but because people of different views could agree on technology as something empowering. Like from the famous hackers manifesto: "I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me..." Today it feels like technology doesn't like me. The decisions were made by someone else "because that is just how technology work". While they are usually making a lot of money.
- temp231239 8y ago
  And thanks to such simplifies return process customers are being psychologically being tempted to buy without thinking twice sucking more time out of life of masses.
agumonkey 8y ago
this era also: - invested in fad - fad that killed the old way - only to ressuscitate the worst of the old (immature business, price games) who wouldn't looove that
DoctorOetker 8y ago
yes, recently I went to the hardware store to get a block and tackle system [0], which I had to use many times as a child (helping my stepfather who was an independent mason, in our "free" time). I remember seeing them in the hardware store more than 10 years ago, and they weren't very expensive in the past. I was surprised not to find any block and tackle system, well they had a pricey electromotor winch and they also had separate individual pulleys and carabiners, but combining those would quickly become a sloppy mess and approach a substantial fraction of the electric winch price... Block and tackle systems have been perfected over the ages with progressively better and better materials regarding strength and friction. Electric cranes/winches have their use cases of course for very heavy loads or faster work, but they also have a lot of disadvantages: they need a nearby power outlet or a generator (B+T you can take to the forrest if you want), there is virtually no feedback apart from your visual observation of the load, and they make a load of noise due to the gearbox. This reduces safety: due to the noise, not only can you hear less if others are speaking / warning you about a problem, but you also don't hear if the load is scraping against something (using an electric crane I once jumped away just in time as I saw a large bucket full of gravel stones tip over because the rim of the bucket got stuck on the other side of the bucket, out of view), but also with a block and tackle system, you feel if the bucket load is scraping or starting to tip through the rope line! I don't care how many bluetooth apps, or blinking leds you attach to an electric winch, it will never succeed in being as intuitive an actuating interface as the load line in your hands, and it is silent so you can hear problems with the load scraping against something, or warnings from other people. Locally we have a couple of large hardware store franchises that have displaced the smaller independent hardware stores, and its the same everywhere. I don't believe there is some greedy scrooge who plotted the removal of the analog block and tackle systems in order to force a higher expense in either individual pulleys (for those who feel they need an actual B & T, DIY if necessary) or in the electromotorized winch (for very heavy loads or faster work). What I do believe is that at some point inventory software was marketed to them, with machine learning to optimize profit, and they blindly followed what the algorithm observed (perhaps some of the shops in the franchise were temporarily out of B & T when they still sold them, whereas others had it in inventory, upon which those who needed to raise a heavy load right then, decided to buy either multiple pulleys and 2 carabiners or the electric winch. so the algorithm that knew stock saw a move that increased profit if they would refuse to stock B&T systems in the future...) So now most people in the West who in the past would have bought a B & T for occasional use, now can only buy a more dangerous, and more expensive and less intuitive device. I'm sure B & T's are still made, but I'm also sure a large number of factories that made them were subsequently closed because "demand fell" or rather "algorithm decided to let demand fall". I'm also pretty sure teachers in technical schools are still teaching kids to calculate the load for N turns through a B&T system in various kinds of scenarios even though those students will not be able to find one when they find themselves in need (they could probably still order them online, but if you see it as a basic tool at school you probably expect it to be for sale instantaneously in the brick and mortar hardware stores...) So the problem is: conspiracies exist, but they are emergent, not explicit, the programmer who wrote the inventory optimizer did not intend to replace all B&T's with electric winches at the pain of clumsy multipart pulley system. Nor did employees in the store come up with this scheme. And yet the conspiracy is executed, because if we blindly optimize we effectively and systematically turn a blind eye to potential exploitation... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_and_tackle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_and_tackle
bsbechtel 8y ago
That’s partially because the freedom gained from tech is oftentimes invisible or taken for granted. The same goes for political freedoms. Try moving backwards, and it becomes obvious how much has been gained.
simion314 8y ago
>My example is silly, I have other example, here in Romania going to your doctor to get your monthly prescription requires the doctor to input something into a computer, if the system acts it can happen to waste 30+ minutes waiting. The IT system is not optimized for the doctor or patient benefit and it should have some fallback mode to pen and paper( if there is such a fallback mode the doctor does not use it for some reason)
huntie 8y ago
"Do you want to use a machine, or do you want the machine to use you?" I've found that this question aptly describes the problem you had. This really isn't an isolated issue either, it's everywhere. Modern design is not user-oriented; it's developer-oriented.
- Barrin92 8y ago
  It goes deeper even. Machines don't work like humans, so as we increase the reliance on machines it's not that machines necessarily become more like us, it's that we adopt to the machines we use. This was already happening 100 years ago when workers were 'deskilled' to operate manufacturing machines efficiently, i.e. turning the worker into a 'trained gorilla' under so called scientific management. It happens today when you talk to Google in a way that the search engine understands, not the way humans understand things, and it happens every time we use a technical device to get a task done. And the conflict here is not between developer and user, because developers are affected by this as well. A software developer adopts the limits of the compiler and the language she uses, the compiler does not adopt to the person. So tech workers are really just a rung up on the same ladder. People in the software world were not entirely oblivious to this. Systems like Smalltalk were designed with the idea of turning human machine interaction into something more organic. Sadly, this idea seems to have been abandoned.
  - lsc 8y ago
    I'm reminded of the quote about how writing everything down is going to ruin the minds of young people for memorization. In general, I'd argue that this is not so much 'de-skilling' as 'learning how to use tools' I mean, I'm sure that before shovels, people were way better at digging with their hands. Before bows, I'm sure we were way better at chasing down animals through strength and endurance. Sometimes there are knock-on effects that aren't so good; cars may be making us less fit, (I personally think this is largely a problem preferences; most people prefer a density level that makes public transit not so practical, and are willing to pay a huge price for this in terms of lost time, traffic deaths, obesity, increased housing costs, etc...) But the point is that these new tools usually make us better at the thing we're trying to do. When I started working on cars in the late '90s, all I had were the manuals and exploded parts diagrams. It is difficult to overstate how much easier a repair becomes now that I can type a few words in and get a video of someone performing the exact repair I need on the exact same model of car. As a shadetree mechanic who isn't an expert with the exploded parts diagrams, this is a huge game changer. I've even used the youtube to fix a laptop, something you'd expect me to be good at. (I'm no longer a professional hardware tech, but I was never a professional mechanic; go back far enough and I did fix laptops and other computer hardware for money) a friend had one of those fancy, thin Sony laptops; they tried to replace a keyboard and it wouldn't boot. they then took it to a repair place, who couldn't figure it out. The exploded parts diagram was impossible. But I looked up on youtube, and found a detailed teardown and assembly. I followed along with the heavily accented voice, and the laptop booted up like new. You could argue that in a bygone era, I would be more incented to figure out how to go from those line drawings to actual parts, to learn how to read those exploded parts diagrams. And you are right, of course; but I didn't, and because of modern tools, I'm better at fixing things than I would have been.
ctoth 8y ago
The thing is, this isn't tech restricting or freeing anyone. Tech doesn't come up with the business rules. Engineers don't decide hey, I want to make this old lady's life harder. Middle management decides that. And we write it. Because that's what we do. Paper forms have been keeping two intelligent people from being able to do what they wanted to do since far before the first electron flowed through a wire. Should we blame printers? The printing press? Now if you want to blame technology for making it easier for pointy-headed assholes to micromanage every single human interaction? maybe. But computers don't decide to restrict people, and history has shown us that bureaucratic people have wanted this sort of petty power over others since long before we could reify bureaucracy into business logic. If you believe that our mistake was in listening to the pointy-headed assholes, I'd love to know where I can work and not do so. Paperwork's dark forest would be an equally applicable headline and yet...
- vkou 8y ago
  > The thing is, this isn't tech restricting or freeing anyone. Tech doesn't come up with the business rules. Engineers don't decide hey, I want to make this old lady's life harder. Middle management decides that. Middle management doesn't decide it any more, or less then the engineers do. They order a system, the engineers build it, nobody, including the engineers, has a perfect understanding of the problems that the system is supposed to solve, so it doesn't 100% map to the real world. Nobody understands which parts of the system don't map well to the real world, so they don't design a process for dealing with the system's shortcomings. The responsibility for this failure is collective.
  - ctoth 8y ago
    Possibly for situations where the failure comes specifically from an unconsidered edge case. But I'm referring to the all-too-common case which the OP points at where technology is used to deny someone something because of wishes of some nebulous third-party. Do you really think the Product Owner at target didn't think someone might buy something at one store and need to bring it back to another store? Or did they just choose to make this more difficult? I've got a few friends who are unfortunate enough to work in call centers for a large satellite company. They are constantly forced to treat customers like crap and if the customer complains to put blame on the system. Not the managers/executives who came up with the rules that the customer is having trouble with, but the computer system. It is used as a shield/excuse for shitty policies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lu1xyYx3Eo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lu1xyYx3Eo
protomyth 8y ago
Despite what you write in the manual or advertise, your business process is your IT system workflow. If it cannot be done in the IT system then its not going to get done. Its amazing how few companies think up and game the unusual scenarios when designing or accepting a system. If you don't get input from in the field, then you really are missing something. Heck, your example isn't even unusual for a chain: customer returning item - item originally purchased online - origin store different from return store. Simplified, the only thing that matters is "origin store different from return store". Get that right and it fixes a lot.
temp231239 8y ago
I second your thinking. When think more along your line of thought I always come to the conclusion of blaming human's so called advancement(in tech, finance, politics) being the sole cause all miseries of human today. Seems like we are on wrong path and needs to take inspiration from our ancestor way of life who lived a more satisfying and fulfilling lives.
- kamarg 8y ago
  I think you may be giving too much credit to how satisfying and fulfilling the general populace found life back in the day. Any specific part of previous generations that you're thinking of when you say their lives were more satisfying and fulfilling?

by zwkrt 8y ago

amelius 8y ago

> think about how often tech restricts you versus how often is frees you. Type systems restrict me every time :)

fnord123 8y ago

>I had a valid receipt, and in another era she could have just taken the umbrellas and the issue would have been resolved. I think you're looking back with rose tinted glasses. Making returns in previous eras was very difficult. It was very much caveat emptor or make an enormous fuss.

jasode 8y ago
>I think you're looking back with rose tinted glasses. Making returns in previous eras was very difficult. I agree. I remember 20 years ago when returns were much more of a hassle. For example, at Home Depot in the 1990s, to return something, you had to fill out a written form with a pen. The cumbersome pen & paper dance was repeated by the cashier as she had to analyze the receipt and manually circle which items were being returned. Today, their POS system just scans the UPC bar codes and immediately puts the refund amount back on the credit card. Literally 30 seconds instead of 5 minutes. Also, if I lost my receipt, the cashier justs ask for the card number I used. They can then find the transaction in their database and issue a refund back to the card. Container Store can also do this so I assume many retailers can do it. This convenience is all made possible by modern POS systems. Previously, the stores had a strict "no return without a receipt" policy. Overall, returns are easier today, not harder.
- tomrod 8y ago
  > Overall, returns are easier today, not harder. On average, absolutely. In the long tail, maintaining a system that bypasses software blocks is rare, and perhaps prohibitively costly. Yet the need for overrides exists.
- newnewpdro 8y ago
  You're just not going back far enough. It used to be very easy to return things, at least out in the midwest where I grew up. I had budding criminal friends in high school who were no doubt partially responsible for why it became so difficult, because they were exploiting the easy returns for personal gain. They would buy 56K USRobotics modems from Best Buy and return the boxes containing used 14K modems. Someone had found a large quantity of disused USR 14K modems, I think it was from an office building dumpster. Weekends were spent doing this across dozens of stores at scale, I never heard about any of them getting caught. Back then your average retail employee wouldn't know a modem from a sound card. All they verified was that a circuit board computer thing was in the box.
  - LaundroMat 8y ago
    With things becoming obsolete faster than ever before, I'm sure this scam could still work. I know plenty of stores where they only glance in the box when you return something, and if you bought it cash, you'll get cash back (no traceability).
hoaw 8y ago
We can probably agree on that situation, but I don't think that is the greater point so much as whether technology actually empowers you to make decisions. I might certainly also have rose tinted glasses, or was only exposed to certain things, but I remember quit clearly that 'back in the day' there was a strong narrative of having a choice, not technology making the choice for you. I think to some extent that was why the early Internet felt free. Not because it was necessarily that free, but because people of different views could agree on technology as something empowering. Like from the famous hackers manifesto: "I made a discovery today. I found a computer. Wait a second, this is cool. It does what I want it to. If it makes a mistake, it's because I screwed it up. Not because it doesn't like me..." Today it feels like technology doesn't like me. The decisions were made by someone else "because that is just how technology work". While they are usually making a lot of money.
temp231239 8y ago
And thanks to such simplifies return process customers are being psychologically being tempted to buy without thinking twice sucking more time out of life of masses.

agumonkey 8y ago

this era also: - invested in fad - fad that killed the old way - only to ressuscitate the worst of the old (immature business, price games) who wouldn't looove that

DoctorOetker 8y ago

yes, recently I went to the hardware store to get a block and tackle system [0], which I had to use many times as a child (helping my stepfather who was an independent mason, in our "free" time). I remember seeing them in the hardware store more than 10 years ago, and they weren't very expensive in the past. I was surprised not to find any block and tackle system, well they had a pricey electromotor winch and they also had separate individual pulleys and carabiners, but combining those would quickly become a sloppy mess and approach a substantial fraction of the electric winch price... Block and tackle systems have been perfected over the ages with progressively better and better materials regarding strength and friction. Electric cranes/winches have their use cases of course for very heavy loads or faster work, but they also have a lot of disadvantages: they need a nearby power outlet or a generator (B+T you can take to the forrest if you want), there is virtually no feedback apart from your visual observation of the load, and they make a load of noise due to the gearbox. This reduces safety: due to the noise, not only can you hear less if others are speaking / warning you about a problem, but you also don't hear if the load is scraping against something (using an electric crane I once jumped away just in time as I saw a large bucket full of gravel stones tip over because the rim of the bucket got stuck on the other side of the bucket, out of view), but also with a block and tackle system, you feel if the bucket load is scraping or starting to tip through the rope line! I don't care how many bluetooth apps, or blinking leds you attach to an electric winch, it will never succeed in being as intuitive an actuating interface as the load line in your hands, and it is silent so you can hear problems with the load scraping against something, or warnings from other people. Locally we have a couple of large hardware store franchises that have displaced the smaller independent hardware stores, and its the same everywhere. I don't believe there is some greedy scrooge who plotted the removal of the analog block and tackle systems in order to force a higher expense in either individual pulleys (for those who feel they need an actual B & T, DIY if necessary) or in the electromotorized winch (for very heavy loads or faster work). What I do believe is that at some point inventory software was marketed to them, with machine learning to optimize profit, and they blindly followed what the algorithm observed (perhaps some of the shops in the franchise were temporarily out of B & T when they still sold them, whereas others had it in inventory, upon which those who needed to raise a heavy load right then, decided to buy either multiple pulleys and 2 carabiners or the electric winch. so the algorithm that knew stock saw a move that increased profit if they would refuse to stock B&T systems in the future...) So now most people in the West who in the past would have bought a B & T for occasional use, now can only buy a more dangerous, and more expensive and less intuitive device. I'm sure B & T's are still made, but I'm also sure a large number of factories that made them were subsequently closed because "demand fell" or rather "algorithm decided to let demand fall". I'm also pretty sure teachers in technical schools are still teaching kids to calculate the load for N turns through a B&T system in various kinds of scenarios even though those students will not be able to find one when they find themselves in need (they could probably still order them online, but if you see it as a basic tool at school you probably expect it to be for sale instantaneously in the brick and mortar hardware stores...) So the problem is: conspiracies exist, but they are emergent, not explicit, the programmer who wrote the inventory optimizer did not intend to replace all B&T's with electric winches at the pain of clumsy multipart pulley system. Nor did employees in the store come up with this scheme. And yet the conspiracy is executed, because if we blindly optimize we effectively and systematically turn a blind eye to potential exploitation... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_and_tackle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Block_and_tackle

bsbechtel 8y ago

That’s partially because the freedom gained from tech is oftentimes invisible or taken for granted. The same goes for political freedoms. Try moving backwards, and it becomes obvious how much has been gained.

simion314 8y ago

>My example is silly, I have other example, here in Romania going to your doctor to get your monthly prescription requires the doctor to input something into a computer, if the system acts it can happen to waste 30+ minutes waiting. The IT system is not optimized for the doctor or patient benefit and it should have some fallback mode to pen and paper( if there is such a fallback mode the doctor does not use it for some reason)

huntie 8y ago

"Do you want to use a machine, or do you want the machine to use you?" I've found that this question aptly describes the problem you had. This really isn't an isolated issue either, it's everywhere. Modern design is not user-oriented; it's developer-oriented.

Barrin92 8y ago
It goes deeper even. Machines don't work like humans, so as we increase the reliance on machines it's not that machines necessarily become more like us, it's that we adopt to the machines we use. This was already happening 100 years ago when workers were 'deskilled' to operate manufacturing machines efficiently, i.e. turning the worker into a 'trained gorilla' under so called scientific management. It happens today when you talk to Google in a way that the search engine understands, not the way humans understand things, and it happens every time we use a technical device to get a task done. And the conflict here is not between developer and user, because developers are affected by this as well. A software developer adopts the limits of the compiler and the language she uses, the compiler does not adopt to the person. So tech workers are really just a rung up on the same ladder. People in the software world were not entirely oblivious to this. Systems like Smalltalk were designed with the idea of turning human machine interaction into something more organic. Sadly, this idea seems to have been abandoned.
- lsc 8y ago
  I'm reminded of the quote about how writing everything down is going to ruin the minds of young people for memorization. In general, I'd argue that this is not so much 'de-skilling' as 'learning how to use tools' I mean, I'm sure that before shovels, people were way better at digging with their hands. Before bows, I'm sure we were way better at chasing down animals through strength and endurance. Sometimes there are knock-on effects that aren't so good; cars may be making us less fit, (I personally think this is largely a problem preferences; most people prefer a density level that makes public transit not so practical, and are willing to pay a huge price for this in terms of lost time, traffic deaths, obesity, increased housing costs, etc...) But the point is that these new tools usually make us better at the thing we're trying to do. When I started working on cars in the late '90s, all I had were the manuals and exploded parts diagrams. It is difficult to overstate how much easier a repair becomes now that I can type a few words in and get a video of someone performing the exact repair I need on the exact same model of car. As a shadetree mechanic who isn't an expert with the exploded parts diagrams, this is a huge game changer. I've even used the youtube to fix a laptop, something you'd expect me to be good at. (I'm no longer a professional hardware tech, but I was never a professional mechanic; go back far enough and I did fix laptops and other computer hardware for money) a friend had one of those fancy, thin Sony laptops; they tried to replace a keyboard and it wouldn't boot. they then took it to a repair place, who couldn't figure it out. The exploded parts diagram was impossible. But I looked up on youtube, and found a detailed teardown and assembly. I followed along with the heavily accented voice, and the laptop booted up like new. You could argue that in a bygone era, I would be more incented to figure out how to go from those line drawings to actual parts, to learn how to read those exploded parts diagrams. And you are right, of course; but I didn't, and because of modern tools, I'm better at fixing things than I would have been.

ctoth 8y ago

The thing is, this isn't tech restricting or freeing anyone. Tech doesn't come up with the business rules. Engineers don't decide hey, I want to make this old lady's life harder. Middle management decides that. And we write it. Because that's what we do. Paper forms have been keeping two intelligent people from being able to do what they wanted to do since far before the first electron flowed through a wire. Should we blame printers? The printing press? Now if you want to blame technology for making it easier for pointy-headed assholes to micromanage every single human interaction? maybe. But computers don't decide to restrict people, and history has shown us that bureaucratic people have wanted this sort of petty power over others since long before we could reify bureaucracy into business logic. If you believe that our mistake was in listening to the pointy-headed assholes, I'd love to know where I can work and not do so. Paperwork's dark forest would be an equally applicable headline and yet...

vkou 8y ago
> The thing is, this isn't tech restricting or freeing anyone. Tech doesn't come up with the business rules. Engineers don't decide hey, I want to make this old lady's life harder. Middle management decides that. Middle management doesn't decide it any more, or less then the engineers do. They order a system, the engineers build it, nobody, including the engineers, has a perfect understanding of the problems that the system is supposed to solve, so it doesn't 100% map to the real world. Nobody understands which parts of the system don't map well to the real world, so they don't design a process for dealing with the system's shortcomings. The responsibility for this failure is collective.
- ctoth 8y ago
  Possibly for situations where the failure comes specifically from an unconsidered edge case. But I'm referring to the all-too-common case which the OP points at where technology is used to deny someone something because of wishes of some nebulous third-party. Do you really think the Product Owner at target didn't think someone might buy something at one store and need to bring it back to another store? Or did they just choose to make this more difficult? I've got a few friends who are unfortunate enough to work in call centers for a large satellite company. They are constantly forced to treat customers like crap and if the customer complains to put blame on the system. Not the managers/executives who came up with the rules that the customer is having trouble with, but the computer system. It is used as a shield/excuse for shitty policies https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lu1xyYx3Eo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_lu1xyYx3Eo

protomyth 8y ago

Despite what you write in the manual or advertise, your business process is your IT system workflow. If it cannot be done in the IT system then its not going to get done. Its amazing how few companies think up and game the unusual scenarios when designing or accepting a system. If you don't get input from in the field, then you really are missing something. Heck, your example isn't even unusual for a chain: customer returning item - item originally purchased online - origin store different from return store. Simplified, the only thing that matters is "origin store different from return store". Get that right and it fixes a lot.

temp231239 8y ago

I second your thinking. When think more along your line of thought I always come to the conclusion of blaming human's so called advancement(in tech, finance, politics) being the sole cause all miseries of human today. Seems like we are on wrong path and needs to take inspiration from our ancestor way of life who lived a more satisfying and fulfilling lives.

kamarg 8y ago
I think you may be giving too much credit to how satisfying and fulfilling the general populace found life back in the day. Any specific part of previous generations that you're thinking of when you say their lives were more satisfying and fulfilling?