41 ms·

The longer someone is at the counter, the more likely you are to see them. You’re biased towards seeing the relatively few people who take half an hour.

ajmurmann 5y ago
But those are also the people who ruin it for everyone. Why not heavily optimize for the 90% good case via full automation and discourage time intensive behavior. I'm thinking either only taking online reservations or doing a 30% surcharge for walk-ins. The happy case should be that I book online, I get a parking spot location where the car is and a QR code I show on exit. Hertz Gold at SFO is like 80% there, yet the normal case remains having to walk to a desk. It seems in their interest to discourage going to the desk as much as possible.
- jackson1442 5y ago
  Would be interesting if they offered a subscription service and/or loyalty tier that gives you "real" reservations. Call it "$BRAND Car Guarantee." That way, you know that the customers are committing to actually get their cars, and you can make a term of service that you don't miss N cars per T time (this would be displayed prominently - call it something friendly like "house rules"). Boom, everyone's happy. Your repeat customers are more likely to stay that way, and people will hear about this and _become_ repeat customers because that's what it incentivizes. You can keep prices cheap by overbooking your non-loyalty cars like you already do.
- llampx 5y ago
  How would they upsell you on insurance and extras if you didn't have any interactions with a sales agent? Honest question.
zhte415 5y ago
I'm reminded of this train/bus is taking ages to come. If one comes, say, every 15 minutes, that's an average waiting time of 7.5 minutes (and there's a +/- of around a minute for whether the 'time' is arrival, doors opening, closing, departure, depending on one's perspective of which 'time' is important to them). If one's already there, or comes within 1-2 minutes, that's perceptively close to time = 0, which pushes out perceived average waiting time to 8-9 minutes with times approaching or exceeding average waiting time having a disproportionately negative perception (your total journey time/connection impact, expectation of unannounced cancellation, etc, increasing). Nifty modern stuff like indicator boards work to re-align these perceptions. Passage of time is also quite non-linear - back to the ATM queue. When using the ATM I'm engaged in a series of short-term tasks, just as writing a comment on HN when sitting on the subway causes stations to pass 'faster'. And back to the ATM - I'm sure there's someone somewhere in a retail banking team that measures average interaction with ATM timings. Do they read HN or would like to comment?
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  My favorite chestnut regarding this is the one that occurred at Houston Intercontinental: https://archive.ph/Z3gjx https://archive.ph/Z3gjx > SOME years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted. > Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags. > So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.
  - himinlomax 5y ago
    The frustration with waiting at the carousel is not the time it takes but the fact that you have no idea how much time it takes. So you're just sitting there in alert mode looking for your things. If they had given customers information about _when_ their luggage would be available for pickup, the complaints would probably also have dropped to zero.
  - tragictrash 5y ago
    Love this solution. Make it tougher overall but the perceived impact is less. Ooof.
    - ddulaney 5y ago
      And it has a negative impact for the people without checked bags, but they’ll never realize that something changed — their life just gets imperceptibly worse. Big oof.
      - 5y ago
daoismyname 5y ago
That's not the interesting part though. The interesting part is WHY for some people it takes so long that everybody else has to wait. Imagine being on a high speed train and having to travel at the speed of the slowest train in front or if e-mail were sent using snail mail. It obviously happens frequently enough that virtually everyone who ever rented a car - even only that one time - noticed it, so why they do not optimize for that? I used to rent cars very often and I had to wait every single time I went there, it's not really a bias, it's a certainty. Lately there have been some improvements on that front and a couple of the major rental companies made it almost painless if you are a regular customer, but it's still a lottery most of the times.

ajmurmann 5y ago

But those are also the people who ruin it for everyone. Why not heavily optimize for the 90% good case via full automation and discourage time intensive behavior. I'm thinking either only taking online reservations or doing a 30% surcharge for walk-ins. The happy case should be that I book online, I get a parking spot location where the car is and a QR code I show on exit. Hertz Gold at SFO is like 80% there, yet the normal case remains having to walk to a desk. It seems in their interest to discourage going to the desk as much as possible.

jackson1442 5y ago
Would be interesting if they offered a subscription service and/or loyalty tier that gives you "real" reservations. Call it "$BRAND Car Guarantee." That way, you know that the customers are committing to actually get their cars, and you can make a term of service that you don't miss N cars per T time (this would be displayed prominently - call it something friendly like "house rules"). Boom, everyone's happy. Your repeat customers are more likely to stay that way, and people will hear about this and _become_ repeat customers because that's what it incentivizes. You can keep prices cheap by overbooking your non-loyalty cars like you already do.
llampx 5y ago
How would they upsell you on insurance and extras if you didn't have any interactions with a sales agent? Honest question.

zhte415 5y ago

I'm reminded of this train/bus is taking ages to come. If one comes, say, every 15 minutes, that's an average waiting time of 7.5 minutes (and there's a +/- of around a minute for whether the 'time' is arrival, doors opening, closing, departure, depending on one's perspective of which 'time' is important to them). If one's already there, or comes within 1-2 minutes, that's perceptively close to time = 0, which pushes out perceived average waiting time to 8-9 minutes with times approaching or exceeding average waiting time having a disproportionately negative perception (your total journey time/connection impact, expectation of unannounced cancellation, etc, increasing). Nifty modern stuff like indicator boards work to re-align these perceptions. Passage of time is also quite non-linear - back to the ATM queue. When using the ATM I'm engaged in a series of short-term tasks, just as writing a comment on HN when sitting on the subway causes stations to pass 'faster'. And back to the ATM - I'm sure there's someone somewhere in a retail banking team that measures average interaction with ATM timings. Do they read HN or would like to comment?

bobthepanda 5y ago
My favorite chestnut regarding this is the one that occurred at Houston Intercontinental: https://archive.ph/Z3gjx https://archive.ph/Z3gjx > SOME years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted. > Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags. > So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.
- himinlomax 5y ago
  The frustration with waiting at the carousel is not the time it takes but the fact that you have no idea how much time it takes. So you're just sitting there in alert mode looking for your things. If they had given customers information about _when_ their luggage would be available for pickup, the complaints would probably also have dropped to zero.
- tragictrash 5y ago
  Love this solution. Make it tougher overall but the perceived impact is less. Ooof.
  - ddulaney 5y ago
    And it has a negative impact for the people without checked bags, but they’ll never realize that something changed — their life just gets imperceptibly worse. Big oof.
    - 5y ago

daoismyname 5y ago

That's not the interesting part though. The interesting part is WHY for some people it takes so long that everybody else has to wait. Imagine being on a high speed train and having to travel at the speed of the slowest train in front or if e-mail were sent using snail mail. It obviously happens frequently enough that virtually everyone who ever rented a car - even only that one time - noticed it, so why they do not optimize for that? I used to rent cars very often and I had to wait every single time I went there, it's not really a bias, it's a certainty. Lately there have been some improvements on that front and a couple of the major rental companies made it almost painless if you are a regular customer, but it's still a lottery most of the times.