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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 year

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 :)

smallstepforman 3mo ago
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.
- Qwertious 3mo ago
  Plus he can hail you a cab.
michaelt 3mo ago
> 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.
- dekleinewolf 3mo ago
  And everyone knows how well-received clippy was :D
  - AlecSchueler 3mo ago
    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.
    - swsieber 3mo ago
      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.
superfrank 3mo ago
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 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.
- consp 3mo ago
  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?
  - bonesss 3mo ago
    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.
    - benj111 3mo ago
      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.
      - Tarq0n 3mo ago
        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.
servo_sausage 3mo ago
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.
rjh29 3mo ago
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.
- eutropia 3mo ago
  a good doorman would know this about you and tune your greeting into an acknowledgement of a subtle nod, I think
SoftTalker 3mo ago
Seinfeld did a whole episode literally about the doorman fallacy.
aaron695 3mo ago
[dead]
SenHeng 3mo ago
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/ https://mothership.sg/2017/11/raffles-hotel-doorman/

smallstepforman 3mo ago

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.

Qwertious 3mo ago
Plus he can hail you a cab.

michaelt 3mo ago

> 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.

dekleinewolf 3mo ago
And everyone knows how well-received clippy was :D
- AlecSchueler 3mo ago
  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.
  - swsieber 3mo ago
    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.

superfrank 3mo ago

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 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.

consp 3mo ago
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?
- bonesss 3mo ago
  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.
  - benj111 3mo ago
    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.
    - Tarq0n 3mo ago
      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.

servo_sausage 3mo ago

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.

rjh29 3mo ago

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.

eutropia 3mo ago
a good doorman would know this about you and tune your greeting into an acknowledgement of a subtle nod, I think

SoftTalker 3mo ago

Seinfeld did a whole episode literally about the doorman fallacy.

aaron695 3mo ago

[dead]

SenHeng 3mo ago

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