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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

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?

mod 12y ago
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.
- gknoy 12y ago
  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.
  - mod 12y ago
    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.
avn2109 12y ago
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.
dcosson 12y ago
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.

mod 12y ago

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.

gknoy 12y ago
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.
- mod 12y ago
  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.

avn2109 12y ago

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.

dcosson 12y ago

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.