wayneL
VIVA LA LIBERTAD, CARAJO!
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- 9 July 2004
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I would walk straight out and never go back
I would walk straight out and never go backWhat I read into that is this store refuses or is too lazy and can't be bothered to carry a "float" for the till.
Moreso and probably the case, young staff failing NAPLAN and need a 100 fingers and toes to calculate the correct change.
I get it that processing cash is time consuming but to alienate customers, seems plain silly to me.
There were two staff members, both seemed in there 40’s, so not “young staff”.What I read into that is this store refuses or is too lazy and can't be bothered to carry a "float" for the till.
Moreso and probably the case, young staff failing NAPLAN and need a 100 fingers and toes to calculate the correct change.
I get it that processing cash is time consuming but to alienate customers, seems plain silly to me.
As a very simple example of concept, my garage door.No one is arguing that tech isn't useful. It is however very stupid to do away with cash and its delivery systems with the age of AI and super computers. It's just lazy.
Voice of reason and common sense yet you will still find some (i want to use other terms but in the good spirit of ASF, i will pass) who will disagree...As a very simple example of concept, my garage door.
Normal means of opening it is press the button on the remote.
But there's also a physical button on the motor itself which provides another way to open it.
There's also the ability to mechanically disengage the motor, which is manually operated and doesn't need the motor to be functional, and just open the door manually.
Because failure of the motor, the electronics controlling it or mains power are all foreseeable occurrences but it's still necessary to be able to open and close the door. Obviously it's inconvenient to have to get out of the car, manually disengage the motor and open the door but that sure beats not being able to open it at all in the event of failure.
Now apply that concept to things like paying for essentials. Food, fuel and so on are still necessary with or without functioning internet and IT systems. Having a backup system is thus sensible and logical. Even if it's inconvenient to use, it's still wise to have it because at some point if no such backup exists then it becomes a problem.
What I read into that is this store refuses or is too lazy and can't be bothered to carry a "float" for the till.
Moreso and probably the case, young staff failing NAPLAN and need a 100 fingers and toes to calculate the correct change.
I get it that processing cash is time consuming but to alienate customers, seems plain silly to me.
Yeah, so just like my garage door has an emergency release I can use if the power goes out, I carry a $50 note. But just like the emergency release I never actually use it.As a very simple example of concept, my garage door.
Normal means of opening it is press the button on the remote.
But there's also a physical button on the motor itself which provides another way to open it.
There's also the ability to mechanically disengage the motor, which is manually operated and doesn't need the motor to be functional, and just open the door manually.
Because failure of the motor, the electronics controlling it or mains power are all foreseeable occurrences but it's still necessary to be able to open and close the door. Obviously it's inconvenient to have to get out of the car, manually disengage the motor and open the door but that sure beats not being able to open it at all in the event of failure.
Now apply that concept to things like paying for essentials. Food, fuel and so on are still necessary with or without functioning internet and IT systems. Having a backup system is thus sensible and logical. Even if it's inconvenient to use, it's still wise to have it because at some point if no such backup exists then it becomes a problem.
Yeah, so just like my garage door has an emergency release I can use if the power goes out, I carry a $50 note. But just like the emergency release I never actually use it.
The only way the cash system won't work is if the seller refuses to or cannot take the cash.There is also the issue that the cash system doesn’t always work, and the digital payments can back it up, eg you don’t have cash in your wallet, can’t find an ATM, store doesn’t have change, etc etc etc.
But, there are also ways the digital systems can be backed up that don’t require cash.
Dining out has lost its humanity
Last week, the restaurant-loyalty app Blackbird introduced a new way to pay for dinner. Customers check in on the app on arrival, pick a payment source and tip percentage, and then eat. Ben Leventhal, one of the app’s founders, explained what he called the “best part” in an Instagram video shot at the Italian cafe Lodi.
“When you’re done, you just get up and go,” he said. Then he demonstrated how it’s done, high-fiving Lodi’s host on his way to the door without breaking stride.
I’m at the end of 12 years as a critic who ate in and reviewed restaurants constantly. Of those years, I probably spent two solid months just waiting for the check. I ought to be in favor of anything that speeds up the end of the meal, but Blackbird’s new checkless exit gives me the creeps. It is just the latest in a series of changes that have gradually and steadily stripped the human touch and the human voice out of restaurants. Each of these changes was small, but together they’ve made going out to eat much less personal. Meals are different now, and our sense of who we are is different, too.
In my first few years on the job, I thought of restaurants as one of the few places left where our experiences were completely human. We might work silently in our cubicles, rearranging and transmitting zeros and ones. We might walk around with speakers in our ears that played digital music files chosen by an algorithm. We might buy our books and sweaters and toothpaste with a click and wait until they showed up at our door. We might flirt, fight and make up by text. But when we went out to eat, we were people again.
No machine could drink rosé for us, or chew lamb chops, or flirt, fight and make up. And at every critical point in the meal, there were people there to guide us. From the moment we walked in, we talked with hosts, bartenders, captains, runners and bussers. Being served in a restaurant wasn’t passive. We had to participate.
Many of the little routines of dining that we used to handle by talking to a person now happen on a screen. When we go to Shake Shack, we order and pay for our burger and frozen custard on a screen. In some places, we enter our names on the waiting list for tables on a screen. We scan QR codes so we can read the menu on a screen. Restaurants are turning into vending machines with chairs.
Before we walk in the door, we’ve usually made a reservation on a screen. You could still make reservations by phone in 2012. Many places were on OpenTable by then, but if you didn’t feel like using it or couldn’t find a time you wanted, you picked up the phone, and your call would usually be answered by a human. Pleasantries were exchanged. Polite phrases were used: Please. Thank you. I’m sorry. We look forward to seeing you.
Now restaurants hardly ever pay someone to pick up the phone, if they have one; few newer places bother getting a number because so few calls come in. Eulalie, in TriBeCa, is one of the few that still takes reservations over the phone, a quirk so rare that it seems like a willfully perverse exercise in historical re-enactment. (Even the taverns at Colonial Williamsburg are on OpenTable.)
Online reservations are easier on the ego, because they free us from the humiliation of being told no. Mainly, though, we like their convenience, which in the United States is virtually an inalienable right. It’s so much more convenient that we’ve hardly noticed that reservations, once a simple agreement between you and the restaurant, are now a commodity that other people can profit from. We’re used to getting beat out in the race for tables by bots, which can turn around and sell the spot to the highest bidder.
We know that we might not be offered the same reservation times as somebody with a higher tier of American Express membership. Before we even get that far, we have to click OK on privacy policies so long and impenetrable that a lot of people I know assume restaurants know all about them before they show up.
Reservations, once a simple agreement between diner and restaurant, are now a commodity
On nights when we don’t feel like going out, we can order delivery on a screen. In 2012, when I wanted food brought to my house I would pull out a paper menu that had been left on my stoop and call a place in my neighborhood that I had either visited in person or walked past a hundred times.
While most of those neighborhood joints are on the delivery apps today, there are also vendors I’ve never been to or even heard of, because they aren’t real restaurants. They’re ghost kitchens, and I have no idea who is cooking there or where my money will go. Are my dollars supporting a local business owner who lives on my block? Or am I enriching investors in a startup based in Silicon Valley?
Many of these technologies spread during the pandemic, when there was a compelling reason to limit human contact. But the use of tech for social distancing hasn’t gone away. One result is that we feel increasingly alienated from the people who cook and serve our food. It’s no wonder we are always hearing about diners acting like entitled jerks — they’ve been trained to expect that everybody who works in a restaurant should be as fast and compliant as a touch screen.
Restaurants that pride themselves on professionalism are becoming more faceless, too. This reaches depressing depths at the modern tasting counter, which during my time as critic came to dominate the fancy-dining sector. A few of these places are wonderfully personal and idiosyncratic, but many of them feel utterly interchangeable — they follow the same template, down to the signed menu you’re given as you leave, as if you were going to run right home and paste it in your scrapbook.
You sit there having the same experience everybody else is having. (People are so afraid of missing out that they’ll ask the server what’s the right way to eat each dish.) If it’s your birthday — and on a typical night in one of these places, half the customers seem to be celebrating one — you’ll get the same dessert everybody else is having, with a candle stuck in it.
Even the Cheesecake Factory gives you a free slice of cake on your birthday. But the Cheesecake Factory wants you to come back; a lot of tasting-menu restaurants assume, correctly, that almost nobody sitting at the counter is going to become a regular. These places are built for one-night flings, not long-term relationships. They’re hookup restaurants.
People who consume a steady diet of bucket lists and viral videos rush from one restaurant to another so they post about it, to prove they were there. They go to places solely so they can put a photo of the viral egg sandwich or rainbow bagel on Instagram. Whether the sandwich or bagel tastes good is irrelevant; the point is to prove they were there.
Most of these people will never return. Restaurants that are packed for the first few weeks are empty six months later. The wisest owners now avoid serving anything that might go viral, because they don’t want their business to burn itself out.
It’s not that we don’t want to have relationships with the owners and cooks and baristas in our lives. Tiny pop-up restaurants and micro-bakeries are still riding a wave of popularity that started during the pandemic. A large part of the appeal of these places is the chance to meet the person who baked the croissant or cooked your Vietnamese bun cha.
We may value the chance to meet these vendors even more because we’ve lost so many of the personal exchanges we used to have in restaurants.
Not every restaurant needs to provide an intense emotional experience. I love the quick service of Japanese ramen shops where you pay before you eat. But if we’re going to stay in a restaurant for more than a few minutes, we want to connect.
A server’s little smiles, rehearsed jokes, out-of-nowhere raves for the daily special and so on may be subtle or not-so-subtle efforts to bump up the check and the tip, but they also ground us. Without them, the meal may be faster and cheaper, but it leaves us feeling a little empty. And when it’s time to go, we’re not in the mood to high-five the host, if the host still has a job.
If I am a cash type of guy, and decide to go do the groceries today, but the ATM's are down and I can't with draw cash, the cash system has failed.The only way the cash system won't work is if the seller refuses to or cannot take the cash.
I can quite easily carry some cash in my wallet.
The digital system has multiple points of failure.
Pretty hard to carry some spare electricity if the power fails for a business, or for the bank, or the comms provider.
I can't carry a spare cable if someone digs up the comms the cable.
I can't carry a spare software fix if some dork does a software update without testing it properly.
A lot of these things is because of the reliance on the digital system and doing away with cash.If I am a cash type of guy, and decide to go do the groceries today, but the ATM's are down and I can't with draw cash, the cash system has failed.
Yeah, but you need to top that up every now and again, so you rely on ATM's or some form of withdrawals which can fail, Also you might not have enough cash in your wallet, or you forget your wallet.
So does the cash system,
1, you can not have enough in your wallet when you need it.
2, The business can be short of change
3, ATM's can be down
4, Cash registers can fail etc etc
A power failure can shut down a cash accepting business too, I doubt Coles will let you purchase your groceries when their cash registers are down with a power failure, and I doubt ATM's will be working
As I said I carry $50 for emergencies too, but it is not a cure all, and the small chance a the digital system failing is well offset by its convenience every other day.
Doing away with digital systems would make the cash system even less user friendly,A lot of these things is because of the reliance on the digital system and doing away with cash.
The banks aren't doing that though. There's a case for maintaining cash. Not ditching digital.Doing away with digital systems would make the cash system even less user friendly,
Eg imagine not being able to access your cash until the bank opened on Monday, and then having to fill out a withdrawal slip, then wait online for a teller before you could make a withdrawal, All just to get the physical
Cash to buy your groceries.
No - because cash by its very nature is something that's storable and which historically most people kept some of in practice.If I am a cash type of guy, and decide to go do the groceries today, but the ATM's are down and I can't with draw cash, the cash system has failed.
A power failure can shut down a cash accepting business too, I doubt Coles will let you purchase your groceries when their cash registers are down with a power failure, and I doubt ATM's will be working
Doing away with digital systems would make the cash system even less user friendly,
I am not saying we should ditch cash, I am just pointing out how much better digital is, even with the small chance it goes down sometimes, because cash is inconvenient and unreliable in so many of its own ways.The banks aren't doing that though. There's a case for maintaining cash. Not ditching digital.
We can’t all store weeks worth of cash, most people living pay check to pay check would be withdrawing cash once a week and then expecting to spend it that day.No - because cash by its very nature is something that's storable and which historically most people kept some of in practice.
It could thus be compared to a battery storing electricity. It doesn't work indefinitely in a supply failure situation but it works for a while. It works long enough to at least enable an orderly shutdown of a computer, an orderly exit of people from the theatre using emergency lighting, etc.
Versus direct digital payments that have multiple points of immediate failure:
The card or phone.
EFTPOS terminal.
IT systems.
Communications / internet.
Electricity anywhere from bulk generation to networks to within the shop.
That's a lot of things to fail and sooner or later one of them will.
A lot of supermarkets do have limited backup power which enables them to remain open. But if the rest of the community has no power, it's only a matter of time until communications fails if it hasn't already.
Cash continues to work in that situation.
I don't think anyone's suggesting doing away with digital systems, certainly I'm not, only that cash ought remain available and that, in a system failure, businesses operating in an essential industry be required to accept it.
Essential industry = food, fuel, medical etc.
Because whilst it might be fine for the business, there's a broader societal problem to refuse to supply food, petrol etc simply because the local Telstra tower has gone offline etc. Might be OK for many but it's real problem for the tourist who's now stuck, unable to purchase fuel or even pay for a hotel. Etc.
No - because cash by its very nature is something that's storable and which historically most people kept some of in practice.
It could thus be compared to a battery storing electricity. It doesn't work indefinitely in a supply failure situation but it works for a while. It works long enough to at least enable an orderly shutdown of a computer, an orderly exit of people from the theatre using emergency lighting, etc.
Versus direct digital payments that have multiple points of immediate failure:
The card or phone.
EFTPOS terminal.
IT systems.
Communications / internet.
Electricity anywhere from bulk generation to networks to within the shop.
That's a lot of things to fail and sooner or later one of them will.
A lot of supermarkets do have limited backup power which enables them to remain open. But if the rest of the community has no power, it's only a matter of time until communications fails if it hasn't already.
Cash continues to work in that situation.
I don't think anyone's suggesting doing away with digital systems, certainly I'm not, only that cash ought remain available and that, in a system failure, businesses operating in an essential industry be required to accept it.
Essential industry = food, fuel, medical etc.
Because whilst it might be fine for the business, there's a broader societal problem to refuse to supply food, petrol etc simply because the local Telstra tower has gone offline etc. Might be OK for many but it's real problem for the tourist who's now stuck, unable to purchase fuel or even pay for a hotel. Etc.
Hope for the best, prepare for the worst.
Being prepared for the worst means acknowledging that things may not always go as planned. It means anticipating potential obstacles and challenges and taking steps to mitigate their impact. It means having a backup plan in place so that if things do go wrong, we can quickly and effectively respond.
However, being prepared for the worst should not be mistaken for pessimism or negativity. Rather, it is a realistic and practical approach to life. By preparing for the worst, we can actually increase our chances of success. We can identify potential pitfalls and avoid them, or at least minimize their impact. We can develop contingency plans and solutions that will allow us to navigate through difficult times.
I think digital improves accountability, that’s why some people love doing “cash jobs” because they want to rip off their fellow Aussies by avoiding tax.of course you realize that the absence of cash , removes one of the last pillars of fiscal accountability , if 100% digital , all sorts of 'accidents' and chicanery are are possible , and will be very hard to untangle to the extent that the masses will resume trusting the financial system
just saying , you can't even trust the bureau of meteorology so how can you trust another other 'expense-dipping part of the Government , fiscally
not in the long run i remember my early years when a slab of beer was very acceptable to some workers/contractors maybe it won't be beer this time , maybe some herbal stuff or a direct swap services say a Sparky doing a wiring for a home interior paint/repaintI think digital improves accountability, that’s why some people love doing “cash jobs” because they want to rip off their fellow Aussies by avoiding tax.
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