Comment by alfalfasprout
2 years ago
This is the reason I've always been a detractor of purely relying on "data driven decision making". Being data driven is great... if paired with intuition and common sense.
But what ends up often happening is data-driven myopia. You see some statistic that doesn't seem optimal and you end up optimizing for that instead of figuring out how it fits into the big picture.
Restaurants, at the end of the day boil down to food. You serve food. People either like the food or they don't. How many customers you get is a function of how much people like the food, how competitive the pricing on the food is, and the market you're in.
Red lobster at the end of the day suffered from people not wanting to pay what they were charging for low quality, uninspiring seafood dishes.
People nowadays are struggling more (spare me the CPI data, hedonics and other basket adjustments mean the situation for most people is quite a bit worse than it was a few years ago) and there needs to be a value prop for dining out.
> Restaurants, at the end of the day boil down to food. You serve food.
To expand on this a little, restaurants serve food in a building brought to your table by people. If the building/table/environment is dirty or just uncomfortable people don't want to be in it. If the people preparing and serving the food are doing a bad job people won't want them doing it. If a restaurant drops the quality of the food, environment, or personnel they are going to lose business.
As you say it's the value proposition. I go to a restaurant because I want to just pick a food, eat it, and leave. The "hard" parts of cooking and cleaning are someone else's job. All restaurant patrons are willing to pay some premium over the cost of the raw ingredients to save their time and effort. But as the experience gets worse that value proposition starts to erode.
For me and I imagine many people the experience doesn't need to be mind blowing. It just needs to be not shitty.
What I don't understand is the value people place on waitstaff being enthusiastic to serve you. I don't care, as long as you they take my order and check on my drinks.
That value proposition is typically that the experience be enjoyable. What makes it that varies, hence a variety of restaurants to choose from. If I am inconvenienced and have to chase down wait staff then that nudges the experience to the 'non-enjoyable'. If I run out of something to drink while I am eating, that nudges the experience. If we are sitting and having after dinner drinks/coffee and talking, and are surrounded by dirty plates, that nudges. If we just boated to a restaurant after a day on the water enthusiastic comes to play (we want a happy fun experience). If it's a business dinner, enthusiastic could be a detriment.
Glad to be of assistance my friend.
1 reply →
I feel uncomfortable when people make me feel like a jerk for consuming their service, and I would rather opt out of the entire dining experience.
But you clearly care about the staff's enthusiasm to serve you?
1 reply →
The catch-22 is that being data-driven means being driven by what data you can measure. And that is an absolutely gobsmackingly fatal flaw.
For a 1000+ page exposition on why this is such a fatal flaw see James C. Scott's 1990s tome "Seeing Like a State" which addresses precisely this issue with receipts brought from fields ranging from agriculture, urban planning, politics, family naming systems, and more across at least 4 or 5 continents and a century.
It's an essential non-partisan read that manages to piss everyone off by being a peon to left anarchism in many ways while saying "actually yes Hayek was right about sensitivity to local conditions" and "actually the NHS and NWS are good and sometimes centralized planning isn't the worst solution".
I've not seen any direct link between them but I feel like you can draw a very firm line between it and Piketty's Capital and Ideology. You might think "wait isn't Piketty the guy who's completely data driven and publishes stupidly large amounts of xlsx files as appendices" and you'd be right except in his second book he's leaning far more heavily on sociology and just using financial data (much imputed from tax records) as support for sociological arguments that align very closely in many respects.
It's all about information. Some information can be boiled down to statistics and numbers, and that's great!
Some cannot be.
The executives who sits in their office are not going to be able to smell and taste or care about the food.
Data-driven X is a semantic trick to absolve people from owning their X and being accountable for it; decisions just happen to be the most damaging usage. Let data _inform_ you.
I call this metric fetishism