Comment by superfrank
14 hours 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).
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.
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?
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.
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.
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1) Failing can be (mis)attributed to many things particularly if the cause and effect are separated significantly by time, and 2) most businesses want to stay way ahead of the realization they're noncompetitive as by that point often the barn door is open and the horse is gone.
It's difficult to tie changes in customer retention to not having a doorman in a "hard data" way. Ideally you'd want to do an A/B test of doorman vs non-doorman, but you'd need multiple hotels for that to work.