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This coffee shop uses AI to measure the productivity of their employees and the time spent in the shop per customer. Welcome to capitalist innovation.
(lemmy.dbzer0.com)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/11497758
This coffee shop uses AI to measure the productivity of their employees and the time spent in the shop per customer. Welcome to capitalist innovation.
I don't buy into the claim that quantifying performance is bad for employees. It prevents low-performers from free-riding on the productivity of high-performers.
You are not taking into account that someone who sells fewer cups may be better at customer retention through personalized service. Unless this is at an airport or something where service doesn't matter, it's a pile of Elon.
'John is kind of an ass and he messes up orders sometimes but, he's really fast. Joan is a bit slow, but she cares and it's always right'.
This is a shit metric and I would not patronize a place like this.
This is less an argument against quantifying performance in general and more just an example of the importance of choosing the right metrics and interpreting them intelligently.
I have no doubt that more than a few moronic managers will try to make large decisions based on a trivial surface-level metrics like time per customer (which, at the very least, needs to be normalized against the complexity of the order), but still, I think the thing to be criticized is poor data analysis rather than the very concept itself. A smart manager would use this data to learn more about how their operations are going and have discussions with employees about what's going on and how various differences might be explained, while a stupid one would just fire the apparently slowest barista every few months, completely missing the fact that said barista has developed personal relationships with tons of customers and only performs slowly during off-peak hours when it makes no material difference at all.
Very well put
That's a good point, although I presume the same technology could be used to monitor customers and collect statistics about whether the identity of the server affects the probability that a customer will return.
Metrics can be dangerous because if people are rewarded according to a metric, they'll work to maximize their score, which might not be what the actual purpose of their job is. However, I don't think that's a reason to assume that metrics are worse than no metrics.
I see what you are saying but I would rather have good managers who know what is best for both the customers and employees.
As a potential customer I also have big issues with the privacy aspects of this.
Good managers are themselves a limited resource - I suspect that quite soon, the sort of manager who's better than a state-of-the-art AI system will be too valuable to assign to a coffee shop.
I figure that they already track all the customers who pay with a credit card.
https://youtube.com/shorts/XQT8_SAwwUY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law