Cory Doctorow created the term Enshittification for the current trend to make things worse on the web. Unfortunately, it’s not limited to the internet, it has entered the brains of everybody and everything is getting shit. Worse even, everybody notices it, everybody participates in it and everybody gets unhappy. It’s a downward spiral, dumbing the world down.

Two stories from the last weeks:

Parking

I took somebody to the airport in Nuremberg. I utterly hate airports already, to quote Douglas Adams “It is no surprise that no language has come up with the expression ‘beautiful like an airport’”. You need to be there really early, you need to queue up stupidly at the check-in, you need to queue up stupidly at the security theater which changes nonsensical rules every X months and which are different at every airport (shoes on or off, laptop out of the bag or in, belt on or off), then you sit stupidly around for an hour drinking prohibitively expensive coffee or beer to then sit for hours in a sardine can, where you are treated horribly and get an f*ing sandwich that tastes like cardboard, if you are lucky, or just a chocolate to show how valueable customer you are and what a great experience flying is. That’s just the general mood I am in for airports in general…

This time I drove by car to let somebody off there, and put my car at the charger there, which had a sticker saying “No parking fee during charging”. What I seem to have missed is the sign or sticker saying that I need to scan a QR code for this to be true.

The parking management at Nuremberg Airport is outsourced to a company in Munich, which scans you number plate when you go in and when you go out. They do not check if you are at the charger.

According to the company it is clearly visible on the parking ticket machine (which I will not check if there is a sticker “free parking” on the charger) or on the signs they put everywhere (which say “parking tickets at machine”) that I need to scan a QR code when I am staying longer than the free 10 mins or so. Well, I haven’t gone there back to check, but I don’t remember seeing the QR code process described somewhere. Well, I didn’t scan the QR code, and now I have to pay €3 parking fee plus €58 “misuse fee” for the 27 mins I charged there. (For comparison: if you park in Erlangen in a “parking forbidden” area, you pay around €10 penalty per day). This is in addition to the 78 cents per kWh the charger costs, which is also insanely expensive.

So, the airport has outsourced their stuff and doesn’t care about it. The company in Munich has created a process which involves a detective hunt to figure out what you need to do and charges insane fees if you fail the detective hunt - which is probably included in the business model. The whole thing is very innovative and digital and probably sold as “holistic customer-centric touchless pay-on-the-go integrated smart parking solution with AI and blockchain”. And it’s a fucking nightmare…

Their employees are sitting behind an online form, you can’t answer their mails directly, you can beg for forgiveness on their form which they did not grant me. I have been administered, and the processes decided “No”. And probably their employees are also fed up by having annoyed customers sending short nasty remarks via a web form which creates already rage when you see it (it’s one of these “jump twenty sticks before you can hit send” things, where you already feel the “prepare to be administered, we don’t care about your topic” oozing off the page).

The whole experience is something which looks good on management slides (Digital! Camera! Free flow!) but fails in not-so-edge-cases like using a charger which is operated by another company and should be exempt from the parking fee. The technical inability of the system to detect that you are at the charger is mitigated by the customer needing to jump sticks. Solve technical problems by making them a customer problem.

I did not follow the process, I made a mistake, and there is probably no legal doubt that I have to pay the fee (to quote the slightly passive-aggressive mail from the company “By entering the parking lot you agree to a contract”). But f* off anyway.

Reserving a table

End of this month I wanted to stay in an expensive hotel (€250/night, as it seems to be low season, normally around €350/night) and visit their Michelin star restaurant (where you pay upwards of €250 per person…). The hotel reservation was OK-ish, standard online thing.

Reserving the restaurant is also required to be done online (gone are the days when a concierge tried the utmost for you in expensive hotels…) So, clicking on online reservation you end up on “The Fork”, which is one of the big players in the restaurant reservation services online. I was happy, because none of the dates I would be there were greyed out. Click on a day, click on a time, and then tried to select “one person”, no chance, only two or more were possible. So I stopped there, and sent and e-mail to the restaurant.

Got an answer fast, that they are completely booked out at these days and that I could be placed on a waiting list, just by reserving online with normal process. They did not answer to the problem of reserving for just one, maybe my Spanish was too horrible… Well, anyway. Then tried to click again using reservation for two people – select day, select hour, get message “Sorry, full”. Select day, select other hour, get message “Sorry, full”. THEN DON’T DISPLAY THE TIMESLOT! You can put the message “Sorry, full” already on the first page before clicking anything! And of course – there’s no way to get on a waiting list.

I probably will cancel the hotel reservation, as their normal non-michelin restaurant has turned into a “Gourmet Steak-House”. It was really good two years ago, but now serves just steaks with a slice of Foies Gras to be “gourmet” – this is not really worth the hotel stay. For the Michelin star I would have stayed, but waiting lists never work out.

Maybe it is my expectation, but for a Michelin star restaurant and a luxury hotel I would expect something more elegant and better working than “The Fork”. The times of concierges like the ones in “Grand Budapest Hotel” are long gone, but something less “You need to click fifty times, and then we tell you ’no’ each time” would have been nice. Definitely not feeling like the “Royal hideaway” as it is marketed.

The common

What do these two things have in common: both cases have outsourced parts of their customer voyage to other companies (parking, reservation). Both outsourced companies do not care about the overall experience, both do not care how the workflow fits into the overall user experience. Both are optimized for their internal processes and costs, and throw a lot of tasks on the user (find out how parking works in addition to finding out how the charger works, we have spread the clues around the hole area… You need to click each hour and each date individually to figure out if something is available or not.)

Both can get away with it, as there are reasons for the users to cope with it - you do not let your friends spend 1.5 hours in the bus when you can drive them to the airport in 20mins; or you want to experience the Michelin star restaurant. Each of the services is driven to the lowest possible standard one can get away with.

The original idea from Adam Smith, that capitalism provides competition, which leads to continuous improvements and makes better products, is not working since a long time. If everything is shit, you cannot turn to a better competitor. All restaurants now use “The Fork” or something like it. There is just one parking lot in front of the airport (and there is no other airport close). You can’t choose anymore, there is no competition for better, just a constant drive to the lowest possible standard companies can get away with…

In the end, everybody is frustrated, but shareholder values are great (we reduced costs by outsourcing non-core processes) and things go shit without consequences. The purpose of a system is what it does.