Bistrotech: The Riddle Of The Cubes

If you run a shop, why would you purposely make it as weird, difficult, awkward and insulting as possible for customers to buy things? Surely there's some theory in Economics that says you should do the opposite?

The wisdom of Douglas Adams inspired our last blog article and I'll continue this week with his concept of Bistromathics, whereby:

"Numbers written on restaurant checks within the confines of restaurants do not follow the same mathematical laws as numbers written on any other pieces of paper in any other parts of the Universe." – Douglas Adams "Life, the Universe and Everything"

Similarly, a alternative branch of software engineering, commonly called "Point Of Sale" - which serves the catering, hospitality and leisure industry - has none of the principles of technology design we apply elsewhere in reality.

It is no accident that the acronym P.O.S. stands for both "Point Of Sale" and "Piece of Shit", since so much "customer-facing" tech is a rogues gallery of faux-efficiency, misdirection, mind-games, gas-lighting, wishful thinking and deep messing with basic human psychology.

It's a good example of tech we should be sceptical of, and if the corollary of a clumsy attempt to aggressively over-lay technology upon society rather than allow it to naturally integrate through uptake. Some of it is sadly detrimental to businesses that adopt it. Hopefully we can learn a lot from such bad examples of trendy, misattuned, technology.

A term "non-functional requirements" is used in engineering. It describes features that are not essential to the core operation. For example, a car may need to have a certain weight and fuel consumption, but "luxury" (leather seats) are not a core requirement. In fact NFRs are very important and include security, interoperability, maintainability, privacy, resilience and all the things often lacking in technology that we talk about on The Cybershow.

Sometimes NFRs are added as "options", for marketing reasons. But when non-functions outweigh the functional basis, or use a functional lure as a carrier to slip in toxic payloads (malware) then a product must be considered less than useless.

If only the real world of tech were as black-and-white as on the classroom chalk-board in cybersecurity training. Malware and good software no longer occupy neat packages that announce their intentions like a military uniform. Any piece of digital technology can be ambiguous, offering utility while stealing from or betraying its user.

A philosophical theory about how technology is both "good and bad" doesn't help here. The surviving user is the one who can figure out and delimit utility from harm, yet because few people understand digital technology or examine it there are many places to hide maleficent functions.

This article is about an everyday kind of technology that's been overtaken by non-functional needs. When we pay for things we are vulnerable. There are many ways we can be swindled or distracted, or simply make mistakes ourselves. The idea of "convenience" offers the possibility to not have to think and pay attention. But the moment we allow someone else to do our thinking for us, they can take advantage of that. We start, as Neil Postman would say, with "somebody else's problem".

The mechanical till or cash register, patented as "Ritty's Incorruptible Cashier", was invented in 1879 by James Ritty and John Birch who wanted to stop employees pilfering profits. It is important to note this entire lineage of technology has roots in mistrust between a business owner and employees.

Mechanical tills, which evolved into electronic tills, offer a receptacle for storing and ordering cash money, a ledger, receipt printer, typewriter keyboard of sorts with shortcuts for common items or operations. Sometimes there are peripherals like scanners, scales, staff keys, card readers, PIN keypads, security-tag deactivation… all part of over-complicatig a simple timeless act of buying and selling and contriving functions incidental to core tasks that a human can do in less time.

POS comes into its own at extreme levels of throughput such as a supermarket checkout. Nonetheless POS technology is deployed uniformly regardless of task fit, and businesses feel they "need" it. In many cases the dark side of the tech is being tapped, rather than its real utility, such as when POS technology is used to ensure serving staff remain untrusted, quickly replaceable cogs in an "efficient" machine.

When it works, signalling technology and order management systems between kitchens, stores and the customer counter is a huge benefit to supply chains. However, those functions are also abused when the supply chain starts to "wag the dog", reducing choice to the level of Soviet GOSPLAN.

As an example of POS tech influencing society positively the takeaway food market is a good first. In the 1970s Chinese Takeaways in Britain led the POS space by several decades. At least from my own experience of eating too much Chinese food and watching the operators while waiting, colourful DOS-like interfaces on low resolution VGA screens ruled the business.

I'd love to know who wrote that software, but it became an iconic feature of every British takeaway. As early as 1980 I saw complex operations bound to single keys, communication to a back-kitchen, non-ASCII characters (way in advance of UTF) to allow operators with weak English skills to work, by binding set menu items to numbers. This numeric indexing became the cultural trope that all Chinese food is organised by numbers. Many innovations emerged from the takeaway food kitchen, such as the ability to handle multiple telephone and in-person orders, pause with one customer, serve another and return to an incomplete order.

But something has gone badly, horribly wrong with POS tech.

Today it is common to see a huge queue of frustrated customers and a group of confused teen or 20-something staff standing around the POS, excitedly arguing about its video-game-like functions.

"No. No. Go back out and come back in again. Now set table number."

"I did that last time. You gotta put the code in first."

"No. Put the code in after. Now switch back to drinks mode."

"Hold on, you said… "

"Not on the 'special offers' menu! Pay attention!"

"Okay, I think I got this…"

Meanwhile the two massing groups of staff and angry customers avoid making eye-contact. We exchange resigned smirking shrugs of helpless acquiescence and docility. No one dare question the technology and the surreal farce unfolding before us.

There is no common sense or flexibility in these scenarios because we've become deferential to even the weakest of systems. The only time I have ever "done a runner" (not paid a bill) was after suffering half an hour of comedic incompetence at a trendy Shoreditch canal bar. Our patience expired and the whole group just shuffled off into the night leaving the staff in their Bistrotech hell.

Let's be clear, this circus of Chindogu is mainly an assault on the role of the waiter or waitress. It is an attack on humans, which tech barons, emboldened by "AI", now openly cheer for. Of course its designers will tell you (and the naive will believe) that it is there to "make the job easier". We often confuse this with the superficially similar but pathological "avoiding doing that job at all".

Let's start with a most basic question. What is a waiter/waitress?

According to Monty Python's Gaston:

"My mother she, put me on her knee and she said to me, Gaston, my son… the world is a beautiful place, you must go into it and love everyone. Try to make everyone happy, and bring peace and contentment everywhere you go…'. So I became a waiter." – Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life".

Like me, surely most readers had jobs as waiters or servers in shops, bars, and restaurants. Always transitory, it's a rite of passage for teenagers. Here we learned to be exhausted, while keeping a cheery smile. As part of the "University of Life", entertainments and hospitality is an opportunity to practice confident interaction, quick-learning, tolerance, magnanimity, good manners, to hone attention skills and memory, read people, follow orders, and use common sense. Like all "roles" (jobs that require a hat or uniform) it is best to wholeheartedly get into the part and fully experience the ride. In my time I enjoyed putting on a well ironed shirt and tie, and grabbing a mop and bucket.

It is an essential education in being human, fitting in to a place.

It is also a first class opportunity to observe the worst abuses, to see people cheat and steal, leverage power against the desperate and vulnerable, make threats and unwelcome sexual advances, see the petty behaviour of Little Hitler first-line managers, angry and violent chefs, and workplace drug use. Interacting, either as customer or staff, in places where people gather to eat and drink is a microcosm of human life.

Although relatively poor, when I lived in Brondesbury, Kilburn, I was lucky to be right beside a small and beautiful restaurant where the food was excellent, incredibly cheap, and served by the most exemplary staff. After eating there a while I discovered its secret - a popular training restaurant for chefs and waiting staff learning the Jedi ways of Cordon Bleu, Michelin Stars and Silver Service.

My wife and I got to appreciate this, sometimes several times a week due to our busy London lifestyle. Other than the cutlery, technology extended only to paper menus, candles, notepads and pencils.

In that time we got to observe all the catering staff in a very favourable way, as they also observed and interacted with us. I deduced they were being assessed on inter-personal skills. We played together at being the ideal, polite yet assertive customers, making occasional complaints where appropriate, sharing pleasantries and enjoying our part of the role. Waiting is at once demanding, yet enjoyable - if you enjoy human relations. We got to know many of the staff and their stories. All you really have to do is be attentive and good-humoured, lose the attitude, ego and desperation for control.

Lest this seem too Arcadian, contrast it with another of my favourite London restaurants, this time in Chinatown. Wong Kei's is famously functional. The food is outstanding but is eaten at perfunctory benches, sitting besides strangers, served by notoriously rude staff. You don't always get what you asked for, but you always get what you want and need, and leave with a full, satisfied belly and buzzing taste-buds, usually en route to a night out at the theatre or Soho.

The point is that food is a human affair. The job of a waiter(ess) is to facilitate that atmosphere, along with the mechanics of crockery, kitchens and money. It is not to become a technology-jockey, a part-time network engineer, or an apologist for broken systems. If we wanted "efficiency" we'd all be munching weight-loss tablets and snacking from vending machines. Of course I'm talking about Britain now, not America.

Britain is a great place to experience arcane ministrations and rituals of modern zealous techno-religiosity. We are the country to "wholeheartedly back an AI economy" without having the first idea of what that even means. A secular, rational Britain? I don't think so.

Trying to eat something as simple as an ice-cream or portion of chips, amidst what is basically technological situationist comedy, is common, awkward and embarrassing for everybody.

I've been to sushi bars in Soho where images of the food are beamed onto the table, so you can see exactly what your order will look like before it actually arrives by robot server. This is delightful as a first experience where the lively topic of dinner conversation is entirely the service technology itself. It falls apart on subsequent visits once the novelty cedes and the awkward reality bites, the tedious scrolling, bad lighting, unavailable items, and the grind needed to change or combine dishes from the approved regime. It's like being inside a giant vending machine.

Creativity in cuisine is all well and good. Food techno-fetishism is part of our culture in which chefs like Heston Blumenthal cook using acetylene, liquid nitrogen and other industrial chemistry, simply for the wheeze. But an obsession with "creating an experience" is the cause of much inappropriate hospitality tech for the 99 percent of cases where people just want some decent grub.

One experience people quickly warmed to was being unpaid employees of the company they're buying food from. The first time supermarkets tried self-serve checkouts the managers were jumping for joy at having customers start doing the work they'd been paying minimum wage for. Of course the prices all went down… right?

Having arrived for drinks on a recent holiday, I noticed the bar was half empty. There was no queue, but far too many unoccupied staff were milling around, oddly avoiding eye-contact with customers, and fiddling nervously with phones and smartwatches.

When my wife and I sat down we did not immediately pay much attention to the large plastic cube in the middle of our table. We discussed our drinks and were about to walk up to the bar and order when I touched the cube. It immediately lit up. I gathered this presumed radio transmitter was an indication of table service soon to arrive. It didn't.

After some period of non-attention we picked up the cube again to examine it. It flashed and beeped some more. I turned it over to read symbolic instructions, but now it bleeped and flashed red, presumably upset at being handled. Our drinks "experience" was clearly being gamified already. And we were losing.

Meanwhile redundant service staff lingered awkwardly, one propping up the bar while staring blankly into a tablet. In a carefully timed moment when the waitresses eyes seemed to momentarily leave her screen, I looked over and coughed, "ahem!", but we may as well have been invisible.

Symbols on the cube seemed to indicate it wanted us to engage in some sort of smartphone nonsense that neither my wife nor I do, especially when on deliberately technology-free holidays.

Eventually a waitress walked past en route to attending other customers, so I took my chance. "Excuse me", I offered in a polite voice. But she'd already tagged us as Luddites, and in a most impressive act of rudeness simply pointed to the cube, grunted, and walked on.

A shudder of the technocreeps or "mall fever" ran down my spine. Had all the staff become Star-Trek Borg, controlled like ants by the giant pulsating electro-brain at the core of the restaurant (or more likely a data centre in Redmond, Washington)? Annoyed, I set out to locate and destroy the nest. I entered command mode. I told my wife I'd return with drinks presently, then made haste to the bar where I directly addressed the most senior-looking Borg, lightly touching her shoulder to escape her from the screen; "I'll have a pint of IPA and a double gin and tonic when you're ready, please".

I was expecting many things; Nonchalant rudeness of simply looking back to her screen. Insistence that I return to my table and use "the system provided". What happened surprised and inspired me.

As if released, the waitress perked up, her screen-scowl vanished. Head up, eyes widened, immediately she began serving me while offering cloaked small-talk. Her tone and eyes said "keen for contact", that a moment of interaction felt welcome, perhaps a breath of air and escape from unreality. There was something else; a definite fear that was impossible to miss. What we were doing was wrong. Like agents making contact amidst the enemy our chatter quickly incorporated an unspoken subtext about the system we both despised.

In my hand I held 50 pound note, still rare enough in Britain to be considered a grenade thrown into the works of a delicate technological machine. I felt a little guilty and expected to be sent away to get "something smaller" or told "card only". At very least it should have provoked a thorough anti-counterfeiting shakedown involving ultraviolet scanners, conference with bosses and suspicious stares, but instead she hardly looked at it, popped it into the till and counted the correct change.

As I returned to my wife bearing promised drinks, a wondrous spectacle occurred. A swarm of local, feral pre-teens ran through the restaurant veranda, laughing and tapping cubes on every table. It was clearly a regular sport. They knew exactly where to hit them, lighting them up in a chorus of beeps then vanishing into the night. Defeated looking staff lumbered up from their screens and flounced out of the door to switch off all the cubes - cubes that were clearly the bane of their existence.

Everyone hated the cubes. It was palpable. Yet it only raised the question - perhaps more apropos a Dr. Who episode - of how and why at this sleepy bar, on the faded-glory esplanade of an end-of-season English seaside town, such incongruent, misattuned technology existed?

I wish Douglas Adams were still alive to expand his ideas on the field of "Bistronomics". He'd have far more hilarious insights than mine. Nevertheless some things seem obvious:

Hospitality is a brutal business of tooth-and-nail competition. We were at the pier bar because our first choice of restaurant just a few hundred meters inland had closed down. Footfall is everything. Margins are tiny. Seasonal weather is a lottery. Proprietors will do anything to "stand out". They make easy prey for sellers of novelty Bistrotech promising "convenient efficiency" and claiming to be what "the younger generation want".

Not that novel "convenience" technology is what "young people" want, or that focusing a business on a cohort with no disposable income is smart, or that any of these things intersect with progress or profit, but people tend to lump these things together in a wishy-washy sort of way. What the "younger generation" allegedly want is not have to make eye-contact or small-talk, at least if Jonathan Haidt's rather good Anxious Generation is on target.

Other than "frictionless" spending, an already problematic prospect with regards to alcohol, the real value of Bistrotech to the barons is it gathers massive amounts of data on customers, including their choices, seating and timing patterns. It shortens the time and distance between impulse and purchase while separating action further from negative feedback (reckoning-up and paying). Whereas the function of the original till was to record and make financial transactions legible - by ringing a bell to alert everyone that a transaction was happening, and displaying every item to the customer - a modern POS technology attempts the opposite; to asymmetrically render the evening's consumption opaque and unaccountable to the patron, while gathering as much data as possible for the proprietor.

Overall, novel POS systems unload risk and labour. Those that ask the user to download an app or scan a QR code, which are obvious vectors for malware and further data harvesting, extend risk, CPU and data usage, and time, all in lieu of the proprietors costs.

Then there are onerous laws, regulations, taxes, and requirements for records and receipts. Bistrotech pedlars can offer "integrated solutions" that promise to make running a restaurant easier. Proprietors like to identify individual cashier activity, ostensibly to track fraud, but in reality to measure sales performance. With some luck incoming labour laws, data protection and privacy codes will scotch these deceitful trends, but they remain part of the lure for business owners.

Technology in fast food also presents opportunities to hide poor quality, long waiting times and hidden delivery costs. It robs waiting and delivery staff of tips, but at the same time erases human interaction that builds connection, familiarity, and loyalty. I once lived in a shared house where we ordered pizza from a company because we liked the delivery guy.

So far all of this ignores the intrusion of BigTech monopolies, online delivery services and the "payments industry" into high-street food and leisure. The pandemic gave corporations a massive boost to push "social distancing" technology and literally drive humans further apart.

Fast food tech is used to separate and modularise actions like preparation, cooking, packaging, delivery and payment. This hides accountability and allows dynamic sourcing from "dark kitchens" in concert with exploited scooter delivery lads (who also run drugs and alcohol as a side line. Young roadmen are frequently injured in traffic collisions and now e-bike fires).

It is clear how hard some people want to push and bully us into accepting these technologies by the dishonesty of their ploys. Techno-green-washing, like pretending to save the planet by not printing a receipt and instead offering it by "email or Whatsapp". Have you consideed the reality of "paperless" based on data-centre energy and endpoint lifecycle cost compared to the timeless renewable of paper?

Any search on the question is crowded by scores of breathless but shallow accounts of why paper is evil but digital technology can save the day! None I have found give any hard scientific evidence or calculations to make their case. Given that paper is renewable, recyclable and rapidly improving its industrial process - whereas digital is still growing exponentially in energy cost and use of non-renewables, the unexamined claims of "paperless" zealots must be treated with suspicion.

When I taught tech to MBA students at a UK business school it was a struggle because, to put it bluntly most had already acquired an 'Artful Dodger mindset' which narrowed their horizons. By this I mean they were always trying too hard, to beguile, to spot a new ruse or caper. I could relate to them from a hacker mindset, but they missed the mark with strategic vision, always choosing to short-cut or defect at the first opportunity. They missed core functional issues in their haste to satisfy frivolous NFRs and did not think in terms of systems of value, only in parochial short-term trickery, grift and extraction.

This is the prevailing "Valley" attitude to products which are designed with deception in mind. They set out to promise and not deliver, to sneak in unwanted payloads, to get you to tacitly "agree" to something you are unaware of, to "bait and switch".

Cory Doctorow calls this strategic treachery "enshitification". It affects everyone on the planet because we're not just overproducing at the cost of the environment, we're producing things of no value, or of negative value.

More and more nowadays we see the packaging of "solutions" to a problem that isn't really ours, presented so as we need to care. For example banks make you pay insurance (fraud protection) against their own incompetence (poor security). Low-penetration 5-10GHz wifi radio sells a lot of "boosters" and signal repeaters (which further saturate the airwaves) as a result of regulating an already over-crowded spectrum. In tech, so many "escalating conflict type" problems fit this pattern of bad separation of spheres.

The supposed need for growth creates "solutionism"; the gratuitous creation of unnecessary products to fix problems caused by other non-functional products. This creates a seemingly limitless market in accordance with a Broken Window Fallacy, where causing problems and harm seems to be a generator of "wealth".

In the space of technology for retail, food, hospitality and entertainment we see these common NFRs;

Aim of Practice	Example	Effect/Harm
Offloading risk	Gig economy apps	Low wage poverty
Confusion, disorientation	Complex reward schemes	Causes victim to make mistakes
Social division	"Loyalty cards" and schemes	Divide and conquer
Advertising, propaganda	Habit nudging	Slow manipulation
Opaqueness (hide the magic)	Closed source, TPM, DRM	Backdoors, hiding problems
Extraction of data	Tracking habits/ preference	Easy targeting
Novelty and amusement	Gamification of life	Hypnosis, docile acquiescence
Ideological design fixations	Thinness, aesthetics	Poor maintainability
Invisibility	Covert (ambient) computing	Privacy problems
Low friction (convenience)	Predefined "choices"	Cognitive decline
Brand tie-ins etc	Linking "partner" products	Antitrust, Non-interoperation

So, the products we use to access/purchase other products are in no way part of a "neutral infrastructure".

They bring outside values to our selection process. We need to see all payment and delivery technology is tied into a bigger, distorted market of advertisers, supply chains, data traders and tech monopolies. This is not a level playing for customer or retailers, who must in a sense work together to avoid losing out. Whether you're a business owner or customer one of the best solutions for your financial health and resilience in the age of "AI" is to use and take cash, operate locally and employ real people you know.

So to sum up, POS is a microcosm to study ways technology designers can implement dark-patterns. It highlights where we fail to understand actual needs of a representative, diverse user base in real situations. It is a domain for giddy, wishful thinking. That is fun to devise and develop, but it's a creative innovation front that must be fed constantly and it neglects observed behaviour; what people actually do and say they want.

Public-facing small business owners beware, if you can't make it work with a pad and pencil, some loyal and properly trained staff, and cash money, it probably isn't going to work at a more complex scale. No amount of POS tech will change that, and it may well upset your core customers in the process. Your authenticity as a businesses is based on human interpersonal connections. Sending a machine, however cute and colourful, to do a human's job is a mistake - a lesson we are already learning around "AI".