Advertise here with Carbon Ads

This site is made possible by member support. ๐Ÿ’ž

Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.

When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!

kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.

๐Ÿ”  ๐Ÿ’€  ๐Ÿ“ธ  ๐Ÿ˜ญ  ๐Ÿ•ณ๏ธ  ๐Ÿค   ๐ŸŽฌ  ๐Ÿฅ”

Waiting in line

Any time I go to the Metreon, people are queued up to buy movie tickets. From the length of the line, I would assume that people spend 10-15 minutes in this line, waiting to buy tickets from the cashiers. I wonder why none of them realize that a mere five feet away from them are 3 automatic ticket dispensing machines with no waiting (and four more upstairs by the theatre with no waiting). Theories: 1. People are stupid; 2. Poor design: machines look like ATMs, not like ticket dispensing machines; 3. People distrust the machines; 4. People want to use the cashiers instead of the machines so that the cashiers aren’t downsized and replaced with more machines; 5. Unfamiliar person-to-person interactions are preferable to unfamiliar person-to-machine interactions because they are easier to troubleshoot; 6. People don’t like using credit cards for small purchases (via jk); 7. People prefer to pay cash (via fk).