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Comment by Lev1a | Hacker News Reader

Same thing in the German supermarket I'm working at. Sending "feedback"(?) about the deliveries (e.g. about missing/broken/etc. wares) back to the chain's warehouses/depots is also done by fax through one of those huge multifunction scanner/printer office machines.

It's a hassle and can take minutes to get the "sent" confirmation coming out of the printer chute. Although I don't know what the other end of the fax call looks like; a virtual inbox or a real fax machine sitting in some office spitting out these forms from >100 stores, though I suspect it's the former because of the potential volume of fax messages.

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I wonder if the other end is a person who'd rather have stacks of physical objects as their task list: read what the issue is, write down how to fix it, hand it over to someone who'll run and fix the problem, and give the replacement object and the paper to a delivery driver, job done.

They could digitize it, but this person would just be staring at the screen the whole day, and then has to click print and people have to wait, etc. Maybe they could amazonize it and have e-ink QR codes and scanners and robots that scan a code and fetch the next job over WiFi or 5G, but, hey, the whole idea's been discussed in the C-level for 5 years now! Especially if there's hundreds of such depots.

Although obviously the input side, at your supermarket, could be digitalized, and they could outsource a software that basically prints everything, replacing this person's fax machine, but hey, that idea's going to take 3 years to materialize, and they'll have to put such a computer with the software on each supermarket and it's been there since 2002, so...

You lose your hair thinking about inefficiencies...

> I wonder if the other end is a person who'd rather have stacks of physical objects as their task list: read what the issue is, write down how to fix it, hand it over to someone who'll run and fix the problem, and give the replacement object and the paper to a delivery driver, job done.

Happens, yes. Part of my job is digitizing analog processes, mainly for technicians in the field. And often you have the problem that the back-office really wants to get back the information what they need to reorder, what they cause bill the customer and so on, as fast as possible. But technicians don't want to bother with having to type into their smartphones or tablets while they are in the field. They just want to jot it down onto a paper, load the whole stack of at the end of the week and let the back-office do the rest.

One of the many sources of 'friction' if you make something digital that was done on paper before that, not made easier by the fact that the offices now want the information even faster, cause "you have the machine with you. You should do it the moment you've done the work."

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