Shriya P

I keep thinking about the doorman fallacy Rory Sutherland keeps referring to. A hotel can replace a doorman with an automatic door and call it efficiency. On paper, it saves money. But the balance sheet only sees one job: opening the door. It does not see everything else the doorman was doing. He was security. He was status. He was recognition. He was the first human signal that this place is cared for. He noticed who came in. He made regular guests feel known. He made strangers feel watched. He made the hotel feel like a hotel. This is the danger of cost cutting. It often removes value that was never measured. Many businesses make this mistake. They define a human role too narrowly, automate the visible function, and then wonder why the experience feels worse. A receptionist is not just answering calls. A call center agent is not just closing tickets. A postman is not just delivering letters. Human beings carry invisible value. They create trust, warmth, reassurance, and memory. These things are hard to quantify, so finance departments treat them as waste. But customers don't behave like numbers inside an excel sheet. They live with feelings and emotions that are hard to measure. And sometimes the thing you remove to save cost was the thing that made people trust you.