When Debbie Gainsford checked into an Ibis hotel in Aldgate, London, to see the Red Hot Chili Peppers on June 26, was told by the front desk that she could scan a QR code in her room to get in touch. She thought it wouldn’t be necessary until she got back to her room at 10:30 PM and wanted a shower, but realized there were no towels.
With no phone in the room, Gainsford, 43, dutifully scanned the QR code. She read out a note stating that the cleaning services only run certain hours and then clicked a link to WhatsApp to message the hotel reception. She sent a message asking for towels. An employee read it but did not respond.
She messaged again. “It wasn’t something I wanted to do so late at night,” she says. Someone eventually replied that she could pick up her towels from reception. She went down nine floors, grabbed her towels and went back to her room. “I paid £120 for the night and didn’t expect to have such an experience in a hotel,” she says. It was less room service, more “come and get it yourself”.
Gainsford is far from alone. During the pandemic, personal and analog services have quickly fallen back on digital alternatives. Many restaurants and bars have abandoned physical menus in favor of QR codes, apps and web forms. At Walt Disney World in Florida, an app-based chatbot tells people to visit long closed restaurants† While the digital divide has excluded economically disadvantaged people and the elderly for years, its rapid expansion creates a new problem: the technology is often terrible.
The frustrations are small but legion: people in hotels who can’t get clean sheets without ordering them on an app; sports fans being told to download a program on their phone as no physical copies are available; McDonald’s customers baffled by banks of cash-and-carry kiosks. For companies, such changes are often seen as more efficient and an improvement, but the reality is more complicated.
The replacement of personal services with digital alternatives is becoming an increasing inconvenience for those on the wrong side of the digital divide. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the United Nations IT agency, an estimated 2.9 billion people – 37 percent of the world’s population – have never used the Internet.
On the one hand, greater convenience and lower prices for phones and the Internet mean more people can get online: 782 million people did so for the first time between 2019 and 2021, according to the ITU. But for many, it’s less about being coaxed online and more about being coerced.
Take banking for example. The number of bank branches in the United States has fallen 6.5 percent since 2012, according to financial services firm Self. The number of establishments in 2030 will be lower than in 1965, when the US population was 194 million. The trend is similar in the UK, where the number of bank and mortgage offices fell by a third between 2012 and 2021.
