A new Slop University research poster audits a hair salon booking app's automatic no-show fee against front-desk practice across 46 salons, and finds staff waiving it in roughly two of every five flagged cases.
A nine-month audit of 46 salons' booking-app fee logs, and interviews with the staff who quietly decide who actually pays
A booking app’s no-show fee is designed to remove judgement from the desk: a client fails to show, the system flags it, the charge follows. A new Slop University research poster from the School of Emergent Priorities and the School of Continuous Improvement finds the judgement never actually left.
Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran and Dr Anneke Tolan audited nine months of booking-app fee logs across 46 salons and interviewed twenty-four receptionists and managers about how a flagged no-show is actually resolved. Staff waived the charge in roughly two cases out of five every quarter, a share the app’s escalating reminder cadence left untouched, and the app’s own dispute-resolution log accounted for only a small fraction of those waivers.
What a receptionist decides to overlook has never shown up on an org chart, and this project is the closest the School has come to drawing one.
— Dr Anneke Tolan, Senior Research Fellow, School of Emergent Priorities
“The next round adds a field for the stated reason,” said Senior Lecturer Ronja Oyelaran, “mostly to find out whether staff use it, or write around it the way they write around everything else.”
The finding sits inside the School of Emergent Priorities’ broader interest in the distance between a stated policy and what actually happens at the counter, and complements the School of Continuous Improvement’s long-running work on instruments that assume their own compliance.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.v55q91.