The van nobody chose

A family in Medina orders a new cooker from a large store online. The store does not deliver it. A booking system does that, handing the job each morning to whichever van company has offered the lowest rate.

The driver arrives four hours late. He calls twice, irritated both times. He leaves the cooker at the door of the building and will not carry it up the stairs. When the family complains, the store says it is the carrier's fault, and the carrier is a company they will never deal with again.

It would be easy to call the driver careless. But nothing around him asks him to care. He did not win the job by being good at it. He won it by being cheapest, and he will win the next one the same way. The family's rating goes nowhere he will see it. His name does not matter, his company's name does not matter, and how he treats a stranger on a staircase changes nothing about tomorrow.

That is what happens when a single number does all the choosing. The system gets exactly what it measured, a low price, and everything it did not measure quietly falls away.

The store saved a little on every delivery. The family paid for it in an afternoon, and the store will pay for it the next time they need an appliance.

More and more, a buyer is being offered one of two deals. A lower price from someone with no reason to care, which delivers less than it seemed to. Or a slightly higher one from someone who can still be held to their name, which delivers more.