Those of us who live in comparatively idyllic places—that is, nowhere near a large American city—watch in disbelief as residents post images and video of the squalor in places like Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. We thank heaven that our home towns are removed from the wretchedness. But the rapid rot of our social fabric, in all its mildewy stink, has reached us even here in northern New England.
No, we don’t have the same scale of homeless encampments or crime. Crime is the lowest in the nation and our quality of life is quite high. New England is home to longer life expectancies, higher educational attainment and higher incomes. Northern New England has some of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation, with Vermont and New Hampshire at less than 2%. We have among the lowest rates of poverty and income inequality. Even our IQ scores are among the highest. It is paradise here if you don’t mind limited cultural offerings and winters that last six months.
And yet something is rotten in the state of Denmark.
Rudeness is new and rampant. Rudeness in traffic. Rudeness in those little interactions between strangers. Small town civility has all but disappeared. In its place is a weird aggressive cynicism. I consider this the COVID Effect. The Trump and COVID years revealed how thin is the membrane that protects society from its worst tendencies.
Yesterday my husband and I went out for some shopping. We live 45 minutes in any direction from bigger towns—larger than 10,000 residents—and with limited time we opted for a rare Walmart trip to get it done in one go.
It is summer and congestion in our tourist towns is expected, but in the last couple of years the congestion has taken on a lawless quality. Rules of engagement in parking lots and aisles are ignored. Even (especially!) older people of the Boomer generation charge through stores without looking, plant themselves in the center of aisles, walk four across without moving for someone coming from the other direction.
Adding insult to our new incivility is the apparent elimination of off-hours stocking in grocery and big box stores, and the addition of in-store shoppers preparing curbside pickup orders. Customers now compete with employees who block aisles with carts and cases of product, not noticing or caring that customers can't get around them.
After an hour of dodging other shoppers and navigating around obstacle employees at Walmart, we had a full cart of food, cleaning supplies, and household goods. We avoided the self-checkout gauntlet and got in line at a proper register.
Except that it wasn’t a proper register. It was the latest Fuck You from the service industry: an unmanned register at which customers unload their carts onto a conveyor that does not move, and scan and bag their own purchases under the watchful glare of a single employee posted at the end of the four open cash-out lanes out of about thirty.
We didn’t know Walmart had eliminated every cashier. If looks could kill, the guy behind us would have left nothing but our shadows burnt into the linoleum.
Limited service retail was once a novelty. “We pass the savings on to youuuu,” was the marketing cry from discount retailers in the 1980s and 90s, the sort that stocked the store with open cases on industrial shelves and stopped offering baggers who might help you to the car.
Now customers are paying for the privilege of providing free labor, saving the retail industry many millions in payroll costs.
I have some sympathy for retailers, even Walmart. Shoplifting the old fashioned way seems almost quaint. In the new era shoplifting doesn't mean slipping something into a pocket, it means filling up a shopping cart and marching out the front door with it. I know stores in America’s worst regions are getting plundered mercilessly. I don't blame them for doing what they can to reduce costs, because price increases have a limit. No one is going to pay $60 for toilet paper because 30% of Walmart stores are losing millions to theft.
Another reality that these businesses face is that it is increasingly hard to hire workers. Hiring people who will show up is the biggest concern. If they do the minimum and aren't crazy, it’s considered a win. Critics cry, “Pay more!” but the fact is that the market sets wages. The minimum wage in New Hampshire is the same as the federal minimum, $7.25, yet I challenge you to find a job that pays it. Entry level cleaning jobs are advertised at $14 to $21 an hour. For comparison, I made $4.25 an hour at my first job. According to the BLS inflation calculator, $4.25 in 1990 is equivalent to $10.18 today.
The issue is not pay. It’s much bigger than that. Decisions made over the last fifty years, many with the best intentions, resulted in less affordability of the things that matter and greater overall unhappiness. Like Murder on the Orient Express, everyone is guilty from college to feminism to the food pyramid to affirmation culture. Each of these deserves more time than I can give here today.
The shift in workforce quality and availability started well before COVID. I started to see serious negative changes around 2016. What the response to COVID did is give businesses of all kinds a rare opportunity: lowered expectations.
Have you noticed that those emergency safety measures like no daily housekeeping service in hotels have become the norm? “Housekeeping on request” has taken the 2010s pretend-green policy of not changing sheets every day to the next level. Anything that reduces costs will be pursued. If it can be marketed as virtuous, all the better. It's all about saving money and reducing staffing headaches.
Sympathy or no, our shopping trip was demoralizing and infuriating. Not only was the shopping experience bad, the parking lot was a mess with carts everywhere and trash blowing around.
It might sound petty, but it's not. We aren't even trying anymore, not even in America's capital of quaintness. There is an unwholesome malaise in the air; a peculiar combination of resentment, apathy, and narcissistic traits. No, not everyone is a narcissist, but we are incentivizing narcissistic behavior by focusing too much on self-love, and by isolating ourselves and interacting with the world through apps. We exist fully only in our own heads, and that is a dangerous place to be.
That's the absolute lack of customer service and the knowledge that you are the only store in 45 miles.
If they had a little competition, it might make them think twice, but I doubt it.
I don't use the self-check lanes, because I don't work for Wal-Mart and they don't pay me to bag my own groceries.