You Are On Your Own
Virtually every time we turn around, the service we receive becomes less and less human. And feels less and less like service, and more and more like work put upon us.
On a recent Saturday morning, I awoke in a budget hotel in Madison, Wisconsin desperately in need of coffee. I was in Madison playing with my band, The Stick Arounds. We had performed the night before at a local dive bar called The Wisco. While I’d only imbibed a single beer and a whiskey on the rocks, I awoke with the fuzzy mild headache of a long night out at a show, and dangerously low levels of caffeine.
I threw some clothes on and grabbed a bag to head down to the lobby for java and to get a bit of work done on the blog. I filled up a styrofoam cup in the empty lobby/breakfast nook. There was not a soul around, not even an attendant at the desk.
Gradually, a couple of folks came down for the meager continental breakfast offerings and went about their day. Having finished my first small cup in fairly short order, I went back to get a refill. Disappointingly, I managed to get a little less than a half of a cup before the keg ran dry. I walked over to the front desk to the grab the attention of someone who could fill up the coffee. Not only was the desk currently unmanned, it would remain so until 10:00 am. As it was only just after 8:00, it meant waiting two hours for coffee. Oddly, the continental breakfast was also scheduled to end at 10:00 am. What the hell?
The scenario was made all the more puzzling by the fact that someone had been on premises to make the coffee in the first place. I found a sign next to the front desk that offered both a number for calling a remote location for help, as well as a number to text with questions. Great, I figured we would be set up in no time. Sadly, after more than a dozen attempts to get an answer via text and phone, I was left with an empty pot.
At a different hotel chain the next morning in Rockford, Illinois, I encountered a very similar experience. This time there was a greater supply of coffee, although that would eventually run out with no replenishment either. In the hotel, there was no longer a font desk as you would expect. Instead, guests are welcomed with an ATM like screen that acts as a mobile check-in desk.
This system allows one person to act as a remote desk agent for multiple hotels, eliminating the need for several workers, and consolidating down to just one. In the darkest days of the pandemic, measures like these were put in place for safety, now they are being exploited by corporations to squeeze yet more profit out of each and every interaction.
Evidence of this type of anti-service behavior can best be seen in line at the grocery store. Meijer, the major supermarket in my town is a regional brand with a huge profit share. The owners of the company are the wealthiest residents in the entire state of Michigan. Yet, I routinely find that they have just two or three lanes open with an actual cashier. Instead, customers are corralled towards self-checkout kiosks located at both ends of the store.
This is the moment where you are likely to hear that tired old cliche that, “No one wants to work anymore.” As we have covered extensively here, no one seems to want to pay workers a living wage and workers are no longer willing to accept that. So, stores like mine will continue to remove services and amenities from your experience in their store just to shave a bit more profit for themselves.
For a long time during my childhood, Meijer had an ad campaign with the tagline, “You’re always next in line at Meijer.” That might still be true, but even if you’re next, you’ll have to do it your damned self.
Frustrated after the coffee ran out again on Sunday morning, I walked a few hundred yards down the road to grab a coffee at the nearby McDonald’s. Upon entering the restaurant, I was greeted not by a smiling employee wondering how I could be helped. Instead, I was assaulted with a series of brightly lit screens on which I could enter my own order and pay for it myself.
Prices at McDonald’s have risen sharply even just within the last three years. The price for a regular cheeseburger has shot up 55%, still McDonald’s feels that they also need to reduce the cost of their labor and to foist more work upon the customer. As this becomes the new way of the corporate world, Americans are given fewer and fewer options where they can actually get a real human voice on the phone, or a live human being to take their order.
We’re now ensconced in a world of phone tree systems that avoid any and all human interaction and automated robocalls that grow closer and closer to mimicking human speech patterns. Our lives are inundated with soulless POS systems and places where technology has poorly replaced any shred of humanity. The points in which our lives might be brightened or softened by human contact have eroded in our dystopian capitalist nightmare.
As those touch points become less frequent, and less vibrant, our lives are all dimmed as a result. While the ownership class may only seek to extract every possible penny from the machine, it is already doing so at the cost of our humanity. Perhaps it is time for us to ask ourselves how far they’re willing to go for profit and how far are we willing to let them erode our humanity?
In a surprising twist, a man named Carl called me during the evening on Saturday and apologized for not being able to answer my questions about the coffee. He was very kind, and most apologetic. In fact, he even offered us a free room the next time we are in Madison, which was a very kind gesture.
The interaction with Carl reminded me that people are still inherently good and kind when given the chance to actually interact with other human beings. Frankly, I also cynically wondered if the occasional free night due to a complaint was still cheaper than having someone at the desk 24 hours a day.
Not having coffee or being unable to get an extra towel due to automation is not a human rights issue, but it is a sign that the dollar you’re providing is worth far more than your comfort, your experience, or your time. It is a reminder that you will be given the bare minimum at each interaction so you can be as profitable of a guest as possible. The only service we have now is in service to the bottom line.
Cheers,
Matty C
This ties into a couple of things that I think about from time to time.
The first and simplest explanation for what you're describing is that as we become richer as a society employing people costs more and so there's a greater incentive to reduce the amount of service work (see: https://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/5/4/15547364/baumol-cost-disease-explained )
But I think that has a couple of other pernicious effects. The first is, as you note, a loss of social solidarity. Second, it means you start to see a growing difference in vibe between spaces where there's some mechanism to keep people out, vs spaces without that (which, in the absence of staff to keep an eye on things become scuzzier).
Finally it goes along with much tighter control (and surveillance) of service workers -- as the cost of people goes up and surveillance goes down there's an economic push in a bad direction. There are a lot fewer jobs like video store clerk where someone has a job but is mostly unsupervised in their interactions with people.
You bring up some very valid points about all of this automation. I find it wild they are doing hotel check ins this way now! Back in the early 2000s, I was a stay at home mom in a rural isolated area - the only adult human contact I had, aside from my ex, was the cashiers at the convenience store and meat market in the next town over, the post office, and occasional trips to Walmart or the small grocery store that were 40 and 30 minutes away… had I not had this minimal human interaction, my mental health would have been so much worse. Of course back then, they didn’t even have pay at the pump options.