Malcolm Cowley wrote a wonderful introduction to a collection of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories where he describes the cultural changes that struck America in the 1920s. It was a sharp rift. The young kids of the Jazz Age felt the older generation was morally bankrupt on issues such as women’s suffrage, prohibition, and the war.
America was changing, demographically, too. “How are you going to keep them down on the farm when they’ve seen gay Par-ee” was the refrain, and the young left farms for the cities. For the first time in our history more Americans lived in cities than in the country. America was more urban than rural.
The divide affected lifestyle, too. The older generation believed in saving, while the younger generation knew that spending sparked economic growth. And oh, how they spent, laughing at their elders: Stuck in the mud.
While they were right about suffrage, the war, and prohibition, their economic theories weren’t quite as durable, as the 1930s saw, and many of my older relatives of that generation came to believe a penny saved was a penny earned.
I inherited this DNA.
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The beer supply store around here give us pretty good rates on the grain, hops, yeast and equipment we need, but they’ll nickel and dime us. Ferrinstance, some of my recipes call for malt extract (syrup made from grain), and if I don’t bring a container with me, they charge $1.75. So I’ve saved the old plastic jugs in my brewery, and on the rare occasion when I need malt extract I try to remember to clean and rinse one out to take with me before I go buy supplies.
During my most recent excursion, to make an imperial stout, I gave the clerk the plastic jug I’d brought for the malt extract, ordered the 26 lbs. of malted barley I needed, had it milled, chose the yeast and hops that worked, and picked up a few incidentals.
After I got home and had the kettle started, and looked at the receipt. I saw the $1.75 charge for a jug. Okay. A buck seventy-five, big deal, right? For a jug I cleaned, rinsed, dried and trucked with me to the store.
Could the young clerk at the register have thought to maybe ask?
Sometimes I get the sense that counter help these days is too preoccupied with their future stardom to focus on the job at hand.
I need to be careful with this notion, I suppose, as it could soon place me on the far side of any current generation gap.
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And it’s not like this is an isolated customer experience of late. I took a roll of film for my wife to Wolf’s Camera to have developed. Shots of my new neice the last time we saw my brother, the quilt my wife made, etc.
And they lost the roll. That’s right. I’ve gone back twice now to see if they’ve found it.
This happens after they talked me in to joining their club whereby I get a discount per roll, too. So our latest roll is lost — and the discount on that isn’t worth a whole lot, now, is it?
So now I’ll go back a fourth time to see what they offer as compensation.
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This isn’t of the same magnitude, but maybe it bugged me because of the prior two experiences.
I went to a local restaurant for lunch recently and wanted simply to order a quick appetizer and bring a salad with me back to my desk. I won’t bore you with why. It was what I wanted. But when I asked for this, my waitress said, “oh, I’ll just bring it out to you in case you’d like some.”
Now, if I had wanted the salad brought out on a plate I’d have asked for that, right?
So she brought out my quick appetizer and the cobb salad, too, arranged very nicely with the beets, avocado, chicken, etc. all separate, and then I asked for a to-go container and she said, I’ll box it for you. Of course she tossed it in a box all slammed together with the darn beets mingling with the avocado with the dressing on the bottom (what did I expect? I should have grabbed her wrist in the restaurant and hollered NO!) and I looked at it at my office and thought, you know, your kitchen probably would have given it to me the way I wanted it, yeah?
Is it so hard to give people what they want? Is it just me, or is customer service going down the same rathole that gave us automated telephone answering services?
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I know each of us stars in our own movie, which we’re filming in our own heads. It’s the only place we all get a recurring starring role. But damnit, I don’t want to be a flummoxed, exasperated Jack Lemmon.
This is not the script I wrote!
So what should I get for the lost roll of film?
I was conservative when younger and have become more liberal with age, to have found that the banking systems which the conservatives have preached do not in fact benefit themselves and still they do not understand.
We need to have common currency based on what grows and sustains us, upon that which blesses us with goodness, and not that which poisons us and causes us to fight.
On another note, could you please let me know if my layout is producing artifacts for you now? I have gone back to a three-column organization, but not using the same one that I know was giving you trouble before.
An agricultural commodity exists which provides food, fiber, fuel and medicine, which has a generally well established value if grown with care. You may create a bread basket as you have done, and float a currency upon them, but a currency should allow people to grow money on trees.
Another basis for common currency is land value. This benefits the established classes, and this is what they should support.
The two currencies may be interchangeable. Just not in the temple. 🙂
I would abolish the income tax to achieve this consensus.
Whig, I looked at your site and the columns are superimposed on top of each other. The margins on either side are open.
My post was a bit of a free-spirited rant on hassles with clerks — how did your comments on banking tie in? Just curious.
Ben, what browser and version are you using?
I was replying to this:
Ah, got it.
Right now, I’m using IE 6.
How do you block quote text from someone else’s post in a comment you’re making on their site? I’m always cutting and pasting into quote marks.
May I suggest Firefox? 🙂
Or IE7, at least. The problem is that newer sites use CSS2 which IE6 may not implement correctly.
To block quote just use HTML markup:
<blockquote>
</blockquote>