Grinding to a Halt

The State of Customer Service, and A Lot More, in 2024

“I know someone who timed his wait in the McDonald's drive-thru line, across the street, last week.

Twenty-four minutes.”

Billy Beck, The Grammatical Fiction, @koestghost, X, April 21, 2024, in a reply to this post earlier that day that concludes, “It’s all grinding to a halt.”

One should hardly be surprised at staffing shortages, and their concomitant customer service problems, in 2024. Long before lockdowns, decades of statist economic policy inflated currency to a moiety of its former value; jacked up the cost of living with housing supply restrictions, high property taxes (passed on to renters), rent control discouraging low-cost housing construction, etc.; taxes and regulations decreasing the quantity and quality of available jobs; and minimum wage legislation pricing inexperienced and unskilled workers (not necessarily the same thing) out of positions.

The decline in customer service has two overarching proximate causes: the late state welfare state and the entitlement mentality.

The late stage welfare state has caused conditions that have ensured that lower-paying jobs are not acceptable to increasing numbers of people, many of whom are leaving the workforce in record numbers. Some of the declining demand for customer service jobs can be attributed to a genuine innovation: the rise of rideshare and delivery opportunities, and similar opportunities related to recent technology. That is a positive development, but most of the decline is due to negative cultural, political, and economic trends. I remember Billy discussing with his Georgia-based relatives that Georgia residents could get paid considerably more money collecting government benefits (if they knew which forms to file and had no shame) than working many jobs. This was some time before 2020. States less economically free might be more expensive but presumably offer more money mulcted from taxpayers. In the freer, more rational past, significantly fewer people would forbear work for handouts. They would forbear it as a matter of pride. Today, there is a consensus that it is masochistic and even stupid not to collect government benefits if they pay more (or even almost as much). Also, those workers of the past had better real wages before hyperinflation and the rise in the cost of living (much of which has nothing to do with inflation). Now, many workers would be living with family or sharing a two-bedroom apartment with five people in many parts of the country.

The sociopolitical landscape has changed to a degree that is unfathomable to many, as it happened slowly enough that the myopic would not really notice it. Many writers, including James Ellroy and Tom Wolfe, have written detailed nonfiction illustrating a different socioeconomic culture. Wolfe wrote of apartment buildings in cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco explicitly catering to twenty-somethings (or even late teenagers). Age discrimination regulations (another bad statist idea, but I repeat myself) probably have something to do with these disappearing, but economic reasons may have at least as much to do with it. In his memoir My Dark Places, Ellroy wrote that his first apartment in Hollywood in 1968 was eighty-five dollars per month. (I refer to Falk’s first law of modern economics as “the inflation alone should be alarming”, but adjust that price for inflation. See if you can find a place in Hollywood or anywhere else for that rent, today.)

If customer service jobs no longer finance an independent life, and government benefits finance the illusion of an independent life, more people in an increasingly dependent culture will opt for the latter.

The entitlement mentality is the second proximate cause of the decline in customer service, and it is now twofold. Workers and others think they’re entitled to others’ money, and some have a point considering what the majority of those in older generations have done to the economy and culture. Some of these younger people (though nowhere near enough) have been fighting those deleterious trends and are the most unjustly affected among those young people,. (Of course, collectivism, which is the dominant metaphysical and ethical trend, states that everything belongs to everyone and anyone and that groups, not individuals, are fundamental. This is the fundamental, deeper cause of the proximate causes.) While service is declining, for reasons many older people don’t understand (and understand even less how they have helped to cause that decline), many older people are used to abundant options and services, they’re starting to lose some of them, and they don’t like it.