The following is a big, vague comment. But I think it's relevant.
Combining the insights of psychology and evolutionary anthropology, it is clear that human beings have a deep prejudice for noticing what is going wrong over what is going right. The fact that everything is okay is not in a threat to your existence. But failing to notice any negative, such as tiger or a snake or even overly spoiled food, could quickly lead to your demise. Thus, we are exquisitely attuned to what is going wrong.
Even though there are so many fewer immediate threats, we still remain attuned to the negative. That is why anxiety and depression are the most common mental illnesses. One of the most effective treatments for both is cognitive therapy which helps people decrease their focus on the negative and increase their focus on the positive therefore achieving a more realistic outlook.
Indeed, trying to figure out whether the trivial things of modern life are getting better or worse is probably an echo of the need of our ancestors to figure out whether tigers and snakes were becoming more common or not. Back then it mattered, now it's trivial.
This is a great question! I’ve noticed the gas station thing in particular, and at least in that case it seems like it’s due to changes in behavior. People now leave their cars at the pump even when they’re done gassing up to go buy stuff inside, rather than moving the car to a designated space and freeing up the pump. This happens even at a place like Buc-ees in Texas that has nearly 100 pumps and a giant parking lot as well. It happens at four-pump stations in small towns. And the only place it doesn’t seem to happen is Costco, because there’s no convenience store. The long lines there are for other reasons.
I don’t know if it’s like a psychologically-motivated small claim on space for a brief period of time (“I’m going in to buy overpriced chips and a drink for the drive so I’m entitled to stay at the pump for a few more minutes”), or laziness, or that it’s an excuse to get out of the car, but it didn’t seem to be that way even 10-15 years ago. People seemed to free up pumps faster, because they moved their cars sooner.
One of the interesting things to me about our land use regime is that, because it prevents a lot of more incremental change, when you do get changes they tend to take the form of larger structures (which, to be fair, is partly building codes fault) or multi phase megaprojects - which naturally tend to be more expensive and more likely to be filled with chains and more "high brow" commercial spaces. It'll be interesting, I think, to see what ends up filling a lot of those newer spaces in 15 to 30 years when the buildings or neighborhood project is no longer "new" and rents are more manageable for smaller scale businesses.
One can already see what happens in a place like Las Vegas, NV or many others where "premature" but often only moderate suburban decline is common. A lot of poorly located shopping centers from only 15-20 years ago or less just in recent years have independent businesses moving in along with less upscale and more regional chains. Others sit partly empty but small businesses are definitely growing in them, -but only in those with relitively smaller spaces available that are amenitable for smaller shops, or where cost are especially low and regulations especially lax (such as parts of the Southern US).
There are probably different categories of explanations for the examples you cite.
Restaurant reservations: I remember my parents nearly always making dinner reservations in the 80s and 90s. The 2000s saw a lot of cities with far more restaurants than the market could sustain, meaning tables were always available and people lost the habit as their expectations changed.
One could argue that this is still downstream of corporate concentration/capitalism/negative interest rates, but I'm not sure that's useful.
I grew up in Sonoma County and have "fond" memories of being dragged to tasting rooms by my parents when my brother and I were kids and had nothing to do but try all the mustard samples (if we were really lucky, there was chocolate sauce). Tasting rooms were usually free in the 90s because they were in the middle of nowhere and only someone actually interested in buying wine would go there. Eventually the secret got out and tasting rooms started to charge for tastings by the early 2000s. Even then, a lot of places did not bother charging the $10 if you seemed like you were sincerely interested. If they did, you'd get the money back anyway if you bought a bottle.
Today, people go to Napa from all over the world because they want to drink wine in Wine Country. Actually buying bottles is secondary (it's a hassle to ship them home, after all) and most tasting rooms have responded by turning themselves into scenic wine bars/picnic grounds.
Certainly the current situation is not better if your goal was to try a some wines that may or may not be good and come home with a trunk full of bottles of the best ones, but it's a more accurate business model for what people actually want out of a trip to Napa these days vs 20-30 years ago.
A friend of mine used to work as a restaurant manager here in Boston and what he said is pretty informative: when he was working, the restaurants were mostly independent places, owned by individuals or small partnerships and they knew that their profits depended on having satisfied customers and that the best way to satisfy them was to have well-trained, knowledgable staff. That meant that the staff got to eat the food that the customers did, so they would learn it, they could (illegally) buy bottles of the restaurants wine at cost so they could learn how it tasted and what it paired well with. Then about 15 years ago, the restaurants started being bought up by corporate ownership groups and the first thing they do is cut costs. Instead of eating the same food as the customers they get chicken tenders and french fries, instead of being able to buy wine, they get a staff tasting once a month where they taste all the wines -- and by the end they're so sloshed they can hardly remember their names -- so they recite scripts. So the staff is less happy, the customers are less happy, but the restaurants profits are coming from $25 cocktails, so they don't care.
You see it in retails all the time: businesses replace knowledgable salespeople makling good money for providing valuable services, with teenage associates making minimum wage, all to satisfy some earnings report somewhere.
I guess it's like the stat revolution in baseball: optimize baseball around the Three True Outcomes of walks, strikeouts and home runs and you get teams that win, but are boring to watch.
came here to say this. more things are owned by big corporations who don't want to pay enough for skilled help, so of course the experience is worse. They're not interested in playing the long game of actually satisfying the customer to stay in business for the long term, they just want the short-term profits that come from cutting costs.
These are mostly small invester groups that have bought up many " "independent" (non chain) upscale restaurants in recent years. They might be coporations but most (not all!) are small. There are still plenty of truly independent family owned restaurants and most non chain mid to downscale restaurants are still truly independent family affairs. But even then, a more corporate mentality or what some call the McDonaldization of society (There was/is a famous book written by that name) has become increasingly influential in many cases.
I feel like most of this is just the nature of human experience. We forget the daily difficulties that have been solved by improvements but remember the niceties. Nostalgia is a powerful force that we need to fight against - because this kind of feeling that things used to be better is exactly the source of anti-density, and anti-immigrant, and anti-growth policies.
This may not answer the question, but there are a few factors I see:
1. More new ventures (food, housing) are backed by investors that have very high profit expectations. These are PE and VC returns, not simple interest. This means that a simple establishment has to return far more cash to investors, and that has to come from somewhere. This was a factor in the early colonies, BTW where manufacturing didn’t get started for many many decades because of capital return expectations and only picked up during events like the homespun movement.
2. The fully burdened cost of life is outlandish. Healthcare, pharmaceuticals, student loans, housing, and food are all captured and extractive. For a human to work, enough money has to be paid to cover all of these “tolls” which means few who are skilled will be a butcher or builder, or conversely, a skilled butcher or builder will be very high cost.
A piece of this is the results of capitalism. To be clear, I am 100% in favor of Capitalism as the foundation of our economy. While quality matters, it pales in comparison to cost, for the vast majority of people. Cheaper is the result of producers squeezing out the marginal costs, especially where they cannot be linked to profit. We may say we like something, but if we (the masses) do not purchase, it will go away.
The flip side of capitalism/consumerism is the consumer squeeze. Things that work on economies-of-scale in labor sooner or later get to a point where the human-interaction component is engineered out of the workflow. The big gas station probably replaced many more smaller station pumps. Restaurant reservations are now sold because everything core to a restaurant’s existence is squeezed between thin profits and consumers who are intolerant of sensible price hikes - so the restaurant becomes more of a broad marketing operation (and sometimes a cross-country Goldbelly seller) than a simple proprietorship.
From the opposite end - if you are in the business of selling experiences, it becomes quickly apparent that the components are all more expensive than the average person can afford / is willing to pay. There’s no mass audience that wants to pay a tour guide for a complete vacation plan, that’s only something you can sell to the middle-rich
Your first bit there echoes another element of this that I've written about, which is scale. That having larger stores/gas stations/whatever also entails a concentration of activity and people, which creates this feeling crowdedness even in places that are objectively pretty low density. The second bit is interesting too - seems like the same thing going on there with things like food delivery.
I read something a while back when I was wondering why my commute home always takes longer than my commute in and it also cited concentration as the cause. Heading to work you have people coming from all over the place and it's only the last mile or so when they all meet together, but when everyone is going home that same group all leaving at the same time is going to cause a big jam at the beginning which will take longer to sort out and will affect your perception because it took so much longer to "get going".
A good retail example is Costco - I just wrote about how that store triggers that "this is too crowded" feeling even in me, I suppose because it concentrates both geographically/selection-wise like Walmart Supercenters, and also has large carts, and also skews towards large families. But in absolute numbers of people it isn't especially crowded, really.
There’s a classic management book ‘in search of excellence’ ( Roger’s & Peter’s?) major premise is nothing over units of 50 can be effectively managed. Interesting premise.
I do believe that density itself can have a negative effect especially if the energies are not working in harmony.
In our ever more complicated interconnected web of humans the disharmony will continue to be a problem.
I think a lot of the movements we see happening are in response to this.
Intentional communities, fundamentalism, homesteading, religious extremism etc
People do have to remember that the people selling gas aren’t also selling solitude, so if your gas fill experience now involves seeing other people around you… that is incidental, and nothing was taken away. I think people ought to get used to the fact that serenity is not going to be part of the retail experience going forward, given the trends in business
I tend to agree with the idea. Spitballing a few reasons why:
1. People don't care as much about brand names. Looking around my living room at my kids' toys, I see a few "Fisher-Price" and a bunch of "Melissa & Doug", but the bulk of them are made by Chinese companies that none of us have heard of. And if we're willing to buy so many unbranded products, that suggests there isn't as much reward for a company to spend on the quality control necessary to maintain its brand.
2. Federal product regulations. The most egregious example is probably the vapor-retaining gas can with the stupid collar that you have to pull back, an obvious deterioration in quality, but there are also subtler examples like dishwashers, where the regulator has an incentive to promulgate new rules to show that it's doing something, regardless of the benefit to the consumer.
When a manufacturer has to please customer+regulator as opposed to customer alone, it's not likely to be able to raise its prices, and thus has a strong incentive to look for ways to cut expenses - and quality - in a way that won't be immediately obvious to the customer.
3. Inflation. We've all noticed the extent to which manufacturers have cut from their products in the past few years because it's been so dramatic, but it strains credulity to think that they just started doing this during COVID.
Fabulous question. The answers may be anecdotal, but the experiences described are the vexations and puzzles and intimations of decay that are quintessentially common now. Even strangers at the next table volunteer their own examples without invitation. Urban densification may be as toxic as it is marvelous, engaging, and generative (at least for its acolytes). Keep up these revolutionary posts.
The only real solution is to find ways to significantly lower the cost of living, and foremost on that list would be lowering the cost of real estate by allowing more development.
The reason I would say density is a red herring is that old places with low growth are still full of the kind of consumer surplus “niceties” that you describe, whether dense or not. But places that are under growth pressure and not allowing the market to supply enough square footage end up with very expensive rent, and this means the businesses have to be kind of cutthroat just to squeak by.
Re: grocery store in hometown had free coffee and cream, new centrally located grocery stores don't have this. In the past, particularly in smaller communities, the customer base for a nice grocery store was likely more homogenous and middle class.
As well, before social media, it was easier for stores to ban low income people who they didn't perceive to be bona fide shoppers without consequences. If a poor person who was denied entry wanted to complain, they'd have to write a letter to a consumer watchdog or human rights tribunal, which requires writing and research skills (to look up addresses).
Nowadays, a person denied entry to a store can post a complaint on social media using a 20 second video, and it may lead to disapproval for the firm.
Thus means that a centrally located grocery store today is likely to have a wider cross-section of society walking in, including homeless and low-income people.
The grocery store views the free coffee as an inducement for customers who are going to spend a hundred dollars or so. In a small-town store in the 1980s, when they could bar poor people, they could ensure that most of the coffee was being sipped by middle class people with money to spend.
But in 2024, with poor or homeless people in the store, the firm is worried that penniless people will be drinking the coffee, and they are concerned that they won't be making purchases. As a result, the free coffee is replaced with a coffee vending machine or a Starbucks.
Population growth, which we see so much more of with all of our screens now (and big Media has monetized clickable disaster scenes) makes everything feel worse - we all see it and even suburbs and “the country” are fuller than decades ago and population increases geometrically, faster and faster - animals show bizarre behavior when overcrowded and people I think feel that same discomfort generally even if they cant identify it, so Density is also sensed even if we aren’t in the dense area ourselves. And together with corporatization/globalization of so much of business, itself due to growth (and greed) all makes us uncomfortable/anxious/irritated, especially at the strip-mall-ification of our towns; and these both make even small businesses less user-friendly - most small restaurants get their food from a semi-trailer from Cisco, frozen processed units, less human, and malls themselves are less personal than shopping used to be. More stuff but less satisfying.
I blame it all on population growth, with all it’s knock-on effects, so, density generally even when we dont live there. Also plus-one on Kathleen Weber comment below, with the addition of media companies monetized to tell us bad news on all of our screens.
Piggly Wiggly is going to close those stores within a year if the merger is allowed to go through, and in most places where Kroger and Safeway both existed there will then be a monopoly which raises grocery prices in many markets. Piggly Wiggly buying the stores is a cheap, dishonest maneuver to get around antitrust concerns. This has happened before, in the grocery industry. We should not trust these people. I’ve lived in a city with two grocery chains where Kroger bought the other one out and the result is job losses and an increase in grocery prices, as any econ textbook would teach.
While I think mergers are almost always bad and should only be approved in extremely rare instances, the Safeway/Kroger merger is particularly egregious, especially since people are already incensed at the recent rise in the price of groceries. It isn’t, say, Google and YouTube, where consumers aren’t really hurt one way or the other and the product isn’t essential for life.
The following is a big, vague comment. But I think it's relevant.
Combining the insights of psychology and evolutionary anthropology, it is clear that human beings have a deep prejudice for noticing what is going wrong over what is going right. The fact that everything is okay is not in a threat to your existence. But failing to notice any negative, such as tiger or a snake or even overly spoiled food, could quickly lead to your demise. Thus, we are exquisitely attuned to what is going wrong.
Even though there are so many fewer immediate threats, we still remain attuned to the negative. That is why anxiety and depression are the most common mental illnesses. One of the most effective treatments for both is cognitive therapy which helps people decrease their focus on the negative and increase their focus on the positive therefore achieving a more realistic outlook.
Indeed, trying to figure out whether the trivial things of modern life are getting better or worse is probably an echo of the need of our ancestors to figure out whether tigers and snakes were becoming more common or not. Back then it mattered, now it's trivial.
This is a great question! I’ve noticed the gas station thing in particular, and at least in that case it seems like it’s due to changes in behavior. People now leave their cars at the pump even when they’re done gassing up to go buy stuff inside, rather than moving the car to a designated space and freeing up the pump. This happens even at a place like Buc-ees in Texas that has nearly 100 pumps and a giant parking lot as well. It happens at four-pump stations in small towns. And the only place it doesn’t seem to happen is Costco, because there’s no convenience store. The long lines there are for other reasons.
I don’t know if it’s like a psychologically-motivated small claim on space for a brief period of time (“I’m going in to buy overpriced chips and a drink for the drive so I’m entitled to stay at the pump for a few more minutes”), or laziness, or that it’s an excuse to get out of the car, but it didn’t seem to be that way even 10-15 years ago. People seemed to free up pumps faster, because they moved their cars sooner.
One of the interesting things to me about our land use regime is that, because it prevents a lot of more incremental change, when you do get changes they tend to take the form of larger structures (which, to be fair, is partly building codes fault) or multi phase megaprojects - which naturally tend to be more expensive and more likely to be filled with chains and more "high brow" commercial spaces. It'll be interesting, I think, to see what ends up filling a lot of those newer spaces in 15 to 30 years when the buildings or neighborhood project is no longer "new" and rents are more manageable for smaller scale businesses.
One can already see what happens in a place like Las Vegas, NV or many others where "premature" but often only moderate suburban decline is common. A lot of poorly located shopping centers from only 15-20 years ago or less just in recent years have independent businesses moving in along with less upscale and more regional chains. Others sit partly empty but small businesses are definitely growing in them, -but only in those with relitively smaller spaces available that are amenitable for smaller shops, or where cost are especially low and regulations especially lax (such as parts of the Southern US).
There are probably different categories of explanations for the examples you cite.
Restaurant reservations: I remember my parents nearly always making dinner reservations in the 80s and 90s. The 2000s saw a lot of cities with far more restaurants than the market could sustain, meaning tables were always available and people lost the habit as their expectations changed.
One could argue that this is still downstream of corporate concentration/capitalism/negative interest rates, but I'm not sure that's useful.
I grew up in Sonoma County and have "fond" memories of being dragged to tasting rooms by my parents when my brother and I were kids and had nothing to do but try all the mustard samples (if we were really lucky, there was chocolate sauce). Tasting rooms were usually free in the 90s because they were in the middle of nowhere and only someone actually interested in buying wine would go there. Eventually the secret got out and tasting rooms started to charge for tastings by the early 2000s. Even then, a lot of places did not bother charging the $10 if you seemed like you were sincerely interested. If they did, you'd get the money back anyway if you bought a bottle.
Today, people go to Napa from all over the world because they want to drink wine in Wine Country. Actually buying bottles is secondary (it's a hassle to ship them home, after all) and most tasting rooms have responded by turning themselves into scenic wine bars/picnic grounds.
Certainly the current situation is not better if your goal was to try a some wines that may or may not be good and come home with a trunk full of bottles of the best ones, but it's a more accurate business model for what people actually want out of a trip to Napa these days vs 20-30 years ago.
A friend of mine used to work as a restaurant manager here in Boston and what he said is pretty informative: when he was working, the restaurants were mostly independent places, owned by individuals or small partnerships and they knew that their profits depended on having satisfied customers and that the best way to satisfy them was to have well-trained, knowledgable staff. That meant that the staff got to eat the food that the customers did, so they would learn it, they could (illegally) buy bottles of the restaurants wine at cost so they could learn how it tasted and what it paired well with. Then about 15 years ago, the restaurants started being bought up by corporate ownership groups and the first thing they do is cut costs. Instead of eating the same food as the customers they get chicken tenders and french fries, instead of being able to buy wine, they get a staff tasting once a month where they taste all the wines -- and by the end they're so sloshed they can hardly remember their names -- so they recite scripts. So the staff is less happy, the customers are less happy, but the restaurants profits are coming from $25 cocktails, so they don't care.
You see it in retails all the time: businesses replace knowledgable salespeople makling good money for providing valuable services, with teenage associates making minimum wage, all to satisfy some earnings report somewhere.
I guess it's like the stat revolution in baseball: optimize baseball around the Three True Outcomes of walks, strikeouts and home runs and you get teams that win, but are boring to watch.
came here to say this. more things are owned by big corporations who don't want to pay enough for skilled help, so of course the experience is worse. They're not interested in playing the long game of actually satisfying the customer to stay in business for the long term, they just want the short-term profits that come from cutting costs.
and with perfect timing just came across this article about another way retailers are making the experience worse instead of having enough employees (sorry for the ugly url, it's a gift link) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2024-08-01/why-cvs-and-target-locking-up-products-is-backfiring?accessToken=eyJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiIsInR5cCI6IkpXVCJ9.eyJzb3VyY2UiOiJTdWJzY3JpYmVyR2lmdGVkQXJ0aWNsZSIsImlhdCI6MTcyMjUyNTE1MiwiZXhwIjoxNzIzMTI5OTUyLCJhcnRpY2xlSWQiOiJTSEpHMDNEV0xVNjgwMCIsImJjb25uZWN0SWQiOiI3MDQyN0U3REVGMkM0MDEzODNCNDUzRjAyNUE2NDc3NyJ9.sDSav8PKyhwbAxMG3CUKloF2TNlMQ3-S9UOTQB3BJHs
These are mostly small invester groups that have bought up many " "independent" (non chain) upscale restaurants in recent years. They might be coporations but most (not all!) are small. There are still plenty of truly independent family owned restaurants and most non chain mid to downscale restaurants are still truly independent family affairs. But even then, a more corporate mentality or what some call the McDonaldization of society (There was/is a famous book written by that name) has become increasingly influential in many cases.
I feel like most of this is just the nature of human experience. We forget the daily difficulties that have been solved by improvements but remember the niceties. Nostalgia is a powerful force that we need to fight against - because this kind of feeling that things used to be better is exactly the source of anti-density, and anti-immigrant, and anti-growth policies.
This may not answer the question, but there are a few factors I see:
1. More new ventures (food, housing) are backed by investors that have very high profit expectations. These are PE and VC returns, not simple interest. This means that a simple establishment has to return far more cash to investors, and that has to come from somewhere. This was a factor in the early colonies, BTW where manufacturing didn’t get started for many many decades because of capital return expectations and only picked up during events like the homespun movement.
2. The fully burdened cost of life is outlandish. Healthcare, pharmaceuticals, student loans, housing, and food are all captured and extractive. For a human to work, enough money has to be paid to cover all of these “tolls” which means few who are skilled will be a butcher or builder, or conversely, a skilled butcher or builder will be very high cost.
A piece of this is the results of capitalism. To be clear, I am 100% in favor of Capitalism as the foundation of our economy. While quality matters, it pales in comparison to cost, for the vast majority of people. Cheaper is the result of producers squeezing out the marginal costs, especially where they cannot be linked to profit. We may say we like something, but if we (the masses) do not purchase, it will go away.
The flip side of capitalism/consumerism is the consumer squeeze. Things that work on economies-of-scale in labor sooner or later get to a point where the human-interaction component is engineered out of the workflow. The big gas station probably replaced many more smaller station pumps. Restaurant reservations are now sold because everything core to a restaurant’s existence is squeezed between thin profits and consumers who are intolerant of sensible price hikes - so the restaurant becomes more of a broad marketing operation (and sometimes a cross-country Goldbelly seller) than a simple proprietorship.
From the opposite end - if you are in the business of selling experiences, it becomes quickly apparent that the components are all more expensive than the average person can afford / is willing to pay. There’s no mass audience that wants to pay a tour guide for a complete vacation plan, that’s only something you can sell to the middle-rich
Your first bit there echoes another element of this that I've written about, which is scale. That having larger stores/gas stations/whatever also entails a concentration of activity and people, which creates this feeling crowdedness even in places that are objectively pretty low density. The second bit is interesting too - seems like the same thing going on there with things like food delivery.
I read something a while back when I was wondering why my commute home always takes longer than my commute in and it also cited concentration as the cause. Heading to work you have people coming from all over the place and it's only the last mile or so when they all meet together, but when everyone is going home that same group all leaving at the same time is going to cause a big jam at the beginning which will take longer to sort out and will affect your perception because it took so much longer to "get going".
A good retail example is Costco - I just wrote about how that store triggers that "this is too crowded" feeling even in me, I suppose because it concentrates both geographically/selection-wise like Walmart Supercenters, and also has large carts, and also skews towards large families. But in absolute numbers of people it isn't especially crowded, really.
There’s a classic management book ‘in search of excellence’ ( Roger’s & Peter’s?) major premise is nothing over units of 50 can be effectively managed. Interesting premise.
I do believe that density itself can have a negative effect especially if the energies are not working in harmony.
In our ever more complicated interconnected web of humans the disharmony will continue to be a problem.
I think a lot of the movements we see happening are in response to this.
Intentional communities, fundamentalism, homesteading, religious extremism etc
People do have to remember that the people selling gas aren’t also selling solitude, so if your gas fill experience now involves seeing other people around you… that is incidental, and nothing was taken away. I think people ought to get used to the fact that serenity is not going to be part of the retail experience going forward, given the trends in business
I tend to agree with the idea. Spitballing a few reasons why:
1. People don't care as much about brand names. Looking around my living room at my kids' toys, I see a few "Fisher-Price" and a bunch of "Melissa & Doug", but the bulk of them are made by Chinese companies that none of us have heard of. And if we're willing to buy so many unbranded products, that suggests there isn't as much reward for a company to spend on the quality control necessary to maintain its brand.
2. Federal product regulations. The most egregious example is probably the vapor-retaining gas can with the stupid collar that you have to pull back, an obvious deterioration in quality, but there are also subtler examples like dishwashers, where the regulator has an incentive to promulgate new rules to show that it's doing something, regardless of the benefit to the consumer.
When a manufacturer has to please customer+regulator as opposed to customer alone, it's not likely to be able to raise its prices, and thus has a strong incentive to look for ways to cut expenses - and quality - in a way that won't be immediately obvious to the customer.
3. Inflation. We've all noticed the extent to which manufacturers have cut from their products in the past few years because it's been so dramatic, but it strains credulity to think that they just started doing this during COVID.
Fabulous question. The answers may be anecdotal, but the experiences described are the vexations and puzzles and intimations of decay that are quintessentially common now. Even strangers at the next table volunteer their own examples without invitation. Urban densification may be as toxic as it is marvelous, engaging, and generative (at least for its acolytes). Keep up these revolutionary posts.
I think you’re largely describing the side effects of Baumols Cost Disease. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect)
The only real solution is to find ways to significantly lower the cost of living, and foremost on that list would be lowering the cost of real estate by allowing more development.
The reason I would say density is a red herring is that old places with low growth are still full of the kind of consumer surplus “niceties” that you describe, whether dense or not. But places that are under growth pressure and not allowing the market to supply enough square footage end up with very expensive rent, and this means the businesses have to be kind of cutthroat just to squeak by.
Most people hate change so yeah, basically the concept of loss aversion.
Re: grocery store in hometown had free coffee and cream, new centrally located grocery stores don't have this. In the past, particularly in smaller communities, the customer base for a nice grocery store was likely more homogenous and middle class.
As well, before social media, it was easier for stores to ban low income people who they didn't perceive to be bona fide shoppers without consequences. If a poor person who was denied entry wanted to complain, they'd have to write a letter to a consumer watchdog or human rights tribunal, which requires writing and research skills (to look up addresses).
Nowadays, a person denied entry to a store can post a complaint on social media using a 20 second video, and it may lead to disapproval for the firm.
Thus means that a centrally located grocery store today is likely to have a wider cross-section of society walking in, including homeless and low-income people.
The grocery store views the free coffee as an inducement for customers who are going to spend a hundred dollars or so. In a small-town store in the 1980s, when they could bar poor people, they could ensure that most of the coffee was being sipped by middle class people with money to spend.
But in 2024, with poor or homeless people in the store, the firm is worried that penniless people will be drinking the coffee, and they are concerned that they won't be making purchases. As a result, the free coffee is replaced with a coffee vending machine or a Starbucks.
Population growth, which we see so much more of with all of our screens now (and big Media has monetized clickable disaster scenes) makes everything feel worse - we all see it and even suburbs and “the country” are fuller than decades ago and population increases geometrically, faster and faster - animals show bizarre behavior when overcrowded and people I think feel that same discomfort generally even if they cant identify it, so Density is also sensed even if we aren’t in the dense area ourselves. And together with corporatization/globalization of so much of business, itself due to growth (and greed) all makes us uncomfortable/anxious/irritated, especially at the strip-mall-ification of our towns; and these both make even small businesses less user-friendly - most small restaurants get their food from a semi-trailer from Cisco, frozen processed units, less human, and malls themselves are less personal than shopping used to be. More stuff but less satisfying.
I blame it all on population growth, with all it’s knock-on effects, so, density generally even when we dont live there. Also plus-one on Kathleen Weber comment below, with the addition of media companies monetized to tell us bad news on all of our screens.
Piggly Wiggly is going to close those stores within a year if the merger is allowed to go through, and in most places where Kroger and Safeway both existed there will then be a monopoly which raises grocery prices in many markets. Piggly Wiggly buying the stores is a cheap, dishonest maneuver to get around antitrust concerns. This has happened before, in the grocery industry. We should not trust these people. I’ve lived in a city with two grocery chains where Kroger bought the other one out and the result is job losses and an increase in grocery prices, as any econ textbook would teach.
While I think mergers are almost always bad and should only be approved in extremely rare instances, the Safeway/Kroger merger is particularly egregious, especially since people are already incensed at the recent rise in the price of groceries. It isn’t, say, Google and YouTube, where consumers aren’t really hurt one way or the other and the product isn’t essential for life.