Entry 731: The Great Subscription Purge of 2024

We performed a recent audit of our subscriptions here at the G & G house and came to the conclusion that we were spending way too much monthly on services we barely use. I recommend every household do this. It's so easy now to sign up for a recurring charge, and then forget about it and continue paying months after you've stopped using it. Just by going through our accounts and toggling a few "auto-renewal" buttons to the "off" positions, we will save like $70 a month. That's not nothing.

I really hate that the subscription model has taken over our economy. It's one that favors the vendor much more than the consumer. I have no problem paying for something that I knowingly purchase and use. What I don't like is being duped into paying for something or having to buy a bunch of stuff I don't want in order to get the one thing that I do want. But this is often what happens when you buy a subscription. That's why I'm not above working the system -- using friends' credentials,* binge-watching during the free-trial period, and in some rare cases watching pirated streams. Although, you have to be careful with that latter one. You have to visit some shady sites in order to do this, and you're bound to get some weird viruses on your computer. I utilized these "shared" streams frequently when I lived in Australia because it was the only way I could watch NFL games without buying some crazy expensive package, but I did so with the knowledge that I would be buying a new laptop when I went back to the States, anyway. Also, toward the end of my time there, it got harder and harder to find these streams, as sites would frequently get shut down, and mainstream blogs started prohibiting users from posting free links in the comments sections.

*I've been streaming cable channels using my parents' cable credentials for over a decade. The beauty of this is that they canceled their cable subscription about four years ago. Their online credentials still work for some reason. Every time I enter them, I'm expecting to see a message telling me they're invalid, but that hasn't happened yet. 

The thing now that really annoys me is how all software has moved to a subscription model. I opened up Microsoft Word today, and I got a message saying: "PRODUCT DEACTIVATED On Tuesday, October 15, 2024, most features of Word will be disabled." This is particularly irritating, as I purchased Office years ago, and I thought I was actually buying it, like, the old way, like, you download it, and install it, and you have it forever. But apparently not, and now they want to charge me $99 a year to reactivate it. I'm not doing it. It's partly out of principle, but more so because I simply don't use the software enough to justify that cost. I might pay $99 if it's a one-time charge (I thought I already did that), but not as a recurring fee. I do use Word sometimes for my crossword puzzles, but I can figure out a different way, or use my work computer, if need be. I usually like to keep a separation between church and state, when it comes to my work and personal computers, but I'll allow an exception if it'll save me $99 a year.

I'm sure companies have done the math and come to the conclusion that subscription models are better for their bottom lines, but certainly not in every case. There have to be people like me who would pay a one-time flat fee, but a not a recurring cost, and so by insisting on subscriptions, you lose the flat fee for those customers. Or people will subscribe for a short period (maybe just the free trial) and then cancel. I did that with the fancy version of Adobe Acrobat. I needed it for a project I was working on, so I subscribed for a month or two and then canceled when I was done, and I haven't needed it since then. Had I purchased the software outright, I would have paid about twice as much, and it would have been sitting on my computer unopened for the past few years.

I think that's the way to gain the edge -- you have to be vigilant about canceling things you aren't getting enough value from them. When we went through and really looked at it, I was surprised by how many services we basically weren't using at all -- MAX, for example. HBO used to be my favorite, but I realized that there is literally nothing on it I watch anymore -- Curb is over; Succession is over; Winning Time got canceled; and their classic shows, The Sopranos, The Wire, Sex & the City, Six Feet Under, etc. are long gone, and nothing has replaced them. Yeah, it would be cool to have access to their back catalog and their movies, but that's not worth a monthly subscription. I could probably rent anything I wanted for a fraction of the price, and if I get a wild hair and decide I wanted to re-binge The Sopranos or something like that. I will just get a free trial and/or buy one month at that time. There's no need to give them a monthly payment right now.

The same is true for Apple TV. Once Ted Lasso ended, we weren't using it at all, so we dumped it. I might have wanted to keep it if it allowed access to all the MLS games, but that's an extra cost on top of the regular monthly fee, so forget it. We also recently got rid of Paramount+*, Slate Plus**, and PlayStation Plus.***

*This is a the classic forgot-to-cancel case. I signed up for a free trial to watch Jack-Ass Forever, but then I kept it for a bit because I could also watch CONCACAF Champions League games, and then a year later, S asked if we could get rid of it, and I'm like, "We still have that!" That's how they get you, and they got me with this one.

**I went to shut off auto-renewal for this, but it had already been shut off. Past me was apparently one step ahead of current me.

***Lil' S1 used this for a while, but then he stopped playing PlayStation altogether for some reason. Lil' S2 only plays the big sports games -- Madden, NBA 2K, and such -- and those don't come with the subscription. Still, they both told me they wanted to keep it, so I said that they could renew it with money they got for their birthdays, and then they didn't want to do it, of course.

And we still have a lot of subscriptions even after that. We have Amazon Prime, which we use frequently, both for the shipping discounts and for the Thursday Night Football. We have Hulu (the basic version) and Netflix because S watches shows on them all the time. We have Peacock because S's sister got it and gave us a profile, and we have Disney+, just because. I'd like to add Disney+ to the purge, to be honest, but S insists it's worth it for the kids, because of all the MCU and Star Wars content and what not. I don't think it is worth it, but I do like having access to the full The Simpsons catalog, so I'm not going to press the issue too much.

There are just too many streaming services now. The joke, of course, is that everybody wishes they could have cable back, but it isn't really about packaging; it's about volume. There's just too much content to consume, and it's spread across too many services. It's not just TV either. The same thing is happening with podcasts and blogs. Everybody wants you to subscribe to their thing -- their Substack or Ghost or Patreon -- and there is so much great content out there, I wish I could do this with everything I like, but I can't. So, I pick out the one or two things I like the best, and then for everything else, I get the free version, or, if there is no free version, I just don't get it at all.

It's a brave new world, and it's so much better than the timid old world in so many ways. In theory, we can consume whatever we want whenever we want. In practice, however, we can't, because everything requires a recurring financial commitment now. And it's hard to figure out what's worth it, and what isn't.

Until next time...

Entry 730: Mosquitoes

Pretty normal week here at the G & G household. There's still some drama going on at Lil' S2's school, but nothing I can't put my head in the sand about. The teacher who responded to the "racial incident" I mentioned in my last entry got put on indefinitely leave, which I don't love for several reasons, one being that now all three of the teachers in his grade are substitutes. His original homeroom teacher, a would-be newcomer to the school, couldn't get certified in time or something like that, so she never even started; his ELA teacher is out on maternity leave (as is the principal); and now his math teacher is out on leave because of the incident. It's not great.

But I'm also not that worried. Maybe I should be, but I take the attitude, He's a smart kid; he'll be fine. Plus, we have the resources to ramp up his education outside of school, if need be. We already enrolled him at this place called Mathnasium, and I'm optimistic he will put more effort into it than he did into guitar.* He's pretty good at math and analytical thinking and shows interest in it, often without even realizing he's doing so. For example, he'll have me twist a solved Rubik's Cube a few times and see if he can put it back in place (which he usually can), or he'll want to count S's hand when we play cribbage (which we've gotten into lately), or he'll study fantasy football numbers (we're in a dads and sons league together) to figure out which players to pick up, or how likely he is to win.

*He took lessons for about six months, but he rarely practiced and clearly didn't like it. That's fine--he tried it out. Not everything is for everybody. I highly suspected that this would be the case, so I was hesitant to spend the money on lessons and equipment in the first place. But, if you can afford to do so, you have to give your kids a chance, at least. That's my philosophy, anyway. It seems like 75% of parenting is spending money on things your kids will immediately want to quit.

I particularly like that he's getting into sports, because it gives us something to do together, and because I'm convinced that that's how I got good at math -- or rather I should say that's how I built the foundation that allowed me to get good at math. I got good at math because I studied it extensively at the college level for like 13 years. But I think I was already primed to develop those skills because I had a basis of analytical thought, cultivated in no small part from studying sports stats. To give a concrete example, I remember once solving a combinatorial problem that keyed off the fact that in every directed graph there must exist a node in which at least half it's adjacent edges are pointing into it. I used this fact without explanation, and the teacher marked me down a tiny bit, saying that it wasn't obviously true. I said it was to me, and when he asked me why, I said, "Not every football team can have a winning record." My love of sports provided me with the intuition to solve the math problem. So, I don't think things like fantasy football and Madden are necessarily a waste of time.

But then again, a bunch of my friends liked sports just as much as I did, and they didn't parlay it into a math degree and a job in R&D, so maybe the causation goes the other way. Maybe it was my proclivity for analytical thought that attracted me to sports stats. Who knows? Who knows anything when it comes to this type of stuff?

All of this is to say, Lil' S2's schooling is not my biggest worry at the moment. My biggest worry at the moment is the potential reelection of Donald Trump, but that's an overarching worry that I'm doing my best not to think about for the next month and half.* One good way to do this, I've found, is to fill my mind with smaller worries, and lately that's been mosquitoes. They've been so bad in our yard this season. We screened in our porch a few years ago, and that's proven to be one of the best investments we've ever made, but there are times when I want to go outside in the yard for longer than 30 seconds, and I cannot do that without slathering on the deet or getting savaged with mosquito bites. The other day I was putting air in my bicycle tires, and they descended upon me like raindrops in a thunderstorm. I don't know what happened. I didn't think they attacked in packs, but this time it was as if I had shaken up a wasps nest. I thought they were a swarm of gnats at first, so I was just kinda casually batting them away, and then I started getting bitten, and I was like oh no! I ran inside, but the damage was already done. I stopped counting after the 25th bite.

*I'm trying to avoid the forecasts this election. In part, this is because they haven't been very reliable the past few elections; in part, it's because it's so close there's nothing really to look at. You can study the polls all you want, or you can just figure it's a coin toss and arrive at the same place with a fraction of the effort. It helps that Nate Silver took his model to Substack and paywalled it, so I can't impulsively look at it.

I've also started noticing random bites on my body when I haven't even gone outside. That's even more infuriating. It's one thing to get bitten when I'm in their territory; it's another to get got in my own house. It turns me into a lunatic. If I see somebody leave the door open for more than two seconds, I scream "Shut the door! Shut the damn door!" like a madman, and I take vengeful glee every time I kill a mosquito. It's not healthy.

I've even developed my own signature method of killing them: I snatch them with one hand, open my fist a tiny bit, no bigger than a pinhole, and run water into it. It might sound overly complicated, but it's not. Most people try to smash them by clapping their hands together, but that's a very low percentage maneuver. When you do that, you create a puff of air that often pushes the mosquito to safety. I have a much higher snatch percentage using one hand. The thing there, however, is that while sometimes you crush them with the snatch, sometimes they stay alive within your hand, even if you squeeze it together tightly. Many a time I've opened my fist, expecting to find a dead mosquito, only to watch the little sucker (literally) fly away. That's why I use the water. Either you wash off their guts or you drown them -- win, win. The other thing you can do is let them land on you and then slap them, but that's risky, because you'll get bitten if you're too late. Also, you can smash them against a wall or a piece of furniture, but obviously they have to be in the right place to do that, and it's pretty gross to splatter them on something light-colored as they often perish in pop of blood.

I saw an advertisement for this thing you plug-in, and it attracts and catches bugs, and I'm going to buy one. I don't know if it will work, but it's worth a try. We also need to spray more, either professionally, or I need to buy the stuff you connect to your hose and do it. One of my dad friends is really into gardening and sustainable ecosystems and whatnot, and he's adamantly against mosquito spraying, but, I dunno, getting swarmed every time I go in my backyard doesn't seem like a proper equilibrium to me. 

Well, I think that's enough for today. Until next time...

Entry 729: Anal Probe

I had my anus probed yesterday. Well, technically, I had my large bowel and distal portions of my small bowel probed -- the anus was merely the adit for the probe -- but you probably get what I'm saying: I had my first colonoscopy yesterday. The colonoscopy is often used as an exaggerated comparison for something extremely unpleasant -- I'd rather get a colonoscopy than watch that movie again -- and I now truly get why. It's terrible. The procedure itself is fine -- you don't even know it happened* -- but the preparation is brutal.

*They knocked me out with propofol, which I best know as the drug that killed Michael Jackson. It's a pretty good drug, actually. It knocked me out cold instantly, but when I woke up twenty minutes later, I was full coherent, if quite groggy.

For three days* before the procedure, you have to be on a special diet, in which you can only eat plain, soft, colorless food. Then one day before the procedure you can't eat much of anything, other than lemon jello and pineapple popsicles, but that's not a concern because you won't feel like eating, anyway. You don't have much of an appetite, when you are ingesting copious amounts of laxative and "pooping" out everything in your body that isn't secured in place. I use the quotes because, after a while, what you are doing can be better described as peeing than pooping. The stuff coming out of you is a yellow liquid, indistinguishable from pee, other than the fact it's coming out of your butt. You are booty-peeing, and you are doing it almost uncontrollably. I was a little worried I was going to wet myself on the way to the clinic. I didn't, but I brought a change of undies, just in case.     

*The clinic where I got my colonoscopy actually said you should start this diet five days before the procedure. But I didn't notice this until it was too late. I was going by a different set of instructions I found somewhere that said three days. So, four days before the procedure, I had a massive Mexican feast and ate a mound of black beans, the worst thing to eat, according to the instructions. It all worked out, though. I think a lot of times doctors' offices pad their instructions a bit knowing people will not follow them perfectly. It's like how they tell you to arrive 45 minutes before your procedure, even though you will almost surely not be called back until well after your appointment time. It's a little annoying, but what's more annoying is how everybody wants you to do a pre-check-in online now. That sounds like a good, time-saving idea, until you get to the appointment and have to fill out a bunch forms giving the same information you already gave online.

But it was all worth it. I don't have colon cancer, and the gastroenterologist didn't even find any polyps. Not that I was worried about it. This was a strictly preventative procedure. I got it because a doctor recommended I get it. I mean, I am 47, and the internet says you should get one by 45, so, if anything, I was a little behind (no pun intended). The best part is that I don't have to get another one for seven to ten years. The second best part is that in the waiting room before the procedure, they were playing "Baby Got Back" by Sir Mix-A-Lot, which I think was coincidental but would be hilarious if it wasn't. Sadly, Queen's "Fat Bottomed Girls" did not come on next.

In other news, the listserv for the parents at Lil' S2's school was absolutely blowing up yesterday. There was a "racial incident" that has gotten everybody abuzz. The school has been very guarded when it comes to releasing information, but they did release a statement, and with that, and the report of other parents, we have some understanding of what happened. Some kids were using racial slurs, including (presumably) the n-word, and two teachers responded to this by separating their students into groups by their racial identities. During this exhibition, one of the teachers used the unabbreviated n-word, as part of an explanation. (I believe she said something to the effect of, "You can't be calling each other [n-word]s.) For context, the races of the students involved are unknown,* but both the teachers are Black women.

*We do know Lil' S2 wasn't involved, at all, thankfully.

As you can imagine, this caused a big stir -- it apparently dominated back-to-school night and the local news even did a story on it -- and a lot of people have opinions on it they wish to share. I've not posted anything to the listserv, but my feeling on the matter is: Can't we just move on? Do we really need to expend this much energy on this incident? Like, whatever happened to "just don't do that again"?

With regards to the initial incident, the kids using racial slurs, it's bad, obviously, but, keep in mind, they're 9-years-old. They don't really understand what these things mean, yet, and I find it hard to believe anybody was deeply traumatized by this. If anything, making such a big deal out of it, only makes it worse. The students should be told not to use this type of language, of course, but I struggle to see what will be gained by going beyond this.

With regards to the response by the teachers, it's also not great. Students should never be separated by race. A lot of parents of biracial children chimed in to say they didn't like that their kids were forced to "pick a side," and I get that, but I just can't get that exercised about it. Lil' S2, who is biracial, went to the Asian/Pacific Islander group, because he wanted to be with a few of his friends who are also half-Asian, and I couldn't care less. I also really don't care that the teacher used the unabbreviated n-word. She wasn't calling anybody that; in fact, she was doing the exact opposite. Assuming this was an isolated incident, which I think it was, it would be a shame if anybody got too severely punished over this.

Anyway, the district is now involved, and we will see where it goes. I fear there might be some punitive consequences in the offing. The reason I say this is because I don't think the district wants to set a precedent that it's okay for teachers to use the n-word, even in a non-pejorative manner, because they then must apply this same standard if a non-Black teacher uses it, and I don't know that they want to go down that route. This is a situation in which the social and legal rules are different. The social rule is that it's okay for Black people to use the n-word, in certain circumstances, but not okay for non-Black people to use it, under any circumstances (except maybe if you're the evil white guy in a civil rights movie). The legal rule is that people cannot be punished differently for the same offense because of their race. And a school district has to apply the legal rule or open themselves up to lawsuits.

But maybe I'm wrong. I hope I am. Like I said, I don't want to see anybody involved punished too harshly over this. We need a lot more "just don't do that again" in our society right now.

Until next time...

Entry 728: Tired Weekend

It's a tired weekend thus far here at the G&G household. Everybody is worn out for different reasons. Lil' S1 is tired because he's sick. He hasn't really gotten out of bed all day. We know he's not faking it because it's Saturday. Actually, come to think of it, if any kid would fake sickness so that he could stay in bed all day on a Saturday, it would be Lil' S1, but he also turned down the opportunity to go to a friend's birthday party, and he would not have done that if he wasn't really sick... I don't think. Also, he just looks sick. I can't explain what it was, but I could see sickness on his face this morning. Hopefully, he gets better soon. In part because nobody wants their kid to feel ill; in part because I don't want him to get the rest of us sick, including me.

S gets annoyed with me whenever I demonstrate concern for myself when one of the kids is sick -- I guess she thinks it's self-centered or something -- but I stand by it. It's a legit worry. You can make a completely selfless argument that you, as a parent, can't properly attend to a sick child if you're sick yourself. Now, it's true that I'm not completely selfless in my motivation. It's about 50-50 -- I also just don't want to get sick because I don't want to be sick -- but that doesn't invalidate the selfless rationale. Anyway, I just don't vocalize this concern to S anymore. But I think it.

Lil' S2 is tired because he's been running around all day, and I mean that pretty much literally. He's turning into such a little dude, where all he wants to do is play football or basketball with his bros. Today, he was already awake when I got up around 8:30 am, and he immediately started asking me if I could text his friends' parents to arrange a meetup. I made him hold out until 10 am, and then I made a few texts and dropped him off at a field with his cleats (lol), a water bottle, and a football, and just went back to pick him up a few minutes ago at 4:00 pm. He didn't play football the entire time -- at some point he went over to a friend's house and made $3 from a lemonade stand -- but he probably didn't rest much either. It's good, but for the fact he often comes home exhausted and hungry and starts pitching fits over the smallest things. He's in a good mood at the moment, but he's also doing screen time. Let's see what happens when we turn off the iPad in a few minutes.

S is tired because she was traveling earlier this week, and that makes almost everybody tired. This is one way in which S has aged over the past few years. She used to be an almost indefatigable traveler. But now I've noticed she doesn't recover from the jet lag like she used to. When she travels I have to mentally factor in a few days after she returns, in which I know she's just going to be a little out of it, and this is true even for domestic trips. I mean, she "only" went to California this time. Although, to be fair, she took a very late flight home Thursday evening and didn't get in until 2:00 am yesterday. Also, she's just a little sleepy now. She's not in can't-opern-my-eyes-full-on-zombie-and-it's-only-4:30-pm-mode.

I'm tired because I go to sleep to late, so I'm pretty much always tired. It gets particularly bad when I don't have to go into the office, and I didn't go into the office at all this past week. Also, there is football on now, and those games frequently go past 11:00 pm. Also, also, I'm about 90% done with Lonesome Dove, and I've been lopping off huge chunks of it late at night instead of sleeping. Also, also, also, I've been hitting the stationary bike pretty hard. I got my routine down. I go for 45 minutes and knock out 15 miles. That's a cool 20 mph pace. Then I get off the bike and finish my workout with 30 seconds of pushups, 30 seconds of crunches, and 30 seconds of squats. (I'm almost able to do 50 pushups in 30 seconds -- my record in 46 -- which is pretty damn good, if I do say so myself.) I pay for one hour of parking and get back to my car just in time.

Alright, that's all for today. No screens time is about to kick in, and I have to practice what I preach. S caught me on my phone the other day during no screens time.

"It's your rule!" she said to me.

"Yeah, but I really only meant it to be for you and the kids," I responded.

She didn't like my reply. Actually, she did -- it made her laugh. But she wouldn't like it if I was serious.

Until next time...

Entry 727: Labor Day 2024

S is out of town again, so it's just me and the boys this Labor Day weekend. So far so good. I got them to come on a walk with me yesterday, and I fudged how long it was going to be without them getting upset about it. Here's my trick: I said we were going to do a trail that would take no longer than an hour, but then 45 minutes into it, when they started realizing it was going to be longer than that, I said I took them on the wrong trail by mistake, and this one was actually two hours, but that we should just finish it anyway. Of course, they balked at that and demanded we just turn around and walk back. I "reluctantly" agreed to this and thus got an extra half-hour out of them without them getting too mad about it, because they were under the impression the alternative would have been even worse.

It's unfortunate that I have to trick my kids into exercising longer, but one of them is kinda anti-movement, and at his physical on Friday, the doctor said he needs to "run around more". So, we are trying. The other one is the opposite -- he's pretty much constantly moving -- but he starts to get bored on longer walks, which actually works out okay, because then he starts complaining, and so he and his brother are on the "same team" against me. If it gets turned into a sibling rivalry, then the other one won't want to go at all, ever. Really, I would prefer he do something more vigorous than walking (as the doctor said, "walking is for old people"), but you take what you can get.

S is in California for an apparently quite important work meeting, and it falls at a very fortuitous or a very inopportune time, depending on how you look at it. To the former, her good friend is getting married in a few months and is having a bachelorette party (or something like that) also in California, so S can save a lot in time and travel expenses by only making one trip out west. To the latter, it's Lil' S1's first week of school at a new school, and I know it's eating S up to not be here for that. It's also putting more of a burden on me, because I have to navigate a new system of pickup and drop-off,* while also being responsible for pickup and drop-off of Lil' S2. On the other hand, since it's a holiday weekend, the kids don't have their usual Monday School of Rock sessions,** so I get out of doing that, which is nice.

*The goal is to get him to use public transportation, but we're not there yet. Our Metro stop was closed for the summer, so we couldn't practice.

**Lil' S2 plays guitar, and he plays it much like I played saxophone back in the day, meaning he doesn't really play it all. Lil' S1 plays keyboards, and he's not bad, but he doesn't seem to like practicing much either, which is unfortunate. Much like conveying the importance of exercise, it's difficult to impress upon a preteen the importance of practice. But if I could instill one character trait into my children that would be it: The self-discipline to practice. The only way to get great at something is to work at it over and over and over again.

In other news, I read an oped recently about the downfall of Starbucks, and I must say it really resonates with me because the things the author describes are exactly the things that I experience at my neighborhood Starbucks. For starters, I swore off Starbucks long ago -- because Howard Schultz gave away the Sonics to Oklahoma City -- but I came back around because I love coffee, and in large swaths of the country Starbucks is by far the best option for a half-decent cup of coffee. I found that it's very easy to avoid Starbucks in a city like Seattle, where there are tons of independent coffee shops, but it's not so easy everywhere else -- and I spend the vast majority of my time everywhere else. There are a few indie coffee shops around our house, but not within walking distance, and driving to and parking at them is annoying. So, I go almost exclusively to the Starbucks just up the street for coffee. (Also, the truth is many indies have worse coffee than Starbucks, especially iced coffee.)

Typically, I buy coffee beans and brew them at home, because it's so much cheaper, but I do enjoy a takeout iced coffee every now and again, and going to my neighborhood Starbucks is often an unpleasant experience, for the reasons outlined in the article. One of the things I like about going to a coffee shop is the "third place" experience -- the regular interaction with the same people. Before the Starbucks moved in there was a Pete's Coffee at the same location (it was a casualty of the pandemic), and I used to go in there frequently enough that I got to know the manager a little bit and some of the baristas, and it was cool to have those acquaintances. But such things are pretty much impossible at a modern Starbucks, because it's now less like a coffee shop and more like a coffee assembly line -- and a very inefficient one at that.

That's the thing. It's like Starbucks has completely removed the "third place" vibe from their stores, but they also are super slow, especially at peak times, so it's the worst of both worlds. I now order exclusively over the app, because it can be a good 15 minutes before you get your coffee, and I would rather spend that on my couch than standing by the counter with a mob of other patrons, getting annoyed because there are only three workers trying to do the job of five. That's how Starbucks is now: Impersonal and understaffed.

You know, it just popped into my head that there is another Starbucks right next to the Starbucks I patronize, but I almost never use this other Starbucks because it's in a Giant supermarket, and they never have more than one person working there--and it seems as if it's always the least ambitious employee in the building--so it's usually even slower than the regular Starbucks. And they don't allow preorders through the app, so you have to physically wait in line. Often I will buy groceries at the Giant, and then order from the regular Starbucks before I checkout, so that it's ready for pickup by the time I'm done. It seems like a weird thing to do, being that I'm standing roughly 20 yards from a different Starbucks when I do it, but it actually saves me time.

The comp that the article uses for Starbucks is Chipotle, and it's a pretty good one -- the Chipotle by my office has a line literally out the door at lunchtime -- but I was thinking of a different store when I was reading it: Dick's Sporting Goods. I took Lil' S2 there to buy some cleats the other day. It wasn't even that busy, but it took about 20 minutes longer than I felt it should have, because the service is so slow. For most the time I was there, they only had one guy on the entire floor (another guy came out as we were leaving), and he looked, and acted, like a too-cool-for-school teenager. He wasn't rude, per se, but he definitely didn't make you feel like a valued member of the Dick's family. A huge pet peeve of mine is when an employee of a business acts like they're doing you a favor by taking your money, and that was this kid to a T.

I don't know, maybe I'm just the old man grousing about "the way things use to be," but I worked at a sporting goods store that sold shoes once, and back then, pretty much the instant a customer walked in somebody was with them. Even if they couldn't help them right at that moment, because they were with another customer, they would at least acknowledge their existence and assure them they would be with them shortly. Now, it's like, you, as the patron, have to actively hunt down an employee and implore them to help you. It's the reverse of how it used to be. Is commission not a thing anymore?

I'm sure the main reason for this is corporate greed. In their insatiable quest for ever-growing profits, business execs are cutting labor costs to the bone, which means not only fewer workers, but also a more inexperience, less-trained staff, as turnover is undoubtedly super high. But also, I think part of it is that it's now unfashionable to put effort into your job ("quiet quitting"), and it's even less fashionable to expect quality service as the consumer. There's a class-based push-back when you complain about bad customer service: Well, why should they have to wait on you, your highness? But I think this is the wrong mindset, because what it does, implicitly, is devalue certain jobs. There's nothing wrong with being a barista or a shoe salesman, so why shouldn't people take pride in these jobs and try to do them well? I mean, I had many working-class jobs back in the day, and most of them I wasn't very good at (I'm incredibly slow at most menial tasks), but I always tried.* I put effort into a job, not because I cared about the company's bottom line, but because it made me feel better to treat what I was doing with a certain level of respect. If you have to do something, anyway, you might as well try to do it well. I think there is something really dignified and honorable in that mentality.

*The worst was when I was put on deli duty at this little grocery I worked at for a summer on Capitol Hill in Seattle. One of my tasks was to wrap the premade meals in shrink-wrap, and I could not for the life of me work the shrink wrap machine correctly. I couldn't get the wrap on tightly -- it was always super loose and looked like something a toddler would do -- and I burned myself several times on this little hot metal thingy that seals the wrap in place. Thankfully, the store owner, this seemingly 100-year-old man, noticed how incompetent I was, shuffled over, and switched me with the guy stocking beer. "That wrapping contraption sure can make a monkey out of you," he said to me, as he was making the switch.

Of course, in my case, I knew it was temporary, and I was just biding my time until I would be raking in that fat tech money. If busboy at TGI Friday's was the beginning of my career path instead of just a summer job, maybe I would have a different outlook on things. I don't know.

Until next time...