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...
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