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A Trip to the Mall and our Society-Wide Experiment in Extreme Trust
OR
Whatever happened to dress codes?
TLDR: We expect the vast majority of shops, restaurants, and other common commercial services to provide service to anyone regardless of appearance. This is a nearly unique experiment in human history, an effort towards not just a high-trust society but an extreme trust society, not long ago it would have been common to refuse service based on appearance. This should be considered when debating the role of trust in modern American society: we have removed the mechanisms by which one can establish trust at a glance, and as a result any degree of trust must be universally extended.
My wife's birthday was this week, and for various reasons my original birthday gift for her fell through, so instead I took her shopping at our fanciest regional mall. Which in practice meant wandering for hours through various luxury brand stores, where she mostly bought nothing but tried a lot of things on and took notes for later second-hand online shopping. What struck me most about the experience, along with going to several rather nice restaurants recently for various occasions, was that people don't dress up anymore. Not just in a general, people have no class anymore kind of way. But in a particular, we don't use dress, appearance, and presentation as a basic credit check kind of way. In the old days class was very easily visible from dress, many historical societies carried sumptuary laws forbidding certain forms of dress to the lower classes. White collar and blue collar and redneck, rather than merely being colorful phrases, were specific references to particular modes of work-clothing: a white dress shirt indicated office work, a blue denim workshirt indicated proles, a red-neck was a poor outdoor laborer with no collar at all, sunburned from labor in the fields. The presence of these class indicators showed what kind of work you did, and showed that you had the wealth to keep these things clean. And in social and commercial settings, a person in one mode of dress would be treated one way, a person in another mode of dress treated another. This has melted away.
I mean, obvious, right? But I'm at a store where the cheapest pair of shoes is $800, or a purse is $2,000, or a jewelry store with a selection of $8,000 watches. And people come in wearing flip flops, sneakers, shorts. And the sales staff were taking care of them as customers. It's summer, so of course people were dressed like that. One obvious objection is that the branding on some of those items indicates to the trained eye that a pair of flip flops can cost vastly more than any suit I've ever owned. But the staff weren't discriminating on that basis either: my canvas sneakers were Amazon chinesium, and the T shirt was Kirkland Signature, and at Ralph Lauren the salesman helped me try on a $2500 suit without blinking. The staff essentially treated, and certainly was expected to treat, everyone who came in as a potential customer regardless of presentation and appearance. I'd imagine there's some level of filth or obvious poverty that would potentially disqualify a person and lead to their being asked to leave, but I didn't see it happen. Certainly, many customers came in wearing clothing that would not reliably indicate an income over $100k/yr, and were treated with respect as potential customers. This is a remarkable fact about our society!
We've decided as a society that classism, most frequently enforced on a commercial level through dress codes and similar mechanisms, is Badtm. We all dress like slobs, and you can wander into Cartier in shorts and a T shirt and expect to be allowed in. Restaurants almost never refuse service based on appearance or dress. This is particularly a problem for Restaurants. Where the worst a bad customer can do in a retail store is steal, and this is fairly easily prevented in a luxury goods store by providing security and limiting access to product without a salesman nearby; a fancy restaurant is essentially giving you a very short term loan, giving you the goods up front and expecting payment after the meal is over. A person who refuses to pay, or leaves without paying, could in theory be arrested or sued in small claims but in practice I've never even heard of such a thing. Yet even the fanciest restaurants I've been to recently have no dress code, no attempt to screen in the most basic way that the people coming in have the ability to pay. There's no effort to screen against lower class people coming into a store or restaurant they can't afford.
Racism was, of course, the most commonly enforced form of classism until at least the 1960s. Black people, and immigrants of all kinds, were typically poor, and so if you lacked white skin or had an immigrant accent, you would be refused service. That has been eliminated, largely through long legal and social efforts by activists, but also simply isn't that useful today. I'm not sure the crowd overall was quite majority-minority, but certainly black Americans and Chinese immigrants (or tourists) formed a strong plurality among paying customers, and a definite majority of customers I saw spending vast amounts of cash on large hauls. You hear stories today about black customers having difficulty getting help, or being followed around, but I saw lots of black customers being served, and if it happens at all today it is much more subtle than one would expect if it were being used as a screening mechanism.
But I'm curious as to how and why we abandoned any effort to screen for class or presentation in these situations.
Clearly the lack of screening "works." In the sense that these stores are open and don't do it. Perhaps it is my Wawa theory of societal honesty striking again: there are few enough problem customers that you gain more from refusing to screen than you lose from screening, and that says something about our society in itself. Or maybe we're missing out on what a truly great public retail experience could be if it were done? There are a handful of boutiques that are appointment only, and restaurants at which one has to Know Somebody to get a table, and those are an obvious cuts above. But even the wealthiest wear Hermes and Rolex as status symbols, and those stores didn't really screen at all. So maybe it's a solution in search of a problem? Americans are generally honest enough that it's not worth checking.
But it's still noteworthy that this is an unparalleled experiment in human history, a society that does not discriminate based on class when providing public services, except at the extreme high end or when someone is visibly disordered. And I'm not sure what that means. I've talked before in the Wawa post linked above, about the evolution of their ordering system. At first one ordered, paid over at the register, your order slip was stamped, and then you handed it to the staff in exchange for your sandwich. Then it was that they didn't collect the slip. And now it's that most people order online, and they set the hoagies and coffees on a big rack and you walk up and take it and leave without talking to anyone or being observed or checked by anyone.
It bugs me, because I read all these screeds, from Op-Eds in respectable newspaper weekend editions to NrX substacks to published sociologists, and they all tell me that our society is becoming ever lower trust. That people don't trust their fellow citizens like they used to. And this seems intuitive to me in my day to day. But then I zoom in on some of these activities, and what I'm seeing isn't lower trust, it is higher trust. Once upon a time if you walked into a Cartier in a T shirt, they'd ask you to leave and not waste their time. If you tried to get dinner at a $100/entree restaurant without a blazer not that long ago, they would refuse to seat you. Today, we don't do that kind of screening. That's a level of trust that you see, that is manifest, and it is raised, rather than lowered. The salesman trusts you not to waste his time, the hostess trusts you to pay your bill. Perhaps they screen in more subtle ways I'm not picking up on. But they once used far more obvious ones.
And I'm not sure why they abandoned them.
Yes, most outward marks of class vanished, but class remains. In classless society, there would be no such thing as luxury shops and luxury products.
What happened is that class is disguised. Your boss is not dressed in silks and adorned in gold any more, he does not demand you bowing and scraping before him any more. He looks equally shlubby as you, he shakes your hand and calls you by your first name, but is still your boss.
Clearly, modern capitalism works much better for the upper classes.
Remember, in trad sharply dressed society 100 years ago, lower class dissent and revolution was omnipresent threat. Massive strikes, riots and urprisings were commonplace, revolutionary parties demanding expropriation of the capitalists had mass support.
These things are unthinkable now, the rich are simultaneously richer than ever before, and more secure than ever before. No one in mainstream politics is any threat to them, and they know it.
I am not saying it is because lack of high fashion, but this can be part of the explanation of this mystery.
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La Perla at South Coast Plaza, one of the premiere malls in the US, had people constantly complain about haughty staff, informing them their goods were more expensive than it looked like they could afford etc. The store then left the mall. My uncle mallwalks there in ratty t shirts with holes, which saddens me.
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There is an extremely obvious answer that jumps out at me from reading the text - discrimination laws. Even if you just want to keep out the riff-raff and the poor, class-based policies like the one you're suggesting are going to be an absolute goldmine for any lawyer who knows what the phrase "disparate impact" means. A policy which keeps out members of the societal underclass is going to disproportionately impact black people, which means it is then going to have the business which upholds that policy wiped out in court if seriously challenged.
I actually disagree - there is in fact less trust. What happened is that the spread of insurance and large corporations mean that the costs of accounting for those problems that you're talking about are simply spread out and distributed across the rest of society and the rest of that corporation. They aren't trusting you or their customers - structural changes mean that there's just not really anything you could do to seriously inconvenience them. If you go into an Apple store and just wreck the entire place, destroying/stealing every single piece of tech in there, the costs of your actions aren't going to be added to the bills of people who shop there - those customers are already paying for that risk and have been for years.
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Clothing and fashion lost its value as signifiers.
Dressing a certain way sends certain messages about what you do, who you are, what tax bracket you're in. However, as new money piles in and out, demographics shift, and things shift on the timescale of days instead of years, the symbols lose their meaning. Society becoming lower trust is a side effect of losing the meaning behind the symbols; you used to be able to trust that the well-dressed man in a suit is on his way to a white collar business job. Now you're not sure if he's a crackhead or a psychopath, or some combination of all of the above.
When all the tech CEOs took fashion lessons from Steve Jobs and influencers pulling millions a year drive Lamborghinis in cargo shorts, when scantily-clad women are not 'asking for it' and how dare you imply such a thing, when nouveau-riche Chinese cover themselves in brand names and gold, then why would you bother dressing a certain way if it's fundamentally interchangeable, meaningless? Fuck that, people will wear what's cheap or comfortable in the end.
Might also be worth looking at the "stealth wealth" trend, and the churn in fast fashion.
While it might not be a good signifier of wealth it does really impact your appearance. Well fitting clothes, better materials and wearing something nicer than a t-shirt can easily add two points on a scale from 1-10. Attractive people are more popular, are perceived as smarter and more moral, have better chances at attracting and retaining a mate and are more financially successful.
If you are really wealthy, you do not have to care how you appear to the plebs at all. The middle classes must care about their appearance, bums and billionaires are free.
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One thing I like about living where I do is that at least my rich largely Arab, Russian, Continental European and Chinese neighbors know how to dress better than most modern Angloids. Super rich Arabs of the non-niqabi kind often have a very pleasing kind of modest-Jackie-Kennedy-meets-Loro-Piana vibe (of course Loro is now trashy, I assume it’s actually Franck Namani), with very good understanding of color and a palette that usually stacks cream and white with the occasional burnt orange or blue accent.
Wealthy young people certainly still judge each other on their clothes and spend (tens of) thousands of dollars trying to look cool. That their choices are often extremely ugly is a sad indictment of zoomer fashion, and perhaps fashion itself, but I certainly don’t think it means people no longer judge each other based on their clothes. It’s more likely that sales assistants at expensive US regional malls know that there are plenty of schlubbily dressed people who come in and drop $50k and adjust accordingly. But those people aren’t cool, or even high status, necessarily.
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I feel that. Im travelling in asia right now, and one thing that jumps out is how well dressed people are here compared to back home. Im kind of embarrassed by how shlubby most of the white tourists look here. Ratty stained t shirts vs suits or stylish street wear.
I think it does help with social cohesion. People here are a super high trust, low crime society. Shops leave their wares unguarded on the street, and nobody steals it. Of course there's many factors for that, but i have to think that a society where everyone dresses terribly helps to erode the social fabric.
I would guess its a combination of car and digital culture. We're so alienated from each other, we just dont see each other much in person. In a more traditional society where people still socialize and conduct business face to face, clothes matter a lot more.
I also tend to think most of the modern clothes sold to men just suck. Its either hip hop, video game graphic tees, or gay country club shit. Very little to make an adult straight man feel cool.
To your point of people in Asia dressing much better than their Western counterparts - absolutely. I was shocked by how stylish the Japanese and Korean people were last time I visited. This ties into your last paragraph too, the big brand stores like Uniqlo, Muji etc, make excellent street wear that is really affordable and lacks the garish logos and brand names all over it that you see in hypewear (BAPE, Balenciaga etc).
Doesn't remotely apply to China however, though a lot of this is probably down to the lower level of wealth and presence of many more poor people, even in the tier 1 cities.
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I just want to thank you for giving a headline, a sub-headline and a TL;DR. Good posting form.
I try my best. No one wants to read all that.
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I feel like the obvious explanation is that clothes (at least such obvious ones) ceased being reliable indicators of the things they would want to screen for. I know this is partly my cultural milieu (west-coast-tech-types) but I basically never see a suit in the office. Or on the street. Or almost anywhere that isn't interacting with some financial services vendor or high end retail. I wear a suit very rarely (generally when a restaurant dress code calls for it) and pull down a pretty comfortable income. Before wearing certain kinds of clothes can be used as an effective screen it has to be an effective signal and I think this is mostly not true. Largely as a result of wealthier people dressing down.
I manage a Men’s Department @Dillards and wear a tie, vest, dress pants, etc
I look like a fucking salesman .., which I more or less am.
It’s just not a thing at all in the lower or middle classes.
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Personally, I absolutely love this change and hope it persists. There's something so charming about for example a famous person walking into your store and still introducing themself with something like "hey, I'm Rob, nice to meet you." First name basis with people, more equal treatment, it's not even purely about trust per se, though you do bring up a good point about it. It's the logical continuation of the American disdain for titles and kings. Frankly even if I met someone who was knighted, I'd refuse to use Sir on principle, because I love that about us. To adapt MLK, "I have a dream that one day our children will be judged not by the brand or quality of their clothes but the content of their character." It's freeing. Just like when you realize that the rule of "it's not awkward unless you make it awkward" is incredibly powerful, and you can have difficult or sensitive discussions with people without hiding behind taboo, it also is liberating. As I like to say, people are just people, so the less we do to hide and obscure that fact, the better and kinder I think we are inclined to be.
I think it’s a negative thing. I think that a loss of respect for yourself and others is often shown by how we present ourselves in public. When you’re dressed well you treat yourself as a person worthy of respect and treat the rest of society as aplace worthy of being respectable for. When men wore suits it wasn’t just an empty signal but came with a statement of respect for others. A guy in a suit insisting on being called Mister and calling his boss Sir or Mister or whatever and who is teaching his sons to treat themselves as people worthy of respect and to respect others is contributing to a lot of very important and beneficial things for society at large. The practice of demanding excellence from ourselves and respect from other works to create a society in which excellence and respect are norms and that even those at the bottom of the social ladder.
When the rich choose to forgo those things it encourages others to do so when they can least afford the problems that come with it. A rich person can afford to talk back to his boss because he has enough cushion to weather a job loss. A rich person can be loud and proud about vices like drug use or drinking or casual sex because he can get access to things to fix any problems that come up. This often leaves a wake of people behind who emulated bad behavior without the means to avoid the consequences.
The other thing that happens is that it erodes the culture’s ability to demand good behavior. We lose the standard and the ability to enforce the standards. When you don’t feel the need to dress appropriately for going out, you also can’t say much about others taking it farther. You can’t get that mad about the people wearing pajama pants to the grocery store when you’re wearing sweatpants. You can’t say anything about being lazy when you’re lazy.
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I dunno. This doesn't check out IME. I think a bit of masking is actually necessary. There was an appeal to getting more intimate with the minds of others when I thought "people are just fundamentally good". While it's not like I believe the opposite now, I can't sign on to that statement as-is.
I have been low-key horrified at many of the utterances good friends and peers have made over the last decade. These are decent, nonviolent, funny human beings who turned on a dime and started expressing every cruel, nasty thought they had in the name of authenticity and 'speaking their mind'. I have not cherished this. I wish they had actually shut the fuck up and kept it to themselves. Our bonds were not strengthened, but frayed. They still are to this day.
That's with actual people I'm familiar with in my life. You can probably imagine how much more insufferable this is with celebrities. More irritating is how that class is allowed to express their 'authentic selves' as much as they want while being completely shielded from the consequences of their expressions, while others get no such protections. Pedro Pascal should be C-tier after all the crap he's said, but instead he soaks up more love, more accolades, and more roles. I guess him and his legions of fans are okay with this, and who am I to complain. But I do not feel inclined towards kindness at this state of affairs.
Maybe society needs masks, and kayfabe, and to be just a little fake and gay. Maybe we are better off with some illusions regarding others. Because just like with the global adoption of the internet that was supposedly meant to help us better understand each other - well, it worked. And I am thoroughly displeased with the results.
See Destiny and his ongoing meltdown. I actually thought he was closer to being 'one of the good ones' worth listening to occasionally, and he seemed to make a concerted effort to drop some of the low-effort gotchas that marked thie beginning of his career as a political streamer. Now I think he's telling us what he really thinks. While I believe this is somewhat of a public good, because now I know I don't ever have to pay attention to him again, it is still depressing and unfortunate. And I also now have in mind several friends who are exhibiting this same behavior to a lesser degree, which makes it doubly so.
I mean, humans being what they are, it's more like we need to give people a chance to be good. It may not happen automatically. I think part of that is searching for common ground and, maybe not values exactly, but starting conversations from a similar point. However, it's definitely tough out there. I had a conversation last month with my brother who I was absolutely shocked to see almost explicitly advocate for rage and violence as necessary to wake people up and get people moving (he is very pro-Palestinian). I still think and worry about that, frankly, radicalization and extremism. I was like look, MLK got civil rights done at the end of the day, not the Black Panthers. He still sort of thinks that whites needed to be 'scared' into it, but I strongly disagree. It was getting moderate whites on board by emphasizing our shared humanity and showing a human face to the suffering. Things like Selma, you know? Hard to ignore.
So we ended on what I felt like was at least an okay note, because I ended up saying hey look, I lean Israel here but it's fucked up all around and just a bad situation. But one thing I do feel strongly about is Palestinians are straight up not getting enough food to live. That, IMO, is and always will be on Israel, who controls the borders - it's not like Palestine can feed itself, and huge chunks of farmland were bombed or bulldozed or what have you anyways. So I'm like hey, we feel powerless and that really sucks, let's do something together and call and email our congresspeople, who actually do have someone read/listen to those. It's a small thing, but felt nice, and was something we were able to come together on. But still, it does still really suck and I get that. I really don't like seeing that kind of attitude so close to home.
Well I got a bit off topic but I don't see casual, equal, class-blind service and conversation as really posing too extreme a risk of people indulging their worst selves instead of putting their best foot forward. Aren't most of these mores really about respect and treatment of people short of friends, not friends per se? I think there's still some rules of politeness involved, it's just a casual politeness and not a formal one.
Yeah sorry, whatever your brother said about how the “Civil Rights” movement won its political gains is almost guaranteed to be more historically accurate than the extremely sanitized, simplified, mythologized version you’ve presented here. If this is the narrative you need to believe in to allow yourself to decry political violence and seek conciliation, then by all means please continue to believe in it. But it doesn’t actually bear much resemblance to the nitty-gritty details of how that particular sausage got made at the time.
They all played some part of course, that’s just the sausage of history indeed. But man, the 60s were ugly. BLM and a single assassination attempt is tame by comparison. Apparently the message LBJ used to carry the portion of Southern senators needed to break the filibuster was the basic idea “better you now than someone more radical later” - so the framing of people seeing some sort of racial equality effort being law was seen as inevitable, make of that what you will. But there’s at least some mainstream thought such as some research here including citations in the intro that suggests nonviolent protests were associated with both successful campaigns and shift in vote share more often and more strongly than violent ones. Of course, a funny fact is that at least per the polls, a good chunk of people thought the March on Washington even was counter-productive. MLK wasn’t actually super cuddly and moderate, he was dedicated to making whites feel uncomfortable, but there’s a difference between that kind of “troublemaking” and the more violent kind, even if you might plausibly call both radical or even maybe extremist.
But at the end of the day it was white politicians giving more advanced civil rights to Black people.
Nonviolent protests, especially back then, ran under good cop/bad cop where the violent protests made the nonviolent ones effective.
There's also the fact that "nonviolent" and "doesn't cause harm" aren't the same thing. Protests in the 60s were absolutely meant to cause harm to members of the outgroup. Telling your employer that you tweeted in support of assassination is a nonviolent protest (and so is firing someone for that tweet).
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Tech workers can be very wealthy and dress like shit. Poor people can be very poor but look wealthy, either through knockoffs or through ill-advised purchases. While physical attire isn’t being judged, the workers are probably checking your social cues to gauge level of wealth. You can tell the difference between a tech worker and a hillbilly even if they both wear cargo shorts.
at the commercial mall. Various subcultures still judge your appearance. From youth subcultures to finance. People dress better at industry conferences and on instagram. The mall is just no longer a place where any social encounter of value transpires. It’s a dead third space.
This does happen. Maybe not in San Francisco or NYC I guess, but elsewhere the restaurant will send the video of your car to the police who will charge you.
I think it indicates a breakdown in predictable attire signaling. There’s just tons of wealthy people who don’t dress up. They can be billionaires and they won’t dress up. There can be people who dress up but waste the attendant’s time. And then of course there’s the prospect that the wealthy person you’ve turned away for looking poor goes to the news or your manager or Twitter. I wouldn’t say it indicates high trust, but alienation from a useful common language of socioeconomic signaling.
Your link appears to be broken for me, goes to an unlisted video of "youtube is not supported on this device".
Fixed. Just a silly link from a recent comedy episode (the Shane Gillis Trump impersonation is insane, though)
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It's not a real video url, just site plus timestamp. Most likely he tried to copy-paste in the timestamp and overwrote the video id. I do that all the time trying to hand share YouTube vids on phone.
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Same, an unusual error I don't think I've seen before.
It doesn't look like there's any video link, it's just youtube dot com slash watch and then the timecode.
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Seems to me the obvious explanation is that they are worried this will look racist. Rejecting a redneck might have been fine, but you can't reject a black person for wearing the wrong clothes without getting sued or boycotted. The only resolution is to not have dress codes.
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Interesting observation.
Probably for barber pole of class signaling reasons, combined with physical objects like suits becoming reasonably cheap and accessible to the working classes.
I don't really know people with nice handbags or jewelry, but for the kind of store that has representatives in malls, it seems to be at least as much a matter of motivation as class. Tradesmen can and do buy $100,000 trucks and $500 boots, and would probably buy their wives some nice jewelry or a nice bag if they really wanted that. They might be more likely to just walk into a store and buy the thing than someone in a higher social class, but who isn't embarrassed to take notes and go look for a better deal online.
Customer service people probably can tell underclass and teenagers likely to shoplift from body language and speech patterns more than by clothing. That doesn't necessarily suggest higher trust, simply that the class markers have changed.
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There’s periodic discussions of one, particular, item commonly on dress codes.
Sagging. For those not in the know, it’s a (very black coded) fashion in which the pants sag down enough to reveal the undergarments, or these days often basketball shorts worn underneath regular pants. I see plenty of ‘no sagging’ signs at businesses, although not usually high end ones(those people wouldn’t go to such anyways). This is sometimes controversial because it’s black coded, but a) no one wants to see it and b) blacks who object to sagging are reliably of the better sort while whites who engage in it are reliably trailer trash. A few municipalities have carried out campaigns against sagging- Dallas ran a series of billboards with the slogan ‘big mama says- pull ‘em up’ a while back. These campaigns are routinely mocked by people who, themselves, view sagging as uncouth ridiculosity.
What I think gets left out is that clothes send a message and the act of sending a message is one which reinforces the truthfulness thereof. In a certain sense the spread of the sagging fashion convinces people who do it to act more like they have neck tattoos, and jeans and a ball cap convince people to act more salt of the earth, and dressing like a harlot convinces a woman to act more like one. All of these statements are controversial because there is a truthfulness to them; our fashion choices are conformity with other people who follow the same fashion choices.
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Counterpoint: it is becoming more common for grocery stores & gas stations to lock their bathrooms. This is a downscaling of trust.
Maybe retail is more accepting to take money from anyone regardless of appearance. But the real trust is if they'll let you take a shit like a civilized person.
Yeah, as someone who commutes via public transit and who walks a lot, the lack of publicly-available toilets is a massive hindrance to my life, and is nearly entirely a result of the fact that homeless people cannot be trusted not to make those bathrooms filthy, or not to use them to shoot up drugs or clean themselves. When I visited Japan, I was blown away by the number of publicly-available toilets - surely a sign of the high trust level of the society. (As well as the generally small number of homeless people in that country.)
Counter-counter point: free tap water everywhere, and at least our toilets support flushing toilet paper (looking at you, Mexico)
Comparing yourself with a third world country is not the W you think it is.
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In Basel, I remember when the downtown public restrooms got considerably upgraded! Automatic doors, light soundproofing, self-cleaning toilets, etc.
Not sure where they stand today, but I think this initiative would be completely wasted in most major US cities. I'm sure there were still junkies shooting up in them, but that activity was often traceless.
Public toilets in Switzerland, certainly in the big cities, are infamously drug injection/use sites, especially in Basel and Zurich. Occasionally they make an effort to clean them up, but I’m skeptical it lasts long.
Oh yeah. I remember the needle bins in the public parks, and the permissive attitudes regarding the use sites. And yet, somehow I never encountered somebody shitting in the streets, passed out on a bench, or going schizo at a random passer-by. The mentality seemed to be "Fine, you can do those things. The moment this starts getting ugly or impinge on anybody else, you will get hauled off. Keep it invisible." I saw more social dysfunction from imported Turks and Albanians than from the junkies.
Not sure how well this model has survived. My experience was about 20 years ago. But I had the sense that this only possible as a result of 'Swiss Culture', if that's not too vague. Being a smaller country also helps. It seemed to work well enough for them, but if anybody pitched the idea needle bins in the nearby parks around me here in the US, I'd tell them they're crazy.
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Yes, this has been a pretty big annoyance when taking children into city downtown areas, especially. It isn't trivially easy to locate, then walk to, then order at a coffee shop or something, then get and remember the code in time.
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Last time I was in Japan I was using a public restroom in a park in an apparently rough part of Yokohama. The soap was a bottle on the counter with a handwritten note "please don't steal the soap" (in Japanese ofc).
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I don't think the dress codes were ever to separate thieves from decent people. When we had them, if you walked into a fancy restaurant without a jacket, the response might be "Did sir forget his jacket? Step over here, sir, and we'll get you a loaner". The dress codes were to maintain a certain atmosphere. Now that few customers care, they've largely fallen away. And in the case of some segments, fallen away from the top before the middle. When my wife and I were looking for her engagement ring in various stores, dressed as one might would for a trip to the mall (i.e. casual) we got the snooty treatment from several stores, but NOT Cartier (which is indeed)
Things like placing the orders out and unguarded work because most people just aren't casual thieves. People who steal from stores generally aren't doing it out of opportunity; they are going in there to steal particular stuff, and customer orders (especially perishable ones) aren't useful.
Trust isn't entirely unlimited; if it's violated it can be withdawn. The Jersey Mike's (a sub chain) in my area used to put the takeout orders on a table, now they're back behind the counter, I would assume due to complaints of orders disappearing.
>Mike
>from New Jersey
>calls his sub chain Jersey Mike’s
is he stupid?
Over the recent years I’ve seen quite a few of my go-to restaurants go from self-serve unsupervised online order pickup shelf, to semi-supervised pickup shelf near the cashier or other employee, to pickup from behind the cashier or employee handoff only, or to even no pickup anymore at all.
It was great while it lasted, being able to swing into a place to pick-up my meal and swing out without breaking stride.
Maybe like a #JustGirlyThings quote, I shouldn’t be sad that such a phase happened, but happy that it happened in the first place.
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You can try on a Hermes or Rolex, but you can't buy one. You have to do everything right to get that call.
You can just straight up buy almost all Rolex watches and almost all items at Hermes too (excepting stuff like Kelly bags but even then you can buy them post retail for a markup).
Plus Rolex is the poor man's idea of a high end watch brand. Their stuff is overpriced and honestly, somewhat declassé among those who are actually interested in horology.
Vicious propaganda spread by AP, Patek, and RM fans. It is perhaps more correct to say Rolex is a rich man's idea of a "blue collar" brand. In horology circles, Rolex is the Toyota Camry: economical, ubiquitous, not particularly flashy (compared to other options) or complicated (in the horological sense), and the high end models are mostly a silly joke and a waste of money. But your basic-bitch Submariners, Explorers, and GMT masters remain about the single most accurate, reliable, and abuse-tolerant mechanical watches sold today.
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This is an odd comment. Rolex AD's are notorious for stonewalling customers who wish to buy (particularly newer models) and making them jump through all sorts of hoops. By this I mean retail authorized dealers, not gray market. And there's nothing at all "poor man" about Rolex movement or quality, even for the Vacheron Constantin or Richard Mille crowd.
You may be right that it's a well-known brand and is by no means at the apex of watch pricing, but Rolex isn't in the category of mall fashion watch quite yet.
Why you shouldn't buy a Rolex
An interesting video. He makes an off-hand mention to the high-pressure sales tactic of 'receiving the call' and talks about the various negatives of having one.
One thing I'm surprised about is that they're apparently... finiky? As in, need regular maintenance. Rather disappointing. Give some of the videos of watch restoration of Rolexs that were worn as a daily beater for decades, I wonder if that's a more recent development.
Still, having one isn't on my to-do list, ever. If I wanted a high-end watch, I'd just buy an Omega Speedmaster and be done with it.
"I own three Rolexes" --> makes a video on why you shouldn't by Rolexes.
I agree with most of what he says about the price-gouging, luxury branding, and artificial or prestige pricing. When Sean Connery would have bought his submariner 6538 it would have cost around 2-300 bucks, which in today's dollars would be maybe 2K ish. A submariner today MSRP is anywhere from 10K-40K+. Plus the hoop-jumping for the AD. It's absurd. You can get a Rolex on the grey market with box and papers for 2K USD depending on the version (not a new one, a new one will be considerably more).
I still think they're good watches, and I've never heard about any problems with quality control as long as the watch isn't routinely abused. Certainly not in terms of mechanics. I don't love all their styles, but I would probably prefer any Rolex to, say, a Hublot, where the average price is like 20K and more often than not they look like garbage (this is just my opinion).
I happen to have a Speedmaster and endorse your choice.
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At one point I had finished some consulting work and was considering getting a moderately fancy (few hundred dollar range) watch. My wife warned me that I should on no account get a Rolex. She ended up taking charge of the project for me and got me a nice vintage Seamaster.
My daily driver is a vintage (well, 1990s) midsize Seamaster! It's actually the same watch Joe Biden wears. It's a quartz because I can't be bothered to reset it every few days if I'm not gonna wear it which takes away some of the magic but I have other watches for that kind of show that stay in their box unless I have guests over who would be interested in seeing an IRL tourbillon etc.
Btw, this is amazing for learning how a standard mechanical watch works. The animations are top notch.
I knew before I previewed the link that this would be the ciechanowski animation, and I'm here to express my extreme delight with everything on that site. The GPS animations are also stand-out spectacular. One of the few people on the internet doing interesting things with the new WASM toys.
That man seriously deserves a Public Engagement in Science/Engineering award. Too bad that the people who usually get those kinds of awards aim their content at the level of an average 8th grader and not an intelligent adult who knows a thing or two about STEM...
I thought I understood how bicycles work. Then I read his bicycle article...
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Not true for Rolexes, but yes if you want a shot at a Birkin bag you need to build up a relationship as an Hermes customer.
Nah, you just need to find the right store (some airports, Tokyo) and have a man walk in and buy it for you (since the assumption is that they’re less willing to play the game). Even if you do neither of those things, you can negotiate a purchase as a new customer in a single day, it’s just about how you talk to the SA. The mythos around this suits the brand, but the idea that you have to spend $100k on scarves and horse saddles before they let you buy a black Birkin is just that.
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Similar for certain Rolexes. Desirable colorways are often available on a limited application basis.
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Great post, interesting observation, keen to hear what others have to say. But two quick thoughts.
(1) how much of this is the rise of wealthy Arabs/Russians/Chinese etc. as potential potential customers? Norms can be difficult to communicate cross-culturally and even harder to motivate (“so what if French people think shorts are just for sport and the beach, if it’s hot I’ll wear them to lunch”). But as the purchasing power of outsiders increases, the cost of excluding them becomes greater, so these codes get retired.
(2) Enforcing these codes requires a certain amount of skill and perspicacity, especially once we get beyond Rolexes into Patek Philippes and Vacheron Constantins. As the role of sales clerk has been shunted down the social ladder, most employees don’t have the knowledge or empowerment to enforce them.
Most sales assistants at the very top of fashion and jewelry are either rich kids or wealthy older women looking for light work after the kids have left home. Quite a few are gay men, usually of upper middle class origin, who can make $200k a year doing very little real work other than hanging around the store and bitching all day in between flattering customers. I wouldn’t really describe any of them as particularly low on the social ladder.
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On (1), it's probably people from other regions of the US as well. Especially California, but the entire West has been informal for multiple generations now. When I was a child, men could dress up for going out either Hawaiian or Texan, and the women would wear their normal dresses, but add some artisinal turquoise and silver jewelry. My family usually dressed Hawaiian -- you can just wear shorts and sandals instead of needing nice boots and maybe a nice belt buckle as well.
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