My Visit to Starbucks and the Decline of Good Manners and Service

“Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight," Cormac McCarthy once wrote.

Image Credit: Pixabay

I took my daughter out for a coffee at Starbucks on New Year’s Day. She’s 12, loves Starbucks, and is always getting gift cards as presents.

It was a nice time—except for the fact that I wasn’t actually able to order a coffee, as I explained in a tweet on X.

I just took my daughter to @Starbucks. She ordered a dragon fruit-mango lemonade. I ordered a bacon-egg-gouda sandwich and a small black coffee.

"My coffee machine is broken," the server says flatly.

She did not sound apologetic, just annoyed. (Whether she was annoyed at me or the fact that her coffee machine is broken was unclear.)

I said fine and paid for the egg sandwich and lemonade ($11, plus tip).

I think the fact that Starbucks can't serve a cup of coffee speaks volumes about where we are today as a society. It's like going to McDonald's and being told they are out of hamburgers.

Everything is more expensive, but the service and quality is worse.

I’m not very good at Twitter. Though once in a while a tweet will pop and reach millions of people, most of tweets disappear into the ether of the internet. This one, however, seemed to strike a chord with people.

Lots of people agreed with me that service and products are getting worse even as prices keep going higher.

This, I think, is the biggest reason the tweet blew up. Countless people are experiencing what I described. Following my tweet, dozens of people responded with similar stories. One guy said he stopped going to Arby’s because they kept running out of beef. Someone else noted he went to McDonald’s recently and was told they didn’t have any have fries. One person even mentioned a KFC being out of chicken (though I think he might have been joking).

“I went to Burger King and they were out of buns,” another person responded. “I went to Rally's and they ran out of French fries (during a SPECIAL on French fries). Just pure incompetence, laziness, low standards.”

To be clear, I’m not blaming servers for not being able to offer fries when there are no fries in the freezer. That’s not their fault. But I do think the shortages and the poor service stem from the same source.

I think this is a natural phenomenon that occurs whenever an economy moves in a meaningful way from one that is mostly capitalistic and consumer driven to one that is more centralized and bureaucratic. As it happens, we just went through a period of massive centralization (and authoritarianism) that really messed with our economy, so I’m not surprised we’re witnessing more and more experiences like I described on X.

Some people, of course, didn’t like my observation. One young woman thought using an anecdote to explain a social trend was silly. But c’mon … This is X, not a journal article.

Some people asked if I’d ever worked in costumer service and understood what workers in this sector have to put up with.

As a matter of fact, I have and I do.

I delivered Chinese food in college. I also waited tables at a fancy restaurant where people expect not just good service but good food (the latter of which is usually out of the hands of the server). I’ve been a bartender where the regulars want their drinks just so.

This is not easy work, but that’s not the point. The point is a certain amount of courtesy and effort are prerequisites for the profession (at least if you take any amount of pride in your work, which you should). Sometimes things go wrong, but you don’t just say tough. You try to offer a solution (or at the very least express some sympathy, even if it’s feigned).

For example, several former Starbucks workers chimed in and said the server should have offered me a “pour over” coffee. If the server had done this, I would have declined so as to not put her out. And I probably wouldn’t have written a word about my experience.

There were other responses, of course.

Manty people couldn’t believe I tipped the server even though she was kind of unpleasant. Part of the reason I did tip was because I know the work isn’t easy (and, let’s face it, because she was handling my sandwich).

Others accused me of being a snob, either because they felt I was being too picky or because I was drinking at Starbucks.

None of these comments bothered me, of course. Observations from total strangers shouldn’t. And I’m only sharing my experience with readers this morning to make a simple point.

I firmly believe that society functions because of little, invisible things we often take for granted, like good manners.

The great thinker Edmund Burke once observed that good manners are more important than good laws.

“Manners are of more importance than laws. Upon them, in great measure, the laws depend. The law touches us but here and there, and now and then. Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe in. They give their whole form and color to our lives. According to their quality, they aid morals, they supply them, or they totally destroy them.”

I don’t see a lot of good manners today, and I have a theory as to why.

There are a great many problems with statism and bureaucracy, but one of the overlooked ones, I think, is that it erodes good manners.

Capitalism demands good manners in a way that bureaucracy does not, because it’s based on service. That’s why the unpleasant waiter is an exception, not the rule; whereas the friendly DMV worker is the exception. (Yes, I have encountered friendly DMV workers.) The same incentives that make Chick-fil-A so efficient are what also make Chick-fil-A workers so friendly.

My theory is that the pandemic didn’t just cause the material shortages we’ve all experienced. It also caused a decline in good social norms (e.g. good manners and service).

Many readers will no doubt think I’m getting carried away by associating a decline in service and manners with a broader decline in society, as I did in my tweet.

Maybe they’re right. But I’ll point out that I’m not the only person who believed good manners were a sign of a healthy and vibrant society.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy, one of the most celebrated writers of the 20th century, has a line about manners and social decline that many readers will remember from the Oscar-winning 2007 movie No Country for Old Men, which was based on his best-selling book.

“It starts when you begin to overlook good manners,” says Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. “Any time you quit hearing Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight...”