The Rembis Report and Other Fascinating Topics - Volume LX

Do you need a receipt?

"Yes, please." said my dear sweet wife.

"Okay, we sent it to your email, so you are all set." said the clerk.

"No, I am not. Can you print one out so I can see the charges?"

"You will have to wait. We need to turn on the printer and put paper in it."

"Do it."

This was the gist of the conversation when we checked out of our hotel the other day. It was no trouble at all to produce the receipt, but the clerk seemed to just not want to do it. No extra miles on her shoes. No pushing of buttons if she did not have to. The customer was served and leaving, probably never to be seen again, with no tip on the way out the door. So, why do anything more?

The clerk did not say thank you. She did not ask about our stay. She did no more than what her employer expected. She offered a receipt with barely any intention of providing one.

I have stayed at lots of overnight properties. I have spent hundreds of nights in hotels, motels, bed and breakfasts, condominiums, and cabin rentals over the years. My guess is that if I strung out all those days and nights in a row it would add up to between three and four years. I know that is miniscule when compared to road warrior traveling salespeople (I once was one), entertainers and their roadies, long-haul truckers, and airline staff.

But like them, I like to suppose that much travel qualifies me as something of an authority on the receiving end of customer service. When a clerk doesn't care, I can tell. This one had absolutely no concern about anything these customers thought. It was over. Time to move on to the next luggage hauler in line.

Similar experiences awaited us at restaurants when visiting the Adirondacks last week. I am not going to single out any in particular. There was good service at some places. But others did not care that we visited at all. I sensed a great lack of appreciation for our patronage. There was a lot of Do-It-Yourself at what at first appeared to be full-service establishments. Read the board. Grab your own drinks and utensils. Find a table and clean it off if you must. We were hoping for a little more ease. It was a vacation, after all.

Restaurants and hotels in the region have slipped into that DIY sensibility more than we expected. The first hotel we stayed at offered your general grab-and-go breakfast; coffee, tea, muffins, bananas, hard boiled eggs, and yogurt. Quite all right for a place without a professional kitchen. But when we went to another nearby hotel that, according to the sign out front, offered dining, the restaurant was closed. Then, we saw keys left out on the front counter, sitting atop welcome packets directing customers to their rooms. No clerk in sight.

Attempts to plan ahead for evening fare, by gathering paper menus from open establishments, were thwarted at nearly every attempt. Several cafes and restaurants had no menus to take away for perusal and consideration. Instead, we were directed to websites, or told to take pictures of the menus with our phones. I politely refused. It became increasingly clear that service was fading from customer service because the people working there simply did not care. If we would not jump through the hoops, less work for them.

I am not sure that some of them were not the business owners, but if so, I would think that they would not let us get away without menus in hand.

Those who were not business owners, but merely employed, may have been quietly quitting.

Quiet quitting is a relatively new catchphrase to explain something that has been happening for years but is becoming more pervasive among those deemed Generation Z or Millennial. It is going to work and only doing the bare minimum that an employer demands and expects, nothing more. Nothing. Do your job and forget about it. Never go above and beyond your assigned duties for anything.

Slacking off is nothing new. Every employee takes some extra time here and there when they need to. But now those quiet personal moments, which may have been a few minutes at your desk, some extra time in the lavatory, or standing at the end of a cool hallway to gather your thoughts, are being taken in plain sight of employers, customers, and coworkers. And they are being bragged about on TikTok.

Doing the bare minimum in order to carve out time for yourself places a lower value on what you do for work. Anyone who feels that they have to do that is in the wrong place.

Mike Rowe explains how on Dirty Jobs people who do real work and don't like it enough to quit, just quit. They don't slack off and stick around because they don't know how to find their own value. They get out and go find something worthwhile and fulfilling to do with their life.

As a person who has held over a hundred jobs and been fired from almost all of them, one thing I can say for myself is, I generally don't quit. I love the challenge of doing something difficult and unfamiliar just to see how well I can do it and say that I had that experience. Some jobs were not right for me, and I was gone in a day. Whenever it happened, I did not quietly quit. I made it loud and clear that I was in the wrong place, and I was leaving.

This is what happened when I got an assignment from a temp agency to make Styrofoam at a place in Baltimore. I entered a blazing hot factory and was given a simple face mask, similar to the N95, put it on, and followed directions.

We opened bags of powdered chemicals and poured them into vats. All the bags had warning labels. They used phrases like extremely poisonous, do not breathe, seek immediate medical attention, induce vomiting, and were emblazoned with skull and crossbones. I am certain one contained arsenic.

Measuring the powder into the vats was simple. One bag of this, two bags of that, add water, close the lid, churn, and cook. The concoction was poured into cast iron forms that clanked and whistled, pressurized above 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. I thought they were going to explode. After cooking a while, each giant piece, as light as feathers, would be used to wrap televisions and other appliances.

Maybe the fellows I worked with that day did not take their health as seriously as I did. Maybe they were a bit brain damaged by the chemicals. At the end of the eight-hour shift that I signed on for, one of them said to me. "Nice working with you. You do a good job. Too bad you ain't coming back tomorrow."

"How do you know?"

"You coming back tomorrow?" he asked.

"Hell no!" I told him. We laughed. That job was not for me.

Not every job is for everyone.

Over the last couple years there has been a workplace exodus that has been dubbed The Great Resignation. The perfect storm of a pandemic heaped upon the newfound ability to work remotely caused millions of people to reevaluate their personal situations and leave their jobs as a way to find purpose in their lives. It may be the most complex culture shift we have ever seen. People quitting jobs to pursue their own goals was lauded by many, but left numerous employers stranded without staff.

Kristie McAlpine, professor of management at Rutgers University School of Business explains in this BBC story that The Great Resignation is the long-term effect of numerous factors. The pandemic kicked it into high gear, but it has been brewing for quite a while.

One of the biggest casualties is the restaurant and hospitality industry. I worked in many restaurants when I was younger. I enjoyed it more often than not. Restaurants can be fun, and every shift comes with a meal. It can also be tedious, stressful, and downright disgusting. Perspective and attitude go a long way. You can either make the best of it and enjoy it or get out.

Call me naive, but when the pandemic started, I was honestly surprised that restaurant workers were considered "essential." Not working in that industry in decades, cooking nearly all of our meals at home, and frequenting dining establishments perhaps only five or six times a year, I did not see how restaurants were essential. I thought everybody knew how to cook. Boy was I wrong. Somebody had to explain it to me. I had no idea that so many other people went to restaurants so often. I only did so when traveling, so my hometown restaurants are foreign to me.

Turns out that there are massive numbers of people who can't cook for themselves, and food and supply chains rely on restaurants for a majority of their business. That was an eye-opener for me. After a while it all made sense.

But where did all the restaurant workers go? There weren't just tons of jobs everywhere looking for displaced servers and cooks. And where did all the other workers who quit other jobs go?

Every economist on the planet has a theory about what is really happening. As of yesterday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce stated that the labor force participation rate is 62.1%, down from 63.3% in February 2020. This equates to 3.4 million missing workers.

Where did they go?

In the U.S.A. Covid killed a million people and 45% of them were over 70 years old. So, they were mostly retired. Roughly half a million people who died left vacancies in the workforce.

Okay, so what about the other 2.9 million? Where are they?

A lot of people retired early because they could afford to.

But how?

Life insurance death benefits and inheritance from those million people who died. That is my theory. This is the Jenga piece that nobody is talking about. It explains the whole thing.

A booming economy with less people working came from an influx of cash brought on by the domino effect of our dearly departed and their estates.

Now consider how entrepreneurs took that payday to start doing whatever they wanted so they would not have to work for anyone else. Then, pile on how technology has evolved and forced us to evolve in kind, offering self-checkouts and conveniences so readily on smartphones, that businesses realize they don't need employees when the customer can do everything for them. No service. Just customers.

And there you have it. A perfect storm. In its wake, we now have lots of businesses lacking employees and vacant storefronts all over the country. Add to that a mindset which does not see work as a challenge, but a chore, and the only people left to hire are slackers who are going to proudly and quietly quit.

I performed in a live show at a Ritz-Carlton hotel once. While on break behind the curtain, in the hidden hallways between the kitchens and dining rooms, are the service areas customers don't see. Staying there and eating their food was magnificent. I know why.

Because Ritz-Carlton, unlike so many other hospitality establishments, takes pride in what they are doing, and their employees were doing their absolute best. I know this because there was a sign on the wall. It wasn't a little poster hung for inspiration. It was painted in big letters and took up the entire wall of the employee inner sanctum.

It read "Remember that you are ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen." or something to that effect. I was there as a performer but seeing that ethos written plain as day on the wall was inspiring. It offered a sense of purpose and a reason for good customer service.

Soon, the nobility of providing customers with excellence will only exist at those establishments which take pride in hiring and training personnel to be serviceable to the masses, who understand they are maintaining a culture which would be otherwise lost.

I hope they survive.