CXLVII. Buyer Beware, America

My recent return to Japan saw one thing that has still not changed.

Ichiban.

The customer is number one. Whether I was at a 7-11, hotel, or an airport, it didn’t matter.

Thirty years ago, I traveled the country to understand the Japanese method of doing business. I saw cars being made by Toyota, batteries produced at Panasonic, even diapers being weighed for consistency at Procter & Gamble. Everywhere I went, there was a sense of a shared responsibility in the outcomes.

One afternoon I bought something small in a shop, a few hundred yen, and walked out into the heat. Half a block later, I heard footsteps behind me. The clerk had run after me. He had given me too little change, a coin or two. He bowed and apologized for a mistake that I would not have even noticed.

I have thought about that man for thirty years because nothing in my country has risen to that level of service for a customer.

Why is that?

First, there is public etiquette. If you’ve done something incorrect, the harm is not just to the person but to your own spirit and to the reputation of the company. Consider that in light of the multitude of videos we can see of Americans screaming, shouting, cursing, and acting without shame in public. It’s hard for the customer to be treated as number one when disagreement comes with verbal and nonverbal abuse.

Then there is pride. Right now, our pride is focused on tangible things; more on our looks, our vehicle, getting our hair done, standing out with what we wear or own.

I’m talking more of an internal pride that goes beyond something you see. You do not chase a stranger down the street over two coins because a policy tells you to. You do it because you were taught that the person on the other side of the counter is an equal.

Because we are not focused on overall health and happiness, it is more caveat emptor here. Buyer beware. Get it in writing. Sue. Culture on a discount.

I think it has become this way because legalese has replaced what we taught as cultural norms. We’ve come to expect the worst instead of the best. We have defaulted to not being responsible for anything beyond our own needs. There’s no room for honest mistakes. This is compounded by companies that have decided it is better to treat people as temporary, not as investments, and it is this relationship that is transferred equally to the customer.

Over the past year the American economy added more than 760,000 private sector jobs in industries paying below the private sector average, while losing jobs in industries paying above it. Low-wage work is now more than 25% of our entire labor force, and more than half of those workers say they see no path to advancement where they are.

Think about it the next time you interact with anyone in a business. Do you expect to see them next year? Do you even think about that?

The most sinister force killing our culture is how great wealth has led to great inequality. The distance between the people at the top and the people doing the work is far wider in America: in 2024, CEOs at major U.S. corporations made 281 times the pay of a typical worker, according to the Economic Policy Institute. The most commonly cited comparison for Japan is roughly…11 to 1.

In essence, we use religion and cultural upbringing to tell our kids how to treat others, but built an economy that tries to run on the good graces of CEOs and on service gigs.

Treat a job as temporary and you will staff it as temporary. You will not train for it, because training is an investment and you do not invest in something you expect to leave. So the training happens at the counter, in front of the customer, at the customer's expense, one bad interaction at a time. That is the system working exactly as designed, and our culture is paying for it through lower happiness, higher healthcare costs, and one of the world’s most lawyer-dense countries.

A few years ago, we bought a gas oven that must have traveled the country from its location to ours. When we got it, during the professional installation, the technician noticed a major bend in the line and concluded it must have been dropped. I took pictures and sent them to the company we bought it from.

They refunded the oven and told us to toss it, along with all the time and effort to get it right the first time. While that is a better than neutral outcome, I can only assume that insurance took the place of corporate and personal responsibility and learning from mistakes.

A friend of mine retired last year after thirty-five years of university teaching. He was still finishing coursework with students after he was officially off the books because that is who he is. He wasn’t paid for it. It was just the right thing to do. He got a nice send off and sincere words of appreciation, and then 35 years of knowing how to do things walked out. There was no overlap with a new professor, and no notice to students to make use of their time with him. There was no effort to help the “new head” learn from the “old”. The new professor will learn what he learned, eventually, by making the same mistakes on a fresh set of students. Overlap costs money. Rigid accounting means two people on one job for a season is a line item somebody has to defend. It is cheaper to let the knowledge evaporate and let the customer absorb the difference. We have decided, quietly and without ever voting on it, that experience is an expense (and don’t get me started on ageism).

Tipping is another interesting phenomenon. While most of us don’t mind leaving something for good service, it has become a de facto device to close the gap between what a worker is paid and what a worker needs. Sixty-four percent of Americans now believe businesses are using tips to replace wages they should be paid directly. They are not wrong, and the resentment that has built up around it is not stinginess. It is the correct reaction to being handed somebody else's obligation and told to feel generous about it.

In Japan there is no tipping. None. The service that stopped me in my tracks thirty years ago is not purchased with a gratuity in mind. It is included, because the wage is a real wage and the job is a real job and the person doing it feels a part of a greater whole.

Japan is not without its own problems. They have their own word for citizens being worked to death. Nevertheless, there are enough lessons there to ask questions here.

Pay the wage instead of passing the hat. Staff the overlap. Treat the counter job as a job. Let the old hand teach the new one before the door closes. Treat the public as the public and not your living room. None of that requires a new theory of economics. It requires good public policy that believes the person across the counter, in the warehouse, and under the car deserves the same respect as we do.

We used to know this. Somewhere between the assembly line and the ease of using an app, we traded the potential for a country where a stranger chases you down the street to return change for one where you check the receipt in the parking lot because you assume, correctly, that nobody else did. And if you feel affronted enough, there’s a billboard on every block to tell you a number to call, or an app that will let you post reviews meant to kill a business instead of reform.

We’ve been conned into believing this is how it is and as good as it gets.

Thirty years later, I am still telling this story of the worker chasing me down because I know we can do better.

For those of you, old enough to remember, we are getting closer and closer to the Jetson way of life. A 2017 MIT class project is now an $850 million factory in Ohio, building a nine-seat hybrid plane that lands on a patch the size of a soccer field. Small is beautiful, and an aircraft that can land near where people actually live is how regional cities get reconnected without waiting on the mercy of four big carriers. Maybe not in my remaining years, but certainly this century, Smaller, more autonomous. If we get our heads together.

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Norman Dixon wrote the book on why lions keep getting led by donkeys back in 1976, and Foreign Policy has now read it back against Hegseth's Iran war line by line, down to the contempt for the press and the anxiety about masculinity. Half of what we are living through was already diagnosed fifty years ago by somebody nobody thought to reread.

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Everybody is tired and sad and refreshing the same feed, and the cure is not more feed. Thicket runs live online seminars capped at fifteen students, taught by people who actually researched and taught this material at universities, on Octavia Butler and Roman medicine and Milton's shorter poems, most of them under a hundred and fifty dollars: learn something, talk to a human, stay in the fight.

Azriel Blackman, longest-serving airline mechanic in history, dies at 100

Azriel Blackman went to work for an airline in July of 1942. He was sixteen, fresh out of Aviation High School in Manhattan, and his mother had to sign the papers because he was too young to sign them himself. He was still turning wrenches on Boeing 777s at Kennedy eighty years later, which got him a Guinness record and an airplane with his name painted on it. The part that does not fit on a plaque is that he clocked in around three in the morning for a five o clock shift because he liked being around the guys, and two generations of mechanics learned the job standing next to him. He died in July at a hundred. Nobody parked him out to pasture. Every safe landing you have ever walked away from is what a workforce looks like when it keeps its elders in the building.

The New York Times

Young Washington's failures as a lesson in leadership

There is a George Washington nobody prints on the currency, the reckless 22-year-old whose ambush of a French detachment helped ignite further war and whose surrender at Fort Necessity came after men died for his miscalculations. He never forgot that. Pick up a book by Ron Chernow and he will walk you through the whole arc. The men above Washington left him room to fail, and the failing is exactly what forged the general who crossed the Delaware.

We built the opposite.

A workforce run on liability and winner-take-all, where a single stumble gets you strung up on the most minimal objection and nobody is granted the apprenticeship that turns a novice into anything. Nobody arrives already cooked. People grow by maneuvering, erring, and being handed the grace to try again. If Washington's superiors could extend that after bodies fell, we can manage room for error better ourselves.

The Washington Post

He breaks the election and loses it anyway, and the Senate goes too

The current occupant knows he is in trouble. Does he work to win, or work to undermine the election itself? He has already started. The executive order directing Homeland Security to build a federal list of eligible voters, and the Postal Service to hand ballots only to people on it, is signed. On August 24 the Supreme Court lifted one of the two blocks holding it back. Between now and November third the squeeze tightens, and the rule itself is not the point. The confusion is.

Then the polls.

Homeland Security promised in February that ICE would not be stationed at voting sites. By August, Human Rights Watch had counted agents already present at a New York polling place. Expect uniforms near lines, in enough places to make the video, in neighborhoods chosen on purpose. And expect one more thing none of us can name today. A fresh debacle in Iran, a document waved as a smoking gun, an emergency arriving conveniently in the last week of October. That is the tell. It always arrives.

None of it works. The slapback comes anyway because people are angry enough to vote in person. This time the Senate will go. A year ago the Cook Political Report called a four seat Democratic gain herculean. Since August twentieth, Cook and Sabato have moved Texas, Iowa, Alaska and Ohio into toss-up, and Silver's model has Democrats better than even money for the chamber.

People do not care to be treated as suspects in their own precinct. Finally, they see this wannabe emperor has no clothes.