Because I just got back from shopping there and it is another example of why I disagreed with Scott's claim that 'Government makes everyone worse.'
"Paul Krugman doesn't understand why people think government is bad:
"Why, exactly, are these public functions unquestioned bywords for "something bad"?
"Maybe I'm living a sheltered life here in central New Jersey, but I don't find the Post Office a terrible experience -- no worse than Fedex or UPS. (Full disclosure: I worked as a temp mailman when in college.) And nobody likes going to the DMV, but the one on Rt. 1 I go to always seems fairly well managed."
"And in general: is dealing with these government agencies any worse than, say, dealing with the cable company?"
"The prejudice against government seems to have become free-floating, unattached to any actual experience."
"From my perspective, that's the most eyebrow-raising post I've ever seen Krugman write. It's so at variance with my own personal experience as to leave me almost speechless. Yes, dealing with the cable company can be a bit frustrating, but you can argue with them over the phone without the employee losing their temper. If you so much as raise an eyebrow to a TSA agent, they can and will make you miss your flight (I speak from personal experience.) There is simply no comparison. I thought about Krugman's column the other day when I took my daughter in for her learner permit test. She asked why the lines were so long, even before the DMV office had opened (BTW, at 10am--what's that about?)"
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/08/sumner-on-government-and-culture.html
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=29920
I don't buy it. You don't have to be a government agency to be either rude or have long lines. There are more incentives than economic incentives. I grant you the TSA is a pain in the ass but this is not because of government inefficiency. To the contrary-the TSA is directed by Congress to be a pain in the ass. It's just doing it's job of being a pain in the ass very efficiently.
This is a point Garry Wills made in a unjustly unheralded book Confessions of a Conservative. The government can be very efficient assuming we want it to be.
If we don't want it to be a pain in the ass anymore-which I certainly don't-then we need to direct Congress to direct it to be different. This is the legacy of the immediate post 9-11 world. After 9-11 many bought into the Dick Cheney view of liberty which was that any rollback of our liberty is acceptable for the chance of even slightly more security.
Now my visit to Pathmark shows that you have miserable service and long lines at private companies-which ought to be obvious. What I notice a lot nowadays-though I'm picking on Pathmark, this same thing happens at all similar supermarkets these days and many other kinds of big stores.
Basically, there are never enough lines open for the amount of customers at the store. Yes, there are self-service lines which I usually prefer as they're faster-though sometimes you'll get a fastidious machine which keeps saying it can't read the barcode.
But those are only available for a small number of items and I had over $200 dollars worth of shopping today. A lot of other customers already on line also had large amounts of groceries. Yet there were just 2 lines open.
Now here comes the particularly egregious part. The young female cashier on my line was running up 2 ladies in front of me. They both had carts full of food. Still this line looked marginally better to me than the other line so I was on it. After waiting 10 minutes one of the two female customers announced to me that the line was closed.
This infuriated me. If it were closed why didn't they tell me this 10 minutes ago? What made me angrier is I realized that the two ladies ahead of me knew the cashier-one of them acutally worked at the store, the other one may have been her mother.. So the cashier was basically ringing up her co-worker friends before me and then closing her lane when she got to a real customer.
I admit I was angry and had some choice words for her. Then one of the other young women up front-like most of these stores they had nothing but young women on the floor who never seem very concerned with customer service-said 'Jenny, shut your light.' I guess this was a reaction to my complaint.
So now that the cow was out of the barn she was telling Jenny to close it. None of these young women seem at all worried about competition from Waldbaum's, Wallmart, or any other competitor.
So what happened? I think you have two related phenomena here that combine to make this happen:
1. The supermarket would rather understaff and inconvenience customers during busy periods than overstaff and pay extra people during dead periods. Also they would rather have as few on the clock as possible at all times as it makes the store's numbers look better.
2. The young store workers don't care about the competitive position of the firm, they'd just rather take it easy and talk to their friends if they can get away with it. As company policy discourages too many cashiers anyway they have a ready excuse not to open another line when it gets busy.
To return to my point about national cultures, this would never happen in England.
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/08/on-cultural-differences-between.html
"Why, exactly, are these public functions unquestioned bywords for "something bad"?
"Maybe I'm living a sheltered life here in central New Jersey, but I don't find the Post Office a terrible experience -- no worse than Fedex or UPS. (Full disclosure: I worked as a temp mailman when in college.) And nobody likes going to the DMV, but the one on Rt. 1 I go to always seems fairly well managed."
"And in general: is dealing with these government agencies any worse than, say, dealing with the cable company?"
"The prejudice against government seems to have become free-floating, unattached to any actual experience."
"From my perspective, that's the most eyebrow-raising post I've ever seen Krugman write. It's so at variance with my own personal experience as to leave me almost speechless. Yes, dealing with the cable company can be a bit frustrating, but you can argue with them over the phone without the employee losing their temper. If you so much as raise an eyebrow to a TSA agent, they can and will make you miss your flight (I speak from personal experience.) There is simply no comparison. I thought about Krugman's column the other day when I took my daughter in for her learner permit test. She asked why the lines were so long, even before the DMV office had opened (BTW, at 10am--what's that about?)"
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/08/sumner-on-government-and-culture.html
http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=29920
I don't buy it. You don't have to be a government agency to be either rude or have long lines. There are more incentives than economic incentives. I grant you the TSA is a pain in the ass but this is not because of government inefficiency. To the contrary-the TSA is directed by Congress to be a pain in the ass. It's just doing it's job of being a pain in the ass very efficiently.
This is a point Garry Wills made in a unjustly unheralded book Confessions of a Conservative. The government can be very efficient assuming we want it to be.
If we don't want it to be a pain in the ass anymore-which I certainly don't-then we need to direct Congress to direct it to be different. This is the legacy of the immediate post 9-11 world. After 9-11 many bought into the Dick Cheney view of liberty which was that any rollback of our liberty is acceptable for the chance of even slightly more security.
Now my visit to Pathmark shows that you have miserable service and long lines at private companies-which ought to be obvious. What I notice a lot nowadays-though I'm picking on Pathmark, this same thing happens at all similar supermarkets these days and many other kinds of big stores.
Basically, there are never enough lines open for the amount of customers at the store. Yes, there are self-service lines which I usually prefer as they're faster-though sometimes you'll get a fastidious machine which keeps saying it can't read the barcode.
But those are only available for a small number of items and I had over $200 dollars worth of shopping today. A lot of other customers already on line also had large amounts of groceries. Yet there were just 2 lines open.
Now here comes the particularly egregious part. The young female cashier on my line was running up 2 ladies in front of me. They both had carts full of food. Still this line looked marginally better to me than the other line so I was on it. After waiting 10 minutes one of the two female customers announced to me that the line was closed.
This infuriated me. If it were closed why didn't they tell me this 10 minutes ago? What made me angrier is I realized that the two ladies ahead of me knew the cashier-one of them acutally worked at the store, the other one may have been her mother.. So the cashier was basically ringing up her co-worker friends before me and then closing her lane when she got to a real customer.
I admit I was angry and had some choice words for her. Then one of the other young women up front-like most of these stores they had nothing but young women on the floor who never seem very concerned with customer service-said 'Jenny, shut your light.' I guess this was a reaction to my complaint.
So now that the cow was out of the barn she was telling Jenny to close it. None of these young women seem at all worried about competition from Waldbaum's, Wallmart, or any other competitor.
So what happened? I think you have two related phenomena here that combine to make this happen:
1. The supermarket would rather understaff and inconvenience customers during busy periods than overstaff and pay extra people during dead periods. Also they would rather have as few on the clock as possible at all times as it makes the store's numbers look better.
2. The young store workers don't care about the competitive position of the firm, they'd just rather take it easy and talk to their friends if they can get away with it. As company policy discourages too many cashiers anyway they have a ready excuse not to open another line when it gets busy.
To return to my point about national cultures, this would never happen in England.
http://lastmenandovermen.blogspot.com/2015/08/on-cultural-differences-between.html
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