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The breaking of social covenant and the rise of selfish societies
Recently in the news, Red Lobster is reporting an 11 million dollar loss, which is forcing the company to close many restaurants and possible file for chapter 11. The problem? Their '$20 all you can eat shrimp' deal was too good. Some anecdotal evidence indicates that large tables would order one or two orders of the never-ending deal, causing huge losses as large parties would share a single plate for $20, causing significant restaurant losses.
In the past few years, NYC has seen significant increases in retail theft, with stores facing many millions of dollar losses, with the estimate of retail theft being up to 4.4 billion dollars for the state alone. The cost of thefts cause a cyclical cycle, it forces stores to raise prices to cover the loss of the theft, which in turn prices people out of purchasing goods, which again raises theft. So far, the plans the governor has been trying to put into place seems to have done little to curtail any theft.
A 2024 jobs report shows a massive shortage of manufacturing labor, with 770,000 manufacturing jobs open. Labor participation has not recovered from the COVID crisis, with participation at 63.3% just before corvid and around 62.5% from the most recent report. Labor participation was highest before the 2008 housing crisis during the Bush admin around 67%. 7.5 million men have dropped out of America's workforce, meaning that they are not job seeking and therefore wouldn't be tracked as part of unemployment in FRED data.
There's a lot of words spilled on the internet on 'high trust societies'. Places like Japan where a lost item will be much more likely returned to its owner than, say, Detroit. Or rural America, where people will pay money at an unattended farm stand for fresh fruits and/or vegetables. However, trust doesn't fully cover what's going on in the west. /u/johnfabian's post is not about trust, but rather the breaking down of the covenant between constituents and their governments that keep a society basically functions. These social functions are much more simple than trust. It's about not running a red light, not driving the wrong way down a highway, or waiting in line for a train rather than trying to crowd on regardless of capacity.
Western society flourishing was largely predicated on this tacit understood social covenant: on an individual level, each person does their best to contribute through labor - be it stocking shelves to software development to entrepreneurship. In turn, the government upholds the status quo and optimizes legislation for stability and prosperity for the working class.
However in recent times this has changed. I'm not sure if the western governments decided they can have it's cake and eat it, too, or that the only way to perpetuate power is finding a new voter base, but the recent focus on marginalized groups has significantly eroded the trust away from indigenous constituents. It doesn't take a genius to tell that demographic groups are being treated, litigated, and policed based off of completely different rule books, and this type of treatment always creates division and resentment. The covenant between government and the constituencies broke, which changed the payoff matrix. As governments pick and choose which demographics to control, people become more selfish, as the ability to create value from freer markets diminish.
This is why 'selfish societies' is a better term than 'low trust' societies. As much as people love to yell at corporations for perusing short term gains, individuals pursue selfish gains at the cost of others even more as shown from my examples alone. Trust does not fully explain how people behave in the aforementioned examples, but selfishness does. Low male employment, antiwork, and the rise of NEET-dom has nothing to do with trust, but selfishness adequately describes the motivations for the ideological positions they hold. Obesity isn't a trust issue, it's a selfish issue, where people would rather eat themselves into oblivion instead of finding a healthy balance and self restraint. Even the declining birthrate is a result of selfishness; people would prefer to have the increased income and enjoyment of consequence-free fornication instead of laying an effective and positive groundwork for future generations.
The question, then, is it possible for a government to regain the respect of its constituents, and can the people understand that there needs to be some amount of selflessness to create an environment to nurture the next generation?
How snail-brained gullible are you exactly?
They couldn't see that one coming at their giant company, that's been running all you can eat deals since my grandmother was taking me there as a kid? This is classic "loser execs blame others for their failures." Every restaurant to ever run an all-you-can-eat deal knows that the first thing you do is say, No Sharing on the menu, on the salad bar, and sometimes a couple other places in the restaurant. "Any Sharing of Salad Bar food will result in an additional salad bar order being charged." My local diner run by a greek dude from Lesbos knows that. How the fuck would Red Lobster not know that? Every all-you-can-eat buffet I've ever been to also reserves the right, on their menu, to cut you off. My concrete contractor and his sons had been thrown out of every smorgasbord in three counties.
And Red Lobster didn't have any kind of metrics tracking the Shrimp deal, to notice that it was causing losses and end it early? This whole debacle beggars belief.
Which can be directly and obviously traced to the trend towards low-staffing in stores. CVS and Walgreens used to have three to five employees in a normal sized store, and the closest you ever got to "Self Checkout" was my local convenience store where I would wave my Arizona Green Tea at the owner and tell him "I'll just leave the dollar on the counter" so he wouldn't have to get up. Now I go into CVS, and if I need someone I spend five minutes searching the store for the one person working there. And that single employee is almost never at the front desk, where they might at least see me leaving and yell at me, they are nearly always somewhere else in the store, stocking shelves or something. If I wanted to steal some stuff, who the fuck is going to stop me?
To say nothing of self-checkout, which invites casual small-scale theft, even by otherwise honest people. On at least three occasions, I've stolen things in self-checkout by accident. A small item in the bottom of my reusable bag (because they charge me for regular bags), didn't make it out of the bag. At no point have I ever felt like there was any chance that if I chose to steal a few small items I would get caught by the bored employee pretending to watch. To say nothing of, say, buying one 15lb bag of cat food and four 20lb bags, and scanning the 15lb bag five times. Even if I were caught, would the bored teenager at Target really call the cops, or would he just accept I made a mistake and make me ring it up again? It's zero risk.
Why do these companies accept these downsides? Because they'd rather lose goods to shoplifting than pay employees, their losses to self-checkout theft are less than the cost of paying a cashier. They could hire greeters and cart checkers, like Costco does, but they don't, because they lose less to shoplifting than they would have to pay greeters and cart checkers.
These corporations are subsidizing dishonesty, and then hiding behind moralistic bullshit pretending that we're becoming a "low trust society." Horse-hockey. The corporations are the ones creating a world where theft is a zero-consequence problem.
It seems far more plausible that Red Lobster unleashed unlimited shrimp as a last stand to stay open, hoping it would be a loss-leader that would enable them to pay off whatever debt they had to go into to run it, and that they were in dire straights to even consider it. If unlimited shrimp was the only problem they would have simply revoked the deal and moved on.
"People don't drink that much anymore" seems like a far more plausible explaination -- tables eating free shrimp all night is no problem if they are also getting hammered on $12 Crantinis or whatnot. I could believe that R.L. was slow to update their business model to take this into account I suppose.
Yeah, they probably assumed somebody eating unlimited shrimp would, on average, drink 3 $5
bud lightscoors lights and an $8 winearita, and that it would be a loss leader for that reason. But to run that deal I suspect they were already looking at some bad numbers and desperately trying to get people in the door to do their $5 light beer drinking at RL instead of chilis.More options
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