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A Trip to the Mall and our Society-Wide Experiment in Extreme Trust
OR
Whatever happened to dress codes?
TLDR: We expect the vast majority of shops, restaurants, and other common commercial services to provide service to anyone regardless of appearance. This is a nearly unique experiment in human history, an effort towards not just a high-trust society but an extreme trust society, not long ago it would have been common to refuse service based on appearance. This should be considered when debating the role of trust in modern American society: we have removed the mechanisms by which one can establish trust at a glance, and as a result any degree of trust must be universally extended.
My wife's birthday was this week, and for various reasons my original birthday gift for her fell through, so instead I took her shopping at our fanciest regional mall. Which in practice meant wandering for hours through various luxury brand stores, where she mostly bought nothing but tried a lot of things on and took notes for later second-hand online shopping. What struck me most about the experience, along with going to several rather nice restaurants recently for various occasions, was that people don't dress up anymore. Not just in a general, people have no class anymore kind of way. But in a particular, we don't use dress, appearance, and presentation as a basic credit check kind of way. In the old days class was very easily visible from dress, many historical societies carried sumptuary laws forbidding certain forms of dress to the lower classes. White collar and blue collar and redneck, rather than merely being colorful phrases, were specific references to particular modes of work-clothing: a white dress shirt indicated office work, a blue denim workshirt indicated proles, a red-neck was a poor outdoor laborer with no collar at all, sunburned from labor in the fields. The presence of these class indicators showed what kind of work you did, and showed that you had the wealth to keep these things clean. And in social and commercial settings, a person in one mode of dress would be treated one way, a person in another mode of dress treated another. This has melted away.
I mean, obvious, right? But I'm at a store where the cheapest pair of shoes is $800, or a purse is $2,000, or a jewelry store with a selection of $8,000 watches. And people come in wearing flip flops, sneakers, shorts. And the sales staff were taking care of them as customers. It's summer, so of course people were dressed like that. One obvious objection is that the branding on some of those items indicates to the trained eye that a pair of flip flops can cost vastly more than any suit I've ever owned. But the staff weren't discriminating on that basis either: my canvas sneakers were Amazon chinesium, and the T shirt was Kirkland Signature, and at Ralph Lauren the salesman helped me try on a $2500 suit without blinking. The staff essentially treated, and certainly was expected to treat, everyone who came in as a potential customer regardless of presentation and appearance. I'd imagine there's some level of filth or obvious poverty that would potentially disqualify a person and lead to their being asked to leave, but I didn't see it happen. Certainly, many customers came in wearing clothing that would not reliably indicate an income over $100k/yr, and were treated with respect as potential customers. This is a remarkable fact about our society!
We've decided as a society that classism, most frequently enforced on a commercial level through dress codes and similar mechanisms, is Badtm. We all dress like slobs, and you can wander into Cartier in shorts and a T shirt and expect to be allowed in. Restaurants almost never refuse service based on appearance or dress. This is particularly a problem for Restaurants. Where the worst a bad customer can do in a retail store is steal, and this is fairly easily prevented in a luxury goods store by providing security and limiting access to product without a salesman nearby; a fancy restaurant is essentially giving you a very short term loan, giving you the goods up front and expecting payment after the meal is over. A person who refuses to pay, or leaves without paying, could in theory be arrested or sued in small claims but in practice I've never even heard of such a thing. Yet even the fanciest restaurants I've been to recently have no dress code, no attempt to screen in the most basic way that the people coming in have the ability to pay. There's no effort to screen against lower class people coming into a store or restaurant they can't afford.
Racism was, of course, the most commonly enforced form of classism until at least the 1960s. Black people, and immigrants of all kinds, were typically poor, and so if you lacked white skin or had an immigrant accent, you would be refused service. That has been eliminated, largely through long legal and social efforts by activists, but also simply isn't that useful today. I'm not sure the crowd overall was quite majority-minority, but certainly black Americans and Chinese immigrants (or tourists) formed a strong plurality among paying customers, and a definite majority of customers I saw spending vast amounts of cash on large hauls. You hear stories today about black customers having difficulty getting help, or being followed around, but I saw lots of black customers being served, and if it happens at all today it is much more subtle than one would expect if it were being used as a screening mechanism.
But I'm curious as to how and why we abandoned any effort to screen for class or presentation in these situations.
Clearly the lack of screening "works." In the sense that these stores are open and don't do it. Perhaps it is my Wawa theory of societal honesty striking again: there are few enough problem customers that you gain more from refusing to screen than you lose from screening, and that says something about our society in itself. Or maybe we're missing out on what a truly great public retail experience could be if it were done? There are a handful of boutiques that are appointment only, and restaurants at which one has to Know Somebody to get a table, and those are an obvious cuts above. But even the wealthiest wear Hermes and Rolex as status symbols, and those stores didn't really screen at all. So maybe it's a solution in search of a problem? Americans are generally honest enough that it's not worth checking.
But it's still noteworthy that this is an unparalleled experiment in human history, a society that does not discriminate based on class when providing public services, except at the extreme high end or when someone is visibly disordered. And I'm not sure what that means. I've talked before in the Wawa post linked above, about the evolution of their ordering system. At first one ordered, paid over at the register, your order slip was stamped, and then you handed it to the staff in exchange for your sandwich. Then it was that they didn't collect the slip. And now it's that most people order online, and they set the hoagies and coffees on a big rack and you walk up and take it and leave without talking to anyone or being observed or checked by anyone.
It bugs me, because I read all these screeds, from Op-Eds in respectable newspaper weekend editions to NrX substacks to published sociologists, and they all tell me that our society is becoming ever lower trust. That people don't trust their fellow citizens like they used to. And this seems intuitive to me in my day to day. But then I zoom in on some of these activities, and what I'm seeing isn't lower trust, it is higher trust. Once upon a time if you walked into a Cartier in a T shirt, they'd ask you to leave and not waste their time. If you tried to get dinner at a $100/entree restaurant without a blazer not that long ago, they would refuse to seat you. Today, we don't do that kind of screening. That's a level of trust that you see, that is manifest, and it is raised, rather than lowered. The salesman trusts you not to waste his time, the hostess trusts you to pay your bill. Perhaps they screen in more subtle ways I'm not picking up on. But they once used far more obvious ones.
And I'm not sure why they abandoned them.
Personally, I absolutely love this change and hope it persists. There's something so charming about for example a famous person walking into your store and still introducing themself with something like "hey, I'm Rob, nice to meet you." First name basis with people, more equal treatment, it's not even purely about trust per se, though you do bring up a good point about it. It's the logical continuation of the American disdain for titles and kings. Frankly even if I met someone who was knighted, I'd refuse to use Sir on principle, because I love that about us. To adapt MLK, "I have a dream that one day our children will be judged not by the brand or quality of their clothes but the content of their character." It's freeing. Just like when you realize that the rule of "it's not awkward unless you make it awkward" is incredibly powerful, and you can have difficult or sensitive discussions with people without hiding behind taboo, it also is liberating. As I like to say, people are just people, so the less we do to hide and obscure that fact, the better and kinder I think we are inclined to be.
I think it’s a negative thing. I think that a loss of respect for yourself and others is often shown by how we present ourselves in public. When you’re dressed well you treat yourself as a person worthy of respect and treat the rest of society as aplace worthy of being respectable for. When men wore suits it wasn’t just an empty signal but came with a statement of respect for others. A guy in a suit insisting on being called Mister and calling his boss Sir or Mister or whatever and who is teaching his sons to treat themselves as people worthy of respect and to respect others is contributing to a lot of very important and beneficial things for society at large. The practice of demanding excellence from ourselves and respect from other works to create a society in which excellence and respect are norms and that even those at the bottom of the social ladder.
When the rich choose to forgo those things it encourages others to do so when they can least afford the problems that come with it. A rich person can afford to talk back to his boss because he has enough cushion to weather a job loss. A rich person can be loud and proud about vices like drug use or drinking or casual sex because he can get access to things to fix any problems that come up. This often leaves a wake of people behind who emulated bad behavior without the means to avoid the consequences.
The other thing that happens is that it erodes the culture’s ability to demand good behavior. We lose the standard and the ability to enforce the standards. When you don’t feel the need to dress appropriately for going out, you also can’t say much about others taking it farther. You can’t get that mad about the people wearing pajama pants to the grocery store when you’re wearing sweatpants. You can’t say anything about being lazy when you’re lazy.
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