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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.
Great post, interesting observation, keen to hear what others have to say. But two quick thoughts.
(1) how much of this is the rise of wealthy Arabs/Russians/Chinese etc. as potential potential customers? Norms can be difficult to communicate cross-culturally and even harder to motivate (“so what if French people think shorts are just for sport and the beach, if it’s hot I’ll wear them to lunch”). But as the purchasing power of outsiders increases, the cost of excluding them becomes greater, so these codes get retired.
(2) Enforcing these codes requires a certain amount of skill and perspicacity, especially once we get beyond Rolexes into Patek Philippes and Vacheron Constantins. As the role of sales clerk has been shunted down the social ladder, most employees don’t have the knowledge or empowerment to enforce them.
Most sales assistants at the very top of fashion and jewelry are either rich kids or wealthy older women looking for light work after the kids have left home. Quite a few are gay men, usually of upper middle class origin, who can make $200k a year doing very little real work other than hanging around the store and bitching all day in between flattering customers. I wouldn’t really describe any of them as particularly low on the social ladder.
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