[mikeash]

That's a good point. It seemed to me that they were making the case that people consciously valued the experience, but maybe it's a hidden value.

It seems to me that there must be better ways to give people social interaction besides making some people sit at a cash register for eight hours a day and making a bunch of other people wait in lines to be served. But that's a tougher argument to make.

[politician]

Well, there's always church.

Religious institutions provide avenues for nominally non-commercial social interactions. Mutiple variants are available to account for taste (e.g. Christianity, some forms of yoga).