I'm not sure how to empirically measure incivility but it seems like it might be... There's certainly been an uptick in things from reckless driving to drinking to drug overdoses. There's a lot of anecdata from nurses, airline attendants, teachers, etc. about bad behavior being on the rise.
Maybe it's all just due to the stress of the ongoing pandemic. But, some of the articles below point out that these trends began before the pandemic.
Correlation is not causation, but we've been on a 50+ year crusade in American culture to destroy any sort of multi-economic-strata commons.
IMHO, the affluent suburbs in the article are both a symptom- and cause-of rudeness. Most of these kids have never worked a customer service job for minimum wage. It's possible even their parents haven't.
And that's not bad, per se, but if the problem is "People treat customer service workers like shit," then you could start at worse places than empathetic employment experience.
Personal vendetta, but Starbucks is emblematic of all that is wrong with American culture. We took the coffee shop -- a local, counter-culture, loitering-tolerant, independently-run staple of American life -- and replaced it with Walmart (+some feel-good PR).
And as a result, any unreasonable adult is catered to, because corporate policy is to make you feel special. When in reality, you should be banned from the premises after your second meltdown. /gripe
IMHO, the affluent suburbs in the article are both a symptom- and cause-of rudeness. Most of these kids have never worked a customer service job for minimum wage. It's possible even their parents haven't.
And that's not bad, per se, but if the problem is "People treat customer service workers like shit," then you could start at worse places than empathetic employment experience.
Personal vendetta, but Starbucks is emblematic of all that is wrong with American culture. We took the coffee shop -- a local, counter-culture, loitering-tolerant, independently-run staple of American life -- and replaced it with Walmart (+some feel-good PR).
And as a result, any unreasonable adult is catered to, because corporate policy is to make you feel special. When in reality, you should be banned from the premises after your second meltdown. /gripe