The Starving Aesthete: You're (not) welcome

You’ve been working at the deli for three years now. The pay is garbage, but the hours are decent. An older man comes up to the counter and puts in his order. “No problem,” you reply. Suddenly, disgust. A snarl erupts across the man’s face. He begins to berate you for your poor manners. You attempt to apologize, but it’s too late — the Boomers have heard you. They begin to move on your position, crawling on all fours across the walls and ceiling, glasses kept in place by those weird beaded straps. You panic, run for the exit — but to no avail.  The last thing you see is the flash of crochet needles piercing your flesh as a dozen pairs of golf shoes drive your skull through the floor.

The phrase “You’re welcome” has always been a sticking point in cross-generational relations; it’s been falling out of fashion since the sixties, and by this point the only young people using it are those who have had it firmly impressed upon them by their elders. 

While Baby Boomers bemoan the failing manners of today’s youth in the same way old people always have, there’s a tinge to this particular bemoaning that seems, if not novel, at least novelesque. Not only is the omission of the phrase considered discourteous, but in the cultural cosmogony of the soon-to-be elderly, it’s taken as a sign of the end of days and the final judgment of man. 

While the forms this argument takes are often theatrical and ill-conceived, they contain a kernel of truth: no one talks anymore. Or, rather, people talk less. But, not being a Luddite, I have sought an alternative explanation for this state of affairs.

As a rising tide of automation and computerization decreases the value of specialized labor, less and less of the exchanges of goods and services which are the backbone of cultural commerce require the input of human judgment. The purchase of a McDonald’s hamburger is not an artisanal form inflected upon by both employee and customer through negotiation and specification; it’s a mechanized process which requires little to no specification of intent. 

“You’re welcome” is a phrase constructed to suit capitalist modes of production. When a person uses the phrase, they are saying “I have provided a service for you, which you could not have provided for yourself — you are therefore in my debt, a debt of which I absolve you through the completion of the ritual phrase.”

However, virtually anybody can put a McDonald’s hamburger in a bag and hand it over a counter — and to claim, even implicitly, a debt on the part of the customer beyond the monetary is mildly absurd. So “You’re welcome” has been replaced with many things, often “No problem,” which suggest a different kind of customer-employee relationship, one in which the services rendered are simple enough to constitute not a gift given, but a basic tenet of decency. 

So, next time you get a glare from your grandmother as you pass her the gravy, tell her to get with the times. You’re on the right side of history.