I’ve got another sort of discussion question/half-baked thought for today’s piece. Some of you like it when I have a clear thesis, which I think is most of the time (clear doesn’t necessarily mean right, of course). Some of you like these open discussions. I like them, obviously, thought I write them sparingly. I find the comments more useful than my own thoughts in these cases, and often they help me revisit the topic with more clarity. It has been a little while since I’ve done one of these—last time I wondered whether urbanism was an artifact of lower economic development. I’m asking something sort of laterally related here today.

Is one of the things going in density/quality of life discussions something like mistaking the rising costs of labor for the inconveniences of density?

What got me thinking about this was reading something about supermarkets. I think it was in the comments section on an article about Piggly Wiggly possibly taking over a few D.C.-area Harris Teeters (for those of you in most of America, those are two regional Southern supermarket chains).

Someone commented that Harris Teeter used to be so much better. For example, the chain owned its own dairy farm and the milk sold in the supermarkets was from this specific farm, and was better than the commodity milk they sell now. (Maybe he’s right—I bought milk precisely once at Harris Teeter, because it went bad four days before the sell-by date.) Someone chimed in about how Giant, another regional chain, used to have butchers trimming meat on site.

I’ve seen a lot of comments like this before, over the years—about more personable customer service, about less of a rush and scrum (or about more polite behavior) when you went shopping, about restaurants feeling more hospitable and homey. I’ve always wondered whether this is even really true or not. Apparently, JD Vance shared a story once about an old refrigerator that supposedly kept lettuce fresher longer than any model available today. You hear these sorts of “quality of life is always deteriorating in little annoying ways” and “nobody makes anything like it used to be made” gripes all the time. Whether they’re true objectively is a separate question.

What interests me is whether we sort of see the country getting more crowded and more built up at the same time these annoyances creep into life, and it all kind of gets rolled into too much is going on, we’re building too much, we have too many people. If the inevitable cost increases of manual labor and personalized customer service in a highly developed economy feel like they’re emanating from density.

Do we perceive that phenomenon as “too many people competing for scarce resources” and not “a country too rich to pay going wages for butchers”?

I also had this thought in another context, when I was booking a reservation to a restaurant. I had read recently about a third-party site that sells reservations for lots of fancy New York City restaurants. (I.e., just like ticket scalping.) I learned a few years ago that between the early 2000s to the late 2010s, the wine tastings in Napa Valley had gone from overwhelmingly free to overwhelmingly $40 and up.

And I just wondered: why does it feel like you almost never used to have to make a reservation for a restaurant unless it was really special? Why did it feel like you could just pull up and get gas without waiting in a line of cars or looking for a pump? Why do the huge gas stations with a ton of pumps have less spare capacity than the little old-school two-pump shop? Why does Rural King out in Front Royal have free popcorn and coffee, and why did an old supermarket in my hometown have free coffee with real (shelf stable) cream, and why do centrally located stores today never seem to have these little treats? Why do so many new restaurants—like an upcoming donut-shop-in-the-morning/fine-dining-at-night place in my hometown—have some schtick?

Why does new development seem bundled with a kind of weird, artificial scarcity?

Why are there some places where you just walk in and get served and businesses seem to function, and other places where everything feels tight and under-supplied?

Is it labor markets? Density? Scale? Is it even a real thing we’re discerning, or just imagining?

My sense from picking this up in a lot of different little ways is that a lot of people have the almost automatic thought that building or doing or adding anything will just make this worse—whatever the heck this is.

Your turn!

Related Reading:

Construction In A Small Town

Respites and Little Luxuries

Inhabiting Old Ghosts

Density Of Stuff

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