Maybe it’s just nostalgia on my part. I don’t think so. Things don’t seem to work quite as well as they used to. Not all that long along—just the closing years of the 20th century—improvements in life were still coming down the pike almost on a daily basis. The transition from dial-up to broadband at the home level had made an enormous difference: things that were blindingly frustrating became pleasant. Online shopping brought buyers and sellers together more efficiently than ever before. I didn’t need to hop in the car to buy what I needed: they were just a few keypresses and mouseclicks away. Being attacked by malware was avoidable. I’d had the same credit card numbers for decades.
Technical support was available and frequently good. Dell had made a name for itself with good technical support (those were the days!). My cellphone was hefty by today’s standards but its reception was excellent and I charged its battery perhaps once a week.
I had identified, perhaps, one bank error in my life. Now they come with tedious regularity. You’ve got to watch your accounts like a hawk.
All of my neighbors were employed, in some cases over-employed. Now by comparison the building contractor across the street is not nearly as busy as he used to be, sometimes for days or weeks on end. The lady next to him is retired. The two houses just north of me belong to retirees. The man who lives in the house south of me is employed; his wife has, apparently, turned the loss of her job at one of our major newspapers into permanent stay-at-home-mom-itude.
The U. S. hadn’t experienced a major foreign attack on its soil since the War of 1812. The federal budget was in surplus. Household incomes were rising for the first time in decades. We definitely weren’t at peace but we weren’t exactly at war, either.
This is what it must have been like to live in Rome in the 5th century. I don’t mean by this remark to imply some sort of permanent decline. Of that I have no idea. My optimistic side tells me that the best is yet to be.
But things certainly don’t seem to me to be working quite as well as they did just a few years ago.
I suspect it’s more perception than reality. Take one example: speech recognition technology. 10 years ago you’d tear your hair out. (As you can see from the attached avatar.) Now it’s so good it’s shocking at times. I have an app on my phone that I can ask to locate the nearest well-reviewed pizza parlor and it does it. And offers a map or spoken driving driving instructions.
Here’s something that has improved dramatically from, say, 25 years ago: cars. Modern cars just don’t break down anymore. They don’t fall apart in crashes, they don’t get flat tires nearly as often, they don’t seem to lose belts or blow hoses as often. You can drive a long time without seeing a car by the side of the road with its hood up.
I’ll give you one more, just to obey the law of threes: Starbucks does not make a great cup of coffee (Peet’s does) but their brew is far superior to what was generally available 30 years ago, or even, by virtue of market penetration, 10 years ago. If there’s no Starbucks within five minutes of your location you’re standing in the corn. So basically everywhere in the country you can now get a B- cup of coffee instead of the previous D+ standard.
I’ll admit some frustration with the call quality of my cell phone. On the other hand, my cell phone now handles email brilliantly searches the web pretty well, stores photos, takes video, takes still shots both forward and backward and also plays music and audiobooks. So we’re asking a lot of a device smaller than Captain Kirk’s communicator.
I could have produced other examples but I thought I was getting tedious. For example, the digital camera I have now doesn’t produce pictures as good as the one I had a decade ago did. I’m on my fourth (I think) cellphone now. They’ve all had cameras and none of them has taken a decent picture.
I don’t care if my stove has an LED display and microswitch controls. There are more step required now to bake a pie or cook a roast than there were with my 20 year old stove. It’s not an issue of familiarity. The stove’s intelligence has made it less usable rather than more usable.
What precipitated this post was that my email had been out for 15 hours. Obvious mail host problem. There was literally no way to get technical support. Ten years ago technical support was available and good. Five years ago technical support was available and lousy. Now it’s not available at all. (same mail host)
Since I rarely buy coffee from a coffee shop and I’ve never bought coffee from anywhere that was as good as the coffee I bought in the first Starbucks boutique-style coffee shop I ever bought from in Germany in the 1970s, I can’t comment on that other than to say that my experience in that area is the same as in others: for me things are deteriorating.
It’s hard for me to relate to the car thing, too. 25 years ago I drove a BMW. Now I drive a Toyota. Both highly reliable.
Speech output is good. I can’t say it’s changed my life. For my money speech recognition still sucks.
I was born in the late 1960’s and I think things are better now. On banks, I remember going with my Dad to the local branch every Friday so that he could withdrawal money for the weekend. I haven’t had to step foot inside an actual bank for years and I can even deposit checks with my smartphone, so mailing stuff isn’t even necessary. If your bank is making frequent mistakes, then I think you need a new bank. I watch my accounts closely and I can’t remember the last time there was error – at least one that was not attributable to me.
There is one thing that’s worse, though, and that’s the building trades. Construction is the family business, though I don’t participate in it at all anymore. The quality of most building materials is better except for wood. Framing wood for houses built 5+ decades ago would be considered trim grade today. Also, the trades in general seem to be in decline. There are a lot more guys working out of a pickup truck with no skill than there used to be.
Overall, though, things have improved IMO.
BTW Dave, I thought of you as I was thumbing through my latest issue of the Journal of Light Construction and came across this blurb which I will quote in full:
Dave,
Good service costs money. Perhaps the difference today is that there are fewer options that provide good service because most people are unwilling to pay for that kind of service. But there is a lot of choice out there – if good mail service is important to you then I’m sure there is a firm that will give you that benefit just as there are plenty of banks that don’t make routine errors on one’s accounts.
On the other hand, I think you’re right about stoves and such. Microwaves are particularly bad. If it weren’t for companies like Apple pushing the envelope regarding usability and interface, we’d be in a bad, overcomplicated electronic world. Personally, I don’t understand why consumers don’t demand greater ease-of-use and elegant simplicity from stoves and such. Car stereos are another area. So I think you’re right – usability has definitely gone downhill.
Probably a prudent choice. Service is lousy. I’m wary of ATMs and bank systems, generally, for a good reason: I used to design them. I know how lousy they are.
That’s where I think you’re wrong. It’s a one size fits all world. My bank is one of the big ones not because I chose that but because the small bank I used to employ was acquired by a bigger bank which was a acquired by a bigger bank which was acquired by my present bank. There’s no accountability and its procedures suck. For a period of four consecutive months they failed to record deposit transactions which forced me in turn to wrangle with them. Based on forensics I know precisely what happened. Their procedures suck.
In service in many areas the choices are no service, cheap bad service, and expensive bad service. Good service is simply not to be had.
Another example: mens clothing. It used to be that you could get quality mens clothing if you were willing to pay for it. Now even the good stores have poorly made crap. The difference between Target and Brooks Brothers are the name and the price. To get a decent suit I’d need to go to London or Hong Kong.
It also might be that your age has lowered your expectations. You’ve never known a time when service and quality were really good. I still own and wear some clothes I bought 40 years ago. They’re still just as good as they were decades ago with no signs of wear. They were high quality.
I will agree on retail service and clothing. I’ve bought very expensive Canali or Zegna suits or slacks (a few years ago before it occurred to me that I’m a writer and my proper uniform is jeans and a t-shirt) and had buttons hanging by a single thread.
Even a decade ago Nordstrom had very good service. Now? Meh. And the only way to get help at a Macy’s is to trigger the theft alert system.
Against that I’d argue that produce has gotten better at least in premium outlets like Whole Foods or Gelson’s in SoCal. (You won’t find an imperfect peach at a Gelson’s.) But also at Costco you can find crazy good prices on pretty good blueberries and apples.
On tech support, Dave, my son finds Twitter is often helpful. A lot of tech support is on Twitter and if you tag them they pop up and offer assistance. Or not. Depending. He bitched on Twitter about our download speed from Cox back in Irvine and they popped right up offering solutions. Of course none of the solutions actually worked, mind you, but they tried. He also goes to various Reddit sub-reddits to find tech and software solutions.
I think I’m spoiled on produce. My little neighborhood grocery store carries topnotch produce (as good as Whole Foods or better), premium beef, and has lower prices than the chains.
Dave,
So switch banks. Unlike in times past, you’re not restricted to who happens to have a bricks-and-mortar local establishment. Consider a credit union – we get our loans through a credit union and their service is outstanding. For our regular banking and insurance we use USAA. Couldn’t be happier. Good service is out there, it may just take some time to find it.
I just had great service from Apple. My wife’s iphone died yesterday and the warranty expired three days ago. One phone call and they granted a warranty waiver and sent a new phone which arrived this morning. I could have had it replaced last night if I were willing to drive an hour to the nearest Apple store.
I don’t know Dave, I’ve never had trouble finding good service if that’s what I’m looking for, but admittedly, often it isn’t what I’m looking for. I don’t expect people at Walmart to be able to explain the differences between digital camera’s to me and relate them to my needs, for example.
I can’t speak to clothing since I don’t wear suits, but I’m very happy with my wardrobe which mostly comes from Land’s End and similar online retailers (I go online simply because there are many more size options and I get a much better fit). I do have a relative who works in the fashion industry though, and she agrees that things are generally more cheaply made these days but that’s because what’s fashionable changes more rapidly and people buy more clothes and wear individual pieces less often. In other words the industry is responding to consumer demand. I suspect that clothes from 40+ years ago were comparatively more expensive than they are today as a result but they were also expected to last longer. And here again, quality can be had if you’re willing to pay.
No doubt things have changed. I think you are right that good service is more difficult to find in the establishments that you are accustomed to. Maybe that is where age does make a difference – I’m accustomed to finding good service in other ways and in other areas.
And really, the best change is the simple fact that we are able to have this conversation in the first or that I can look stuff up online and find things out for myself. If something breaks, or something isn’t working right, I’d much rather be able to figure out some solutions on my own in my own house rather than haul whatever it was down to a store or service center. It’s easy for me to learn from other people’s experience and it’s easy for me to find firms that provide good service. Call it the 21st century version of “word of mouth.” To me, that’s an improvement, but I can certainly understand that many do not share that sentiment.
Michael,
Department stores? What are those? Frankly I don’t see how they are still in business. I haven’t shopped in one in ages except for the tool section at Sears. I’m not at all surprised that they have poor service since I think they are in what I would consider a dying retail segment.
“a few years ago before it occurred to me that I’m a writer and my proper uniform is jeans and a t-shirt”
Heh, I knew you had some minimal redeeming value.
I gave the suits to charity. I like to think there are a couple of very snazzy 48 Long hoboes out there somewhere.
Perhaps instead of coffee, michael should have identified beer.
My main complaint would be that I think we’re getting better at planned obsolescence designs. Computers and related technologies facilitate this. At my office, we really don’t need any computer technology that was reasonably available 10 years ago, but essentially we have to throw away these modern-day miracles every several years just to keep with the proximate design range of the current market.
While replacing a water heater several years ago, I heard one of the serviceman tell his partner that at the last training session, the manufacturer bragged that they’ve got the design of their water heaters down to expecting them to last one day longer than their warranty. I pretended that I heard wrong, since not having a water heater for a day didn’t feel like an option.
“I like to think there are a couple of very snazzy 48 Long hoboes out there somewhere.”
I think I may have seen them, but really, 3 inch wide pinstripes….and the flowery ties. Really? Oh, and the cologne, well, let’s just say it seems to have faded.
Besides quality beer, for other things near and dear to my heart, check out the comments on Amazon for Michael Burlingame’s “Abrahm Lincoln: a Life.” Hailed as possibly the most important Lincoln biography in a generation, it costs just over $100 with a binding almost guaranteed to fall fall apart when you read it.
The Space Program has also gotten worse. Forty-two years ago were about to land on the Moon. Now we’re about to retire a low-Earth orbiter that never worked as well as advertized, and we’ve really got nothing worthwhile in the works. It’s a failure of long-term planning (which Americans have always sucked at) and a failure of vision. We’ll probably kill The Next Big Thing in Astronomy, too, the James Webb Telescope.
The worst of it, from my perspective, is that I didn’t get my duaghter over to see any of the last launches. She wouldn’t remember them anyway, but I could have told her in my dotage that she had been there. But that’s all gone now, too.
Service in the medical industry has gone to Hell, too. The doctors may, in agregate, know more and have more capability now than they did then, but given that you can’t get anything of consequence done without seeing at least five doctors in at least eight facilities,treatment is effectively worse now. Then you’d die because they didn’t know how to find things out or treat them. Now you die because they can’t coordinate with each other despite large office staffs, telephones, cell phones, email, texts, face-to-face meetings and all the rest of it. Dead is dead, but it’s a pisser to be dead because one no one read their texts-answered their calls-etc-etc, and then to have them bill you for their incompetence.
Bathroom scales are also worse than they used to be. The new electronic ones definitely give hinky results.