Can I Help You - Road to the Middle Class

IT’S A GILDED Age, writes Peggy Noonan, an age of fabulous wealth, but the manners aren’t so good. Noonan reports daydreaming into a store on Madison Avenue recently

"Hi! Let me help you find what you’re looking for!" She is a saleswoman, cracking gum with intensity, about 25 years old, and she has made a beeline to her mark.

Hmm. And another store:

"How are you today? How can I help you?" Those dread words.

The angle, of course is that the shop assistant is trying to engage, to have a relationship. And that makes it easier to sell.

No doubt. But I rather look on the bright side of this.

It is, I believe, hard work to be cheerful and outgoing to every customer that comes into the store. This is particularly so when you enter the produce department at Safeway and you are greeted by a worker restocking the food displays.

“Hello, can I help you find anything?”

I find this affecting. There is nothing in the world that I would find more difficult than to stop what I am doing to take a customer half way across the store to find a product and be cheerful about it. Yet the folks working at Safeway greet me like this every time I go in.

I try to respond by being cheerful in return.

I found out recently why they are so careful to greet me. They never know when a mystery shopper might come by. If they don’t greet the mystery shopper then they get into trouble.

They work hard in retail, and they do it right out in the open, not hidden, like many of us, in a cubicle. I think they deserve our respect and consideration.

It’s a question of manners.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

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Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

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Class War

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Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

Conservatism's Holy Grail

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Conversion

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James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
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Drang nach Osten

There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

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