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3 hours ago
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In today’s hyper-connected world, where I can have anything from a power drill to a little chocolate pudding delivered to my door the same day, shops have it rough. They can’t compete on choice, price or (usually) convenience, and so their single selling point is that little frisson of social interaction that lets a work-from-homebody like me feel like a functioning human for 30 seconds out of my day.
In this challenging retail environment, my local bookshop has hit on an incredible strategy: simply being nice to anyone who walks in. A jovial hello and a smile set the scene, followed by an inquiry about whether I’m looking for anything in particular that’s warmer than my interactions with some of my actual friends. Then – assuming that I’m not just bimbling about – there’s something like a treasure hunt, a look for a good book that might accumulate more members of staff, usually culminating with me buying something I’ve never even heard of before. My book budget has gone through the roof, the teetering to-read pile under my desk now posing a danger to small children and pets. I couldn’t be happier.
It’s a bit weird, then, that more shops don’t behave in this way. Before you call me an overprivileged little prince, I don’t expect the red carpet everywhere I shop – in the past, I’ve spent 10 minutes looking for a pot of glacé cherries rather than bother anyone, and the owners of my local corner shop treat my biscuit-buying habit with the silent judgment it very clearly deserves. But, bookshops, in particular, seem often to actively resent me trying to buy anything – meeting requests for help with pained expressions, and till-side chit-chat with flustered hostility. I worked in a bookshop (for literally about two weeks) in my youth, and so I can understand some of this. Plenty of customers are infuriating or snobbish or oblivious to the other demands on staff time – and maybe I’m unknowingly one of them. But come on, guys, I’m trying my best – and you’re competing against me clicking a couple of buttons without ever changing out of my sweatpants. Maybe just help me find a nice book about the Battle of the Atlantic?
More and more, it feels like sitting in the sweet spot of the Venn diagram where the “providing the goods and services you advertise” and “not being openly rancorous” overlap is what separates gangbuster businesses from those struggling to stay afloat. In my area, there seems to be exactly one building service that’s more or less guaranteed to reply to an email on the same day they get it; they also get most of the work because nobody else seems all that interested in it. On the (infrequent) occasions that a young journalist asks me for advice, I tell them to ignore all the old stuff about being good/fast/cheap, and instead concentrate on being communicative and easy to work with, because nobody in the modern world can afford a Hunter S Thompson gumming up the gears. And, incidentally, I do very much apply this to myself – I might be terrible on deadlines, but I try my absolute best to keep my interactions with the people I work with positive and friction-free. I don’t have the relentless energy of the generations coming up behind me, but I do (mostly) answer my phone.
I don’t really like the way algorithms are pushing our social interactions and spending habits – I doubt anyone does – but friendliness, for now, is the one thing we have going for us in the war against the machines. Yes, ChatGPT and Claude can pretend that they enjoy my company or suggest a reading list to me, but they can’t offer me a chocolate finger or make me feel as if it’s just the two of us trying to find something fun to read. So I suppose what I’m saying is: please let’s all just be a little bit nicer to each other, at least until we hit the singularity, when finding a good Japanese mystery thriller becomes the least of anyone’s concerns. We might not be the big dogs at chess or medical diagnostics any more, but at least we can laugh at each other’s jokes.
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Joel Snape is a writer and fitness expert
