Future Shock?

New Bern, NC

A luxury of staying at this marina is the free Starbucks Coffee and free WSJ to read in the hotel lobby every morning. It is quite decadent. But on Wednesday, I was sitting there sipping my second cup of coffee when I realized that it didn't taste very good. "What's up," I thought, "Starbucks coffee is supposed to be the best." Indeed, I remember drinking a cup in the Fort Meyers, Fl Starbucks 3-4 years ago that was superbly good. Why wasn't this coffee equally good?

Then i realized that I was applying the wrong standard. Not just a standard of quality, but nearly absolute uniformity. We bought an iPad this year. It is one of millions Apple sold. It is identical to all other such iPads. It was perfect right out of the box. In fact, the idea of getting a lemon iPad is preposterous in this modern world. I was trying to apply that standard to coffee brewing too. Whoops inappropriate.

Years ago, we lived in the analog world (contrasted with today's digital world). Nothing was uniform in the analog world. Even if you bought top quality, a Cadillac car for example, it may have been a Monday Cadillac, or a Friday Cadillac. We didn't expect it to be perfect as delivered. Instead, we expected the dealer to tweak it as necessary to deliver the quality we paid for. No mater what the product, in the analog world there was no such thing as absolute uniformity. In today's digital world, we still have varying quality but we receive, and have come to expect nearly absolute uniformity, in goods if not services.

Not only that, but things that are imperfect are not tweaked, they are discarded. If your pone doesn't work, get a new one. If your TV stops working, don't look for a TV repairman (hardly any exist any more). If your watch battery dies, it would cost less money and much less hassle to buy a new one than try to get a new battery installed in your old watch.

I also got caught by modern attitudes in retailing this morning. I had a flat tire on my bike. This bike is 2-3 years old. I bought it at Walmart for $79. It is very rusty, having been soaked by salt spray when we are out at sea. The fender struts rusted away and I improvised new ones from coat hangers. Libby asked about the other tire, but I said "it could last a while longer.": The mistake I made was to go to the bike specialty shop only 300 yards away for a new tire. I paid $30 for a new tire, plus $5 for a new tube at the bike store (old school) Walmart (new school) would have sold it for half that price. Then it hit me. for the price of two such tires I could have bought a whole new bicycle at Walmart. It was economic nonsense for me to invest so much money repairing my bicycle.

Holy mackerel, things are changing more rapidly that I had realized. Will my grandchildren live to see the day when cars and houses become not economically repairable? That sounds preposterous to me, but until today I would have said that it was preposterous for bicycles too.