Everything is Stupid and Expensive Now

We all feel it. It's OK to say so.

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On a recent Instacart run through Target, I noticed that every single item I was supposed to shop for had the wrong aisle assigned.

For those who have never seen the other side of a delivery app: the whole time you’re shopping, a timer is running, and you’re often handling multiple orders for multiple customers at the same store, so those location markers — when they are correct — are extremely helpful in getting the job done quickly. Even if you know the store well, you’d be amazed how many items you’ve never noticed because you simply weren’t looking for them.

So, I found myself wandering towards the back of the grocery section, shaking my head, mumbling, “They’re all wrong. Every single one of these is wrong…”

I came across a young man in the soda aisle, on the phone with some sort of customer service. He was wearing a red shirt, marking him as an employee, and from the sounds of things he was trying to get help with some kind of inventory issue. I caught only the tail end of the call, just long enough to hear the woman on the line thank him and hang up on him just as he was starting to ask a new question. He looked up with this exasperated expression, and we made eye contact. I felt it.

“Why is everything so stupid now?” I asked him.

“I don’t know, but it really is.” He laughed, wearily.

My entire trip through the store was like a blindfolded scavenger hunt. It’s one thing to go shopping for things you buy regularly, because you have a basic idea where to find them in your favorite retailer. But when all you do is shop for stuff other people buy that you never do — I have no idea where they kept the 5 packs of Little Bites Blueberry muffins, or where to find a 3-compartment ladies’ tote bag — it can get pretty challenging.

“I’m looking for a lens-cleaning microfiber cloth,” I say to another employee, turning my phone screen towards him in a move I swear he flinched inwardly at. These poor employees get asked these questions by app shoppers all day, every day.

“I tried looking in the eye care section, but the only thing there are band-aids, for some reason.” I added.

“Yeah,” he murped, his voice a little closer to Kermit the Frog than I anticipated. “They recently moved everything around.”

Turned out, the lens-cleaning cloth, which was much smaller in real life than it looked in the picture, was adjacent to Target’s surprisingly extensive vibrator selection.

Because obviously, where else would it be?

It took three additional employees to help me find the tote bag. It was a full-on community event.

“The things we do to feed our kids,” I said to the middle-aged woman at the checkout.

“Tell me about it,” she said, her look softening to one of understanding and camaraderie.

I’ve been noticing that a lot, lately. Checkout and bagger positions manned by silver-haired folks, usually white, who should be enjoying their golden years. People closer to my parents’ age than mine.

“I started out my working life bagging groceries,” says Ed, my favorite cashier at Wegman’s. He looks to be in his late 50s or early 60s. “I never thought I would wind up back here.”

“I used to own my own business,” I said. “Now this is all I can find.” We talk as we work together to make sure the three orders overflowing my cart are properly labeled and separated. I like Ed because he’s smart, works quickly, and goes the extra mile to help me not mix things up.

I saw a tweet this morning about reverse discrimination in hiring practices, that confirms my suspicions after getting no replies on any professional job applications:

I work in tech recruiting.

It's 100% your race, gender, sexuality and nationality blocking you.

Our ATS/HR systems can sort and filter you by "pipelines" which users label with demographics.

Most have diversity features that alert you when you have too much or too little of a certain group.

We have constant lunch-n-learns and seminars about how to recruit "for diversity" in a "compliant" way (how to do it illegally without getting caught).

We pay NGOs and staffing agencies to hand us resumes from people who are only of a certain race or gender.

Our "global mobility" departments get the foreign resumes and we put them first because they cost less AND check off DEI boxes.

We put you on blacklists/ignore lists/do-not-hire lists if you arent diverse. And if we don't have that feature, we put it in the "notes" on the candidate file.

It is DEFINITELY discrimination. Every straight white American male I've screened was qualified and well-versed for the position they were going for, and every time I was told by superiors to focus on "other pipelines" AKA the diversity hires.

In the replies, someone posted a recent article at Yahoo Finance that backs this up:

Hundreds of companies are deliberately shunning white men for jobs amid pressure to make workplaces more diverse, a survey has found.

A poll of 1,216 of American businesses with diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies found that one in 10 avoid hiring white men altogether and six in 10 human resource (HR) managers put diversity over qualifications when selecting candidates.

If you’re a middle-aged white man trying to restart your career, good luck. You can probably do retail, delivery, or restaurant work, but don’t get your hopes up about much else. Certainly not anything that pays a living wage.

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I’ve never used Instacart or DoorDash to get food for myself. Never in my life. I used UberEats once, but only because I got a promo that made my meal ridiculously cheap. I would rather drive to the store at 10:30PM in the rain than pay the fee for convenience.

But you know what my daily experience tells me about the demographics who are fine with paying that fee?

Poor people who live in slum rentals. Big apartment complex dwellers — especially on the top floor, up several flights of steps. College students who should be saving everything they can for the brutal economic reality they’re going to graduate into.

The other night, I delivered a box of cereal, some milk, and a pint of ice cream from a grocery store to a shanty-town apartment building less than a mile away. That run made me $11. It took less than 20 minutes of my time. I can only imagine that the poor girl who ordered it must have paid about 200% over what it would have cost if she’d gotten it herself.

To say nothing of the people who are buying takeout food. I got a Mediterranean salad from Panera when I was on an out of state trip recently, and it was almost $17, including tax.

FOR A FREAKING SALAD.

But if people are willing to pay for this convenience, who is this Dasher to judge? If Klarna wants to offer financing for takeout food, who am I to question such horrible-idea financial practices?

Thank you. God bless you. I need the work, so I’ll take the money, but y’all need to learn some basic financial literacy, for your own sake.

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So much of our lives these days are dependent on technology. Apps. Programs. Subscriptions. Services.

But they often don’t work. And many charge endless recurring fees without providing any new value.

If Instacart crashes out, like it was doing last night, I can’t scan the bar codes at the store, and so I can’t complete the order. If the GPS takes me 9 miles in the wrong direction down a FREAKING TOLL ROAD to make a delivery to a house I’ve never gone to before, that just costs me time and gas and money. But there’s nobody to complain to. I mean sure, I can try to start up a chat with Instacart customer service, so that they can waste 20-30 minutes of my life and still not help me, but why?

I got charged $95 yesterday for an annual subscription I had completely forgotten about. I only had $200 in my account. It’s a service I used to collect and brainstorm ideas, so it’s worth it to me to have it, but why can’t I just buy it once, instead of over and over and over? It’s not worth hundreds and hundreds of dollars. But there’s no good “buy-it-once” alternative, so I pay.

Adobe emailed me this morning to let me know that since I’m “graduating in June,” I am no longer eligible for “student pricing” on creative suite, and it’s going up from $40 to $70 a month! I was never signed up as a student — I did buy my subscription through my non-profit, at a discount — but even though I use Adobe products every day, I can’t afford that kind of outlay on the monthly. I clicked the link in the email to update my status, and it just took me to a dead page. I tried clearing out the trailing text and just going to the primary domain, and that also gave me a 404. I attempted to reply to Adobe’s email, and it bounced.

And again: there’s nobody to talk to most of the time, and even if you can, they’re never empowered to actually help you. There’s always some policy in the way, tying their hands, making it impossible.

I went with my wife to visit a house we are listing, and when the elderly gentleman who lived there let us in, he was on the phone with customer service for something or other. It was immediately clear, based on the accent alone, that “customer service” was a call center somewhere in the Philippines. He grew increasingly agitated as the woman told him they had emailed him documentation, and he kept telling her he didn’t have it. He had his email open on his computer, and he was actively looking through it. I looked over his shoulder, and he was right: there was nothing there. They went back and forth until he got fed up and gave up.

My wife is doing a remodel and flip job on a house. She ordered appliances from Home Depot, and was assured that even though the dishwasher was delayed by the manufacturer, the stove and microwave would be delivered last Friday.

Guess what didn’t happen last Friday.

Guess who didn’t even call to tell us that the delivery wouldn’t be happening, or why.

When my wife called in again on Monday, she got the run around for 20 minutes. She never did find out why the stove and microwave didn’t show.

“I have contractors I’m paying for on my dime,” Jamie ranted into the phone, “and they’re sitting there twiddling their thumbs because the appliances I bought and you promised would be delivered never showed up.”

They offered a credit that we’re pretty sure never got applied. We also got no solution to the problem.

You just have to eat it, because nobody cares.

There’s no accountability anymore. Everyone just does whatever they want, and mostly, they get away with it. Customer service, which saw a huge resurgence in quality a decade or so ago, has gotten far worse than it’s ever been.

And systems, in general, often don’t work.

Every day, I drive around on expired tags, waiting to get pulled over, because the North Carolina DMV system is so broken, you can’t get an appointment that isn’t months out and far away. And they won’t let you do much of anything online. So you have to camp out like you’re trying to get Taylor Swift concert tickets, lining up at 5 or 6AM, and waiting ALL DAY to get in.

I don’t have time for that. Nobody does.

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The fact that everything is stupid now is one of the things driving rapid adoption of AI.

When you interact with ChatGPT, or Grok, or whatever, they’re unfailingly polite. Prompt. They get you answers. Most of the time whatever they cough up is at least moderately helpful. Often it’s very helpful.

We are overwhelmed with too much info, too many subscriptions, too much complexity, too much tech, too much everything. We are drowning in recurring payments we don’t even remember signing up for, all while we watch the price of the daily necessities go up by double and even triple digits.

Give us an AI assistant that can help us filter the incoming, find signal in the noise, save us money, and simplify our lives, and we will grant it the keys to our personal kingdoms. Our tech ecosystem is now so overgrown and unwieldy that we need a digital Virgil who can guide us through its circles of hell.

I talk to ChatGPT in voice mode quite a lot, especially while driving. I would much, much rather deal with an eager and easily understandable AI customer service agent than some thickly-accented person in a call center in Manilla or Mumbai. If none of them are empowered to do anything anyway, but the wait time is less and the experience is more pleasant, sign me up. I will take any reduction in frustration I can possibly get.

I use AI every day to fact check the firehose of online stupid that gets directed my way. People have lost the ability to discern fact from fiction, truth from conspiracy theory. I don’t have time to debunk every crazy reply in detail, but in just a few seconds, AI can do it for me, providing links to real sources, and then I can go on about my day.

Hell, I can take a recipe for four people and paste it into ChatGPT or Grok and have it upscale it to nine people, generate a shopping list, and walk me through the steps without a million popup ads and some long-winded story on the recipe site, and I can even ask it questions about certain aspects of the task and get good advice about seasoning or technique.

It feels good to have an upbeat, actually helpful bot who sounds like a human give you the assistance you need without any hassle.

I saw a post last week from a guy who asked ChatGPT for a consult after his wife had a routine surgery to remove a cyst. The doctor had told her it looked swollen, but not infected. Despite being on a strong antibiotic, she had a fever and felt ill. Chat urged him to take her to the ER immediately, and he did. They confirmed that she had gone septic, and they were able to save her life.

That’s kind of a big deal. Stories like this abound.

We have a lot to be concerned about when it comes to AI, but in every respect that it simplifies our lives, gives us the information we actually need, and makes it easier to navigate our broken down systems (and the people who clog them up with their incompetence), it’s going to be almost impossible to resist. We’re all exhausted from dealing with a deluge of moronic crap, where we pay more and get less.

We might be more eager than we think to embrace our new AI overlords if they can just alleviate us of meddlesome stupidity.