There's a reason your waiter hates you

Markets make people independent from traditional, mandatory roles and relationships, such as family and gender hierarchies that assign you specific work because of who you are. But at the same time, markets involve people in new roles and relationships, which can feel just as mandatory and unequal. Markets break people out of one kind of intimate intrusion, then involve them in another, in which work tells you who to be.

I don’t like rudeness. I was raised, and am temperamentally inclined, to obsessively say please-and-thank-you-so-much, and a rude or indifferent barista can hurt my feelings as easily as anyone’s. But if I could live in an economy where everyone had the privilege to be rude rather than the obligation to fake it, I would. In that economy, the price of a smile would only be a smile, and flirtation could be exchanged only for flirtation. Having $20 in your pocket wouldn’t entitle you to anything but a second overpriced latte.

The only way to that economy is through more employee power and more job security—just the things that are falling away in a precarious and de-unionized time.