There’s an Ed McBain police procedural novel (Poison, I think it was), where the cops take a statement from a man accused of gunning someone down in a movie theater. The suspect explains how the deceased kept talking and talking behind him during the picture, just wouldn’t shut up, and so in a moment of blind rage the suspect turned around and emptied his pistol into the offending loudmouth. Memorably, one of the cops thinks it over, and wonders whether the shooter could beat the wrap with a plea of justifiable homicide.
That darkly humorous vignette carries within it the kernel of a hard truth. It points out the way our culture has coarsened over the years. One of the marvels of classic movies is that they remind us of a glorious time in America when service — true, wonderful, humane service — hadn’t yet been brutally legislated out of existence by do-gooder liberals. Real, live, friendly, English-speaking humans used to answer your phone calls whenever you called a business. They used to bag your groceries and carry them to your car. They would check your oil and pump your gas at the station, or carry your luggage through airports or up to your room at hotels. Old movies featuring department stores show armies of employees manning every department.
And yes, at movie theaters (movie palaces, they were called, and looked the part) they would usher you to your seat with a flashlight and a smile. If someone starting talking during the picture, the usher would shut them up. If the film was out of focus, an usher would alert the projectionist.
You were happy to have the service and the smile, they were happy to have the tip and the job. Everyone was happy. Life was good.
Then the liberals descended like vampires (the Stoker kind, not the Meyer kind) and passed all manner of laws and regulations about who these businesses could employ and at what price. Almost overnight, all of these service jobs vanished.
Why? Economist Peter Schiff explains it well in a trenchant article he wrote last year titled “Minimum Wage, Maximum Stupidity”:
When confronted with a clogged drain, most of us will call several plumbers and hire the one who quotes us the lowest price. If all the quotes are too high, most of us will grab some Drano and a wrench, and have at it. Labor markets work the same way. Before bringing on another worker, an employer must be convinced that the added productivity will exceed the added cost (this includes not just wages, but all payroll taxes and other benefits.) So if an unskilled worker is capable of delivering only $6 per hour of increased productivity, such an individual is legally unemployable with a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.
These days we all go through life with our humanity and civilization diminished because of these laws. Look around, and you’ll see old people struggling to pump their gas or carry their luggage. You’ll see Mom and Dad ready to pop a blood vessel as they frantically navigate through computerized telephone menus looking for a real live human being who can help them. Simultaneously, you’ll see an ever-growing army of unskilled people — mostly teenagers looking to break into the job market — denied the opportunity to work because liberals have made it functionally illegal to employ them.
Such problems are a direct and predictable consequence of thoughtless wage and employer regulations, and they’ve wreaked quiet devastation on our society and standard of living, especially among the very people they were originally designed to help.
Think of some of the ways in which movie theaters have tried to improve their service in past years: Reserved Seating, Over-21 only theaters, and even food and beverage service delivered right to your seat. All fine ideas. But in my experience, the theaters never manage to do any of these things right. Pay a few extra bucks for a reserved seat, and more often than not you’ll find some surly Morlock already sitting there, with no one around to help you get what you paid for. Buy a ticket for an “over 21 only” showing at a theater, and odds are that enough obnoxious teens will have snuck in to ruin the peace and quiet you paid a premium for. And just try to find someone to place a seat-side food order with on a busy Friday night.
All of this ineptitude could be ameliorated if theaters were once again able to marshal this:
A phalanx of trained ushers — nay, bouncers, with heavy police flashlights and tasers at the ready! All lined up in parade formation, and poised to bring the lost service-sector glories of Western Civ back from the dead! Make their day, reserve-seat stealing punks.
Like any other business, movie theaters would love to employ more people and, in so doing, vastly improve their services. Simultaneously, lots of unemployed teens and retired seniors would be happy to make a bit of spending money working for them. The only thing stopping this marriage of supply and demand are people like this:
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