Be nice to them

The kitchen at Delmonico's Restaurant, New York City, in 1902. It was probably America’s most famous restaurant at the time.

From Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

I walk in Wayland Square, on the East Side of Providence, almost daily. It’s now dominated by a wide variety of restaurants, some of them very good. While such neighborhoods used to have more shops than restaurants, now it’s the other way around, as the Internet and other ambiguous forces take away retail business, especially clothing sales. Consider such big pharmacy chains as CVS, whose  Wayland Square store, for example, sells a far wider variety of stuff  (including underwear, socks and such fast food as plastic-wrapped sandwiches!) than did most drugstores a half century ago. But bring back the soda fountains!

The exit of some of the charming small shops in places like Wayland Square and Providence’s Harvard Square – Thayer Street –and their replacement by restaurants is sad,  even as people are happily eating out more and more in those neighborhoods.

They like to sample food that they feel might be too complicated to prepare at home, they like being served and not having to clean up and they like the psychological ease of meeting people in a place without the complications of being a host or a guest. For one thing, it’s much easier/crisper to end an evening in a restaurant than in someone’s home.

Many people of very modest means spend a fiscally dangerous percentage of their income eating in restaurants. Indeed, it’s so pleasant and easy that many do it several times a week.

But the congenial experience requires what is often exhausting work by restaurant staffs, who must also all too often deal with arrogant, obnoxious people. It’s enlightened self-interest to be nice to restaurant workers. Don’t drive them away even as the  tentative retreat of COVID-19 reopens so many understaffed restaurants to indoor service.