In my case, I’m talking 30 to 40 years ago. This is about power and its abuse. I worked at that time in high end restaurants as a bartender where service is a game. The staff pretend to be obsequious and servile, and the clientele pretend they are overflowing with noblesse oblige. The problem is that if a staff member doesn’t hold up her part of this fiction, she gets fired. Whereas if a customer steps out of bounds-- he just gets more slavering attention from owners and mgmt.
Given the lack of any kind of organized labor in the USA, the only tools the average worker has to fight back in this situation are these ridiculous little passive aggressive slights. We of the lower orders (I may have graduated financially, but I still feel the solidarity) have to find some to way to recover our dignity when we are attacked asymmetrically. I believe we are entitled. It’s telling that you don’t think that the man in @Gyrofrog’s example needs counseling or is somehow leading the decay of our society.
And no, this isn’t some millennial behaviour that is the harbinger of a collapsing society. I suspect this has been sop of the oppressed since at least the time of the pharaohs.
