As a mere 30-something, it's always amazing to me to read about these things that seemed ubiquitous when I was a child (store-bought bagels, folding ping-pong tables, even things like vacuums, electric stoves, and color TV) really are recent inventions. I had no idea that the Bagel didn't become what I think of the Bagel until this article. I regularly talk to my nearly nineties grandparents, and they regularly mention something that they are amazed by that I just take for granted (air conditioning, power steering, batteries, frozen meals, and more).
I hope I don't lose my sense of wonder for the world.
Here's to you, Mr. Thompson, a tinkerer from the age when one could revolutionize the world twice from one's garage.
I have fond memories of listening to my grandmother tell stories about how her father installed the first (private, consumer) electric generator in the state of Alabama and how at night, you could see their farm glow for miles around. And I often contemplate how my 2yo daughter will think it's totally normal to have all the world's information at your fingertips 24/7. The pace of change is accelerating, and while we don't know what the future holds, this is a damned exciting time to be alive.
However, I bemoan the scarcity of good bagels, and it saddens me if Lender's is your concept of a "Bagel". That's like having McDonald's or Dominos be your concept of a Hamburger or a Pizza. They're the same type of food, in general, but you really won't understand what all the fuss is about until you have a more authentic, less processed version.
Thing is, though, Lender's bagels, and McDonald's hamburgers, are tasty.
Certainly there are better, I've had much better bagels when I've lived in big cities, but in my relatively small home city that I've retired to starting my day with a Lender's bagel, as I do almost every day, is not a bad thing.
I acknowledge that, not trying to come across as some food snob.
I've enjoyed many a McDonald's cheeseburger. They've spent literally millions of dollars to make it taste good. I should hope it tastes good to most people. But if that's the only burger you've ever tasted, you should really try one made by somebody who grinds/chops their own meat. It's different, better I think, but it's also going to cost 10 times as much.
And yeah, I've enjoyed a few Lender's bagels, toasted with some butter or cream cheese, maybe even gasp some jelly. Untoasted, they're far too spongey, IMO, and I greatly prefer a denser, chewier texture with a stronger flavor. But that doesn't mean Lender's tastes bad.
Well, I guess we just disagree. I think if you look back over the last 500 years, modern society is changing faster – technologically and culturally. Society is undergoing massive shifts more frequently, with the move from agrarian societies to the industrial revolution to the information age to the coming, IMO, biotech revolution. Or to use the classic example, I think if you plucked an adult from 1500 and transported them to 1600, they'd be able to understand and navigate society much better than someone plucked from 1915 transported to 2015.
Related to your point though is the idea that change is not just happening faster, IMO, it's spreading more uniformly due to globalization, e.g., cellphones have spread to all but the most impoverished, over 90% of the global population at the last estimate I saw.
And yes, I'm aware of Rachel Laudan, though I haven't seen The Search for General Tso. "More authentic" is clearly vague, context-dependent, and ever changing, akin to "proper grammar". You can intellectualize it forever, which can be fun, but eventually you should try actually tasting the food. You will taste the difference in a bagel made from traditional ingredients, i.e., no fats. You can rightly argue about exactly what is meant by "traditional," but at some point, there's a way that's been practiced for hundreds of years and there's a newer, more automated way.
That's not to say I'm right or that the factory-produced food is always worse. I know many people who think Panera has fantastic bagels. I disagree and think they're far too spongey. But there is a difference.
Maybe technologically, but there have been significant technological advances almost every 100 years that don't look as significant to us because we're way past them. The jump from sailing to steamships doesn't seem that big to us, but in terms of reliability, speed, etc, etc, etc, it was an incredible leap, similar to propellers to jets.
I don't know about culturally. If you plucked a European adult from 1500 and dropped them in the same city in 1600, chances are the Protestant Reformation would have done a pretty big shakeup of their cultural and societal expectations.
Food is weird. Not arguing that there is a difference between 'modern' bagels and 'traditional' bagels, just arguing that the traditional way is perhaps not as traditional as someone might think, and I would guess that 'hundreds' of years isn't in many cases (perhaps not specifically with bagels, I'm not a bagel expert, when I eat them I buy the bag of mini-bagels from Aldi).
Yeah, maybe I've just drunk too much of the Ray Kurzweil, "the singularity is nigh" koolaid. I think you're right that perspective is important.
And I totally agree: food is weird. One of my favorite little mind-expanding (for most people) topics of conversation is how so many ingredients we consider to be iconic of certain cuisines came from the new world. For example, before ~1500 there were no tomatoes in Italian food, no chili peppers in Thai/Indian food, no Belgian/Swiss chocolate, no potatoes in Ireland, etc.
Plenty of things have slowed down. For example engine horsepower/lb used to double regularly, but we are past the point of diminishing returns so a car from 10 years ago is more or less just as fast.
Guns are another area where 1,000 years from now people will look back and see zero progress from say 1950-now. Just as we look back on bows and ignore the 'minor' improvements and more or less meaningless.
So, really it's less progress speeding up, so much as ignoring what's static and focusing on the few things that are actually changing.
It depends where you live. I've had great bagels all over NYC and upper NJ, obviously, but also in Boston, Charlottesville, VA, Sarasota, FL and so on.
Bagels made according to the "traditional way" don't have any eggs or fats in them. They're chewier and denser (and more flavorful IMO), but they also get hard/stale very quickly. Thus, I've found the most important aspect of a good bagel shop is very high turnover in the product and baking new batches throughout the day. Typically this means a place that bakes everything from scratch in house and only serves bagels. A bakery that offers bagels as one of its many products will probably add egg or oil to keep the bagels palatable longer, which is fine, but means the texture will be different, more like a roll.
I have two young kids. It is completely inconceivable to them that anyone might be in a situation where all of the world's information isn't immediately available at a moment's notice one any of several nearby screens.
They will fundamentally never understand the idea that it used to be hard to know something.
I do think there will always be this detectable weird KT-boundary starting around the mid-late 90's where information is just hard to come by (on the internet). Important stuff like GI Joe cartoons and news stories will of course be available, but simple everyday facts and figures will be really hard to uncover.
So I 100% agree with you that this is a pretty huge transition and will be hard for them to look back over, but they will always have a chance to experience ignorance, but only when they look for boring stuff from the last century.
I also find it interesting how there's a seemingly erroneous association of bagels as a Jewish food item even though the earliest depictions of bread with holes in the center appear in Egyptian hieroglyphs as far as I know.
I think there were bagels in Brick Lane before they were in the US, so in that sense it's a very traditional bagel indeed.. Not sure how long the shops there have been going though (white or orange).
There's a schizoid perspective in this article that arises a lot with these kinds of things.
Bagels used to be better, and there were tons of people making them! But there weren't enough bagels, because not enough people were making them!
Hand-rolled bagels taste so much better! But Americans like the texture and flavor of the machine-rolled ones better!
You used to only be able to get authentic hand-rolled bagels in cities with a large Jewish population, which was exclusive and cool! But now, you can only get authentic hand-rolled bagels in cities with a large Jewish population, which is awful!
> You used to only be able to get authentic hand-rolled bagels in cities with a large Jewish population, which was exclusive and cool! But now, you can only get authentic hand-rolled bagels in cities with a large Jewish population, which is awful!
It's more complicated than that.
First, the article notes that the old-style bagels are hard to find now, even in cities like New York with large Jewish populations where they used to be everywhere. Even though they still had people there who preferred them, they were driven out of those markets by a combination of factors arising from the rise of the machine-made bagel. Since "bagel-maker" isn't a career that an artisan can make a living at anymore, for instance, the knowledge of how those old bagels got made doesn't get passed down from one generation to another like it used to. Eventually that knowledge will be lost, and the machine-made bagel will be the only bagel. So it's not a straight case of everyone's better off; if you're one of the people who lives in those markets and prefers the traditional bagel, you're losing it. It's possible to argue that loss is outweighed by the benefit everyone else in the world gets from having access to any kind of bagel at all, but it's definitely a loss.
Second, it's tied up with longstanding anxieties in the American Jewish community (anxieties that will be familiar to any immigrant minority) about assimilation. On one hand, if you are Jewish or love Jewish culture, it's exciting to see something as central to that culture as the bagel exploding outside the Jewish community to the plates of the nation at large; when Jewish food becomes American food, it helps reinforce the idea that the days when Jews were seen as foreign or alien are over. But the flip side of that is that you can look at the bagel that's landing on all those gentile plates and worry that maybe the price of becoming "American" involves having to give up the distinctiveness that makes Jewish culture Jewish. Is that too high a price for what it buys? How much of traditional Jewish culture can you give up before you've given up your Jewish identity altogether?
None of those anxieties are unique to Jews -- I imagine Americans of Hispanic extraction must feel the same way every time they see a Taco Bell. It's a question that immigrants to America (and those descended from them) of all kinds have always had to grapple with: how do you embrace your new home without completely losing your connection to the old one? How much assimilation is too much?
I am not Jewish, and what I know of that community's anxieties about assimilation I have read in the press. However, though I am a Gentile who grew up in the Midwest eating peanut butter sandwiches made with toasted Wonder Bread, I do know good bread from bad, and a lot of the bagels out there are just not very good. Would I rather have a machine-made bagel than none at all. It depends, I guess, on my experience with the store, and on what else is on the menu.
OK, there was a good bakery in town. At this point I have no idea what their ethnicity was.
"""
First, the article notes that the old-style bagels are hard to find now, even in cities like New York with large Jewish populations where they used to be everywhere. Even though they still had people there who preferred them, they were driven out of those markets by a combination of factors arising from the rise of the machine-made bagel. Since "bagel-maker" isn't a career that an artisan can make a living at anymore, for instance, the knowledge of how those old bagels got made doesn't get passed down from one generation to another like it used to. Eventually that knowledge will be lost, and the machine-made bagel will be the only bagel. So it's not a straight case of everyone's better off; if you're one of the people who lives in those markets and prefers the traditional bagel, you're losing it. It's possible to argue that loss is outweighed by the benefit everyone else in the world gets from having access to any kind of bagel at all, but it's definitely a loss.
"""
How much of the problem is due to the machine as originally conceived, and how much due to subsequent changes in ingredients and other aspects of the process?
I've never tasted a hand-made bagel other than my own attempts to make them at home. But I know, even over the span of my own lifetime, that store-bought bagels have changed a lot. Many brands of bagels, such as a couple of the chains operating in my locale, are basically toroidal wonder bread, huge, soft, and sweet.
There's a reasonably decent bagel factory near my house, with a retail counter. So at least the bagels are fresh, and buying a couple dozen is a convenient respite from baking bread every evening for the family.
When I was in school in the US I asked the first Jewish person I met "Where do I get good Jewish bagel". He knew exactly what I meant: unleavened and boiled. Despite both of us coming from either side of the continent, we both appreciated west coast lox and actual Montreal smoked meet. Just don't ask an American about pizza.
I have to admit, I don't get bagels. Beyond spiritual imagery, what's the appeal of toroidal food? The slight increase in surface area?
I get that if the appeal is in the coating more so than the pastry itself, as in a chocolate donut, but with bread, my goal is usually to maximise the capacity for delicious treats to fill or cover them.
The only reason I bake bagels is that they simply taste good. Sure it's bread, but the texture is very different (crackly crust, chewy but light interior) and the flavor is subtly different.
As far as I know, the shape is incidental, since the ones that end up shaped like buns taste just like the toroidal ones.
>> what's the appeal of toroidal food? The slight increase in surface area?
You can put them on a stick or hang them from a rope in your shop to sell, clearing up counter space. Shops and street vendors will often have them stacked high on rods.
Never work in a bagel shop. I don't know if it was me, the job, or the owner, but it was the worst job I have ever had.
I was just out of college, and didn't want to wear a tie.
I thought this would be a fun, temporary stint.
I would get to work at 4:30 a.m. I would pack bagels, and talk to the only female in the joint. Well, I didn't know it at the time, but the owner like this girl, along with every girl that walked into his shop--including high school girls. Yea, the dude should have been but put down?
Even though my intentions were innocent; I was just young and liked to talk to the fairer sex, and people my own age, Dodger(the owner) had it out for me.
He had me doing all the lousy jobs. My favorite was rotating the freezer. He would give me this job when he was really angry with his personal life. It entailed taking every package out if a 10 X 20 foot freezer (crammed with product. 6" of top clearance.) and basically repacking--when
I waked in at 4:30 a.m. I was so young, and naieve, I didn't know he was angry with me. And for some reason, he kept the dead rats he killed in the freezer? I don't know why, but he liked to kill rats. He would chase them around the shop and grab them with his bare hands, and feet. He would then put them in plastic bags, and keep them in the freezer. I never asked why. Kinda didn't want to know? I do remember him wiping up the blood, and thinking, they deserve better than Doger. Still have red dreams?
Aa to the bagel machine, I never saw one. We rolled out the bagels, and pinched them together. Boiled them, and baked them. (I did get the recipe out of another employee, because I thought they tasted great. Will post if anyone wants, but need to find it.)
I put up with this owner for too long. I finally realized I need to right some wrongs. It was the late 90's and technology was expensive--meaning he didn't have cameras. Now I should have just quit, but I needed some revenge. Since this is a public forum, let's just saw my revenge was a keen interest in the front counter, and the cash register.
Yes, I was finally making a good salary. I'm not proud of it, but looking back it still feels good.
Today, my shinagigans would be impossible because of the proliferation of cheap surveillance devices. Guys of my generation(basically the 80'-90's) would look for gravy, especially if treated horribly. I wonder how that has affected the economy today? Back in the day, if you had a gripe, and willing to take some real risk; you could get revenge. (I saw other guys doing what I did--basically being horrid employees in the end, but they all went into this weird denial? I guess it's human nature to not admit someting like this? ("This"--could be just cleaning the register keys. They can get so sticky? And my ip is open sometimes, and I think my neighbor is a Reaver?)
Anyway, the last I heard, Dodger (the 45 year old jerk) was caught the second-third time trying to give flowers to high school girls, and he sold his store to someone. The sale was unrelated to being a creep. He would stand at their cars, dusted in flour, didn't believe in bathing, with his bouquet of flowers. He didn't understand why the 16 year olds didn't want to date him.
The only thing I miss was the fresh onion bagels, with 1/2" fresh lox, creme cheese, and onions. I would sneak out two and eat them in my chit box. Thinking, "I need to go to graduate school!", and "Why does my head hurt?". I was a bit neurotic, and thought I had an aneurism.
(if buying bagels, buy them the dozen. You will save money, and they freeze well. )
The Awl ran an interesting piece on this [1] which focused more on how disruptive the bagel machine was to the bagel unions. I wonder if people will ever lament the loss of taxis if Uber and its ilk take over.
A major reason why Uber has been successful (in New York at least) has been a deliberate political move to make taxis scarce by limiting taxi medallions which created a shortage of taxis as well as increased fares.
The taxis in New York City have adapted to Uber by installing their own e-hailing app called Arro and they offer an advantage over Uber because there is no "surge pricing."
By simply removing the political limit on taxi medallions in NYC, there will be an increase in the use of taxis because they also have the advantage over Uber in that people can hail taxis with their hand.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 134 ms ] threadI hope I don't lose my sense of wonder for the world.
Here's to you, Mr. Thompson, a tinkerer from the age when one could revolutionize the world twice from one's garage.
I have fond memories of listening to my grandmother tell stories about how her father installed the first (private, consumer) electric generator in the state of Alabama and how at night, you could see their farm glow for miles around. And I often contemplate how my 2yo daughter will think it's totally normal to have all the world's information at your fingertips 24/7. The pace of change is accelerating, and while we don't know what the future holds, this is a damned exciting time to be alive.
However, I bemoan the scarcity of good bagels, and it saddens me if Lender's is your concept of a "Bagel". That's like having McDonald's or Dominos be your concept of a Hamburger or a Pizza. They're the same type of food, in general, but you really won't understand what all the fuss is about until you have a more authentic, less processed version.
Certainly there are better, I've had much better bagels when I've lived in big cities, but in my relatively small home city that I've retired to starting my day with a Lender's bagel, as I do almost every day, is not a bad thing.
I've enjoyed many a McDonald's cheeseburger. They've spent literally millions of dollars to make it taste good. I should hope it tastes good to most people. But if that's the only burger you've ever tasted, you should really try one made by somebody who grinds/chops their own meat. It's different, better I think, but it's also going to cost 10 times as much.
And yeah, I've enjoyed a few Lender's bagels, toasted with some butter or cream cheese, maybe even gasp some jelly. Untoasted, they're far too spongey, IMO, and I greatly prefer a denser, chewier texture with a stronger flavor. But that doesn't mean Lender's tastes bad.
In regards to your second paragraph, I don't know if 'more authentic' really means what you think it does. I've had the idea for a while that traditions around food are a lot more fungible than is popularly thought. Something like the documentary The Search for General Tso [ http://www.thesearchforgeneraltso.com/ ] or Rachel Laudan's work [ http://www.utne.com/environment/fast-food-culinary-ethos.asp... or https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/slow-food-artisanal-natur... ] better illustrates it than I could in a comment.
Related to your point though is the idea that change is not just happening faster, IMO, it's spreading more uniformly due to globalization, e.g., cellphones have spread to all but the most impoverished, over 90% of the global population at the last estimate I saw.
And yes, I'm aware of Rachel Laudan, though I haven't seen The Search for General Tso. "More authentic" is clearly vague, context-dependent, and ever changing, akin to "proper grammar". You can intellectualize it forever, which can be fun, but eventually you should try actually tasting the food. You will taste the difference in a bagel made from traditional ingredients, i.e., no fats. You can rightly argue about exactly what is meant by "traditional," but at some point, there's a way that's been practiced for hundreds of years and there's a newer, more automated way.
That's not to say I'm right or that the factory-produced food is always worse. I know many people who think Panera has fantastic bagels. I disagree and think they're far too spongey. But there is a difference.
I don't know about culturally. If you plucked a European adult from 1500 and dropped them in the same city in 1600, chances are the Protestant Reformation would have done a pretty big shakeup of their cultural and societal expectations.
Food is weird. Not arguing that there is a difference between 'modern' bagels and 'traditional' bagels, just arguing that the traditional way is perhaps not as traditional as someone might think, and I would guess that 'hundreds' of years isn't in many cases (perhaps not specifically with bagels, I'm not a bagel expert, when I eat them I buy the bag of mini-bagels from Aldi).
And I totally agree: food is weird. One of my favorite little mind-expanding (for most people) topics of conversation is how so many ingredients we consider to be iconic of certain cuisines came from the new world. For example, before ~1500 there were no tomatoes in Italian food, no chili peppers in Thai/Indian food, no Belgian/Swiss chocolate, no potatoes in Ireland, etc.
Guns are another area where 1,000 years from now people will look back and see zero progress from say 1950-now. Just as we look back on bows and ignore the 'minor' improvements and more or less meaningless.
So, really it's less progress speeding up, so much as ignoring what's static and focusing on the few things that are actually changing.
Bagels made according to the "traditional way" don't have any eggs or fats in them. They're chewier and denser (and more flavorful IMO), but they also get hard/stale very quickly. Thus, I've found the most important aspect of a good bagel shop is very high turnover in the product and baking new batches throughout the day. Typically this means a place that bakes everything from scratch in house and only serves bagels. A bakery that offers bagels as one of its many products will probably add egg or oil to keep the bagels palatable longer, which is fine, but means the texture will be different, more like a roll.
They will fundamentally never understand the idea that it used to be hard to know something.
Except perhaps that very idea--they won't know not knowing.
So I 100% agree with you that this is a pretty huge transition and will be hard for them to look back over, but they will always have a chance to experience ignorance, but only when they look for boring stuff from the last century.
It's still hard to know things, but it is much easier to look things up.
It's also easier to change the meaning of things when nobody knows anything.
He prefers Android to iOS, BTW ^_^.
I always thought bagels were a bit harder so they lasted longer like German rye loaf. I didn't know about the dough-boiling bit.
[0] http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Tassajara-Bakery-to-close...
Sorry. Maybe they have a spiritual heir that someone here can identify.
Bagels used to be better, and there were tons of people making them! But there weren't enough bagels, because not enough people were making them!
Hand-rolled bagels taste so much better! But Americans like the texture and flavor of the machine-rolled ones better!
You used to only be able to get authentic hand-rolled bagels in cities with a large Jewish population, which was exclusive and cool! But now, you can only get authentic hand-rolled bagels in cities with a large Jewish population, which is awful!
Bagel hipsters.
It's more complicated than that.
First, the article notes that the old-style bagels are hard to find now, even in cities like New York with large Jewish populations where they used to be everywhere. Even though they still had people there who preferred them, they were driven out of those markets by a combination of factors arising from the rise of the machine-made bagel. Since "bagel-maker" isn't a career that an artisan can make a living at anymore, for instance, the knowledge of how those old bagels got made doesn't get passed down from one generation to another like it used to. Eventually that knowledge will be lost, and the machine-made bagel will be the only bagel. So it's not a straight case of everyone's better off; if you're one of the people who lives in those markets and prefers the traditional bagel, you're losing it. It's possible to argue that loss is outweighed by the benefit everyone else in the world gets from having access to any kind of bagel at all, but it's definitely a loss.
Second, it's tied up with longstanding anxieties in the American Jewish community (anxieties that will be familiar to any immigrant minority) about assimilation. On one hand, if you are Jewish or love Jewish culture, it's exciting to see something as central to that culture as the bagel exploding outside the Jewish community to the plates of the nation at large; when Jewish food becomes American food, it helps reinforce the idea that the days when Jews were seen as foreign or alien are over. But the flip side of that is that you can look at the bagel that's landing on all those gentile plates and worry that maybe the price of becoming "American" involves having to give up the distinctiveness that makes Jewish culture Jewish. Is that too high a price for what it buys? How much of traditional Jewish culture can you give up before you've given up your Jewish identity altogether?
None of those anxieties are unique to Jews -- I imagine Americans of Hispanic extraction must feel the same way every time they see a Taco Bell. It's a question that immigrants to America (and those descended from them) of all kinds have always had to grapple with: how do you embrace your new home without completely losing your connection to the old one? How much assimilation is too much?
OK, there was a good bakery in town. At this point I have no idea what their ethnicity was.
Disruption in a nutshell.
I can confirm that they taste _much_ better. And are more expensive.
I've never tasted a hand-made bagel other than my own attempts to make them at home. But I know, even over the span of my own lifetime, that store-bought bagels have changed a lot. Many brands of bagels, such as a couple of the chains operating in my locale, are basically toroidal wonder bread, huge, soft, and sweet.
There's a reasonably decent bagel factory near my house, with a retail counter. So at least the bagels are fresh, and buying a couple dozen is a convenient respite from baking bread every evening for the family.
When I was in school in the US I asked the first Jewish person I met "Where do I get good Jewish bagel". He knew exactly what I meant: unleavened and boiled. Despite both of us coming from either side of the continent, we both appreciated west coast lox and actual Montreal smoked meet. Just don't ask an American about pizza.
I get that if the appeal is in the coating more so than the pastry itself, as in a chocolate donut, but with bread, my goal is usually to maximise the capacity for delicious treats to fill or cover them.
As far as I know, the shape is incidental, since the ones that end up shaped like buns taste just like the toroidal ones.
You can put them on a stick or hang them from a rope in your shop to sell, clearing up counter space. Shops and street vendors will often have them stacked high on rods.
I was just out of college, and didn't want to wear a tie. I thought this would be a fun, temporary stint.
I would get to work at 4:30 a.m. I would pack bagels, and talk to the only female in the joint. Well, I didn't know it at the time, but the owner like this girl, along with every girl that walked into his shop--including high school girls. Yea, the dude should have been but put down?
Even though my intentions were innocent; I was just young and liked to talk to the fairer sex, and people my own age, Dodger(the owner) had it out for me.
He had me doing all the lousy jobs. My favorite was rotating the freezer. He would give me this job when he was really angry with his personal life. It entailed taking every package out if a 10 X 20 foot freezer (crammed with product. 6" of top clearance.) and basically repacking--when I waked in at 4:30 a.m. I was so young, and naieve, I didn't know he was angry with me. And for some reason, he kept the dead rats he killed in the freezer? I don't know why, but he liked to kill rats. He would chase them around the shop and grab them with his bare hands, and feet. He would then put them in plastic bags, and keep them in the freezer. I never asked why. Kinda didn't want to know? I do remember him wiping up the blood, and thinking, they deserve better than Doger. Still have red dreams?
Aa to the bagel machine, I never saw one. We rolled out the bagels, and pinched them together. Boiled them, and baked them. (I did get the recipe out of another employee, because I thought they tasted great. Will post if anyone wants, but need to find it.)
I put up with this owner for too long. I finally realized I need to right some wrongs. It was the late 90's and technology was expensive--meaning he didn't have cameras. Now I should have just quit, but I needed some revenge. Since this is a public forum, let's just saw my revenge was a keen interest in the front counter, and the cash register. Yes, I was finally making a good salary. I'm not proud of it, but looking back it still feels good.
Today, my shinagigans would be impossible because of the proliferation of cheap surveillance devices. Guys of my generation(basically the 80'-90's) would look for gravy, especially if treated horribly. I wonder how that has affected the economy today? Back in the day, if you had a gripe, and willing to take some real risk; you could get revenge. (I saw other guys doing what I did--basically being horrid employees in the end, but they all went into this weird denial? I guess it's human nature to not admit someting like this? ("This"--could be just cleaning the register keys. They can get so sticky? And my ip is open sometimes, and I think my neighbor is a Reaver?)
Anyway, the last I heard, Dodger (the 45 year old jerk) was caught the second-third time trying to give flowers to high school girls, and he sold his store to someone. The sale was unrelated to being a creep. He would stand at their cars, dusted in flour, didn't believe in bathing, with his bouquet of flowers. He didn't understand why the 16 year olds didn't want to date him.
The only thing I miss was the fresh onion bagels, with 1/2" fresh lox, creme cheese, and onions. I would sneak out two and eat them in my chit box. Thinking, "I need to go to graduate school!", and "Why does my head hurt?". I was a bit neurotic, and thought I had an aneurism.
(if buying bagels, buy them the dozen. You will save money, and they freeze well. )
I love bagels but unfortunately they are really something I only enjoy fresh. A refrigerated bagel is just weird.
[1] http://www.theawl.com/2015/09/a-disruption-cautionary-tale
The taxis in New York City have adapted to Uber by installing their own e-hailing app called Arro and they offer an advantage over Uber because there is no "surge pricing."
By simply removing the political limit on taxi medallions in NYC, there will be an increase in the use of taxis because they also have the advantage over Uber in that people can hail taxis with their hand.
That sounds like a disadvantage to me -- can you actually get one if lots of people want rides?