Visuals are an important
ingredient in consumer marketing, so it is surprising to come across retail
managers who are so purblind as concerns the latent yet obvious passive
aggression in some of the visuals that those managers themselves approve in the
name of security. The espoused, yet utterly fake claim that customer experience
is improved by the added sense of safety—the actual underlying motive lies in
loss prevention—is typically outweighed by the very human negative experience
from being intentionally intimidated by passive-aggressive visuals. It may be
that such managers, frustrated by high rates of in-store petty theft (i.e.,
“shoplifting”), are unconsciously taking their latent aggression out of the
customers as a group. Even if not, the lack of judgment is palpable from the
visuals themselves. It is no wonder that an increasing number of customers
prefer shopping online.
The chain of Safeway grocery
stores is a case in point. One store manager admitted to me that the
subcontracted security company hires from “the ghetto,” meaning that the young
security guards may themselves need to be watched. I was discussing one such
guard, who had been standing just inside the interior entrance gates
watching customers entering the aisle-area of the store as if we were
suspects. The young man’s hostile facial expression was such that I
instinctively took out my phone, which triggered him. “You better NOT be
recording me, BRO!” he threatened. According to the store manager, the guard
should not even have been standing in the entrance gate (as shoplifters
typically do not bring and deposit merchandise inside stores, and watching
people enter means missing people leaving). Even though the manager told
me that the subcontracted guard would be dealt with, on my next visit that very
same guard stood next to the cashier as I was about to pay for groceries; I
left without the groceries or paying and reported the serial guard to the
company. The manager, who had admitted to me that he had authority in the store
even over subcontracted employees, had failed to hold the guard accountable, given
the guard’s sordid, unrepentant attitude. The manager also told me that the
guards were not supposed to cluster together, given the overdone visual, yet I
witnessed just such a clustering a week later. Apparently latent visual
passive-aggression, likely intended to intimidate, is not worth preventing in
retail management.
At a Vons grocery store in downtown
Long Beach, California, customers leaving the store must hand receipts to a security
guard and then take the paper back in order to tap it to an electronic device that
opens a gate allowing customers to exit the store. Presumably those customers
who decide not to purchase an intended item must justify themselves to a guard
in order to be let out of the store. Simply stated, this goes too far and yet
strangely customers put up with the invasiveness such that it could become
status quo, and thus the default not to be questioned. The passive aggression
in the active involvement of security guards misleadingly dressed as police and
the control-of-movement, if to become characteristic of society, would render
it as saturated with latent hostility and severe distrust.
At a Safeway store in San Francisco, customers using the self-check-out area must tap in order for a gate to open out of that area. Just outside that gate, sometimes as many as three security guards cluster to present a redundant display of intimidation, for they too are dressed to look like police employees. I submit that the managerial urge to dominate customers, even by using hired guns (literally), rather than to serve customers should be better studied in business schools, for the urge to control has arguably gotten out of hand at too many retail companies. If the latent hostility and over-control are allowed to reach a critical mass, a societal culture could be characterized in such terms, eviscerating connection that would otherwise exist between social animals like humans.
Even coffee shops are not off limits to overdone passive-aggressive visuals. Police should be mature enough to have the good sense to limit their number when they enter a small coffee shop to order and pick up coffee, for it is obvious that a lot of guns and uniforms in a small area are uncomfortable to customers who have not been in prison. The passive-aggression of guns should be obvious, especially given the incidence of abuse of power by police in the United States and the lack of accountability on police forces. Where, it may be asked, are the store managers in all of this? They err in judgment in favoring a sense of store safety and deterrence over providing customers with a comfortable in-store experience. Starbucks has been particularly guilty in throwing customer comfort under the bus in order to appease police. At the very least, the latter could leave their weapons in their squad-cars.
One coffee shop in San
Francisco that I walked past once even had a security guard wearing what looks
like military (or police) heavy gear (or bullet-proof vest!) just inside the
front door. Even if “people off the street” are a problem, the militaristic (or
police look-alike) visual is antithetical to “chill” coffee shop culture; the
sheer fact of being overdone should not go below the radar. Where intimidation is
so obviously the intent, potential customers should indeed keep walking, for no
innocent person deserves to be intentionally intimidated, especially in
spending money for a product. The irony is that on the window facing outside
was a poster urging love; just inside stood the security guard intimidating
people entering the coffee shop. Intentional intimidation by overdoing visuals
is antithetical to love, and yet there were the two visuals, back-to-back.
The impact on a society’s culture of this trend of presenting a visual overabundance of store guards as police and even giving them control over gates inside stores is in need of study. The related impact on the psychology of individuals is also important. Moreover, the individual-organizational-societal nexus should not be minimized. The uptick in store security-presence in the early-to-mid 2020s was no doubt due to a surge in shoplifting (stealing merchandise), but this does not justify either in moral or psychological terms the collateral damage that is done culturally and to the psychological well-being of individuals while in public.
The impact on a society’s culture of this trend of presenting a visual overabundance of store guards as police and even giving them control over gates inside stores is in need of study. The related impact on the psychology of individuals is also important. Moreover, the individual-organizational-societal nexus should not be minimized. The uptick in store security-presence in the early-to-mid 2020s was no doubt due to a surge in shoplifting (stealing merchandise), but this does not justify either in moral or psychological terms the collateral damage that is done culturally and to the psychological well-being of people in public places and retail stores. That a toxic norm eviscerating the vital element of trust in the natural romantic coupling instinct of falling in love was well ensconced by then at the expense of interpersonal emotional intimacy added another level—that of romantic connection—to the larger problem of social cohesion in San Francisco.
Like the toxic psychological
impact from excessive visual intimidation in stores, the emotional intimacy
lost by the anti-commitment, momentary pleasure norm was not grasped by the
people themselves. As a result, the unbalanced power relations in stores and in
romantic relationships could both continue as viable—both sadly involving
passive-aggression. Imposing an excessive security presence in stores in order
to use intimidation to reduce stealing, and imposing on the person one is
seeing (dating) one’s own selfish desire to continue to have sex with other
people with whom one has romantic feelings both involve harm and thus are
unethical. This is not to say that opening a relationship to some outside,
separate sex without emotional feelings is necessarily toxic; it, and
bringing in a third to share, can even be a healthy release from the monotony
of monogamy. So, I am not urging a socially conservative position for San Francisco.
The problem, especially as pertains to the culture of young gay men in San
Francisco, is that a sexual norm had by 2026 become so ensconced as the default
that dating someone meant having to accept the other person’s decision to continue
to have massive amounts of outside sex, even some of it with external romantic
affection/attachment to others.
I know from personal
experience in having lived for a year when I was young with a woman with whom I
was engaged to be married only to discover back then that she had no problem
sleeping with her ex-boyfriend again when she was back visiting her hometown. That
it hurt me emotionally because it was not just mechanical sex was my problem,
according to her. Obviously, I broke off the engagement. Like the norm in San
Francisco, a unilateral decision to foist an open relationship (with lots of
outside sex) on another person fused with “poly amorous” sex with emotional
feeling for others. I contend that such “open relationships” go too far from
the standpoint of the emotional harm that is inflicted. Back then when I was
engaged, the callousness of putting momentary pleasure before the feelings of
the other person as coupling is otherwise taking place was viewed as an outlier—a
red flag pertaining to particular characters.
The problem with San Francisco’s culture by 2026 was that the latent passive aggression of inflicting such harm had become an epidemic, at least in the gay “community.” If this conclusion makes some of those people angry, perhaps they should look at themselves in the mirror rather than be angry with me. Selfishness, a preoccupation with momentary pleasure, and being fine with inflicting harm even to a person with whom one is naturally in the process of coupling are indeed a toxic cocktail—lethal to genuine love that I believe we all want. Because interpersonal harm was also being inflicted by retail managers via visual intimidation (of latent force) in stores, we can conclude that the two emergent societal norms were mutually reinforcing—both involving severely unbalanced power making passive aggression possible (and perhaps even enjoyable), and both therefore expunging interpersonal trust and killing emotional intimacy. Such loss; so far from Plato’s ideal of the just city of interpersonal and psychic harmony, and so close to the fulfilment of Nietzsche’s aphorism on egoism: “Egoism is the law of perspective applied to feelings: what is closest appears large and weighty, and as one moves farther away size and weight decrease.”[1] Security guards standing too close to customers, and decisions of whether to have sex by a person dating or being in a relationship being a banal function of simply whomever happens to be closer in proximity.
Again, drawing on an episode from my own history, a few weeks after I had begun to see/date a woman, she left me a message that she would be out of town the next weekend and would be staying with and likely have sex with a guy for whom she had feelings. I was not emotionally attached enough for that to hurt; I stopped dating her anyway because she was clearly a creature of proximity, and a person cannot always be in close proximity to a person being dated. In any romantic coupling, there are times when other people will be closer and thus reckoned by an instant-gratification egoist as greater in size and weight on one’s feelings and thoughts. Trust is vital to emotional intimacy, and a more long-term oriented egoism must take the place of expedited egoism for real connection to be strong and deep rather than compromised and betrayed. Priorities say a lot about a person in relation to others, and about a city. I contend that San Francisco is a case in which emotional intimacy because too little valued in the climate of passive aggression. It is no wonder that by 2026 the city had become rife with drugs such as cocaine and meth, as if those could effectively nullify the relegation of emotional intimacy both in the arena of dating and in stores.
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #162.
