Raleigh Green wrote a piece recently about customer service in Kingston, the vanishing smile, the Gen Z stare, the slow disappearance of the kind of small talk that used to be compulsory. I’ve read a lot of columns about customer service over the last few years, almost all of them written by people who’ve never had to clock in for a Friday “clopening” shift (if you know, you know). Raleigh’s isn’t that, in fact he’s put his finger on something tangible and painful. Having spent the last twenty-four years in hospitality, in every single position imaginable, I want to tell you what it looks like from where I stand. It confirms almost everything he’s saying, and it’s more urgent than even he made it seem.

He’s right that this is a generational thing, and he’s right that it’s hard for a city like Kingston to ignore. Though it’s worth being direct about something Raleigh’s piece undersells massively: Kingston isn’t some pristine small-business enclave insulated from the chains. If you drive on 9W or Ulster Avenue, you’ll pass by Walmart, Target, Sam’s Club, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Kohl’s, Best Buy, half a dozen car dealerships, and a full lineup of chain restaurants ranging from McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, Burger King, Chipotle, Five Guys to Applebee’s & Texas Roadhouse all within a mile or so of each other. By actual count of registered businesses in the area, independents still make up the overwhelming majority of what’s here; the chains are a small fraction of the roster. However, they’re also the fraction that owns the corridor everyone drives on, which means the competition Raleigh’s worried about isn’t hypothetical. It’s a five-minute drive away, every day, for anyone in this city who wants the automated version instead. Independent businesses don’t have the built-in advantages of a big-box chain in their sales volume, their buying power, or even having name recognition that gets someone through the door without preconceived notions.

What we, small businesses do have, if anything, is the experience we sell when you walk into a room and we see you. That’s not one competitive edge that any of us have, that’s our entire competitive edge. Places like Target or Applebee’s couldn’t care less if you ever return or spend your money with them because you as a consumer are as replaceable as their staff. That’s the entire pitch.

And he’s right, society is fraying, in ways I feel every single time I’ve tried to hire someone over the last three years. It used to be that good guest service was the unspoken bare minimum to work in the service industry. Now it’s a differentiator, like a character trait that must be screened for specifically and held onto desperately. It’s no longer safe to assume that people are capable of basic social interactions without some level of handholding. That’s not a knock on the people applying, in fact most of them are perfectly capable, perfectly polite, but also perfectly checked out the moment the conversation requires anything of them beyond the basic transaction in front of them. Raleigh calls it the disappearance of casual repartee. I call it the disappearance of basic responsibility and the unspoken assumption that a shift includes engaging with strangers, which used to be a large portion of the job.

The part that makes his piece land harder than most of the “kids these days” columns is he acknowledges that this isn’t happening in a vacuum. In fact, the entire industry underneath us has taken a real beating since 2020, and the timing is exactly as bad as Raleigh suggests. The National Restaurant Association’s 2026 State of the Industry report found that 42% of operators weren’t profitable last year, up sharply from 29% the year before. That’s nearly half the industry underwater in a year when headline sales still technically grew on paper.

All around foot traffic to small brick and mortar businesses has declined nationally for sixteen of the last seventeen months. Every food and beverage operator as well as many retail operators I know far and wide from Woodstock to Carrol Gardens in Brooklyn has been forced to run leaner than they did five years ago (assuming they were even open five years ago). The ones that opened more recently have had to go in with the assumption everything is harder, more expensive and nobody is coming to save us. Every operator I know is asking their staff to do more work with less supervision and the same level of pay, giving them less resources and far less training on what being “good with people” is supposed to look like on any day of the week.

So, while Raleigh is correct that we’ve stopped training the basics of human connection, I’ll add that we’ve effectively stopped training almost everything from basic guest service etiquette to fundamental food safety awareness. Prior to 2020, it wasn’t a prerequisite but rather an assumption of a set of basic skills. What most consumers fail to grasp is that training costs real money and money is the one thing the hospitality industry has the least of right now, considering that banks outright refuse to lend to hospitality operators in most cases so we’re left to redistribute our own personal resources just to barely cover payroll, rent and utilities this week.

It’s not just the industry’s own cost structure squeezing us between Sysco moving to acquire Restaurant Depot or the tariff wars we’re still paying for silently, it’s coupled with the customer’s wallet too. That’s a domino effect no one has bothered to publicly acknowledge, as if somehow no one has had the nerve to address it in previous articles. Real disposable income growth has ground to a halt to about 1.1% year over year as of this summer. That’s down from the 2.8% the year before, of course with inflation eating the gains faster than they can show up. Which leads us to consumer surveys this year showing candidly that Americans specifically are cutting back on dining out and entertainment, and it is reflected in their behavior: delivery now accounts for roughly 40% of all U.S. restaurant sales, and no generation has moved toward it faster than Gen Z. People haven’t necessarily stopped eating out, in fact plenty of them do, just through a screen now, because convenience supersedes experience. Ironically the costs are almost identical when you factor in the delivery fees, tips and taxes.

That’s the part that logically explains what’s happening to service workers’ paychecks, more precisely than the ubiquitous belief that “tipping is down”: the tip rate itself hasn’t collapsed, full-service tips are still running close to 19%, roughly flat against pre-pandemic figures. What has collapsed however is the average guest check underneath it, with average tabs down close to 8% this year alone, dragging total tip earnings down with them even though the average tip percentage never actually moved.

A server or bartender isn’t making less because guests got stingier per drink. They’re making less because there are fewer drinks to sell, on smaller tabs, ordered less often. Consumers consciously pull back spending, dining gets cut first, delivery eats up the physical visits that remain, the visits that do happen shrink from once a week to once a month, and the person behind the bar or on the floor takes the hit at the exact moment the owner is least able to make up the difference financially to entice them to stay.

Dissatisfaction grows, staff quit or are let go, turnover goes up and the owner is then left to find a replacement and must now scrape the bottom of the barrel of talent in a market where many were already burned from the volatility in their paychecks in the last venue. That’s the domino Raleigh’s piece doesn’t quite trace back far enough.

When a chain restaurant or big box store loses its human touch, nobody notices, because the average consumer wasn’t going there for the human touch in the first place. Those places don’t compete on human touch, they compete on price and convenience. When consumers are forced to be price sensitive, they are already mentally prepared to trade on experience for low standards and low prices. Ironically, when a locally owned and operated venue trips up and misses the mark, they immediately lose the only competitive edge they had, being personable.

So Raleigh’s right, this is the competitive advantage small businesses have over the businesses that don’t have to care. He’s also right that we’re currently the ones doing the least amount of training, at the exact moment we can least afford to. However, what he overlooks is that we’re in a precarious economic state where we don’t have the available disposable financial resources to allocate toward better training, or any training for that matter.

For context, I spend part of every year on the other side of this problem, too. I go back to the CIA campus annually to teach a portion of the Beverage Alcohol Resource (BAR 5-Day) program in Hyde Park as a faculty member to lecture on rum. The course costs $4,450 and accepts up to 65 students each year from scores of national and international applicants. The room is full of young, enthusiastic bartenders who show up on their own time and often their own dime because they wanted more than what their job was teaching them. That tells me Raleigh’s diagnosis about the training gap is exactly right, there’s real hunger out there for the craft and the human side of this work. It also tells me something he only gestures at: nobody is getting that intensive level of training from their employer and likely never will. It’s not that the desire to connect with a guest has disappeared from an entire generation. It’s because operators must prioritize how to keep up with rent, payroll and utilities.

His idea for local certification programs, something through Ulster BOCES, SUNY Ulster, or a local trade group, is a genuinely good one, and I’d go further. It should be built and funded like the culinary programs already are, with real hours behind a real bar, not a weekend seminar on eye contact that is an afterthought. Government, leading by example on service standards, is worth trying too.

I know firsthand what happens when someone actually tries to build the thing Raleigh’s asking for, because I did it. I created and ran Class to Glass for nearly a year (2024-2025), a real training series about service standards, spirits education and technique. It was free to anyone in the local industry and while I organized and hosted it weekly, eventually I had to let it go. Not because nobody showed up, they simply couldn’t justify showing up. Almost all of the attendees traveled 30-plus minutes to our location, on their own unpaid time, to learn from someone who, from their employer’s point of view, was a direct competitor. It’s a hard sell no matter how good the course material. So while the training existed, the economics to actually attend it didn’t. Class to Glass was proof that this city has both the interest and people willing to build a solution. Its quiet death was evidence that the gap was never about a lack of available learning resources in the first place, it was about the economics.

I’d add, standing where I am now, that none of this works unless small operators are able to afford to allocate resources to training. Right now most of us can’t. That’s not an excuse for letting the standard slide but the honest reason it’s sliding, and any fix that doesn’t reckon with the state of consumer spending and industry economics is just a nice idea that will never get beyond an op-ed.

Raleigh ends his piece on kindness, a clear smile, human-to-human contact, the basics, done well and consistently. I don’t think that’s naive, but I do think it’s the only strategy many operators in the area have ever known. The long-standing operations have finally come up against something they’ve never faced before, shrinking margins and the math behind it isn’t working. The hospitality business has always run on single digit margins, but post pandemic they have become either negative or near zero with even thinner patience. The operators who are going to make it through the next few years are the ones who have a surplus of cash, own the building they are in and protect the one thing a spreadsheet can’t replicate: somebody behind the bar or counter who’s genuinely glad you walked in. If we lose that, we’ve lost the entire reason to go out to a small business in Kingston instead of somewhere else with a bigger parking lot and cheap eats.

That’s something to drink about.