Patrick McKenzie talks about the vicious hate that
people from different classes, educational backgrounds, and across the urban/rural divide in the USA often feel for one another. Just keep in mind that he spent from the late oughties until 2020 living in Japan and he returned as a rich man with very rich friends. So the confidence and feeling of insight are not necessarily backed by recent experience more profound than 'living in San Francisco'.
One very real reason this type of business exists in the world is to be a firewall between social classes and the businesses that serve them. Check cashing establishments insulate banks, which are indispensable for cashing checks, from needing to talk to certain people.
A check cashing business is “alternative finance." It is alternative to the banking world of smartly dressed middle class employees, free coffee, and firm handshakes.
A check cashing clerk and a bank teller look to many to be similar jobs done by similar people and crucially they are not. Bank tellers do not make much money but know they must present as middle class. They work in a built environment where surveillance is absolutely ubiquitous and where deviant behavior (like using certain prescribed words) will have one referred to an alternative court system for swift and certain punishment.
That is to say: bank tellers work for an American corporation with an HR department. And bank tellers, in their hearts and in their actions, internalize the class that they must, must, must present as. There are classes of people that the bank does not want to do business with. (Banks are, as we have frequently covered, not allowed to say this in as many words.) The tellers do not want to speak to them, either, and this disdain radiates from them as palpable waves.
The clerk at a check cashing business is not a bank teller. She does not disdain talking to poor people; being able to do that in such a way that most poor people end up liking her is her job. Don’t take my word for it; take the customers’. We have studied this industry extensively. We ran surveys. The customers keep saying things like “I like my local check cashing place because the girl behind the counter is kind and doesn’t judge me like those #%*(#%( at the bank.” You can present as being kind to almost all of your customers and be obviously unemployable as a bank teller.
You will deal with thousands of customers. If you use “kind girl behind the counter” language about the 0.01% most aggravating customer once, you will not be a bank teller tomorrow. So bank tellers basically never use those words, and instead can inflect “Can I help you, sir?” in a way which leaves absolutely no doubt as to how welcome the new arrival to the branch is.
I don't know what to do about this other than try to treat people as people and not let myself get recruited by one side in these conflicts. I can't heal 300 million people from a lifetime of real and perceived disrespect. And his theory that bank tellers in the USA learn to perform specific prejudices in specific ways because it seems expected of the kind of person they are pretending to be is very human.
