Hurry Up

The gold standard of service here in New York City is efficient and friendly.  I suppose that’s true anywhere, but there’s a special empahasis on efficiency here.  In many places, a lot of friendly allows customers to cut you slack on the efficiency.  Here, efficiency is king, with friendly optional.   Why?  Because time spent waiting in line is time that is not being used to make or spend money.   And being nice is no precondition of success in New York.  Everybody knows that.

Some juggernauts are exempt.  This weekend we went to the IKEA store in Red Hook and waited in lines for ungodly amounts of time.  Efficiency was not on anybody’s mind.  But IKEA knows that there is nowhere else to go for IKEA-type shit.  And so we waited… and waited…

Which, I decided, was my comeuppance for shopping at a store that changed the face of one of my favorite neighborhoods forever.  Yes, I felt guilty, even if you could make the argument that the IKEA was good for the area, economically.

I used to host an Amateur Variety Hour at a bar-that-used-to-be called Lilly’s on Beard street.  Beard street used to be a desolate cobblestone street  running by warehouses and packs of roving dogs and one lonely fisherman’s bar called Lilly’s.  People who discovered the bar always said they felt like they had come to the middle of nowhere.

Now that nowhere is IKEA drive.  It really does me head in.