The Diner Canary

A couple weeks ago, my son had a weeknight soccer practice. By the time it ended, we were both hungry but not in the mood to go home. So, we decided to hit a diner. But then we couldn’t find one that was open.

In my day, that was not a thing that occurred. Diners stayed open. They were always open. A diner was the default late-night choice because it was the only late night choice. And now we couldn’t find an one open at 9:30 p.m..

In New Jersey where I live, diners have always been an institution. Every town had one. The layouts differed but the format was always largely the same. A counter, some booths, some tables. Basic food, reasonably priced, available anytime you wanted.

They did a brisk business for breakfast, lunch, and dinner and then bustled again late when people young and old came in after movies, dinners, parties, and nights out drinking.

I entirely took for granted that there would be a nearby diner open late because there was always a nearby diner and they were always open late.

And then, a couple weeks ago, they weren’t.

It was only 9:30. Yet, scrolling through a list of ten diners, not a single one was open past 10. Eight were already closed.

I’ve been thinking about that a lot these last couple weeks in part because, 1) It sucks. A man should be able to sit on a swivelly stool at a long counter and get bacon and eggs at the hour of his choosing.; and 2) It felt like a sociologic signal of some kind. When venerable institutions change or fail, it is usually a signal that the society around them is changing or already has.

The day after we got shut out, my son and I were talking in the car and I lapsed into a fairly rose-colored “In my day…” speech about the golden era of diners and what his generation was missing out on. It was one of those sentimental reminiscenses of something remembered fondly. Told him how we all used to meet up at the local place after parties and how you’d always bump into other people you knew.

In hearing my own words aloud though, it shifted from being a warm memory – something in my past - to a statement about his present. Diners were a central part of socializing in my teen years. He wouldn’t have that.

What did he have? What replaced diners? Did anything?

His take was that nothing had replaced them and kids just didn’t hang out late at someplace open anymore... in part because they don’t hang out someplace open even before it was late. They go to each others’ houses or maybe go eat something but other than that, they stay at home and talk to each other online.

And I think that is true. It isn’t binary but it does indeed seem true that teenagers do a whole lot less than we did back in the day. We went bowling and to the movies and played mini-golf and shot pool and went to the track and went to parties. We were always doing something and it was almost always outside our own homes.

I’m literally sitting here typing this in a place overlooking the spot where there used to be a little amusement park. It was rundown and dinky but it was there and close and fun enough on occasion.

My friends and I went regularly to play mini-golf. Ask any of the six or seven of us and I guarantee you all could still recite the line the place used to stamp on your scorecard if you made a hole-in-one on the last hole and therefore won a free game.

“Your eagle-eye and well-bent knee has won for you this one game free.”

That little amusement park is condos now. They tore it down a couple years ago. I know of no other mini-golf places within a half-hour. Or driving ranges, pool halls, or bowling alleys. There used to be several of each.

We have incrementally closed businesses that used to be community entertainment centers.

They don’t exist anymore. And they were not replaced by something new, different, and just more popular. They just went away.

Instead of MANY local theaters, we now have fewer but larger ones spread farther between.

Instead a bunch of mom and pop bowling alleys, there is a grand total of one. It is expensive and bougie. It looks cool and has cool lighting. They serve drinks and food ordered right at your lane over the computer. And it cost my son and me $80 to bowl three games each there one night.

All of these little places that used to get us out of the house have gone away… because people progressively left the house even less before COVID and then stopped entirely during COVID.

And that isn’t just a teenage phenomenon.

A few months ago, my old high school friends all got together in our old town. Most have moved away. A couple still live in town. At some point, the subject of our old diner came up. It closes at night now. It is fairly dead the rest of the time. We used to go there late. Our parents used to go early.

That was a thing adults did. They went out to the diner for an actual dinner. They ordered actual entrees from the sections of the menu we flipped right past. Actual whole meals like steak and broiled flounder and baked ziti.

Now, adults don’t go early and nobody can go late.

I think COVID hastened a long, slow change in society that isn’t small or without consequence.

That change was a byproduct of a whole bunch of factors: costs of doing business; availability of entertainment options at home; rising costs of living.

We went to the movies because that was where you could see a movie. Now, we can watch anything we want all by our lonesomes at home. Other than occasional blockbusters, there are very few movies compelling enough to require seeing in a theater.

And as the volume of people making use of social entertainment centers goes down, the prices go up… which, in turn, reduces the frequency with which people make use of them… which reduces their revenue further… and round and round it goes until there are only a few and they are huge and are located a drive away. They are not community meeting places. They are destinations.

My son and I have since found a diner we like within reach of where his soccer team practices. It closes at 10. We can’t go after his one late practice each week. But we have gone a bunch of other times.

It is a DINER. It looks like a diner and has a diner menu. It has a manager and waitstaff who look the part. They serve coffee in those indestructible ceramic mugs. The plates are heavy and the eggs are always good and the toast is just right and has a lot of butter on it.

Most times we go, the same waitress is working. She is in her early sixties maybe and is friendly and attentive despite giving off the vibe that she’s tired – and she undoubtedly is. As I told my son, that’s an exhausting job. On your feet for a long shift, carrying heavy plates, shuttling around constantly. It is tiring work. But she is sweet and caring and kind even on tired feet.

Last time we were in, she came to take our order, looked at my son and said “Surprise me.” and broke into a smile. My son had been a creature of habit the few visits before. French toast. Chocolate milkshake. This time, he ordered a waffle and vanilla milkshake. She laughed and so did we. And then she brought out our food and came back a little while later with the silver canister from the old fashioned blender with the remainder of the milkshake in it and topped him off.

We like that place. As my son put it on the drive home “It is reliable.” And it is. It is solid and familiar and… reliable. And what makes it that way – reliable – is that we can count on the experience of it feeling somehow personal in the way only places you have visited many times can.

That isn’t to say it is always a delight. During our last visit, there was complete jackass sitting behind us. An insufferable, loud, jerkoff. I wrote about him on Twitter.

But even in that there was something important that we no longer experience much.

There is a social communication in merely being proximate to other human beings. We learn more than we think and are influenced more than we know from being merely within earshot of other people. We subconsciously absorb endless input on social norms and acceptability. We consciously process the things we heard said by people we didn’t choose to interact with and don’t know.

And all of that connects us all to each other in a vague, loose form of community in an intangible way that we don’t recognize, see, or realize is missing when absent. But without it, we are harmed. Our communities are materially harmed. Society is materially harmed.

The loudmouth guy in the next booth was, at least in some part, a product of having been cloistered away and spoonfed increasingly toxic disinformation largely online. He is what you get when you start with ignorance and then reduce most human interactions to words on screens. You get radicalized misfits.

And as for the rest of us…

With all of the casual, circumstantial exposure to other people that we once got playing mini-golf or going to the movies or sitting in a busy diner, we fed a general subconscious understanding of the range and diversity of people and personalities in a three-dimensional way.

Now, we reduce the world and the people in it to a flattened two dimensions seen mostly on screens. Polarization is a dimension problem as much as it is an extremity of thought problem. We see each other in simplified, flat ways as if looking through only one eye and from a distance.

We don’t have exposure to each other even briefly in a diner. Because we don’t go to diners. Or much of anywhere really.

So, now diners close.

And that is more than just the way of the world where once popular things eventually become less so.

It is a canary in a coalmine that is already noxious and getting worse.

Diners are closing their doors early because people no longer open their own doors to leave the house. COVID may have accelerated that but it didn’t start it and it isn’t the cause. We were becoming a nation of homebodies already and COVID forced us to get good at it.

We can get diner food delivered now.

But french toast and a vanilla milkshake in a diner booth served by a waitress who has become familiar is more than just food you could just easily eat from a bag. It’s the experience that connects you to the place where the food came from and the people who work in it and the people who go there.

Now, we just have someone leave it on the doorstep.

And when that diner closes, people will just order from somewhere else without ever missing the friendly waitress who was kind to their kids.

Because they never knew she existed.

Diners close early now. That’s a real shame, I think.