Coffee shop, Latin America, union idea

One day a week, I go to a coffee shop where the tables for customers are very close to the kitchen baking area. The kitchen staff has loud music turned on and the customers have trouble talking to each other as a result.

I talked to the manager who somewhat understood the problem, and just for me turned down the music. This shop is owned and mostly operated by Latin Americans.

I began to realize that it is a well established Latin American idea that the workers are more important than the customers. This is also a 400-year-old union idea.

In a stable economic environment where very little changes, as was the case in most of the world before 1900 and is still the case in much of the world, workers can demand better treatment without directly chasing away customers. That seems to be the case in Latin America and one of the reasons it remains so backward.

However, in our contemporary world the market is changing rapidly and customers cannot be subsumed under the interests of workers (except in government). Customers, every year as modernity expands and extends, have more choices and greater retail opportunity. No business can treat them as a secondary issue.