And Then, Suddenly, Buying a Quart of Milk Became an ‘Experience’
We have a granddaughter, Sarah, who has spent a good part of the last decade following her muse around the world.
After she graduated from college, she taught English in Thailand before taking a long, slow roam through Southeast Asia. Ask her what she’s done lately and she might say oh, I was in China visiting a friend. Or in Australia, visiting a friend. Or in Europe. We have pictures of her cooking native meals a dozen time zones distant and standing under waterfalls in places we barely knew existed. She spent part of the pandemic in Costa Rica.
She’s done it with backpacks, hostels and an international network of friends. It’s pretty cool.
It’s also given her a trunkload of experiences, the kind where for the rest of your life you can say, “Yeah, I did that.”
Meanwhile, back here, we had the lawn mower serviced and we went to dinner at an Indian restaurant. It’s what we do and it’s fine, but by comparison these sorts of things have usually felt like something less than experiences.
So imagine my surprise over the last couple of years to learn that perhaps I was wrong.
Last week we had a local company put new window blinds in my wife’s art studio. The installation team, by all appearances, did a fine job. We shook hands and thanked them, they gave us some paperwork and they left.
Within 24 hours we had an email asking us how we felt about our window blinds installation “experience.”
And here we thought we were only having window blinds installed. If we had known we were having an experience, we would have, I don’t know, maybe popped some popcorn or posted on Instagram.
The truth is, of course, that anyone who has had even a single commercial transaction over the last few years, from buying a pack of M&Ms to buying a two-story Colonial, very likely has received that same follow-up note asking him or her to rate the “experience.”
We all know why this happens. In the age of Yelp, TripAdvisor, GlassDoor and Rotten Tomatoes, potential patrons of any product can with a single click read reviews written, at least some of the time, by previous patrons. I read them myself, and I assume I’m not alone in saying they factor into some of my buying decisions. It’s good to know if a hotel room was clean and whether the company selling parkas on the Internet will answer the phone if the zipper arrives torn.
It’s a pretty democratic phenomenon, because everyone now really is a critic. Still, maybe the most exhilarating benefit lies in the way that redefining everything as an “experience” elevates the seemingly mundane to the noteworthy.
For decades I thought my annual physical was, well, my annual physical. Now it’s my Medicare Wellness Visit and it’s apparently an experience. At least that’s what the computer-generated follow-up email calls it. I thought right up until I bought two pairs of pants last fall that I was just buying two pairs of pants. When I got home and checked my email, I found I had had a retail experience. I thought I was just buying two tickets to a baseball game, albeit with an extortionate “service fee” added for no recognizable service, before an email informed me that I had just had an experience, and would I mind doing some post-purchase analysis on it.
We are a nation whose real national pastime is marketing. We started driving trucks when they were rebranded as SUVs and we routinely pay a couple of dollars for bottles of water even though water remains widely available for free. How could we not embrace the Age of Experiences?
No, this has propelled us into a world where you can Google “Lincoln Tunnel,” the six-lane underground passageway between New Jersey and Manhattan, and read 77 reviews on TripAdvisor, with an average rating of 3.5 out of 5. While I’m not sure exactly how you parse a tunnel experience, TripAdvisor says that number makes it #423 out of 2,543 attractions for visitors coming to New York. The image of a couple from Iowa renting a car and driving through the Lincoln Tunnel just for the experience has added personal resonance to me since my wife and I once took the Chunnel train from France to England largely because it was the Chunnel.
It was a better option for crossing the channel than, say, the way they did it in 1940 at Dunkirk. Beyond that, honestly, it didn’t feel like all that much of an experience at the time. It felt like sitting in your car for 45 minutes.
Now, by the revised standards, it was absolutely an experience, and I’m sure many of the Chunnel’s 1,736 reviewers agree.
My favorite experience rating, though, is somewhat less personal. It’s for Rikers Island, New York’s most famous jail, which has 51 Yelp reviews with an average score of 3.2. That’s not as good as the Lincoln Tunnel, but it’s not bad, and it makes me wonder whether, as inmates are processed out of the correctional facility, they are handed both their belongings and a slip of paper that asks them to scan a bar code and rate their “experience.”
Was the check-in efficient? Was the staff knowledgeable? Was the staff helpful? Did they address all your concerns? Where did you hear about Rikers Island? Would you recommend it to a friend? And how was the food?
Now sure, spending time at Rikers Island probably differs in some ways from my purchasing a cheap DVD player at Walmart. But by current protocol, they’re both experiences. If Jimi Hendrix came back today and again asked “Are you experienced?”, we could all tell him yessir, we are, and I can’t tell you how worldly that makes me feel. Everyone gets a trophy.
The next time Sarah calls and we get to talking about her time in Tasmania, I will be ready. While you were chasing devils, I can tell her, we were getting an order of Lamb Sagwaala and Kadai Cholley at that Indian restaurant. And I want to tell you, it was an experience.
