I know I'm hardly the first person to lament the death of good manners. But it's not a superficial issue. Manners are the grease in the cogs of a society. When you lose them, you ultimately lose your society. Of course, there are many other factors involved, many of them much more important than manners. Manners are probably more symptomatic than causitive. But they're a good indicator of where a society is at.

It is not infrequent that I can now go through an entire drive-through food transaction without ever once being spoken to by the person in the window. Somebody has to speak with you when you actually place your order through the little speaker, but after that, you're on your own.

This is now a fairly typical drive-through transaction in South Florida:

A little screen near the window shows the amount owed. The slack-jawed cashier silently sticks his hand out the window and stares at me, awaiting the cash. I hand the cash to him and the window closes. A minute later, the window opens again, and the cashier hands out my change and then a bag of food, without ever actually looking at me. He then stands there, staring blankly off into space. "Uh, are we done? Is that it?" I ask him, not sure if my order has been completed or not. The cashier responds by grunting in the affirmative and closing the window.

It's not much better at the counter. In fact, at the counter, they don't even have to speak to you to take your order. When your turn comes up in line, the cashier will often just look at you silently in a way that says "Well?"

Now I know that teenagers are generally punks, and most of the people working in these positions are teenagers. Hey, when I was a teenager, I was a punk. But when I had jobs in high school, my bosses still at least made me do the things that were conducive to good business. Though teenagers are generally a sullen, uncommunicative lot, management at least recognized this and worked on making them presentable. I'm not talking about having tea with the Queen. I'm talking about "hello" and "thank you."

A few months ago, I took my kids to McDonald's as a treat. The gal behind the window smiled at me, asked me how I was doing today, and thanked me after she handed me our food. I would have jumped out of the car and kissed her had I not been afraid of being maced. I wanted to write a letter to somebody. I wanted to nominate her for employee of the month.

I have to give the Blockbuster folks some credit in this department. They say "hello" to every single soul that walks into that store. No matter what. In fact, they're almost militant about it. It can be intimidating. If you attempt to sneak past them, they will send someone over the counter to chase you down, corner you in the foreign films section, plant himself in front of you, and say "hello." They will badger you until they receive some reciprocal acknowledgment. Maybe if we could send all the slack-jawed drive-through cashiers down to Blockbuster a couple of times a week, they might become so edgy about not saying "hello" that they'll start to do it out of fear. Which would be better than grunting.