COVID was a tough deal. We're not going to sort through exactly what happened there, what to make of it in this conversation. We haven't really had a national reckoning even about that yet. Maybe we never will. We're certainly not going to do it here, but it's a fresh example of a really big thing, a very revealing thing that we all just went through together. So I can't help myself, but to bring it up from time to time,

because I think it's useful for understanding certain parts of the Bible.

Before COVID, there were rules at some stores that I would go to,

especially like mom-and-pop shops.

They'd have old handwritten notes and had yellowing tape around the edges from 30 years ago.

They were like,

starting July 17th, 1994, we will no longer be accepting checks.

I'm like, why is that still up there?

You don't need it anymore.

We get it.

You're fine.

If somebody starts to write a check, just be like, we don't do that.

Or just write a new sign, maybe.

I don't know.

But there were, you know know you get that kind of stuff

but there weren't generally a lot of signs about how you treat people like please be nice to

our employees that is more of a post-covid thing and i remember it happening and people went kind

of feral it was weird it was hoarding and yelling and blaming and finger

pointing and understandably. And people were scared and upset and people got terribly sick. People died.

It was a huge deal. I get it. It was a lot of pressure. A lot of us at once and ugly things are

going to come out. Well, one of the ugly things that came out was people who worked at stores started

getting treated real crappy. And I think it happened a lot. And so signs started to crop up. Signs that didn't used to be necessary started to appear at first handwritten, then formally printed on a placard or something in stores. And they'd say something like, if you verbally abuse our customers, you'll be asked to leave or something like that.

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