Somehow I forgot to mention it when I wrote this, perhaps because it's a fairly personal, innocuous event, but I have a pretty good example of the brain rot that seems to underlie all these issues.
I've worked two years as a fish wife in a supermarket, following my experience in a proper fish shop. My colleagues and I worked really hard to both run a profitable fish stand and provide good service and advice to all our customers, the last part being invaluable when you sell fish so far island. Alsatian people know cod and they know shrimps, but anything else they tend to need a little nudging to come around to.
So anyway it's my last day of work, I just got tipped by a nice old man for my cooking tips, a lady is coming to the stand and starts thanking me. The day before, we'd had a sale on calamari rings because we'd overstocked a bit, and that same lady had asked how even you could make them and I'd given her a handful of ideas from frying them, marinating them etc. So we get to talking about qualified workers, I mention that one customer I've had one christmas who asked me to help him making a seafood platter and ended with "I'm coming here for my seafood now, the other store's filled with imbeciles".
So this lady I'm talking to, turns out she knows the owners of the supermarket I'm working at. This is very common, the owners are nouveau rich assholes who rub elbows with everyone who will have them, and many of our customers know them. So far I haven't met a single friend of theirs tho. Apparently the owner once loudly said "all of these, the deli stand, fish stand etc, in three years tops they'll all be gone. I don't wanna have to wait when I do my fucking groceries !"
This from the person who has us make him a seafood platter and charcuterie board for every holiday mind you.
And I think that's the real root of the problem, that these rich assholes are stuck so far up their own ass that they can't even conceive that anyone "below" them could have have anything to teach them, that they're not just an hindrance that they're paying just to waste time. They look at the numbers and they see our salary not knowing what purpose it serves, they don't see the number of people I've steered towards buying more exotic fish, that I've convinced to get the half off stuff that was getting a little stale by making it into a stew, the dozens of customers who, no bragging, chose to get their fish here because of me. The owner was paying minimum wage to hire me, someone who had been trained by the best fishmonger in Lyon and provided a skillset unique to his store, but all he saw was money coming out of his bank account and he didn't like it.
They sold the supermarket recently and it's actually been doing better.
Rich people are dipshits, they're just too rich to ever face the consequences.