I don’t think that shelter in place has had that large an effect on most of the kinds of interaction relevant here. People still have largely the same economic interactions—we’re still buying mostly the same products from mostly the same sources. There’s maybe some shift in middlemen—more Amazon, less brick-and-mortar—but our interactions with the brick-and-mortar Walmart store weren’t really any more personal than the interactions with Amazon anyway. There might have been a time when everyone was on a first-name basis with their grocer, but those days were long past even before COVID.
To the extent that COVID has had an effect, I expect it’s probably increased the proportion of repeated interactions, rather than decreased that proportion. There just aren’t as many opportunities to go out and interact with strangers. We’re interacting less with cashiers or waiters or bartenders or hotel staff. Conversely, we’re still interacting about as much with family or coworkers—those close ties are relatively less sensitive to the barriers created by COVID.
Interesting question.
I don’t think that shelter in place has had that large an effect on most of the kinds of interaction relevant here. People still have largely the same economic interactions—we’re still buying mostly the same products from mostly the same sources. There’s maybe some shift in middlemen—more Amazon, less brick-and-mortar—but our interactions with the brick-and-mortar Walmart store weren’t really any more personal than the interactions with Amazon anyway. There might have been a time when everyone was on a first-name basis with their grocer, but those days were long past even before COVID.
To the extent that COVID has had an effect, I expect it’s probably increased the proportion of repeated interactions, rather than decreased that proportion. There just aren’t as many opportunities to go out and interact with strangers. We’re interacting less with cashiers or waiters or bartenders or hotel staff. Conversely, we’re still interacting about as much with family or coworkers—those close ties are relatively less sensitive to the barriers created by COVID.