It begins to look as though something in the nature of a day of retribution were actually at hand, and that the meek, represented during the past few years by the cash customer and member of the buying public who could not by any stretch of the imagination be described as inheriting the earth, might once more get at least a fifty-fifty break here and there. And if the wheel has come full circle and the customer is again about to have his innings, there is no valid reason why his revenge against arrogant shop clerks, supercilious waiters, sneering hotel clerks and impertinent cab drivers should stop this side of murder.
The signs of change, even without the election returns to underscore them, are discernible here and there, and by the time the new year rolls around it is possible that the dime tip will once more get a civil thank you. Already cab drivers in New York, perhaps the most offensively mannerless public servants in America, are assuming what almost amounts to toleration of the people who keep them alive; hotel rooms in San Francisco are filled only to about ninety per cent of capacity, which makes things better for everybody. And even the South Americans in New York night clubs are beginning to ask the price of champagne before they order more than half a dozen bottles. The shocking rise in barbers' fees in Manhattan is being met by a customer resistance which is expressed in terms of a haircut only half as frequently, and abated tips when one is necessary, and Saturday night on Broadway is approaching reasonable proportions rather than an explosion in the sub-treasury. There are plenty of men's shirts and shorts in the shops, phone operators only cut off the customers half as often, and if impatient motorists will only hold off a little longer they will be able to get a new car without permanently endowing a crooked salesman.
Only in the gyp state of Florida and a few other booby traps for tourists is there any prospect of the brave snow-storms of currency that in other years bought annuities for hotel clerks and made landed gentry of speculators in Pullman space. In Florida's racket resorts and among the tasteless goons who populate them frenzied finance promises still to hold sway. The almost complete breakdown and demoralization of air transport and the discomfort and unreliability of what flying services still function at all, have placed an unprecedented demand on rail space south with the resultant profiteering, and there are still enough phonies and punks in the chips to populate the Yahoo parades of Miami and a few other pickpocket paradises, but the chances are that another year will see Florida returned to the haunted house status it enjoys nine seasons out of ten. Make no mistake, the bloom is off the boob for a while and the chances seem to be that the customer's market, as dead under the New Deal as chattel slavery or the flat earth theory, may actually become a reality once more.
Matters sartorial are only the most casual concern of this department, which is generally dedicated more to inward and spirituous grace than to the minks and sables of outward substance. But a nice question has been posed, implemented by the published photographs of what is described as “a night club commuting service” between Miami and Havana, and we purpose to get a ruling from someone in the stratospheric know. In the pictures of this amiable and obviously well-promoted junket the participants are one and all formally and politely attired for the evening; low cut ball gowns for the ladies, white or black dinner jackets or mess jackets for the men, depending probably whether they were among the cash customers or the plain staff, as is the custom on ship-board. It was all, obviously, an evening when champagne and summer mink were taken for granted.
All of which poses a question hitherto rendered inconsiderable by reason of the limited space and general urgency of air travel. Will voyagers dress for dinner in the air? Until now air travel has been a matter of necessity, discomfort and general distress. That it has been possessed of certain advantages when functioning at its greatest reliability, which wasn't all the time and certainly isn't yet, is undeniable, but nobody but a humorist would suggest that until now the accommodations available have been in any way superior to, say, the early day-coach era of rail travel. It seems probable, however, that in future and despite a current trend toward mass air transport by the air lines under conditions which make steerage travel in the middle of last century a de luxe proposition by comparison, there may be some flights organized on a reasonably comfortable, even de luxe basis and that passengers will be able to ride from coast to coast without being strapped into their seats and allowed the dubious privileges of a single communal washroom. Should such flights be inaugurated it is almost inevitable that actual dining in the air will follow and supplant the present shoe-box lunch arrangement with its little nastinesses of paper towels and tea-room dabs of food. The intelligences which made it possible to get off the ground at all will almost inevitably make it at least partially bearable to patronize their devisings.
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