Radical Kindness & Community
An ideological crisis in the parking lot of a 'Kwik Trip' in Wisconsin
The town of Black River, Wisconsin has an old iron mine you can hike around. It’s got the best nature trails for miles, and the landscape is gorgeous if you can manage to forget the geographical violence at its origins. There’s a water pit there, too, where teenagers like to swim. It’s so deep the water remains ice cold regardless of the length or intensity of the summer heat. Mothers bring their children there after work, but only to play on the gravely, trucked in sand, and to dip their toes into the water when they need to cool off.
Black River has never had just one economic engine. There’s a feed mill some miles outside the downtown area, and — on a small river running through its central park — some vague-looking industrial buildings. With the mine long closed, it’s hard for an outsider (like me) to guess what keeps the majority of the town’s residents employed, but they seem to be doing well enough in general. With a handful of recently renovated churches, storefronts with shining picture windows, and the kind of mid-sized retail chains that provide comforts bordering on luxury, it’s hard to see what you’d miss if you moved there from a large regional city in the midwest. There’s even an authentic Mexican restaurant that recently opened in the building that formerly housed a mom and pop ice-cream shop; a place that presses its own tortillas and makes its own chips.
I happened upon this town, this context, and its backstory, during the roughly two hours I spent with a Kwik Trip employee there named Ashlee on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago.
The family and I had pulled off the highway just two hours into our trip back to Indiana after spending two weeks in Minnesota with family. We’d timed our trip so that we could quickly attend an 8am mass at Guardian Angels Parish before continuing the rest of the six hours home to South Bend. But after finding the door of the church locked (it’s not uncommon to find radically erroneous information about mass times on Google, and the internet more generally), we headed to the Kwik Trip because we were almost out of gas.
Black River is one of those rare places (though more common in the rural midwest) where they trust you enough to let you pay after fueling without taking a credit card. Upon returning to the car with donuts (a post-mass ritual we never miss, even on the rare occasions when we’re prevented from actually making it to mass), I found that, for some reason, the car wouldn’t start.
We’ve got a Honda Odyssey, a beautiful minivan. But the one thing I most dislike about it is how “digitally integrated” the whole thing is. Starting it up feels like starting an old Dell Desktop computer circa 1998. You put your foot on the pedal, then — so long as you have the key fob in your pocket or someplace — you just push the power button and wait for the car to start up. A computer on the dash boots up, and you barely even hear the engine turn over. After going through the sequence several times with growing alarm, it became obvious that the battery was dead. I was pretty sure it was dead, dead, since we’d just finished driving a couple hours, but we held out a shred of hope in the tense silence that followed.
“What are you going to do?” Shayla asked. I was pumping my fist and trying to stare at nothing in particular through the windshield.
“I don’t know,” I said, because I didn’t. Then I exited the car and went back into the store, now a beggar.
I had a nonsensical exchange with the clerk — “Our car battery died, do you have a…charging pack or something? Is there anything you guys do for that?” — who very kindly made an announcement with my question to all the employees. One of these employees, the aforementioned Ashlee, answered the call and told me to meet her back at my car in a minute.
Ashlee’s grandfather owned a mechanic shop on Hollywood Boulevard. Her dad’s side is from the west coast, and his family ran it for years. The shop was busy and successful, but awhile after her grandfather passed, her dad decided he didn’t want to run it anymore and sold it, or closed it or something. Somewhere along the line, he divorced Ashlee’s mom, who took her to the middle of Wisconsin (closer to her family), but not before he had taught her basic mechanical competencies.
“He told me that you never want to be a damsel in distress,” she said opening the hood of my minivan, exchanging a glance that both recognized and then excused the fact that that is exactly what I now found myself to be. This is why she knows how to test, charge, remove, and install car batteries, and change flat tires and her own oil.
After confirming with jumper cables that the battery had given up the ghost, she invited me to jump into her Chevy Cruz so we could drive down to a shop around the corner where she knew the owners charged fair prices. As I got into her front seat, she quickly removed the battery with her own tools, and then set it on a towel in her backseat next to a collection of kids’ toys, swim clothes, and half-eaten snacks in half-opened wrappers.
When we got to the shop, I remembered myself and insisted that she let me grab the battery and bring it in. I was shocked at how heavy it was, and wondered how Ashlee — who was at least a full foot shorter than me — had heaved it out of my engine with so little apparent effort.
I bought a new battery from a cashier whose half-heartedly attempt at an upsell seemed perfunctory — “For forty dollars more you can get what we call the ‘Big Dog’ of car batteries” — and Ashlee and I returned to the Kwik Trip parking lot where she quickly got to work again with her tools.
For me, the significance of this event can’t be fully captured in any description of Ashlee’s kindness, competence, or generosity. And it certainly can’t be captured in the terms a coworker (who may well have been a manager) suggested as I was profusely thanking anyone in sight prior to leaving the parking lot. “This is what we do at Kwik Trip” he said, “This is how much we care about our customers.”
During the whole ordeal, I kept thinking about how radically uncharacteristic such an episode was in the context of a big corporation like this. About how such virtue — kindness, compassion, competence — that seems to belong to the cliched small towns of the recent past, seemed to defy the socio-economic structures in which Ashlee and I found ourselves enmeshed.
Humor me for one more moment…
In a local community organized around various goods and a common good, to help a neighbor — or even a stranger — makes sense. It’s still exemplary, of course, maybe even supererogatory, but it’s a deeply intelligible thing to do. The “thick moral concepts” (to borrow a phrase from Bernard Williams) with which we can describe it are multitudinous: caring for a stranger, generously reaching out, etc., etc., etc.
But I’ve worked for corporations. We live in a world structured by massive markets. And what Ashlee did for me (for my family) exists outside of these, perhaps even in defiance of them.
When I was a cashier at Target (years ago), I was trained never to actually put items into a customers car. I was issued vague warnings about liability and told that doing so wasn’t actually helping customers even if they asked me to do it. The whole time Ashlee was helping me, my biggest concern was that a manager was about to show up. Not just because I figured he (or she) would tell her to stop, and that my entire day would then be structured by the dark pattern of customer service calls required to get in touch with my insurance company, a roadside assistance agent, a corporate car servicing company…but because I knew that what Ashlee was doing for me wasn’t just how Kwik Trip — as a company — treats its customers. She was taking a risk, personally and perhaps on behalf of the gas station chain. I can’t imagine how many corporate polices she broke…just to treat me like the person in need that I genuinely was.
The rest of the trip home to Indiana, I found myself puzzling. About what it was about Ashlee — or perhaps about her and her setting in Black River, Wisconsin — that allowed her to step outside this system. About whether it was just the excitement of a situation arising in which her skills matched the moment (and gave her a chance, as she kept putting it, to “get outside the store for a bit”), or whether it was something deeper. Something sentimental and significant, perhaps about the midwest, or small-towns, or how these resembled “older times.”
I’m always confused by big meta-narratives about “capitalism.” I never know how to understand systemic critiques or sweeping historical analyses. But in moments like these — moments where the intelligibility of an action reveals the constraints we’ve accepted on personal relationships in the context of the various communities we inhabit — I see something radical shining through virtue like Ashlee’s. Something one’s corporate headquarters could never fully recognized (and, indeed, would diminish) by describing it as “exemplary customer service.”
-pb
Deep(ish) Thoughts
I often get asked where someone new to philosophy should start, so I made a quick video linking my top five favorite resources. Thought I’d share it here in case anyone needs it, or — like me — could use a quick link.
(As always, if you like what you see here, feel free to subscribe to my channel here.)
Ideas Workshop (new segment)
I’ve mentioned before my (admittedly mixed) admiration for the “Daily Stoic” and all its resources, and was inspired to think up the following brief encapsulation of virtue ethics in the tradition of Plato and Aristotle.
I think these four phrases capture much of what’s useful, and would like to use them as a jumping off point in future video explainers, articles, chapters, etc. But I made up this post to try the ideas out, and to gather some feedback.
If you’ve got any thoughts about important ideas from VE that you don’t see reflected above, please leave a comment letting me know what’s missing!
And if anything in the story about Ashlee above strikes you (or if you’ve got any thoughts on how this connects up with broader critiques, theories, etc), I’d love to hear that, too.
Please…
And:
…if you haven’t already. And check out my TikTok. It’s getting real over there…
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