Maybe it’s because I’m pushing 60 or just culturally unhip, but I have a problem with substituting the phrase “No problem” for “You’re welcome.” With increasing frequency, I’ve been in a store, a restaurant or on the phone with a teen, 20- or 30-year-old who replies to my “Thank you” with the phrase “No problem.”

These interchanges vex my patience. I feel like challenging them with the following question: “Why should the ordinary performance of your job constitute a problem? That’s what you are being paid for, is it not?”

Have members of the younger generation become so unconsciously self-obsessed that their ordinary discourse has degraded the practice of interpersonal relations once embodied in the “Thank you,” “You’re welcome” exchange into a phrase indicative that my patronage of the establishment of their employ was for them, not a problem? It would appear so to me.

If I were a service-sector employer today, I’d attempt to educate my hirelings to speak to customers as if they were appreciated and entitled to good service, not merely tolerated.

Is this just me or what?

Russell Jabaut, Durham