Many of us have moaned about the great replacement. No, this isn’t about immigrants coming to the United States. It’s about replacing our manufacturing economy with a “service economy.”

And now the “service” is disappearing from “service economy.” Here are a few examples of the decline of service in our service economy.

Last Christmas, one of my sons bought a cell phone for me. From a small company with a name like an herb. He paid for a year in advance, and the company sent each of us tracking updates on the shipment. Then it told us the phone had been delivered. It hadn’t.

Then I got two emails from the herbal phone company, which has been bought out by a larger company, reminding me to activate the phone. Which I hadn’t received. I replied via email that I hadn’t received the phone. No reply. That is, no service.

My son and I each contacted the delivery company, about which a great movie was made in 2000. That company told us the phone had been delivered to the farm next door. The farm told me it had returned the phone to the delivery company. Again, the deliverers told us the phone had been delivered, and it denied our claim. My son is out $300+ and I never got the phone.

So I decided to buy a phone from another company, a company that likes the color orange and whose named suggests it is here to serve people who use things. I filled out the online form six times. Each time I typed in my postal address, the form told me zip code 04955 does not exist. Funny, but the post office says it does. You know, the post office. Which originated zip codes.

The orange user-oriented company also didn’t reply to my emails. So, I wrote each cellphone company a letter. Printed on paper. Addressed to corporate headquarters, one in California, one in Oregon. That was on Sept. 8. You know what happened next. Neither replied.

I can’t get through to either phone company, but now when I buy items to be shipped I insist they not be sent via the company that states falsely that it delivered a phone to me.

Here’s someone else’s ordeal. A friend ordered nutritional supplements from a big retailer with a name like a river full of piranhas. The bottles came. A month later, six more bottles. She went online, found she had mistakenly ticked the box for repeat orders. She canceled the repeat order.

Next month, six more bottles. Finally, she called the piranha company’s 800-number. We’ll take care of it. They didn’t. Finally, they did, but she was billed, automatically, for each shipment. She has enough cranberry extract soft-gels to last several people’s lifetimes.

You’ll notice the common thread here is that you can’t cut through the technology to speak with a real person.

It’s not that the technology is bad, it’s that technology may give humans the sense that they don’t have to respond to other humans, aka customers. Even when you do reach a real human with the authority to fix things, you may be ignored.

Local example. I have shopped at a local grocery for more than 40 years. That store is now under out-of-state management. In the time the store has been run from out-of-state lots of items have been discontinued. I handed the manager a letter I wrote, detailing 17 items I can no longer buy regularly in his store. He thanked me. And I never heard from him again, though I see him often in the store. Sometimes while he watches the self-checkout aisles.

Self-checkout, where the customer does the store’s work while a store employee watches the customer and the machine. But here, I see a ray of hope. The New York Times reported last week that Booths, a grocery chain in northern England, was dropping self-checkout.

Booths may be part of a mini-trend. Wegmans, a company with more than 100 stores along the Atlantic mid-coast, dropped self-checkout after in-store theft doubled. Too often, a larcenous customer will tap an icon of a 45-cent zucchini instead of the 79-cent cucumber in her basket.

One reason stores put a worker at the self-checkout aisle is to stop such thievery. The thievery that doesn’t get stopped raises losses and prices the rest of us pay to cover the loss to thieves.

And despite the rise of artificial intelligence, machine eyes aren’t as good as human eyes. As Claire Moses wrote in The Times, “The machine doesn’t recognize your spaghetti.” So, a store employee has to key it in. “And buying something like alcohol or medicine still means you have to wait for a store worker to come over.”

Booths said employees interacting with customers provides for a better experience.

“We have based this not only on what we feel is the right thing to do but also having received feedback from our customers,” the company said. “Delighting customers with our warm northern welcome is part of our DNA.”

Would that some of that warm “northern welcome” creeps into the DNA of phone companies in California and Oregon, retailers in Washington state and my local supermarket.

Bob Neal is no luddite. He writes on a desktop. But he has never liked talking to the sign at drive-thrus or ordering things online that he should be able to buy at a store just down the road.

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