This column first appeared in Kyle Whitmire’s weekly newsletter, Alabamafication. Click here to subscribe for free.

Something has happened at my grocer’s deli counter, and it isn’t the fault of Boar’s Head meats. Surely, the recent listeria outbreak and subsequent recall will keep many patrons at bay, but I gave up shopping among the counter’s offerings months ago. And since then, I’ve dwelled over my loss.

Once, the deli counter was among my favorite weekly shopping pleasures. As a kid who grew up eating tasteless cold cuts sealed in shrink wrap, this is what I imagined the boucheries of Paris to be. There wasn’t only smoked turkey and ham, but Black Forest, mesquite and Cajun flavors to choose from.

And the cheese! There, behind the glass, were provolone and Swiss and long blocks of yellow and white fromage, proud to be called American — something made from milk of happy cows and not extruded between sheets of sickly cellophane. When I made my choices, the kind man or woman behind the counter would happily hand me the first cuts from the deli slicer for my approval of their taste and thickness.

I didn’t have to endure shopping to fill the cheese and meat drawers in my fridge. It was a small Saturday something that I loved.

And then, at some point, that changed.

I’d like to attribute the change to the pandemic, although I can’t argue COVID is to blame. Rather, it’s a convenient marker on the timeline between before and after.

The before time was all of the pleasures above.

The after was when they began to slip away.

First, the folks behind the counter seemed busier than before, even though there were about the same number of people working there. And despite their bustling between tasks, their efforts weren’t to meet the weekend desires of us casual shoppers. Rather, they filled online requests sent by customers not yet in the store as those in front of them tapped their feet.

To my horror, one weekend morning, my wife told me she had submitted such an order and asked if I would pick it up.

“But it’s convenient!” she argued over my protests.

I arrived at the counter at the appointed time, but the meats and cheeses were not there to meet me. I’d have to come back in 15 minutes, the weary, apologetic man said from the other side of the countertop.

An appointment, it seemed, was not enough. Like Lucille Ball in the candy factory, the men and women there toiled in vain against time and the work expected of them.

On another visit, I asked for my weekly staples, this time for a bleary-eyed woman to point to a kiosk behind me. There, the meats and cheeses had been cut to satisfy the aggregate customer expectation and parceled into little plastic baggies.

I suppose I could have protested, but to do so would have been another aggravation of already exhausted store employees. It was clear, they were only following orders, marching under a banner of maximizing shopping convenience.

I didn’t feel inconvenienced. My Saturday ritual was gone. I felt betrayed.

At first, I thought this was a failure of management at my neighborhood store, but wishful trips to the grocer’s other locations in town led to the same disappointment.

This isn’t a complaint letter to customer service, however. It’s more than that. You see, I’ve had this experience in other places, too — little incidents of retail entropy, scattered signs of a system slowly breaking down.

Two young children prone to ear infections have made me a regular customer at the drug store drive-thru, where I don’t believe I’ve dealt with the same pharmacist twice. Frequently, I make a first pass there, knowing well that my child’s prescription isn’t ready, because if I don’t, they won’t bother to fill it until the next morning.

Then there was the department store that once was a shopper’s wonderland, now littered with unsorted piles of loose merchandise like a Russian market.

And then there was the to-go order from the shopping mall “Chinese bistro” which was like watching the iceberg can-open the Titanic.

My wife put in the online order for Mongolian beef, and I arrived ready to speed the delivery home before it cooled. But when I arrived, I found a backlogged line of Doordash drivers, an open kitchen of panicking cooks, and a floor worked by apologetic servers, each with that dead-eyed look I’d seen behind my grocery store deli counter. Rather than fume or fuss, I stood there for an hour (OK, I also had a drink at the bar) and watched this calamity play itself out.

What I witnessed was the convergence of several things, each of which promised convenience and a pleasant consumer experience — online ordering, curbside pickup, apps for reservations, apps for delivery — but when brought together with short staffing and just-in-time logistics resulted in disaster.

And that’s the thing that’s become common in American consumer culture. Too many corporations have turned staffing decisions over to algorithms, as Inc. magazine editor Bill Saporito recently wrote in the New York Times. Companies have set the dials to maximize profits at the cost of customer experience and employee satisfaction. It’s a phenomenon Saporito witnessed at Starbucks, where drink combinations might soon outnumber the stars in the observable universe.

“This is a problem Starbucks shares with many companies — drugstores, cosmetics outlets, airline check-in counters — that have decided that, should the algorithm get the scheduling wrong, they would rather risk having too little labor on hand than too much,” he wrote. “Pity that there’s no accounting entry for lost revenues from customers who walked away.”

To the companies making these decisions, it’s a matter of math — 10 grumpy customers is better than five happy ones — and that’s good enough to please shareholders. No app, no technological innovation will solve this problem.

But something here is being lost, something that can’t be quantified on a balance sheet or managed by AI — the joy of fulfilling work, the simple pleasure of a happy customer experience.

And the taste of a perfectly sliced piece of smoked turkey passed between two people happy to be there.