The Nasty Nineties

I about choked when National Geographic subtitled their series on the 90’s as “the last great decade”.  Great for economic growth, no doubt was the reasoning.  But we remember the nineties as significantly un-great in the sense of common ethics and morals.  We’ve been in the lodging business since the late 80’s when we and two other families started the Oklahoma Bed and Breakfast Association.  We would put people up in our home, zoned for guest privacy and a common area where we served gourmet breakfasts.  People in the late 80’s and early nineties were polite, happy with the experience (or didn’t make a fuss), and paid willingly.  We branched out into the hotel/motel business which serves a wider clientele, including some nasty characters.  But again, there were some who could be counted upon to be honest and good customers.  That all began to fall apart in the 1993-96 period and by 2000 it had reached about the level of rudeness, crudity, profanity, and cheating as today. 

It seemed in the 88-92 era we could always count on seniors to pay bills, though some would hint that they wanted discounts or further services—we often tried to work a deal.  But in the 90’s seniors became profane and began to claim they had an agreed-upon rate which never existed in the history of our hotel.  People in the 90’s went ballistic as the new term was.  They tried to trick you into free lodging, and so forth.  My favorite story is from our son who grew up with the business and  became Asst. Mgr. for a Holiday Inn for a time.  He told about a fairly well-heeled couple who checked in on a Sunday afternoon right after the hotel had hosted a convention that ended the previous night.  And he had few housekeepers to make up enough rooms.  So taking a maid cart he began helping staff furiously clean rooms.  About 1pm that couple arrived, and hurrying back to the desk, he knew the room he had just cleaned was good to go.  5 minutes after they had checked in they called him and demanded a free stay.  There was toilet paper they had thrown into the toilet, the fresh sheets had been rumpled to look like the room was unmade.  And something was purposely spilled on the carpet. Just 30 seconds before he saw them he had cleaned that room himself.   And so he told them that he was going to void their lodging bill and that he wanted them to leave forthwith and that they were never to stay at another Holiday Inn again—he could make it stick in the reservation system.  But then he got scared that he had gone too far and so he brought up the incident at a Holiday Inn convention.  Instead of drawing worried faces, the convocation gave him cheers.  They had all experienced things like this.

If seniors got nasty and profane, young people were sometimes almost scary.  We had robbery of fellow guests, stolen items from the kitchen when the lights were off, fights started with other guests, and, my favorite, throwing a TV over the balcony onto the parking lot below.  We had human trafficking, drug dealing, and con artists.  As our hotels were small, we could provide close, stiff security backed by 911 and police.  The nasty guest behavior wasn’t anything new under the sun, but other managers to whom I talked swore it had doubled or tripled during the mid to late-90’s. 

Why?  The political thing to say is that the President lied and lying became common and somewhat acceptable.  Except that this nastiness began prior to 1998 and Willie’s blue dress problems.  I wonder if the rap music, which glorified killing your mother and the cops, began to make us cruder in the late 80’s.  Pop culture was in decline.  When half the teens in high school chose to listen to 60’s oldies on the radio, we knew something was rotten in Denmark.  The generation of latch-key kids of the 70’s had also grown up.  Peter Drucker predicted that a generation raised without sufficient parenting was sure to bring lots of anti-social behavior into the workplace.  Government became lawless by not following the law concerning illegal immigration and income tax.  (horrendous income tax auditing scandal with the IRS in the mid nineties).  Whatever the cause, it seemed like everyone with an inclination to cheat or chisel came into full practice.  For this reason, we often reminisced about the change in people and dubbed it the Nasty Nineties.