Decency in America: Hotels and Motels

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One thing most observant immigrants and visitors to America seem to agree on is that the behavior of citizens is extremely variable. Some are crass and inconsiderate, others are polite and considerate in the extreme. But there seems to be a weird tradition about how to conduct oneself in a motel or inn.

At least two friends have informed me that the thing to do in a hotel or motel is to leave one's room in a complete and filthy mess.  These were two entirely unrelated friends: one, a colleague from graduate school who tended to travel only professionally, and the other a very close friend from a family that one could only describe as civilized in the best sense. You were supposed to trash the place.

The reasons I was given by the two sources were a mixture of sensible and quite irrational.

A. You would be considered a provincial if you left the room clean. Only farm folk cleaned up after themselves.

B. The cleaning staff needed to know which items of linen had been soiled at the end of your stay.

C. The whole place was carefully cleaned after you leave: this was mandated by the hospitality and sanitation laws, so why bother?

D. A hotel or inn was one of the few places that you could make a mess in with impunity, so why not?

I had to smile to myself at reason A. The last category of people whom I could possibly have an interest of impressing with my non-farmliness would be hotel or motel staff. Whom was I impressing: the cleaning staff? The management? The front desk?? And why? Of course, when you're young, you want to impress everybody. But ... well, never mind.

Reasons B and C made some attempts to sound reasonable, but in the last analysis, they seem to be urban myths, or the sorts of rationalizations that adolescents would use. Adults really don't spend a lot of time thinking about their impact on places of commercial hospitality, and they go on autopilot, so these habits of conduct in inns and hotels are probably left over from their youth.

The fact is that at one time, hotel guests were civilized and considerate. Perhaps this was from a time when only the wealthy could afford to travel, and the wealthy employed servants at home, and were accustomed to treating them with decency even away from home. As travel became more affordable, a new class of hotel guest must have found some pleasure in vandalizing hotel rooms, and spread the myth that it was an actual requirement, in order to fully enjoy one's stay in the hotel, to leave a mess behind. Popular musicians of the mid century were notorious for leaving their hotel rooms in terrible condition, but popular musicians are often undisciplined and uncouth, and bad examples of conduct for anyone. (I'm a great admirer of some of the worst-behaved ones, but I wouldn't emulate their hotel behavior.)

Look around you at the motels and inns that spring up like mushrooms. In contrast to old, established turn-of-the-century establishments built of stone and marble and brick, these places are intended to be used like shoes: they have a finite lifetime, during which they will be trashed by waves of guests. At first, while they were still charging top dollar, they would be regularly repaired and maintained by professional builders and craftsmen. The value of the property is based mostly on superficial things, such as the decor, the rugs and the wallpaper, and the veneer on the counters, and the haughty attitude of the front desk staff would reflect this. As the cost of a room stays around $200 a night, the efforts to clean the rugs and the drapes is considerable.

As the property ages, it is sold off to a medium-grade hotel chain, which would employ people of lesser talent and qualification both to staff the place, and to maintain and repair it. The rugs and drapes are cleaned less frequently, the plumbing left to its own devices, especially if all the rooms are never filled most of the year, and guests can be assigned any remaining functional rooms, until eventually all the rooms are in need of repair.

 

I believe this is actually not a view of a location in the USA

After a decade or two, I suppose, the buildings are sold to investors who focus on extracting the last penny of profit from the place, before it is handed over to the arsonists. Smokers and bums are permitted to stay in them for long stretches of time, and eventually the property is razed to the ground, to make space for a parking lot.  In my mind, hotels and motels in strip malls represent the worst aspects of suburban sprawl.


Is it impossible to go back to building something to last: a concrete or brick building that could last several decades? No, because modern standards of profitability dictate that the hotels and inns must be built precisely where they can attract the greatest number of guests of the highest strata of society, and it is difficult to decide on suitable locations once and for all. One location would work for a few years, and then lose its shine. So you want to build your motel to last, say, about four years, and no longer. It's planned obsolescence, really, one of the worst ideas that ever wafted over the soon-to-be-blighted landscape of America.

It is peculiar to regard a motel or hotel as a consumer item. It is as though these places are constructed to be slowly destroyed, rather than to endure. A lot of things we use are disposable, and I deplore the fact. Ballpoint pens, razors, carpet slippers, soda and water bottles: the list is endless. And now motels are on the list.

These are the mindsets that have to change, if this society isn't to blight itself to death.

[Added later:
Now it is common to find little notices in hotel rooms such as:
"Please help to save our Planet; if you can re-use your linen, please do so, and save many gallons of water. Place towels you cannot use again on the floor; if you can re-use a towel, hang it up. ..."

This seems a good idea, generally. I wonder why it should require so much more water to launder 100 towels rather than 50, but it is probably a matter of saving energy and costs as well.

In my youth, I was accustomed to showering before I climbed into bed, simply because I had to do my own laundry, and showering beforehand lengthened the number of days the same linen would serve before it needed to be laundered. The people of today palm off laundering linen to their parents first off, and then consider themselves too tired to shower at the end of the day, and do it in the morning. Bed linen, as a result, tends to get soiled very rapidly. It is easy to see how this habit would result in very little likelihood that hotel linen can be used without laundering for more than a single night.

To summarize, personal habits of people are possibly migrating towards habits that are more harmful to the environment. To reverse this trend, reasonable kids of reasonable parents can probably be steered towards routines which, in later life, are conducive to less environmental impact.

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