There's a café near where I live that used to make a particular sandwich. People planned around it. Then one day it wasn't on the board, and it never came back. The owner, when asked, said the supplier changed and it wasn't worth sourcing anymore.

I've watched people get genuinely angry about this. Not disappointed — angry. Betrayed, almost. As though something had been taken from them.

And I don't get it.

Here is what actually happened: a person opened a business. They made something. For a while, it was available to buy, and you bought it. Then it stopped being available. At no point in this sequence did anyone owe you anything beyond the sandwich you paid for on the days you paid for it. The transaction was complete every single time. Nothing is outstanding.

We seem to believe that consistency creates obligation. That if someone provides a thing reliably for long enough, they've quietly signed something. But they haven't. Unless there's a contract, a subscription with terms, a prepayment, an actual promise — the arrangement is exactly as durable as both parties' willingness to keep showing up. Either side can stop. You can stop. That's not a loophole; that's the whole structure.

And notice we grant ourselves that freedom without a second thought. Nobody feels they owe the café an explanation for going somewhere else. The obligation is only ever imagined running one direction.

What makes it stranger is that the businesses we get angriest at are usually the ones that served us best. Nobody rants about the mediocre place. The fury is reserved for the ones that were good for years, because the better they were, the more we quietly converted their generosity into an entitlement. Reliability gets mistaken for a guarantee, and then the guarantee gets mistaken for a right.

The correct response, as far as I can tell, is: that's a shame, and then you go somewhere else. That's it. That's the entire response. You keep the years of good sandwiches — those happened, you enjoyed them, they were real — and you don't retroactively sour them because they ended.

I've been this way as long as I can remember. If someone isn't obliged to do something for me and they stop doing it, I might feel the loss, but I can't find the grievance. There's nothing there to be aggrieved about.

Everyone else seems to find it immediately.

I don't get it.