There's a café near where I live that used to make a particular sandwich. People loved it; they 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 just disappointed, but angry. They seemed to feel betrayed, almost. As though something had been taken from them. Something that was owed to them. And I don't get it.

What happened was that a person opened a business. They made something that ended up becoming a favourite. 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.

For some inexplicable reason, people thought of it as a commitment made to them, without any having been made. Nobody feels they owe the café an explanation for going somewhere else, or for not buying the sandwich for a day or two, or many days in a row even. The obligation is only ever imagined running in one direction.

What makes it stranger is that the businesses we get angriest at are usually the ones that served us best; the ones we love the most. 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 the guarantee then gets assumed to be a right. The correct response, as far as I can tell, is feeling that that's a shame, and then going somewhere else. That's it. That's the entire response. Feeling sad is completely understandable. Feeling wronged, not so much. You keep the years of good sandwiches. Those happened, you enjoyed them, they were real. You don't retroactively sour them because they ended.

I've thought of it 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.

I don't get it.