The Airing of Greivances

In which I have a lot of problems with Salt Lake City, and now you're gonna hear about 'em.

We’re breaking from tradition a little bit this year to celebrate a Festivus miracle!

I usually do a year-end Top 5/By The Numbers list of movies, books, shows, and albums—and I still may!—but I didn’t feel like it at this moment. I haven’t seen nearly as many movies as I usually do this year, and my TV habits have mostly been rewatching comfort shows and other things I’ve definitely seen, but never paid attention to¹.

One of those comfort shows has always been SEINFELD², and the episode about Festivus came on a couple of weeks back. If you’re unfamiliar with that particular episode, in it we learn that George’s father, Frank, invented his own holiday for the Constanza family to celebrate instead of Christmas. The Festivus traditions include an aluminum pole in place of a tree (Frank finds tinsel distracting), feats of strength (in which the host of the Festivus dinner challenges one guest to a wrestling match), and the Airing of Grievances (an opportunity for everyone to state how others have disappointed them over the year, or share their issues with the world at large).

I don’t have many personal grievances—and none that I’m willing to share publicly—but I do have some directed at the city I live in.

I love Salt Lake City, but man, I have some things that I need to get off my chest³. Let’s get to them.

Paid Parking Increases Downtown

In July, Salt Lake changed the parking regulations because… well, because they can. I assume it’s so they can give more money to the police so they can continue to shoot dogs and share revenge porn, but I can’t prove that. You now have to pay at meters until 10pm (it was 8pm before), they eliminated free parking on Saturday, and they raised the price. I hate it so much. The stated reason behind this is twofold. One, they want more people to use public transportation, but unfortunately public transit in Utah sucks. The second reason is that the the elected officials that actually live in Salt Lake City want to make downtown more pedestrian/bike friendly. They think that raising prices will encourage people leave their cars at home, and either walk, ride their bikes or take public transit when they go out. Elected officials⁴ who live in, like, Herriman or something, fucking hate that idea with the passion of a thousand suns. They never come downtown unless they absolutely have to, but if they can’t drive their lifted F-350 right up to the front door of whatever restaurant they’re not going to like anyway, it’s going to be everyone else’s problem.

Drivers Ignoring Crosswalks

To piggyback on the above, here’s where we get to the part that most people driving around Salt Lake also hate anyone that’s not in a car. Every city has terrible drivers, but I swear Salt Lake gets worse every year. I love to walk places. It’s my favorite thing to do when the weather cooperates. And I will never stop being amazed at how careless the drivers are—especially when it comes to crosswalks. Most of them treat the crosswalk as merely a suggested stopping place for a red light. It’s wild how many people just roll right through, and when they’re turning right on a red light, they don’t even pretend to consider there might be someone trying to cross the street. Then they get mad when they almost hit someone in the crosswalk and get flipped off. It’s insane. They want more people to walk around downtown when things like this happen? Or this? Or this? Or this? Or this? Yikes.

Local Businesses Refusing to Add their Address in Social Media Bios

This might be the thing that irritates me the most when it comes to social media. At least once a week, I’ll be scrolling through Reels, or TikTok, and come across a video that’s clever enough to catch my interest. It’s usually a couple of employees doing a trend, or having fun when it’s slow, and the post gains a little momentum. They tag the place they work at, but when you follow the link to the business page there is zero information on where that place actually is. This is especially frustrating when it’s a plea to support local businesses. Even more frustrating is that THERE IS A DEDICATED SPOT FOR AN ADDRESS IN BUSINESS BIOS! When you put the address in that spot, it creates a link. When that link is clicked, it opens the app for whatever map you use on your phone, and shows us exactly how to get there. But for some reason NO ONE USES IT! The address is always buried at the bottom of the Contact Us section of a poorly made website, that’s like the fourth thing down in a LinkTree. Once I even came across a video of the employees telling people where they can park when they arrive, with no mention of the address anywhere in the video, the caption, or the bio. It’s insane. Help us help you, for god’s sake.

Anything That’s Not a Bar Closes at 6pm

COVID screwed up a lot of things, but few things are still affected more than hours of operation. This is a much bigger problem in the colder months. There have been so many times this “winter” that it’s been pitch black at 7:45pm, I’ve already eaten dinner, and just want to hang out somewhere that’s not my house. Unfortunately, there’s nowhere to go. My options are bars that I don’t want to be at, or Barnes & Noble. You’d think that a place with an ENORMOUS population of people who don’t drink would have more third spaces, but you’d be wrong. If you do manage to find somewhere that’s open late, the employees are so accustomed to people just getting their treat/drink/whatever and leaving that it confuses the hell out of them when you actually sit down. It’s like the tables and couches are strictly for decoration, and they’re going to get yelled at by their boss for not stopping you.

The Most Random Road Construction

Every morning a city worker walks into the foreman’s office and asks, “What are we working on today, boss?” The boss rises from his chair, and heads to the wall where there’s a giant “Wheel of Fortune” style wheel with a bunch of numbers on it. He spins it, waits for it to stop then writes down the first number. He spins again and writes down the second one. Then he closes his eyes, reaches into a hat, and pulls out two letters. One is an E, the second one is an S.

“642 East, 600 South. Go ahead and dig a hole there.”

“You got it. Then what?”

“Haven’t decided. Just dig it up, close a lane or two, and we’ll figure out the rest in a couple of weeks.”

“Should we stick around for a bit to see which streets people start taking to avoid the lane closures, then close those, too?”

“Good thinking. Come on back afterwards, and we’ll spin again to see where to go this afternoon.”

This is how road construction in SLC is planned and you won’t convince me otherwise.

Door Dash Drivers

I dream of becoming a Punisher-style vigilante, but my vengeance is focused solely on stealing the cars that Door Dash Drivers leave unattended in irritating places. How they are able to have absolutely no regard for anyone else is astonishing. They park wherever they feel like, walk inside a restaurant, cut to the front of the line, and shove their phone in the face of some 18 year-old trying to take someone else’s order, and get mad when they’re told it’ll be a few minutes. It’s crazy. I hate all of them.

Everything Is Expensive All the Time

This isn’t Salt Lake specific, but it’s getting really bad. I know the President keeps saying that prices are going down⁵, and that “affordability is a con job” by the democrats or something equally stupid, but holy shit are things expensive. Lunch is like $20, an Iced Latte is $9, and seeing a movie that was released in 1987 at Broadway costs $17. Smith’s pretends to give discounts, but makes you jump through so many hoops that it’s not worth the effort for most people. “We know you have a Shopper’s Card, and the computerized voice is going to loudly demand that you scan that at checkout. But if you also scan this QR code, you can clip a digital coupon that will be added to your Shopper’s Card for an additional discount. But there’s no cell service in any of these stores, so you’ll have to connect to our WiFi that only sort of works occasionally. Also, the QR code opens the app in your browser, then it’ll prompt you to switch to the actual app from there. And you’ll have to sign back in because the app never remembers your info, and you’ll have to change your password before the WiFi signal drops. Then we’re going to send you an email with a link to verify that it was actually you that requested to change it. Oh dang. You actually did all of that? Um, okay, I guess we’ll take and extra 35 cents off. You’re welcome!”

Meanwhile every other business is trying to figure out how they can use AI to make things worse, so they can fire the people that work for them, so that their CEO can get a bigger bonus, all while not lowering prices at all. It sucks.

Settle Down. Deep Breaths. Serenity Now.

I could go on, but I’m going to stop there. Hopefully 2026 will bring some changes to a few of these things, but until then…

1. I’ve been ending my nights with a random old episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE, and I may have to do a post solely dedicated to that pretty soon.

2. Shoutout one more time to Rob Reiner.

3. This could also double as the “Betrayal List” trend that’s been popular on social media for the last couple of months.

4. And UTA execs who have a stroke every time they think about having to hire another driver whose salary might cut into their year-end bonus.

5. And people believe him! It’s nuts.