You don't have to, and I personally also find small-talk with strangers rather tedious, but in the specific cases brought up by the author, it sounded like he would've saved himself time by just briefly explaining his reasoning. Which also would've had the nice side-effect of treating his interlocutors as rational human beings worthy of a measure of respect.

> no one wants to explain themselves to a stranger we will never meet again

Even though I, personally, feel the way you do, the above doesn't ring true. Many people crave those small interactions with strangers, and welcome the opportunity to talk about themselves. That's the reason they're a social norm.

I'm in a very similar boat as you two (why does the barista at Starbucks care what my weekend plans are?), but I don't think it's always that people want to talk about themselves, I think they just want to talk to somebody, period. Humans are social creatures and have survived on our ability to form communities, so there is part of us that sometimes just want people to talk to, not necessarily about ourselves. For sure there are narcissists who do only want to talk about themselves, but I wouldn't say that's everyone.

> I hate this, the idea that I should have to explain myself to a random stranger in a shop as if they are entitled to know anything about me.

You sound like someone who has never worked in any customer facing position. Many people come in wanting X. They don’t realize X has many consequences. You know if you just give them X then they’ll come back another day, leave a bad review, or say, “but why didn’t you tell me this?!?!”

I mean, ffs - this happens to me as a customer and I’m thankful. Sometimes there are obscene arcane scenarios that you can’t find out about through regular means that only that service rep will know about. They are mostly fine if you just explain what you’re doing - they’re safe guarding the company’s reputation. They have nothing against you asking for weird shit - they just don’t want your bad shit later.

> no one wants to explain themselves to a stranger we will never meet again

So you walk into the Apple store, walk up to an employee and when confronted with the question "How can I help you today?" what do you do?

Telling them "I would like X", seems like an unneccesary level of "explaining yourself". They should just know and understand exactly what you want from non verbal signals?

Thats not the scenario the scenario in the example was walking up to the staff and asking "I would like X" and then instead of selling you X they ask why you want X and would you not prefer Y?

Very annoying, I want X thats why I asked for it, I dunno if I want Y because I didn't spent time researching it like I did X. I want X not an argument there are lots of other place I can buy X if you are going to be difficult about it.