i live in a city with a population of 14 million people, but still most of my everyday transactional interactions like buying churros, chicken wings, or electrical supplies are with people i know and transact with repeatedly. that's because i walk there, lacking a motor vehicle. i imagine this was also true of day-to-day commerce in ancient rome, and of course the patron-client and master-slave relationships that were so central in roman society were anything but anonymous

I agree: I live on and off in a city of many, many millions. Maybe it’s just the idiosyncrasy of how I choose to live and shop, but I personally know most of the people with whom I transact regularly in the same way you describe.

Including many of the specific humans who staff the handful of Anonymous Big Chain kinds of enterprises that have weaseled their way into our city: even one of those branches tends to have familiar faces managing or preferring to work the shift that overlaps with when I visit.

I would know how to seek social and transactional anonymity if I wanted to—just go do my shop in a different neighborhood!—but I don’t want to, and that seems pretty consistent with the way things are done in my city.