Wealth & Money Quote by Douglas Adams

A line like this sounds like a tidy moral, until you remember Douglas Adams made a career out of puncturing tidy morals. The author of Hitchhiker's Guide knew how easily big ideals get packaged, marketed, and sold back to us as lifestyle upgrades. So when he frames “real service” as something money can’t touch, he’s not offering a Hallmark slogan; he’s drawing a boundary between transaction and relationship.

The phrasing does sly work. “Add something” implies service is often a baseline commodity - competent, priced, and interchangeable. Adams accepts that reality before he undercuts it: sincerity and integrity aren’t “value-adds” in the customer-service sense. They’re the only parts that can’t be faked indefinitely without collapsing. “Cannot be bought or measured” is a direct jab at managerial cultures that try to quantify trust with surveys, scripts, and KPIs. You can measure speed. You can measure satisfaction. You can’t measure whether someone actually means it - at least not without turning sincerity into another performance, which is the trap he’s warning about.

The subtext is almost bleakly funny: modern institutions will happily purchase the appearance of care, because appearances scale. Integrity doesn’t. It costs something different - consistency, accountability, sometimes profit. Adams’ intent reads as a corrective aimed at anyone tempted to confuse polish with ethics: service becomes “real” when the person behind it is not just doing the job, but refusing the small dishonest shortcuts that make systems run smoother on paper.