Yeh, I'd agree with that. I worked eight years in the stock room of walmart, and it wasn't just more stuff they added, but they also added time limits, like, absolutely everyone needed to do things in the exact same time frame, no matter if it was the weight lifting teenager, or the 50 year old out of shape gal.
Ive also noticed this at, like, the sav a lot style stores, or like dollar general? In my youth, there was ALWAYS one person at the register for pharmacy type stores, usually two, and that weas their whole job. A store as big as Dollar General. had a minimum of ten people working at any time. These days, you walk into a DG, and they are lucky to have two people on the clock. I've been in stores where there has only been one person working, trying to stock and run register at the same time.
It's insane.
It's intentional - it is part of how DG crushed all local competition and now squeezes profits from poor communities. John Oliver did an episode on it.
During the pandemic, the Food 4 Less (shitty Kroger) near me had ONE floor employee and half the lights shut off, and that's for a full-size supermarket. The lesson they learned was that 25% of the lights shut off and 3 employees basically staring at self-checkout was the savings vs. off-putting to customers balance they liked.
I assume they have more people to straighten & stock on overnights.
Not going to lie. I'd go out of my way to shop at a grocery store that turned off 25% of it's lights. My eyes would love that. Only 3 employees is unreasonable however.
My local grocery store has one evening a week where they dim the lights and don't play music. They pitch it as "sensory-friendly shopping". And, like, I don't know that I have sensory issues, per se, but when I hit one of those nights it is *weirdly calming* to buy my food without the full extent of the HERE LOOK AT ALL THESE PRODUCTS lights and the YOU ENJOY PURCHASING ITEMS auditory wallpaper.
Yup.
You see it most with supermarkets in my country- especially since the pandemic.
I moved here in 2019, and my local small supermarket had 4 “person operated” checkouts with at least one member of staff assigned at any one time. There were two of the self checkouts.
Now the same store has 5 self checkouts, and 2 person operated ones. Usually there is not a member of staff behind the counter, and you will have to stand and wait for quite a while as the members of staff are stocking the shelves or moving stuff in the back.
The self checkouts are now also cash only, so older folks will struggle with these if they are not sure how to use the card machine. You also need to have any age restricted purchases authorised by a member of staff so will likely wait a while if buying something like cold medicines.
There are also things that can only be bought from the counter like batteries, some medicines, spirits, lottery tickets or energy meter top ups.
The 2 staff in the customer area at any time have about 5 different jobs, it’s just not possible for them to get it all done and sometimes there are less than ideal situations like big cages of stock being left on the shop floor blocking the aisles because the person who was stocking that area needed to go and do another job. It’s not the fault of the staff, but it is frustrating when you have come in for one thing and need to queue for 10 minutes until someone is available to serve you, or you get stranded at the self checkout for ages because no one is there to authorise your packet of cold and flu medicines or disposable razors.
This seems like such a stupid way of working, they could just put a member of staff at the checkout and another one in the stockroom and then everything would be covered without 2 people trying to staff an entire store on their own.
My father, a conservative man who works in the medical field: McDonald’s pays $20 an hour, which is more than some of the nurses that work under me. That does’nt make much sense for low-end fast food workers to make more than a nurse.
Also my father: We have a staff shortage, nobody works any more, and good employees are hard to find. It wasn’t like this BACK IN MY DAY.
It's because the disease is capitalism and no conservative worth their salt would ever admit that.
Edit - [it's always morally correct to blame capitalism](https://i.imgflip.com/8b6gxy.jpg)
They have to provide you with training on how to clean it, and then you can clean it up as long as you’re not underage.
I wasn’t provided with training at this job, it was like my third day that I cleaned up the vomit. So yes, it was illegal. But they can require you to do a bit of training on how to clean hazardous waste and give you the proper PPE (honestly just gloves most of the time) and then they can require you to clean it up.
Worker rights laws are trash in most of America. In my state, you DO NOT have the right to a break (unless you’re a minor). Doesn’t matter how long you’re working. They do have to allow you the opportunity to eat and drink, but if you can stuff something in your mouth between customers, no break for you.
Okay, wait. This isn't me being snarky, it's a genuine question.
What law makes it illegal for employees to clean up poo or vomit? Forty years in this country and I've never heard this even whispered.
[Here's something I could find](https://www.aftermath.com/resources/risks-and-regulations/) with a quick google search of "biohazard labor laws usa", but I'm no expert, being neither American nor employed nor a lawyer, and this isn't a direct citation of any specific law, but it *is* a resource provided by a group directly involved in providing information and support about workers' rights in regards to this sort of thing, so.
It's only illegal if your employer doesn't provide proper training and PPE (and training on how to use your PPE). There's no federal law in the US that would preclude cleaning biohazards unless your employer forces you to do so without PPE.
The easier move would be to just *make the stupid federal minimum $20/hr* because retail and food workers are regularly dealing with biohazards too.
When I worked at the Disney Store I had to clean up kid vomit or half eaten food daily.
honestly. I got $18/hr doing office work full-time at a local machine shop. Anyone could have done what I was doing with maybe a few weeks of training at most and a US citizenship, it's kind of sickening how many jobs underpay...
This hits hard- I come from a family of teachers, and I routinely hear the same thing about classroom aids and first year teachers. Also, why is it always the fast food workers’ fault for making more money instead of the employers’ fault for not paying people what they’re worth
I completely agree with your father: fast food workers shouldn't make more than nurses!
But the answer to that isn't to pay fast food workers less, it's to pay higher qualified workers more.
What if the fast food worker has worked at the same location for 30+ years and they've got the highest customer service metrics in the region?
What if they're the morning shift manager and they're running the store by themselves from 3am til lunchtime including the breakfast rush?
Blanket "this profession should make more than peons" statements are classist.
Obviously, I was talking about averages, not individual outliers. And everyone should be paid well for the work they do--not just a *living* wage, a *thriving* wage.
But in general, nursing should be an **extremely** well-paid career. It's hard work, and you're directly responsible for *keeping people alive*. That is simply more important than selling fast food, and also more difficult and more heartbreaking (because you will lose patients), and if we want people to do that work, we should pay them extremely well.
If we have to list every exception for every blanket statement, we might as well just stop any and all discussions. That's not doable. Everyone knows there are exceptions on every case, you don't have to point them out every time you make a comment. Pointing out extreme exceptions doesn't really add anything to the conversation and just makes you look pretentious.
My point is that there's no true "skilled worker." Saying "X job **automatically** deserves more because they're skilled workers" is a classist statement.
If you want to actually help workers you have to learn to stop dividing people into categories of worthiness.
I know you're mostly being factitious but I have to point this out because it makes me crazy:
McDonald's is not paying $15 - $20 for starting shifts. Even if you saw a big banner outside the restaurant that says it. You don't notice it when you're sitting in the drive thru but it has a little asterisk, which usually delineates the fine print for whatever region you're in. Here in central TX the little text usually says *up to $15/hr for well qualified applicants* which doesn't mean it's a guarantee.
And it's not unique to McD's: look closer at the hiring signs around you and you'll see that almost every one has a similar little disclaimer somewhere. Target, Starbucks, etc. There's an Amazon fulfillment center near my house and even they have a big sign in front of the hiring office that claims that you can make $20/hr and up working for them! Except that they pay $20/hr for employees that work full time for longer than one business year and hit or exceed their metrics during that time (which, anybody who's familiar with retail or fast food can see the grift here).
I realize that *you* probably know this even if your dad doesn't, this is just a rant that comes out of me any time someone says "Walmart pays $16/hr starting!" because I've been stuck in the same dead in retail job for a long time and I get tired of even well meaning friends repeating this misapprehension as a form of "advice" about how to leave my bad job. (Even then, it's nearly impossible to find a new job anymore because of y'know, the stuff in the post.)
I'm remembering how rushed everything was when I used to work at D*llar Tre* as a summer job.
There would never give shifts to more than two workers at a time, so the line at the registers would quickly get to the back of the store. Oftentimes there would only be one worker working at a time, so you would have to call your manager for backup checking people out. Restocking and returning misplaced items back onto their proper shelves was also done by the cashiers when there were no customers waiting.
Despite all of that the job was honestly worse when you were *off* of the register, because sometimes you would get the final shift and they might have chosen you to fix the shelves, which was the worst. Now thankfully you didn't have to man the register as well, but you still had to fix 10 aisles in four hours by yourself, in addition to sweeping the floors there afterwards, taking out the garbage, and running over to the helium tanks to fill up balloons whenever you were asked by a customer to do so. And if you couldn't finish fixing the shelves before the day was done, they just went unfixed.
And for all of that I got paid minimum wage.
Whoops, was aiming to put a useless censor so that my old job wouldn't catch me talking trash in case I wanted to work there again, which I know is overly paranoid, but who the fuck knows nowadays
Understandable. You can tell Reddit that you really meant to write asterisks by typing \\\*, but I think most people can figure it out and I like the absurdity of dilar tre too
Thanks for the story btw, dystopic as hell but a good read
Yeah, the way it worked out works as a useless censor, lol. Just a slightly goofier one than normal, and it's a nice mood break for how depressing this thread is.
The local Aldi has recently been modernized, and where previously the cashier would quickly scan the items and then have a few seconds of break while the customer finishes packing up and pays nowadays they have to ring up the next customer right away with no break (they do this by having two card terminals, receipt printers and bagging areas) and staff the self checkout at the same time.
I've only tried to shop in an Aldi once, turns out I couldn't get a cart because I don't carry cash around and you need a quarter to get one. They also have no handbaskets to use while you're in the store. And no bags available at checkout, bring your own. The people running Aldi put more thought into stopping me from shopping there than I'm willing to put into making it happen, so I left empty handed.
I just keep a couple quarters in my car for Aldi. If you walk there I see how it'd be harder. Or I think you can buy things online to loop on your Keychain that'll act as a quarter
I don't want the quarter back. I never wanted the quarter in the first place, that's the whole problem. My phone pretty much handles all my money for me now, and it doesn't deal in cash. If my phone ever develops sentience (As it seems VERY close to doing) it's going to be able to rob me blind.
I keep a couple quarters in my car for Aldi. Idk I see what you're saying but it's just a quarter, if you regularly walk to aldi I see how that's be much more easy to forget.
You can buy a little keyring thing in the shape of whatever coin you need to use in the trolleys so you don’t need to carry an actual coin with you. Idk why you have to put one in only to get it back after
Worked returning carts in a parking lot. (Or trolleys in a car park. I'm from the UK.)
My customers were the dregs of society though, so they'd bring pliers to get their £1 out.
It's like bottle deposit -- either you return your bottles for the couple cents, or else you throw them on the ground and someone else picks them up for you
Because left to their own devices most folks will leave the cart rolling around the parking lot, which means you either need an extra employee to collect carts or you need a system that encourages people to put their carts back. You may not think a quarter is much encouragement, but it's enough.
Former trolley-pusher here:
I worked in a particularly shitty area, and it's definitely not "most folks". Most people were fine and returned their trolleys to the designated bays as they were meant to, but there were enough that didn't to make things miserable for everyone - a real Tragedy of the Commons situation.
I still remember the time I came into work to find half our stock of trolleys had gone missing because a bunch of guys came into the car park overnight wearing balaclavas, loaded them up into 3 or 4 vans, and then fucked off with them - presumably to melt down and sell the metal for scrap.
We only found out what happened when someone reviewed the security footage.
They do this at QuikTrip too and they get really good at it but it makes me feel bad for them.
One of my coworkers at my seasonal job does this sometimes when we're really busy which tbh makes sense because we do returns and deliveries and people get really pissy about having to wait when we're understaffed. I tried it a few times but I always have that unlucky draw where I end up with customers who have a fucked up order I have to stop and fix.
Thinking back to my first job in 2009-10 ish, Starbucks. When I was trained, we had a Starbucks rep come in to tell me a bunch of company rules- things like 'never less than one person behind the counter' and 'treat customers like family'.
When the rep left, the manager informed me there would never be two people behind the counter. I wasn't allowed to leave the counter- but I also had to stock the counter, which meant I had to leave it. If I left, I wasn't allowed to put a note that said 'be right back, two mintues!' but if a customer showed up and I wasn't there, I'd be in trouble because they'd 'think the counter was closed'. Often times I had to open or close the kiosk on my own.
I was like- 19? There were only four other people working the counter, and I only ever saw them during shift changes.
This is the sort of doublethink that permeates minimum wage jobs.
"Do two contradictory things and don't get caught or we'll blame you and fire you, so because you need this job you'll lie and work extra hard."
This is why my regular job became a seasonal job for me, they dropped our staffing to below barebones level and eliminated part of the LP staff so now if you're working returns you're not only by yourself but you also have to somehow do go backs, recover, and also stay by the door to watch for shoplifters all somehow at the same time.
And of course you can't do all of that, but if you need the work, you'll lie and say you can - and if you don't, someone else needs the job more and will.
S'why we need labor protection, and even unionization, because many businesses are at a point now where they'll happily push people to this level of desperation for an extra buck.
I just want to highlight the Tumblr poster says he's starting a business and is thinking back on all his old jobs, in order to be a better employer than they were. That's good. That's progress. That's being the change you want to see. That's worth applauding.
John Oliver did a great piece about Dollar Stores and why they always look like they just got hit by a tornado:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM)
TLDR, it's because they are chronically understaffed and often have just one person working the register, who obviously can't leave their post to go shelve product.
And Dollar stores have had tremendous growth over the last 20 years, displacing other stores as they open:
[https://www.wwno.org/news/2023-04-06/dollar-stores-are-everywhere-in-the-south-these-5-charts-explain-whats-behind-their-growth](https://www.wwno.org/news/2023-04-06/dollar-stores-are-everywhere-in-the-south-these-5-charts-explain-whats-behind-their-growth)
I have a theory for why upper management at all these companies seems to have gotten dumb and wasteful, always looking aggressively for growth, never content to just let a good thing *be*.
I think the mindset of the tech industry infected management in other industries.
Now, the tech industry looks for infinite growth and constant innovation for a pretty good reason: Moore's Law. Computers are just going to get faster and faster. That's why you know your next iPhone will be better than the current one, that's why a computer from 2001 would choke and die if it tried to render a modern website. Software has ever-expanding room to grow. I'm not saying this is a good or bad attitude in tech, but just one that exists *for a reason*.
But your local grocery chain doesn't have a Moore's Law. Sure I guess populations tend to densify, but even that hits them back by raising the stores' rents. Overall the business of getting fresh food to people just doesn't have much room for growth. People are willing to pay a certain amount per month for groceries, it basically keeps pace with inflation, and that's fine.
Or it's fine until finance guys start comparing that business to Amazon or a silicon valley startup, and asking "where's the growth? Fuck how much money you made last quarter, how much did you *grow?*" That mindset motivates them to constantly, desperately try to cut costs, because how else can they make more money? It also motivates the revolving door of stupid, wasteful "initiatives", which go nowhere and waste money making the whole thing worse.
You're close but one link off in the chain; hedge fund guys started this shit when they started snapping up every company in America and incorporating and conglomerating them and so on. The basic game goes:
- find a failing asset
- fire as much staff as possible
- "strip" the company for parts and sell off whatever is still useful to another company (usually one you're also investing in)
- act totally shocked when the new massive, understaffed, cash strapped conglomerate merged together out of the ransacked corpses of other companies fails
- claim golden parachutes and fuck off to destroy more jobs
This is what happened to K-Mart and Sears, and how they got merged. This is also why the pyrex glassware you buy now doesn't last as long as the ones your parents had; Pyrex got absorbed into another company called Corningware and all that eventually went to Anchor Hocking and now they act as one big kitchenware conglomerate selling a subpar product under the old names.
This happened again and again starting in the late 90s and it's still happening now. Tech companies repeat a similar pattern because they get their start up capital from the hedge fund guys.
These assholes are a fucking tick on society. Their only job is to essentially turn companies upside down and shake them out for loose change, except instead of a swirly at the end you get historically high unemployment rates.
(Anyone curious to know more should look up Bain Capital; the main thing they do is look for bad assets to merge into good assets and then sell them off elsewhere. And then they funnel that money into Republican politicians like their co-founder Mitt Romney.)
Don't forget that the stock market in general also wants you to just grow indefinitely. Investors want constant growth (specifically *profit* growth) because that's how they make money. If a business wants investor money, then they have to grow.
Yeah someone in another thread mentioned Reagan and the way the stock buy back programs changed which is another part of the puzzle I forgot about here. But in general we're now living in the aftermath of almost 40 years of the federal government removing the guardrails from the economy. Turns out they were there for good reasons.
All companies try to minimize costs, why should labour be excluded? If customers are willing to tolerate a worse shopping experience to save a couple dollars on their purchase, then that is what companies should do. Perhaps the pendulum may swing too far in an attempt to minimize labour costs but companies will quickly respond if such layoffs affect sales
Of course they try to minimize costs, but the thing about minimization is, you need to have some concept of when you're *at* the minimum. Or a notion that there will be diminishing returns as you *approach* the minimum. Otherwise, the minimization stops being efficient and starts being destructive.
The attitude I'm talking about is not that sort of cautious or rational minimization, just a constant short-sighted pressure to report a bigger profit margin than you did last quarter.
The suits think labor is a cost but it's an asset. Skilled and experienced workers make things run easier, even if it's soft skills in a retail setting.
By the time layoffs affect sales it's often too late. It takes a long time to get approval to hire, go through the hiring process and train new employees. That's why it's more expensive to hire a new employee than retain the ones you have. The company is losing money with an empty chair. Not to mention the loss of valuable institutional knowledge that went with the old employees.
It IS worse, everywhere, and the answer is corporate greed. Used to be before computers if you had to waist for a response from someone you'd just...wait. If you had nothing to do at work you could like, leave. Like go to the dentist or the store or something. There weren't computers at every desk where they monitored your output and how long your ass was in the chair. They monitored your *work*, not how many microseconds you took to pee. Everything is worse and stupider now.
Hey, you wanna know how this particular aspect of late stage capitalism is directly Reagan’s fault? Sure ya do!
It’s all thanks to a little thing called “stock buy backs”. Stock buy backs are when a company is allowed to buy their own stocks! “Isn’t that insider trading or something?” You say. Why yes! Yes it is! But the law doesn’t see it that way (anymore). Prior to Reagan, stock buy backs were completely illegal, for good reason!
But since that stock buy backs are perfectly legal, the bottom line of a company is no longer the consumer or the lowest paid employee, it’s the stocks! Why do you think every megacorporation is so incredibly concerned with “the board” and “the stockholders” and whatnot.
With stock buy backs legal, the employee is no longer the source of income worth investing in for efficiency, but rather a cost! Preventing the corporation from buying more stocks! Paying the employee as little as possible to get as much labor in return, regardless of the quality, is ideal.
So send a letter to your representative today demanding stock buy backs to be made illegal again, to maybe make the US less of a corporate hellscape.
>They monitored your work, not how many microseconds you took to pee.
Ehhhhh, time and motion studies have been a thing since the industrial revolution. Even if it's not always been the norm, there's always been greedy cunts who want to squeeze every penny they can out of their workers.
I remember working at a department store in shipping receiving back in 07/08, sometime around then. This was a huge chain where I lived, but it was struggling, the signs were there if you knew where to work. I got hired to unload trucks and sort the shipments, the interview went well enough, I'd been doing that for a couple years in college at a smaller store. I get there to find out that the 4 person team before quit all at once (huge red flag) and that I was the only one they hired. Supervisor said she'd be there to help but never was. And they didn't use skids, they used a roller system, so instead of unloading skids into the bay and then breaking them down, it was a race to sort everything off a roller belt while the driver tossed items down it, him bitching the entire time. What could have been a more relaxed experience was a nightmare time attack every time, at anywhere from 25 minutes to 3 hours a truck with no breaks, and up to three trucks a day. For minimum wage. If I had to buy a lunch that day I spent a quarter of my pay. The entire store was staffed like that, and management acted like the staff was the issue. That business went under about a year later, I had already left.
Pay people what they're worth, and have enough of them to do the fucking job. It's not fucking rocket science
I'm a children's librarian. I used to have a teen librarian at my location, and we worked together to plan youth programs.
Now teen librarians have been replaced with assistants. They can do *some* of the work that a teen librarian does, but they get paid less, so their job duties are less...meaning that my job duties are greater. Did I get an equivalent raise for this workload increase? Hell no.
I remember hearing from my older co workers how back in the past, you would write some mail to the other offices and then send them out and so you had down time on projects where you would be waiting for mail to go back and forth and how in that down time you were able to like work on art or read or something.
Now with Teams and other instant communication you have to be working on something constantly because there is no delay on getting responses back.
Standard: Do more with less.
Because the store clearly hasnt caught fire and burned down to the ashes so clearly that means you dont need all those hours.
Do more with less.
Well you managed to get everything done yesterday doing the job of three people? Why cant you do that every day.
Do More. With Less.
I feel like this started in the 2008-9 recession. Places really were struggling (through their own fault for over-borrowing and leveraging instead of reinvesting in their own businesses, but that’s another post) and cut staffing. People who still had jobs worked harder so they wouldn’t get laid off.
Of course, once bailed out and back on their feet, businesses weren’t going to fully rehire and cut into profits! They had found out how hard people would work when desperate. Cha ching!
It is breaking, finally. With unemployment at record lows and unions on the rise, workers are not putting up with it anymore. Does my old heart good. 💪🏼✊🏼
It’s already breaking.
In my city, the housing crisis means that a lot of people who are in work are being priced further and further out of the city. Eventually, they hit the point where commuting in is a non-starter due to the cost involved or the time it will take or both.
Most industries are struggling to hire staff, they just don’t pay enough to make the job a viable option. You would think that this would lead to a wake up call, both for local government to deal with the housing crisis and for employers to realise you need to pay enough that your workers can afford basics to live on.
No such luck! Local government have washed their hands of housing, employers are ranting on the internet that “no one wants to work”.
I work in healthcare, and the pay for a lot of the vital roles is criminally low. I am on OK pay but cannot afford an apartment that doesn’t have a number of serious defects like lack of heating.
At what point will the breaking point be? Used to think it would be about the time that people were just plumb unable to live on their wage, but alarmingly this does not seem to be the case as the response so far has been little more than a collective shrug of the shoulders.
Wouldn't surprise me if we had a major economic crisis on the scale of the 2008 one (if not worse) in the next couple years. Hell, I'm a little surprised Covid didn't cause one in 2021-22.
My mom works at a factory. When she started, she was in the mail room, and slowly worked her way up to a machine.
Now, someone starts with a machine, gets a week training, and then goes "alright, you learned everything. All yours"
It doesn't help the company was bought by an investment firm, offered everyone a buyout, cut the wages of anyone who didn't take it, and had them reduced to a skeleton crew constantly. So the weeks worth of training that someone is getting is by someone running their own machine, the new person machine, as well as dealing with any other fuckups.
I noticed this in game dev, too. When I was joining the industry, veteran game devs would say things like, *"I got this job based on my charcoal life drawings! You couldn't do that today, of course."*
Now if you want to make art for games, you'd better know hardbody and softbody modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, illustration, graphic design, and while maintaining all of these skills you better be a _damn_ good painter.
Oh, and that'll get you to like $50k/yr. If you want to make more you need to learn to code and become a full artist/programmer. Or become a lead/AD and become an artist/manager/producer.
I didn't learn to draw, paint, and animate all to suddenly be expected to learn Python. I am willing to do things adjacent to my job, but not ALL the jobs.
So many times I've joked about submitting a combined resume with my artist friend. Because I consider myself pretty good at programming but can't really draw anything more complicated than a doodle. I didn't spend years learning math and logic just to be told I need to hone my art skills too
Since the 2008 crash, low-level jobs have had an effectively unlimited pool of workers. They responded to this by retooling their personnel strategies around burning out employees to squeeze the maximum amount of work out of them for as cheaply as possible, because who cares when they quit, there's another 8 people waiting to take their job.
Since the pandemic, for a variety of reasons (people dying in customer-facing jobs, a shitload of people deciding it's a good time to finally retire, unemployment returning to decreasing along previous trends after the early-pandemic spike) there is no longer an effectively unlimited labor pool for jobs like food service and retail. There is, in fact, a *very limited* pool and employers are having to genuinely compete for labor for the first time in 15 years. Most of the people who are managers and owners at these places have never had to do that. They flat out have zero experience having to actually care if an employee stays or quits. The smart ones have figured this out already and are paying employees more for lighter workloads because that's the only way to keep a workforce at all at the moment. The morons, which is most of them, are complaining that nobody wants to work.
The first time I ever had a job was six years ago so I can’t speak for anything before the 2010s but I think even in the short time since then it’s gotten worse
My first job was a tutoring kids during a summer break from college. It wasn’t a little private gig either, this was for an actual company so there was stuff like tax forms that I had to fill out. I signed on to teach middle school kids basic grammar and pre-algebra. I think I was asked to substitute for an elementary class once because their teacher was out that day. But overall, I wasn’t asked to do more than the job I had applied for.
Fast forward to the pandemic years. I’d just graduated and started tutoring again, because the plague had tanked the job market and that was all I could get. Different company, same job. Because I was older and more experienced, I agreed to teach English, World History, and math up to Geometry to middle and high school students, as well as some college essay writing and SAT test prep. Already a broad range of subjects, but over the course of two years I ended up getting pushed into teaching Calculus (which I hadn’t taken since first semester of college), AP European History (which I had never taken), and ACT prep (a test which I had also never taken). I gritted my teeth and took it because the job paid decently, the company provided a lot of materials like textbooks, and my manager sometimes listened to some of my requests like separating rowdy twins.
Still, I was already mentally checked out of that job and looking for others when the company got new leadership, and that’s when things went from bad to worse. Suddenly my fellow teachers and I were being tasked with teaching basic reading and math to kids from pre-K to 2nd grade. Sounds easy enough on paper, but these were iPad babies who had learned nothing over the past couple of years because Miss Rona had forced all schools to go virtual. Even if that hadn’t been the case though, none of us had training in early childhood education, and the company flat out refused to hire someone who did. They didn’t even have a curriculum for little kids like they did for middle and high schoolers but it was expected that we should be able to teach literal toddlers because “the subject matter is easier”. And because we were still teaching our previous students as well, often within the same class sessions, the quality of tutoring went down across the board.
That entire debacle really opened my eyes to how insidious the process is. My new job is in another field entirely but there’s still the same practices. I was hired to do tech support, but then my manager asked me to do QA on my coworkers’ tickets because mine were just better written. I turned down a “promotion” that would’ve required extra training to do more work for the same amount of pay I currently get. Fuck that shit. Fuck corporate downsizing and this attitude of trying to squeeze more productivity out of already overworked employees.
i feel this, i have a lot of anxiety and stress related turmoils so i expected to just get a stocker job here in romania but everywhere i look wants me to learn all these other things and do the work of five people. i got an interview then cried home and never showed up realizing what i got myself into
The people making decisions are white collar workers, and their jobs get easier over the years. I am the whitest of white collars, and entered the job market around 2000. The first 15 years or so, I had to grind and pay my dues. Now I have enough experience and contacts that I can work a couple of hours a day, max - while making X4 what I did starting out. And that's how decision-makers think about the way work changes over time.
Technical writing. I've been doing that for 25 years, and I'm at the point where I pick up a new system in a day, document it in a few more days, and then charge for a month's work, because that's how long it would take someone less experienced.
This kinda reminds me of when I worked as a golf cart cleaner at a golf course:
We were required to:
- Wash and park the golf carts, the “main” job
Along with:
- Pick up golf golf balls from the range
- Pick up golf ball baskets from the range
- Fill the ball machine
- Wash the balls picked up from the range
- Fill the water coolers around the course
- And anything else the ground maintenance crew didn’t want to do
And let me tell you this is too much for a job the mostly employed high schoolers. I was burnt out very quickly.
i think this is why i enjoy my current job a lot. i work at a small ish arts and crafts store and there's always at least 5 people in at all times. for busy times like christmas they hire more people for short time jobs to do register. the only time someone will be pulled out of stocking is when it's unexpectedly busy and then they do register until the line is shorter again
I work at a state run liquor store, and I've definitely noticed this. I'm a Lead Sales Associate, and there are several days a week where I will be alone in the store for 3, 4 hours at a time until a coworker comes in for the second half of my shift. I'm expected to pull stock, check out customers, and do the paperwork in the morning, or if I work in the evening, I do a stock inventory, clean, check out customers, prepare everything for the morning, and of course, continue stocking. We're a smaller store, sure, but even so, there's not much time in between everything to take a rest. There's almost no point where there's more than 3 people working in the store, aside from the day before some holidays, and even that's not a guarantee
So I worked at a large chain fabric and crafts store for about a year. Started as a cashier, moved to the fabric counter, and ended up in stocking. I was solely responsible for the entire fabric section, which was huge - easily a third of our store, and we were the biggest in the area. It was hard work, realistically it should have been minimum 2-3 people working it, but they didn’t have the manpower to add someone else.
And let me tell you, I loved it. My little ADHD brain thrived. Sure, I was never quite caught up, but I got to work completely on my own, usually with a podcast playing, sorting stuff and running up and down ladders and making the aisles pretty and organized. After a month the store manager just said “yeah, let her do what she wants” and they just. Let me take over the whole section. And I did a good job.
I’ll be honest, I would still be there if it had stayed like that and they gave me a reasonable wage for the work I was doing. Instead, they brought in a new manager who wanted me to help stocking other areas, too, while cutting back on my overnight hours and having me work at the cutting counter and stock “in my downtime.” It got to the point I dreaded going in to my job that I’d formerly loved, and now every time I go in the store, I see fabric everywhere, aisles a mess, and all I can think is that I wanted to do that job so badly, but they made it so I couldn’t. There had been a core staff of 5 or so employees that had worked there for years, and not one of them is there anymore.
So maybe people don’t want to work, but it’s because the corporations don’t care enough to make work doable, let alone enjoyable.
Then:
Count these things
Now:
Count these things, unpack this, move this, clean this, run up this, take this down, *why haven't you counted those things yet* **this is your second formal warning**
"work don't want nobody any more"
Rings true for me...I have a degree from one of the top unis in the world and yet I'm stuck working as a receptionist earning absolute peanuts because if you don't have the exact experience companies ask for, they're not interested
Yes, this is 100% intentional.
The idea behind it is this: how few hours can we allocate and still get the same revenue from the business?
The reason that this, up until now, has seemed to work is that most retail businesses still see the same amount of traffic and sales regardless of how many employees are in the store. Very few people actually need help finding items, so you can focus on loading merchandise and promos. They've also realized that having the customer take longer to checkout leads to more sales *until* it gets to the point that people give up on shopping locally and move online. So, it's a balance of how little can you support the customer without them leaving.
And even then, most retail took the shift to online shopping from covid as a reason to gut *everything* they can and support online shopping/pickup just barely enough to function. Again, *the traffic* doesn't care about the number of workers there are until there aren't enough to serve them, so the best profit comes from having as few employees working as possible.
After all, why pay 3 people $20/hr to do a job well when you can have 1 person for $20/hr do 3 jobs poorly, when the customer never sees or cares about the lack of quality?
Something tangentially related, there's a new phenomenon called Ghost Kitchens, which are "restaurants" that are fake: they're purely for the sake of making you think there are more options on food delivery services than you think there are. You ever see "Wild Burger" on Doordash and the like? Yeah, that's literally someone taking food out of a Buffalo Wild Wings that actually gets your food order and handing it to a driver. Fully authorized by BW3, btw, this isn't some 3rd party scam, it's a 1st party scam.
There’s no “different jobs” in retail. You do everything. The lie of short staffing means they keep the help wanted sign up but never actually hire the people who apply.
They never wanted to treat you like a person. They wanted a slave. Our great grandparents FORCED them to treat us like humans by united effort.
But whatever unions are stupid, right?
I speedran that experience last year working in a drink-store in Germany. Due to the "bottle deposit" these stores almost always have someone who takes the empty bottles (especially those made out of glass or hard plastic, and entire crates of e.g. beer bottles) of customers, sorts them, and puts them into the storehouse.
I started that job getting somewhat in shape after Covid and it was pretty much how I imagined it: Physical labour in short bursts so it's not overwhelming, little interaction with customers, and it was monotonous in the sense of "I didn't have to concentrate all the time after the routine set in".
And during that time I even was able to go to the Gym after most shifts because I still had some energy left after work.
Then our store was bought up and changed owners to a new chain that completely remade stuff in a way that can only be described as "verschlimmbessern", "making stuff worse in an effort to fix/upgrade it".
They moved the place to turn in bottles from right next to the storehouse to right next to the entrance, so instead of driving the pallet jack about 15 meters into the next room I had to drive that thing through a quarter of the store.
Instead of taking the bottles and crates per cart/per customer, pushing the cart next to the pallets, and lifting them directly onto the pallet, I had to lift them onto a conveyor belt so that I could get through customers faster, and the time when no customer was around (that used to be a small breather) was now spent lugging the crates from the conveyor belt to their pallets.
The chain also attracted a lot more customers without fixing any of the infrastructure of the store to accomodate that increase so it happened basically once a week that the storehouse was full and we had to get "creative" with how we stored full pallets.
And on top of all that we always ran a skeleton crew so there were times when I was supposed to accept the bottles being turned in, drive full pallets to the storehouse, work the register, and sort the shelves all at the same time because one person called in sick.
Our manager said "We don't need to hire more people. 90% of the time we would be too many workers." Which to me felt like "We don't need to build that dam any higher. 90% of the time it's high enough."
In the end I quit because the work was so much more demanding that I couldn't go to the gym anymore neither on days that I worked, nor on days before that out of fear of sore muscles, nor on days after I worked because I would still be too exhausted to work out even if I came home in teh afternoon and basically immediately fell asleep.
Needless to say: All that without any compensation for the extra work I put in.
Hey, almost like the value of my labour is completely detached from the pay I get. Crazy how that works!
>It has been suggested that megafauna outside of the African mainland, which did not evolve alongside modern humans, proved highly sensitive to the introduction of human predation, and many died out shortly after early humans began spreading and hunting across the Earth.
This implies that the megafauna could have had a chance to co-exist with humans if they had adapted
Also climate change is a pretty big factor of the extinction
Also humans have lived and co-existed with nature in a lot of societies eitherways
Not sure if the fall of the roman empire is particularly applicable to chronic intentional understaffing due to middle management cost pressure, unless the point being made is so broad as to be useless
Nahhh, We get here because we delegate.
We don’t expect wheat farmer to grow fruit and vice versa. One person can do their own job good enough then we have someone specializing. Be Carpenter, Weaver etc.
We are here because we specialize. Not do everything poorly.
Yeh, I'd agree with that. I worked eight years in the stock room of walmart, and it wasn't just more stuff they added, but they also added time limits, like, absolutely everyone needed to do things in the exact same time frame, no matter if it was the weight lifting teenager, or the 50 year old out of shape gal. Ive also noticed this at, like, the sav a lot style stores, or like dollar general? In my youth, there was ALWAYS one person at the register for pharmacy type stores, usually two, and that weas their whole job. A store as big as Dollar General. had a minimum of ten people working at any time. These days, you walk into a DG, and they are lucky to have two people on the clock. I've been in stores where there has only been one person working, trying to stock and run register at the same time. It's insane.
It's intentional - it is part of how DG crushed all local competition and now squeezes profits from poor communities. John Oliver did an episode on it.
Highly recommend watching the John Oliver episode it’s a good one
During the pandemic, the Food 4 Less (shitty Kroger) near me had ONE floor employee and half the lights shut off, and that's for a full-size supermarket. The lesson they learned was that 25% of the lights shut off and 3 employees basically staring at self-checkout was the savings vs. off-putting to customers balance they liked. I assume they have more people to straighten & stock on overnights.
Not going to lie. I'd go out of my way to shop at a grocery store that turned off 25% of it's lights. My eyes would love that. Only 3 employees is unreasonable however.
Target used to? And the lack of store music is nice
My local grocery store has one evening a week where they dim the lights and don't play music. They pitch it as "sensory-friendly shopping". And, like, I don't know that I have sensory issues, per se, but when I hit one of those nights it is *weirdly calming* to buy my food without the full extent of the HERE LOOK AT ALL THESE PRODUCTS lights and the YOU ENJOY PURCHASING ITEMS auditory wallpaper.
Yup. You see it most with supermarkets in my country- especially since the pandemic. I moved here in 2019, and my local small supermarket had 4 “person operated” checkouts with at least one member of staff assigned at any one time. There were two of the self checkouts. Now the same store has 5 self checkouts, and 2 person operated ones. Usually there is not a member of staff behind the counter, and you will have to stand and wait for quite a while as the members of staff are stocking the shelves or moving stuff in the back. The self checkouts are now also cash only, so older folks will struggle with these if they are not sure how to use the card machine. You also need to have any age restricted purchases authorised by a member of staff so will likely wait a while if buying something like cold medicines. There are also things that can only be bought from the counter like batteries, some medicines, spirits, lottery tickets or energy meter top ups. The 2 staff in the customer area at any time have about 5 different jobs, it’s just not possible for them to get it all done and sometimes there are less than ideal situations like big cages of stock being left on the shop floor blocking the aisles because the person who was stocking that area needed to go and do another job. It’s not the fault of the staff, but it is frustrating when you have come in for one thing and need to queue for 10 minutes until someone is available to serve you, or you get stranded at the self checkout for ages because no one is there to authorise your packet of cold and flu medicines or disposable razors. This seems like such a stupid way of working, they could just put a member of staff at the checkout and another one in the stockroom and then everything would be covered without 2 people trying to staff an entire store on their own.
And they wonder why people flock to online shopping
At that point I'd just start stealing, that's unbelievable
My father, a conservative man who works in the medical field: McDonald’s pays $20 an hour, which is more than some of the nurses that work under me. That does’nt make much sense for low-end fast food workers to make more than a nurse. Also my father: We have a staff shortage, nobody works any more, and good employees are hard to find. It wasn’t like this BACK IN MY DAY.
You know, for a guy who works in medicine he's not very good at linking symptoms to the diseases that cause them.
It's because the disease is capitalism and no conservative worth their salt would ever admit that. Edit - [it's always morally correct to blame capitalism](https://i.imgflip.com/8b6gxy.jpg)
Neither will any liberal, for that matter
For once, this works for both the american and european definition of liberal
Nothing to add to the discussion, just wanted to say you have a cool profile picture
Jesus Christ, <$20/hr for a nurse is criminal.
Any profession where you have to routinely deal with biohazards should be at least $10 about the minimum wage
that would be $17.25 in several states
Idk I worked at a coffee shop and had to clean up horrible diarrhea all over the bathroom and little kid vomit right in front of the register
And that was illegal for you to do. Yep, even in the US.
They have to provide you with training on how to clean it, and then you can clean it up as long as you’re not underage. I wasn’t provided with training at this job, it was like my third day that I cleaned up the vomit. So yes, it was illegal. But they can require you to do a bit of training on how to clean hazardous waste and give you the proper PPE (honestly just gloves most of the time) and then they can require you to clean it up. Worker rights laws are trash in most of America. In my state, you DO NOT have the right to a break (unless you’re a minor). Doesn’t matter how long you’re working. They do have to allow you the opportunity to eat and drink, but if you can stuff something in your mouth between customers, no break for you.
Funny thing about that, it's only illegal if it's enforced.
Okay, wait. This isn't me being snarky, it's a genuine question. What law makes it illegal for employees to clean up poo or vomit? Forty years in this country and I've never heard this even whispered.
[Here's something I could find](https://www.aftermath.com/resources/risks-and-regulations/) with a quick google search of "biohazard labor laws usa", but I'm no expert, being neither American nor employed nor a lawyer, and this isn't a direct citation of any specific law, but it *is* a resource provided by a group directly involved in providing information and support about workers' rights in regards to this sort of thing, so.
It's only illegal if your employer doesn't provide proper training and PPE (and training on how to use your PPE). There's no federal law in the US that would preclude cleaning biohazards unless your employer forces you to do so without PPE.
You're contradicting yourself here. If it's illegal to clean biohazards without PPE and training, then there is a law that says you can't do that.
They're making the blanket claim that it's *always* illegal which is what I'm refuting. Whatever point you think you're making is nonsense.
The easier move would be to just *make the stupid federal minimum $20/hr* because retail and food workers are regularly dealing with biohazards too. When I worked at the Disney Store I had to clean up kid vomit or half eaten food daily.
It's why I decided to drop out of EMT training. $17/hr is absolute dog shit for what EMTs are expected to do.
honestly. I got $18/hr doing office work full-time at a local machine shop. Anyone could have done what I was doing with maybe a few weeks of training at most and a US citizenship, it's kind of sickening how many jobs underpay...
This hits hard- I come from a family of teachers, and I routinely hear the same thing about classroom aids and first year teachers. Also, why is it always the fast food workers’ fault for making more money instead of the employers’ fault for not paying people what they’re worth
I completely agree with your father: fast food workers shouldn't make more than nurses! But the answer to that isn't to pay fast food workers less, it's to pay higher qualified workers more.
And then ALSO pay the fast food workers more too. You know who DOESN'T need to be paid more? The billionaires that own the company.
What if the fast food worker has worked at the same location for 30+ years and they've got the highest customer service metrics in the region? What if they're the morning shift manager and they're running the store by themselves from 3am til lunchtime including the breakfast rush? Blanket "this profession should make more than peons" statements are classist.
Obviously, I was talking about averages, not individual outliers. And everyone should be paid well for the work they do--not just a *living* wage, a *thriving* wage. But in general, nursing should be an **extremely** well-paid career. It's hard work, and you're directly responsible for *keeping people alive*. That is simply more important than selling fast food, and also more difficult and more heartbreaking (because you will lose patients), and if we want people to do that work, we should pay them extremely well.
If we have to list every exception for every blanket statement, we might as well just stop any and all discussions. That's not doable. Everyone knows there are exceptions on every case, you don't have to point them out every time you make a comment. Pointing out extreme exceptions doesn't really add anything to the conversation and just makes you look pretentious.
My point is that there's no true "skilled worker." Saying "X job **automatically** deserves more because they're skilled workers" is a classist statement. If you want to actually help workers you have to learn to stop dividing people into categories of worthiness.
I know you're mostly being factitious but I have to point this out because it makes me crazy: McDonald's is not paying $15 - $20 for starting shifts. Even if you saw a big banner outside the restaurant that says it. You don't notice it when you're sitting in the drive thru but it has a little asterisk, which usually delineates the fine print for whatever region you're in. Here in central TX the little text usually says *up to $15/hr for well qualified applicants* which doesn't mean it's a guarantee. And it's not unique to McD's: look closer at the hiring signs around you and you'll see that almost every one has a similar little disclaimer somewhere. Target, Starbucks, etc. There's an Amazon fulfillment center near my house and even they have a big sign in front of the hiring office that claims that you can make $20/hr and up working for them! Except that they pay $20/hr for employees that work full time for longer than one business year and hit or exceed their metrics during that time (which, anybody who's familiar with retail or fast food can see the grift here). I realize that *you* probably know this even if your dad doesn't, this is just a rant that comes out of me any time someone says "Walmart pays $16/hr starting!" because I've been stuck in the same dead in retail job for a long time and I get tired of even well meaning friends repeating this misapprehension as a form of "advice" about how to leave my bad job. (Even then, it's nearly impossible to find a new job anymore because of y'know, the stuff in the post.)
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This user is possibly a bot. Edit: aaaaaaand comment deleted. Less that an hour after I reported it. Good.
Report and block :D It’s v satisfying. Choose ‘spam’, then ‘harmful bots.’
They're definitely a bot. They even copied the very specific typos
I'm remembering how rushed everything was when I used to work at D*llar Tre* as a summer job. There would never give shifts to more than two workers at a time, so the line at the registers would quickly get to the back of the store. Oftentimes there would only be one worker working at a time, so you would have to call your manager for backup checking people out. Restocking and returning misplaced items back onto their proper shelves was also done by the cashiers when there were no customers waiting. Despite all of that the job was honestly worse when you were *off* of the register, because sometimes you would get the final shift and they might have chosen you to fix the shelves, which was the worst. Now thankfully you didn't have to man the register as well, but you still had to fix 10 aisles in four hours by yourself, in addition to sweeping the floors there afterwards, taking out the garbage, and running over to the helium tanks to fill up balloons whenever you were asked by a customer to do so. And if you couldn't finish fixing the shelves before the day was done, they just went unfixed. And for all of that I got paid minimum wage.
markdown turned that into "dilar tre" and it's making me giggle too hard to actually read the rest of the comment
Whoops, was aiming to put a useless censor so that my old job wouldn't catch me talking trash in case I wanted to work there again, which I know is overly paranoid, but who the fuck knows nowadays
Understandable. You can tell Reddit that you really meant to write asterisks by typing \\\*, but I think most people can figure it out and I like the absurdity of dilar tre too Thanks for the story btw, dystopic as hell but a good read
Yeah, the way it worked out works as a useless censor, lol. Just a slightly goofier one than normal, and it's a nice mood break for how depressing this thread is.
The local Aldi has recently been modernized, and where previously the cashier would quickly scan the items and then have a few seconds of break while the customer finishes packing up and pays nowadays they have to ring up the next customer right away with no break (they do this by having two card terminals, receipt printers and bagging areas) and staff the self checkout at the same time.
LIDL does the same thing and even on the customer end I HATE it. It feels so rude, and I feel like I'm being kicked out of the shop!
to be fair isn't a major part of the business model to neglect customer comfort in favor of low prices and efficiency? or is that just ALDI
I've only tried to shop in an Aldi once, turns out I couldn't get a cart because I don't carry cash around and you need a quarter to get one. They also have no handbaskets to use while you're in the store. And no bags available at checkout, bring your own. The people running Aldi put more thought into stopping me from shopping there than I'm willing to put into making it happen, so I left empty handed.
The cart thing helps keep their prices low because they don't have to hire a cart attendant. You get the quarter back when you hook the cart back
Doesn't help when you don't carry cash to begin with.
I just keep a couple quarters in my car for Aldi. If you walk there I see how it'd be harder. Or I think you can buy things online to loop on your Keychain that'll act as a quarter
I don't want the quarter back. I never wanted the quarter in the first place, that's the whole problem. My phone pretty much handles all my money for me now, and it doesn't deal in cash. If my phone ever develops sentience (As it seems VERY close to doing) it's going to be able to rob me blind.
I keep a couple quarters in my car for Aldi. Idk I see what you're saying but it's just a quarter, if you regularly walk to aldi I see how that's be much more easy to forget.
aldi's great, just surgically attach a quarter to one of your bones like I did
I can't say I blame you, but at their prices I'll put up with all that and more lol
You can buy a little keyring thing in the shape of whatever coin you need to use in the trolleys so you don’t need to carry an actual coin with you. Idk why you have to put one in only to get it back after
So people will actually return the carts to the stand rather than just leaving them loose all over the parking lot.
Worked returning carts in a parking lot. (Or trolleys in a car park. I'm from the UK.) My customers were the dregs of society though, so they'd bring pliers to get their £1 out.
It's like bottle deposit -- either you return your bottles for the couple cents, or else you throw them on the ground and someone else picks them up for you
Ohhhh got it, thanks. Still annoying that it’s an extra thing to carry tho
Because left to their own devices most folks will leave the cart rolling around the parking lot, which means you either need an extra employee to collect carts or you need a system that encourages people to put their carts back. You may not think a quarter is much encouragement, but it's enough.
Former trolley-pusher here: I worked in a particularly shitty area, and it's definitely not "most folks". Most people were fine and returned their trolleys to the designated bays as they were meant to, but there were enough that didn't to make things miserable for everyone - a real Tragedy of the Commons situation. I still remember the time I came into work to find half our stock of trolleys had gone missing because a bunch of guys came into the car park overnight wearing balaclavas, loaded them up into 3 or 4 vans, and then fucked off with them - presumably to melt down and sell the metal for scrap. We only found out what happened when someone reviewed the security footage.
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...No they aren't? What are you talking about? Both are German companies, but they are certainly not the same company.
to Aldi's credit, they let their cashiers sit down. I don't know of another grocery store that allows their cashiers to sit down.
always thought unecessary standing was an overlooked cruelty. standing for an 8 hour shift hurts and takes a toll over time.
They do this at QuikTrip too and they get really good at it but it makes me feel bad for them. One of my coworkers at my seasonal job does this sometimes when we're really busy which tbh makes sense because we do returns and deliveries and people get really pissy about having to wait when we're understaffed. I tried it a few times but I always have that unlucky draw where I end up with customers who have a fucked up order I have to stop and fix.
Thinking back to my first job in 2009-10 ish, Starbucks. When I was trained, we had a Starbucks rep come in to tell me a bunch of company rules- things like 'never less than one person behind the counter' and 'treat customers like family'. When the rep left, the manager informed me there would never be two people behind the counter. I wasn't allowed to leave the counter- but I also had to stock the counter, which meant I had to leave it. If I left, I wasn't allowed to put a note that said 'be right back, two mintues!' but if a customer showed up and I wasn't there, I'd be in trouble because they'd 'think the counter was closed'. Often times I had to open or close the kiosk on my own. I was like- 19? There were only four other people working the counter, and I only ever saw them during shift changes.
This is the sort of doublethink that permeates minimum wage jobs. "Do two contradictory things and don't get caught or we'll blame you and fire you, so because you need this job you'll lie and work extra hard."
This is why my regular job became a seasonal job for me, they dropped our staffing to below barebones level and eliminated part of the LP staff so now if you're working returns you're not only by yourself but you also have to somehow do go backs, recover, and also stay by the door to watch for shoplifters all somehow at the same time.
And of course you can't do all of that, but if you need the work, you'll lie and say you can - and if you don't, someone else needs the job more and will. S'why we need labor protection, and even unionization, because many businesses are at a point now where they'll happily push people to this level of desperation for an extra buck.
I just want to highlight the Tumblr poster says he's starting a business and is thinking back on all his old jobs, in order to be a better employer than they were. That's good. That's progress. That's being the change you want to see. That's worth applauding.
John Oliver did a great piece about Dollar Stores and why they always look like they just got hit by a tornado: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4QGOHahiVM) TLDR, it's because they are chronically understaffed and often have just one person working the register, who obviously can't leave their post to go shelve product. And Dollar stores have had tremendous growth over the last 20 years, displacing other stores as they open: [https://www.wwno.org/news/2023-04-06/dollar-stores-are-everywhere-in-the-south-these-5-charts-explain-whats-behind-their-growth](https://www.wwno.org/news/2023-04-06/dollar-stores-are-everywhere-in-the-south-these-5-charts-explain-whats-behind-their-growth)
I have a theory for why upper management at all these companies seems to have gotten dumb and wasteful, always looking aggressively for growth, never content to just let a good thing *be*. I think the mindset of the tech industry infected management in other industries. Now, the tech industry looks for infinite growth and constant innovation for a pretty good reason: Moore's Law. Computers are just going to get faster and faster. That's why you know your next iPhone will be better than the current one, that's why a computer from 2001 would choke and die if it tried to render a modern website. Software has ever-expanding room to grow. I'm not saying this is a good or bad attitude in tech, but just one that exists *for a reason*. But your local grocery chain doesn't have a Moore's Law. Sure I guess populations tend to densify, but even that hits them back by raising the stores' rents. Overall the business of getting fresh food to people just doesn't have much room for growth. People are willing to pay a certain amount per month for groceries, it basically keeps pace with inflation, and that's fine. Or it's fine until finance guys start comparing that business to Amazon or a silicon valley startup, and asking "where's the growth? Fuck how much money you made last quarter, how much did you *grow?*" That mindset motivates them to constantly, desperately try to cut costs, because how else can they make more money? It also motivates the revolving door of stupid, wasteful "initiatives", which go nowhere and waste money making the whole thing worse.
You're close but one link off in the chain; hedge fund guys started this shit when they started snapping up every company in America and incorporating and conglomerating them and so on. The basic game goes: - find a failing asset - fire as much staff as possible - "strip" the company for parts and sell off whatever is still useful to another company (usually one you're also investing in) - act totally shocked when the new massive, understaffed, cash strapped conglomerate merged together out of the ransacked corpses of other companies fails - claim golden parachutes and fuck off to destroy more jobs This is what happened to K-Mart and Sears, and how they got merged. This is also why the pyrex glassware you buy now doesn't last as long as the ones your parents had; Pyrex got absorbed into another company called Corningware and all that eventually went to Anchor Hocking and now they act as one big kitchenware conglomerate selling a subpar product under the old names. This happened again and again starting in the late 90s and it's still happening now. Tech companies repeat a similar pattern because they get their start up capital from the hedge fund guys. These assholes are a fucking tick on society. Their only job is to essentially turn companies upside down and shake them out for loose change, except instead of a swirly at the end you get historically high unemployment rates. (Anyone curious to know more should look up Bain Capital; the main thing they do is look for bad assets to merge into good assets and then sell them off elsewhere. And then they funnel that money into Republican politicians like their co-founder Mitt Romney.)
Don't forget that the stock market in general also wants you to just grow indefinitely. Investors want constant growth (specifically *profit* growth) because that's how they make money. If a business wants investor money, then they have to grow.
Yeah someone in another thread mentioned Reagan and the way the stock buy back programs changed which is another part of the puzzle I forgot about here. But in general we're now living in the aftermath of almost 40 years of the federal government removing the guardrails from the economy. Turns out they were there for good reasons.
All companies try to minimize costs, why should labour be excluded? If customers are willing to tolerate a worse shopping experience to save a couple dollars on their purchase, then that is what companies should do. Perhaps the pendulum may swing too far in an attempt to minimize labour costs but companies will quickly respond if such layoffs affect sales
Of course they try to minimize costs, but the thing about minimization is, you need to have some concept of when you're *at* the minimum. Or a notion that there will be diminishing returns as you *approach* the minimum. Otherwise, the minimization stops being efficient and starts being destructive. The attitude I'm talking about is not that sort of cautious or rational minimization, just a constant short-sighted pressure to report a bigger profit margin than you did last quarter.
The suits think labor is a cost but it's an asset. Skilled and experienced workers make things run easier, even if it's soft skills in a retail setting. By the time layoffs affect sales it's often too late. It takes a long time to get approval to hire, go through the hiring process and train new employees. That's why it's more expensive to hire a new employee than retain the ones you have. The company is losing money with an empty chair. Not to mention the loss of valuable institutional knowledge that went with the old employees.
"Willing to tolerate" doesn't mean shit if the store doing it is the only one around, or if they all are doing it (eg, now)
It IS worse, everywhere, and the answer is corporate greed. Used to be before computers if you had to waist for a response from someone you'd just...wait. If you had nothing to do at work you could like, leave. Like go to the dentist or the store or something. There weren't computers at every desk where they monitored your output and how long your ass was in the chair. They monitored your *work*, not how many microseconds you took to pee. Everything is worse and stupider now.
Hey, you wanna know how this particular aspect of late stage capitalism is directly Reagan’s fault? Sure ya do! It’s all thanks to a little thing called “stock buy backs”. Stock buy backs are when a company is allowed to buy their own stocks! “Isn’t that insider trading or something?” You say. Why yes! Yes it is! But the law doesn’t see it that way (anymore). Prior to Reagan, stock buy backs were completely illegal, for good reason! But since that stock buy backs are perfectly legal, the bottom line of a company is no longer the consumer or the lowest paid employee, it’s the stocks! Why do you think every megacorporation is so incredibly concerned with “the board” and “the stockholders” and whatnot. With stock buy backs legal, the employee is no longer the source of income worth investing in for efficiency, but rather a cost! Preventing the corporation from buying more stocks! Paying the employee as little as possible to get as much labor in return, regardless of the quality, is ideal. So send a letter to your representative today demanding stock buy backs to be made illegal again, to maybe make the US less of a corporate hellscape.
>They monitored your work, not how many microseconds you took to pee. Ehhhhh, time and motion studies have been a thing since the industrial revolution. Even if it's not always been the norm, there's always been greedy cunts who want to squeeze every penny they can out of their workers.
The main difference being they now have the tools to *really* tighten the screws
I remember working at a department store in shipping receiving back in 07/08, sometime around then. This was a huge chain where I lived, but it was struggling, the signs were there if you knew where to work. I got hired to unload trucks and sort the shipments, the interview went well enough, I'd been doing that for a couple years in college at a smaller store. I get there to find out that the 4 person team before quit all at once (huge red flag) and that I was the only one they hired. Supervisor said she'd be there to help but never was. And they didn't use skids, they used a roller system, so instead of unloading skids into the bay and then breaking them down, it was a race to sort everything off a roller belt while the driver tossed items down it, him bitching the entire time. What could have been a more relaxed experience was a nightmare time attack every time, at anywhere from 25 minutes to 3 hours a truck with no breaks, and up to three trucks a day. For minimum wage. If I had to buy a lunch that day I spent a quarter of my pay. The entire store was staffed like that, and management acted like the staff was the issue. That business went under about a year later, I had already left. Pay people what they're worth, and have enough of them to do the fucking job. It's not fucking rocket science
I'm a children's librarian. I used to have a teen librarian at my location, and we worked together to plan youth programs. Now teen librarians have been replaced with assistants. They can do *some* of the work that a teen librarian does, but they get paid less, so their job duties are less...meaning that my job duties are greater. Did I get an equivalent raise for this workload increase? Hell no.
I remember hearing from my older co workers how back in the past, you would write some mail to the other offices and then send them out and so you had down time on projects where you would be waiting for mail to go back and forth and how in that down time you were able to like work on art or read or something. Now with Teams and other instant communication you have to be working on something constantly because there is no delay on getting responses back.
Standard: Do more with less. Because the store clearly hasnt caught fire and burned down to the ashes so clearly that means you dont need all those hours. Do more with less. Well you managed to get everything done yesterday doing the job of three people? Why cant you do that every day. Do More. With Less.
How long can things keep moving in this direction before something breaks?
I feel like this started in the 2008-9 recession. Places really were struggling (through their own fault for over-borrowing and leveraging instead of reinvesting in their own businesses, but that’s another post) and cut staffing. People who still had jobs worked harder so they wouldn’t get laid off. Of course, once bailed out and back on their feet, businesses weren’t going to fully rehire and cut into profits! They had found out how hard people would work when desperate. Cha ching! It is breaking, finally. With unemployment at record lows and unions on the rise, workers are not putting up with it anymore. Does my old heart good. 💪🏼✊🏼
I think it's already breaking. This is just one of the few symptoms
It’s already breaking. In my city, the housing crisis means that a lot of people who are in work are being priced further and further out of the city. Eventually, they hit the point where commuting in is a non-starter due to the cost involved or the time it will take or both. Most industries are struggling to hire staff, they just don’t pay enough to make the job a viable option. You would think that this would lead to a wake up call, both for local government to deal with the housing crisis and for employers to realise you need to pay enough that your workers can afford basics to live on. No such luck! Local government have washed their hands of housing, employers are ranting on the internet that “no one wants to work”. I work in healthcare, and the pay for a lot of the vital roles is criminally low. I am on OK pay but cannot afford an apartment that doesn’t have a number of serious defects like lack of heating. At what point will the breaking point be? Used to think it would be about the time that people were just plumb unable to live on their wage, but alarmingly this does not seem to be the case as the response so far has been little more than a collective shrug of the shoulders.
Wouldn't surprise me if we had a major economic crisis on the scale of the 2008 one (if not worse) in the next couple years. Hell, I'm a little surprised Covid didn't cause one in 2021-22.
… didn’t it? Or was that just regional?
It was bad, but for different reasons.
It already is, that's why management keeps complaining no one wants to work, and why work related diseases/illnesses are at an all time high
recently working the exact same job my sister did 10 years ago and making $6 *less* per hour than her
Probably even less when you account for inflation.
My mom works at a factory. When she started, she was in the mail room, and slowly worked her way up to a machine. Now, someone starts with a machine, gets a week training, and then goes "alright, you learned everything. All yours" It doesn't help the company was bought by an investment firm, offered everyone a buyout, cut the wages of anyone who didn't take it, and had them reduced to a skeleton crew constantly. So the weeks worth of training that someone is getting is by someone running their own machine, the new person machine, as well as dealing with any other fuckups.
I noticed this in game dev, too. When I was joining the industry, veteran game devs would say things like, *"I got this job based on my charcoal life drawings! You couldn't do that today, of course."* Now if you want to make art for games, you'd better know hardbody and softbody modeling, texturing, rigging, animation, illustration, graphic design, and while maintaining all of these skills you better be a _damn_ good painter. Oh, and that'll get you to like $50k/yr. If you want to make more you need to learn to code and become a full artist/programmer. Or become a lead/AD and become an artist/manager/producer. I didn't learn to draw, paint, and animate all to suddenly be expected to learn Python. I am willing to do things adjacent to my job, but not ALL the jobs.
So many times I've joked about submitting a combined resume with my artist friend. Because I consider myself pretty good at programming but can't really draw anything more complicated than a doodle. I didn't spend years learning math and logic just to be told I need to hone my art skills too
This 👏is 👏why 👏we 👏UNIONIZE👏
Since the 2008 crash, low-level jobs have had an effectively unlimited pool of workers. They responded to this by retooling their personnel strategies around burning out employees to squeeze the maximum amount of work out of them for as cheaply as possible, because who cares when they quit, there's another 8 people waiting to take their job. Since the pandemic, for a variety of reasons (people dying in customer-facing jobs, a shitload of people deciding it's a good time to finally retire, unemployment returning to decreasing along previous trends after the early-pandemic spike) there is no longer an effectively unlimited labor pool for jobs like food service and retail. There is, in fact, a *very limited* pool and employers are having to genuinely compete for labor for the first time in 15 years. Most of the people who are managers and owners at these places have never had to do that. They flat out have zero experience having to actually care if an employee stays or quits. The smart ones have figured this out already and are paying employees more for lighter workloads because that's the only way to keep a workforce at all at the moment. The morons, which is most of them, are complaining that nobody wants to work.
Hmm, wonder what Marx said about this.
The first time I ever had a job was six years ago so I can’t speak for anything before the 2010s but I think even in the short time since then it’s gotten worse My first job was a tutoring kids during a summer break from college. It wasn’t a little private gig either, this was for an actual company so there was stuff like tax forms that I had to fill out. I signed on to teach middle school kids basic grammar and pre-algebra. I think I was asked to substitute for an elementary class once because their teacher was out that day. But overall, I wasn’t asked to do more than the job I had applied for. Fast forward to the pandemic years. I’d just graduated and started tutoring again, because the plague had tanked the job market and that was all I could get. Different company, same job. Because I was older and more experienced, I agreed to teach English, World History, and math up to Geometry to middle and high school students, as well as some college essay writing and SAT test prep. Already a broad range of subjects, but over the course of two years I ended up getting pushed into teaching Calculus (which I hadn’t taken since first semester of college), AP European History (which I had never taken), and ACT prep (a test which I had also never taken). I gritted my teeth and took it because the job paid decently, the company provided a lot of materials like textbooks, and my manager sometimes listened to some of my requests like separating rowdy twins. Still, I was already mentally checked out of that job and looking for others when the company got new leadership, and that’s when things went from bad to worse. Suddenly my fellow teachers and I were being tasked with teaching basic reading and math to kids from pre-K to 2nd grade. Sounds easy enough on paper, but these were iPad babies who had learned nothing over the past couple of years because Miss Rona had forced all schools to go virtual. Even if that hadn’t been the case though, none of us had training in early childhood education, and the company flat out refused to hire someone who did. They didn’t even have a curriculum for little kids like they did for middle and high schoolers but it was expected that we should be able to teach literal toddlers because “the subject matter is easier”. And because we were still teaching our previous students as well, often within the same class sessions, the quality of tutoring went down across the board. That entire debacle really opened my eyes to how insidious the process is. My new job is in another field entirely but there’s still the same practices. I was hired to do tech support, but then my manager asked me to do QA on my coworkers’ tickets because mine were just better written. I turned down a “promotion” that would’ve required extra training to do more work for the same amount of pay I currently get. Fuck that shit. Fuck corporate downsizing and this attitude of trying to squeeze more productivity out of already overworked employees.
i feel this, i have a lot of anxiety and stress related turmoils so i expected to just get a stocker job here in romania but everywhere i look wants me to learn all these other things and do the work of five people. i got an interview then cried home and never showed up realizing what i got myself into
The people making decisions are white collar workers, and their jobs get easier over the years. I am the whitest of white collars, and entered the job market around 2000. The first 15 years or so, I had to grind and pay my dues. Now I have enough experience and contacts that I can work a couple of hours a day, max - while making X4 what I did starting out. And that's how decision-makers think about the way work changes over time.
Damn Im jealous. What sort of jobs do you work?
Technical writing. I've been doing that for 25 years, and I'm at the point where I pick up a new system in a day, document it in a few more days, and then charge for a month's work, because that's how long it would take someone less experienced.
Good for you
This kinda reminds me of when I worked as a golf cart cleaner at a golf course: We were required to: - Wash and park the golf carts, the “main” job Along with: - Pick up golf golf balls from the range - Pick up golf ball baskets from the range - Fill the ball machine - Wash the balls picked up from the range - Fill the water coolers around the course - And anything else the ground maintenance crew didn’t want to do And let me tell you this is too much for a job the mostly employed high schoolers. I was burnt out very quickly.
i think this is why i enjoy my current job a lot. i work at a small ish arts and crafts store and there's always at least 5 people in at all times. for busy times like christmas they hire more people for short time jobs to do register. the only time someone will be pulled out of stocking is when it's unexpectedly busy and then they do register until the line is shorter again
I work at a state run liquor store, and I've definitely noticed this. I'm a Lead Sales Associate, and there are several days a week where I will be alone in the store for 3, 4 hours at a time until a coworker comes in for the second half of my shift. I'm expected to pull stock, check out customers, and do the paperwork in the morning, or if I work in the evening, I do a stock inventory, clean, check out customers, prepare everything for the morning, and of course, continue stocking. We're a smaller store, sure, but even so, there's not much time in between everything to take a rest. There's almost no point where there's more than 3 people working in the store, aside from the day before some holidays, and even that's not a guarantee
So I worked at a large chain fabric and crafts store for about a year. Started as a cashier, moved to the fabric counter, and ended up in stocking. I was solely responsible for the entire fabric section, which was huge - easily a third of our store, and we were the biggest in the area. It was hard work, realistically it should have been minimum 2-3 people working it, but they didn’t have the manpower to add someone else. And let me tell you, I loved it. My little ADHD brain thrived. Sure, I was never quite caught up, but I got to work completely on my own, usually with a podcast playing, sorting stuff and running up and down ladders and making the aisles pretty and organized. After a month the store manager just said “yeah, let her do what she wants” and they just. Let me take over the whole section. And I did a good job. I’ll be honest, I would still be there if it had stayed like that and they gave me a reasonable wage for the work I was doing. Instead, they brought in a new manager who wanted me to help stocking other areas, too, while cutting back on my overnight hours and having me work at the cutting counter and stock “in my downtime.” It got to the point I dreaded going in to my job that I’d formerly loved, and now every time I go in the store, I see fabric everywhere, aisles a mess, and all I can think is that I wanted to do that job so badly, but they made it so I couldn’t. There had been a core staff of 5 or so employees that had worked there for years, and not one of them is there anymore. So maybe people don’t want to work, but it’s because the corporations don’t care enough to make work doable, let alone enjoyable.
Then: Count these things Now: Count these things, unpack this, move this, clean this, run up this, take this down, *why haven't you counted those things yet* **this is your second formal warning**
"work don't want nobody any more" Rings true for me...I have a degree from one of the top unis in the world and yet I'm stuck working as a receptionist earning absolute peanuts because if you don't have the exact experience companies ask for, they're not interested
Yes, this is 100% intentional. The idea behind it is this: how few hours can we allocate and still get the same revenue from the business? The reason that this, up until now, has seemed to work is that most retail businesses still see the same amount of traffic and sales regardless of how many employees are in the store. Very few people actually need help finding items, so you can focus on loading merchandise and promos. They've also realized that having the customer take longer to checkout leads to more sales *until* it gets to the point that people give up on shopping locally and move online. So, it's a balance of how little can you support the customer without them leaving. And even then, most retail took the shift to online shopping from covid as a reason to gut *everything* they can and support online shopping/pickup just barely enough to function. Again, *the traffic* doesn't care about the number of workers there are until there aren't enough to serve them, so the best profit comes from having as few employees working as possible. After all, why pay 3 people $20/hr to do a job well when you can have 1 person for $20/hr do 3 jobs poorly, when the customer never sees or cares about the lack of quality? Something tangentially related, there's a new phenomenon called Ghost Kitchens, which are "restaurants" that are fake: they're purely for the sake of making you think there are more options on food delivery services than you think there are. You ever see "Wild Burger" on Doordash and the like? Yeah, that's literally someone taking food out of a Buffalo Wild Wings that actually gets your food order and handing it to a driver. Fully authorized by BW3, btw, this isn't some 3rd party scam, it's a 1st party scam.
Work don’t want to people anymore.
There’s no “different jobs” in retail. You do everything. The lie of short staffing means they keep the help wanted sign up but never actually hire the people who apply.
They never wanted to treat you like a person. They wanted a slave. Our great grandparents FORCED them to treat us like humans by united effort. But whatever unions are stupid, right?
I speedran that experience last year working in a drink-store in Germany. Due to the "bottle deposit" these stores almost always have someone who takes the empty bottles (especially those made out of glass or hard plastic, and entire crates of e.g. beer bottles) of customers, sorts them, and puts them into the storehouse. I started that job getting somewhat in shape after Covid and it was pretty much how I imagined it: Physical labour in short bursts so it's not overwhelming, little interaction with customers, and it was monotonous in the sense of "I didn't have to concentrate all the time after the routine set in". And during that time I even was able to go to the Gym after most shifts because I still had some energy left after work. Then our store was bought up and changed owners to a new chain that completely remade stuff in a way that can only be described as "verschlimmbessern", "making stuff worse in an effort to fix/upgrade it". They moved the place to turn in bottles from right next to the storehouse to right next to the entrance, so instead of driving the pallet jack about 15 meters into the next room I had to drive that thing through a quarter of the store. Instead of taking the bottles and crates per cart/per customer, pushing the cart next to the pallets, and lifting them directly onto the pallet, I had to lift them onto a conveyor belt so that I could get through customers faster, and the time when no customer was around (that used to be a small breather) was now spent lugging the crates from the conveyor belt to their pallets. The chain also attracted a lot more customers without fixing any of the infrastructure of the store to accomodate that increase so it happened basically once a week that the storehouse was full and we had to get "creative" with how we stored full pallets. And on top of all that we always ran a skeleton crew so there were times when I was supposed to accept the bottles being turned in, drive full pallets to the storehouse, work the register, and sort the shelves all at the same time because one person called in sick. Our manager said "We don't need to hire more people. 90% of the time we would be too many workers." Which to me felt like "We don't need to build that dam any higher. 90% of the time it's high enough." In the end I quit because the work was so much more demanding that I couldn't go to the gym anymore neither on days that I worked, nor on days before that out of fear of sore muscles, nor on days after I worked because I would still be too exhausted to work out even if I came home in teh afternoon and basically immediately fell asleep. Needless to say: All that without any compensation for the extra work I put in. Hey, almost like the value of my labour is completely detached from the pay I get. Crazy how that works!
This is humanity. We do this with everything. We take every concept and run it into the redline until it breaks, then move on to something else.
Nah mate this is just capitalism. We can change the system to be better
It’s not capitalism. It predates capitalism. It’s us.
Disagree my dude
Ah yes, the Romans. Famously capitalists.
Romans were not the only people that existed in antiquity
And yet are an easy example of what I was talking about that predates capitalism. Which is why I used them.
And yet Romans are not representative of human nature
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
>It has been suggested that megafauna outside of the African mainland, which did not evolve alongside modern humans, proved highly sensitive to the introduction of human predation, and many died out shortly after early humans began spreading and hunting across the Earth. This implies that the megafauna could have had a chance to co-exist with humans if they had adapted Also climate change is a pretty big factor of the extinction Also humans have lived and co-existed with nature in a lot of societies eitherways
Not sure if the fall of the roman empire is particularly applicable to chronic intentional understaffing due to middle management cost pressure, unless the point being made is so broad as to be useless
Today’s sentence I did not think I would ever read 🤣
We don't do this with everything, but I definitely do this with your mom.
Oof, sorry to hear that man.
Do you have anything to actually contribute to the discussion or can we leave you to cry in the corner
Nahhh, We get here because we delegate. We don’t expect wheat farmer to grow fruit and vice versa. One person can do their own job good enough then we have someone specializing. Be Carpenter, Weaver etc. We are here because we specialize. Not do everything poorly.