They're there so the owner of the club/restaurant can relax, not you.
Right now, I feel like this guy is useless and I don't want to give him money and I feel bad about that, like by not paying him I'm calling him useless.
If it were for the owner, and that was clear, I'd feel great because I was making his job easier by not causing any trouble or mess, and on top of that, hey thanks for the towel!
But it is one of those weird things that survives long past the point of sense, they should just be paid a wage and be employed rather than work on this weird charity-basis. It's a bit akin to waiters in the US working on tips, whereas the rest of the world just pays them a normal wage. The clubs bank on guys with 10 beers in em to both be drunk enough and close to bursting enough to pay for the service.
The highlight of that experience was the drunk lady who stole a toilet lid in the men’s room.
Japan can be even worse. I’ve seen it at hotel seven when you’re eating at the hotel restaurant.
The toilets at St Pancras are free and always have been. He was just some random guy you gave money to!
You might be confusing this with curb side check in, which is a service airlines use as a convenience to customers checking bags (so they don't need to go to the ticket counter with heavy/numerous bags ).
They also sometimes do this when looking for a bag for transfer (which failed to get interlined correctly or something, or when an elite has a connection but there's no interline agreement.)
I think you may not realize how many shoppers/how much person-density there can be in the US.
Norwegians was confused every time AFAIK.
Having to bag my own groceries is infuriating. In Canada, The Real Canadian Superstore was the first to do this and it has a shitty feel.
The lines are long, I bring my own bags and have to get out of peoples way as I pay and try to bag my own groceries.
I actually started going to self checkouts because if they don’t bag my groceries, cashiers are useless to me!
If you think bagging is just stuffing bags in orde that groceries come, you’re nuts. I hate it when a useless cashier takes my apples and just tosses them into bags too. They’re fragile and need to be handled as such.
I definitely think bagging is a service worth paying for and appreciate when I get a bagger that gets it.
Oh, my first real job was bagging and helping customers with the groceeos to their cars. Not useles.
There is a big difference between a job that creates convenience for other people and one that’s redundant or pointless.
Please tell me that you say this only to win the argument, because, come on. Putting things into something else is as trivial as it gets, and I can assure you that, even though I have never seen one, a person whose job is to fill the bits someone else bought into bags for them will give absolutely zero fucks about how he puts them things into them bags. Except maybe it's somewhere like Harrods, I guess, if they are paid high enough (now I recalled this: there was a comment or an article recently about an employee of Harrods whose job was to get fired when customers came to complain about other personnel).
You figure out how to build a base, how to seperate items by contimination risk, learn how to fill a bag up.
People who do it poorly give you 15 bags when 7 will do.
The biggest incentive is to do it faster. The job is boring as sin, so you just want to get it over with.
It's also a good job for mentally challenged people. It's low stress, something they can learn, and something they can do well at.
This is a job that could literally be automated with a pole :)
You also have to watch for the pedestrians walking around and so on. It's actually a lot more involved than you think.
I did it a few times. Not hard, but it does matter a lot, and definitely not pointless.
But, yeah you have a point.
Missing the /s. Drivers today are far worse than they were in the 80s.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/21/auto-crashes-are-on-the-rise...
[1] http://gazette.com/study-finds-fatal-crashes-in-colorado-hav...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/06/26/what-...
But here's the thing: There wasn't any roadwork in between. There had been, but everything was neatly packed away.
Then again, I've worked in public administration. Nothing will shock me.
What if you were older/disabled and had trouble lifting a medium-large suitcase?
Seems like not the most useless job in the world, especially since it helps keep things moving in the airport and reduces congestion by getting people their bags slightly faster.
So maybe this man is not needed all the time but definitely lack of somebody to unload the belt would cause problems.
In the US, many people get their living from holding a “anything helps, homeless vet” sign at the train station.
Coming back home from Tokyo is always a major shock.
When I was in the US there was a guy handing me a towel in the bathroom. That is an incredibly meaningless and superfluous job!
On the other hand, most Americans live their entire lives in the US without ever seeing such a guy. Are you mind-bogglingly rich?
I would just simply refuse to go to such places, but I've only ever gone at the strong insistence of friends and perhaps the insistence some strong drink.
Perhaps a real-life hack could be to bring sanitizer gel.
In an economy where having a job (or somehow having attained large sums of money because of luck/previous endeavors) is necessary to not be an outcast, this is one way of mitigating this or at least pushing the larger problem forward. We would very likely have a huge crisis if all bullshit jobs were to disappear overnight.
https://data.bls.gov/pdq/SurveyOutputServlet
You can control what years are shown on that page. I sugggest you look at 1950 to 2018. Although the data is noisy, you can see it has declined. Also note that the era of occasional double digits advances ended decades ago. The 14% in 1956 and the 12% in 1971 have never repeated this side of 1973.
The economy is stagnant because the trend toward automation has died out. Although people in tech keep predicting a robot revolution, there is no evidence of it in the productivity numbers.
> Not having a job puts you in a lower social caste
This is a stupid societal expectation that should be fought rather than supported in the way you say.
There is always valuable work that can be done. It can be improving the maintenance or cleanliness of places, etc.
And they can quit. I mean, a job guarantee isn't directly a requirement in the same sense.
Thinking is a useful skill if and only if the job they aspire to is philosopher. For everything else (and for philosophers as well, really) you need training, and for that you need time.
> And they can quit.
Sure. Anyone can choose to starve.
For example, https://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2013/basic_income_vs_basi...
Which I totally get - a tourist is way more likely to make a mistake than a local.