The reasoning isn't to save money, however. It is precisely to teach them there's no such thing as work that is beneath them.
on how to leaving any space... Even a bird will leave their nest in a tidy manner.
on how to clean... treat the object you want to clean like it's your soul
And man oh man did I wiped those mirrors...
I love the Japanese ethos of Community (but don't always find myself in agreement with some of the other aphorisms, like "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down.").
However, the person responsible for that gem has obviously never looked into a hawk's nest.
- no job is truly beneath me, and sometimes I have to wade into the weeds so better be prepared
- it's also a way to just get essentially free or cheap(er) labour by increasing the duties of those whose time would be better spent elsewhere.
We don't think of brushing our teeth as "wading into the weeds", it's just an integral part of life for us. Cooking and laundry is (hopefully) just as much an integral part of life. Similarly, the Japanese famously don't have public trash bins everywhere and yet their streets are spotless because they consider public space cleanliness an integral part of life.
And one would hope that saying hi to people is an integral part of life too.
I think that's kinda the point of the article. The people that ignore janitors surely are under no illusion that their time is better spent elsewhere than talking to cleaning staff. Rich parents in Dubai surely are under no illusion that it is better to hire full time nannies than to waste their time raising their own kids. The people in Wall-E surely are under no illusion that their time is better spent entertaining themselves than, well, anything.
But as the increasingly absurd examples hopefully illustrate, not everyone thinks the same way. For example, my wife firmly believes that food that is paid for is intrinsically inferior, because, all else being equal, it's not made with the same level of care as if it was made by family (and this in fact can be a particularly noticeable observation if you come from a culture that takes pride in elaborate cuisine)
We all have things that we believe implicitly are a waste of our time, perhaps because of our upbringing or some other reason, but I think the overarching message of the article is that there are some things in life that we should not be compromising on, even if we did have all the money in the world.
Do you think the cleaner is paid more than the other workers???