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Comment by throwaway5959 | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a problem with a lot of places now, not just rental cars. Employees just don’t give a shit anymore, if anything they hate their jobs and customers.

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Office Space as relevant as ever: https://youtu.be/cgg9byUy-V4

I agree, and how did that happen? It’s incredibly hard to find a painter who will actually paint, even when it takes exactly less time to do it properly than do a thin layer and be summoned to come back( Did we go to far into commoditizing everything, such that people don’t care about their reputation anymore, and don’t care about the poor schmocks who will have to live in half-built houses, and therefore, the only important thing is the plausibility that the job was performed?

People that get business from the Internet don't care about reputation. You can always just buy fake reviews, sometimes you can pay to have negatives removed, or you can just start a new company name and buy fake reviews.

Also so many businesses have sufficient barriers to entry that there is a considerable under supply of service providers.

Employers get what they pay for.

Pay people well (aka enough to actually save and be able to afford property) and you might see something different.

But ShArEhOlDeR VaLuE!!!! means it’ll never happen.

The "not caring" aspect has been a problem in the US for a long time.

Same in Canada. I worry that we’ve become too comfortable and will need to be reminded why it’s important to care.

In the defence of people who don’t care right now, our culture is not conducive to caring whereas it seems it was more so in the past. There was more social and family cohesion. There were more readily available evidence and reasons to care on a day to day basis. Things appear objectively different for most people now.

On top of that there is increasing wealth disparity which people are confronted with on a hyper-frequent basis. Just take a peak at instagram and you’re reminded that you’re just a serf with every ad and every few posts.

I feel you're onto something, and like others on the thread, I've got too many anecdotal observations of service providers blatantly being in-your-face apathetic in the US vs, say, Japan where even if forced by convention, people do need to at least appear to really care. Is there formal research on this phenomenon?

> need to be reminded why it’s important to care.

In the 'good old days' a person could work their way up in a company from the sales floor into a leadership role. The company would encourage this to create a pipeline of experienced managers with first-hand knowledge of customer needs.

That era is long dead. Companies don't care about their customers, they care about maximizing shareholder value above all else. That means doing things like slashing staff to the point where 2 people have to run the entire store. How are they supposed to provide good customer service in a situation like that?

They’re not able to or supposed to, so it’s completely understandable why many people stop caring. I definitely don’t place the responsibility of caring on the people working closest to the customer. They need to be given the training, tools, compensation, and flexibility to have a life in order for that to be realistic. They really aren’t, though. Without that, the immediate responsibility is on corporations and governments to establish baselines which allow workers to have jobs that aren’t totally soul crushing and thankless.

Jobs like that shouldn’t exist at all in my opinion. They’re the result of regulatory failure as far as I can tell.

Yeah I wonder why people who feel like they are getting poorer and poorer while their bosses get richer and richer, stopped giving a shit.

The average American has never been materially wealthier. Even the poorest Americans that are housed have a fridge, a TV, a cell phone, many have a car (or two) and a majority of Americans own their own home/condo.

This isn't the 1950s where a TV was a signifier of the strength of the American economy. TVs are dirt cheap now, whereas rent, food, education, healthcare, all of which are more important for survival, have all skyrocketed.

Hahahahahahaha yeah that’s the problem, the employees! Why don’t they “give a shit” about their jobs that barely pay their rent and groceries and give them zero chance of ever retiring?

You seem sheltered

higher pay, the solution is higher pay.

You have that backwards. Better performance/value => higher pay. Why should we pay people more if they suck at their job? They should be fired.

If you fire them and pay is the same why would you expect higher performance from the new person? You said it yourself, the problem exist everywhere now. You get what you pay for.

Yes, fire them and hire better help, even if it costs more. Giving people a raise doesn’t automatically make them better.

> even if it costs more.

So the solution is higher pay

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