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Comment by Shank | Hacker News Reader

> In Japan, you get the impression that everyone takes their job and role in society seriously. The median Japanese 7-11 clerk takes their job more seriously than the median US city bureaucrat.

My favorite example of this is how, if you visit 7-11 in Japan and an employee isn’t busy, or is busy but with an unimportant task, they will jump to open a cash register and check people out the second a queue forms. They will move as quickly as possible to clear the queue of people, seemingly aware that everyone has some place to be that isn’t a checkout line. It’s wonderful.

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In Japan this attentive behaviour is often out of fear or boredom. Either way the service is good overall.

I live here. Sometimes the service isnt good and staff behaves like an insentient robot who repeats a script and fucks off.

If you know Japanese and actually talk to them, its obviously the same ape base mech the rest of us are driving.

One thing that rarely mentioned in Japanese 7-11 efficiency is the "employment ice age" problem that contributed to it: there was a massive job crisis around 1993-2005 and major STEM university graduates were dime a dozen. A McDonald's but with only clones of Gordon Freeman as employees tends to become a bit different place than a regular hamburger shop.

theres an effect in countries with high average iq where the quality of low skill labor workers is higher. I dont remember the name, but was convinced it was causal.

its similar to what you are saying, but applies across the board, not just to university grads, and in taiwan also.

i suspect japanese workers at 7-11 now are not college grads still working there from the 90s. its mostly young part time workers. i see middle age people sometimes. Noteably theyre losing the high quality service reputation entirely because many of the stores are being run by immigrants from nepal and the philipines now who dont follow the japanese service memes.

They also mess up the sushi at sushiro/kurasushi and your fish come sideways.

Oh.. do people not do that anymore? At the little grocery store I worked at in BC Canada, if there were like 2 or 3 people in line we'd call for help if they weren't already on their way. Seems like a pretty basic thing.

Here in the US, I don't know what's going on with the cashiers. They're slow. They don't say a single word to you, not even to give you your total. And they're awful at bagging. I just don't get it. It's not a hard job.

How roles are perceived, becomes how people perceive themselves, becomes how people act out those roles.

Or more to the point: Its easier to be what people expect you to be.

In my experience the US is especially susceptible to this 'roleplaying', probably because all (entertrainment) media comes from the same overarching culture.

What, we expect cashiers to be slow and bad so that's how they act? That's ridiculous. I expect them to scan my groceries at a reasonable pace, put the eggs and bread on top, and read me the total when they're done. I expect their managers to give them heck if they're clearing lines at half the speed as the next cashier over. That's about it.

It's not a shameful or embarrassing job. My sister-in-law made a career out of it. She's happy there, so I'm happy for her. She gets good benefits and decent pay. Just do your job and everyone's happy.

It is a hard job if you and your partner both have full-time jobs and other part-time or side-hustles just to barely pay the rent.

It's not a hard job to check out any single customer's groceries. It's a hard job to do it all day, especially when you're not allowed to sit down.

I've literally done it. It's not hard. Maybe if you have some health conditions that make it difficult to stand, but I hope the store will provide accommodations if you do.

I used to rank the McDonald's in Toppongi hills Tokyo as having the best employees anywhere after I saw one run from one side of the little shop to the other when the French fry buzzer went off.

However, it got beat out by the McDonald's in Arkadelphia Arkansas, where the employee fast walked as quickly as hen could to take the order to the car waiting in the Drive-Thru, and then also fast walked back. Running of course would have been against OSHA and gotten hen in trouble so hen did the best hen could.

Are you Swedish? Just wondering because I've never seen the gender neutral pronoun "hen" in English.

"hen" is my go-to gender neutral 3rd person singular pronoun.

I realize that English speakers use "you" for both singular and plural, having retired "thee" and "thou", but the resulting ambiguity has led to the creation of a new word, "y'all", or sometimes prepending it with "all of" for clarity.

Using "they/them" in the singular will just lead us down the same path.

Why not short circuit it and just add the pronoun English speakers have needed forever?

How often is the gender of the pronouned person(s) relevant? In my experience, almost never.

Right now I am reading William Gibson’s Neuromancer for the first time and guess what, back in 1984 there are uses of “they” in a situation where gender of a hypothetical singular third person is irrelevant. It is not confusing in the slightest, compared to a completely new artificially created word.

As a writer, he can make sure that he crafts a situation so that they is unambiguous. I have tried using it in my personal life only to stumble on whether they is one or many.

That's why I settled on borrowing a word that has proven its mettle

(Edit: I used "he" here because William Gibson seemed to identify as a guy, but Gibson's gender is completely irrelevant to this.)

And here I thought it was about how actual hens walk.

Til https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hen_(pronoun)

The run usually isnt because they care its because theyre scared of senpai and (bucho/shacho) big boss.

If the management is chill they arent gonna run.

I'm not sure what was going on in tokyo, but in arkadelphia it was simply that there are a huge number of people waiting for food and the employee did not want them to wait any longer than they had to.

I don't want to see employees running in the direction of hot fat, thanks.

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