My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Conditions have been deteriorating for a while now. Extended hours on holidays, terrible scheduling, and peculiar "performance measurement" tools. At my particular store, they adopted a system of tracking how many transactions a cashier performed per hour and then penalizing them when those transactions exceeded a certain number. The thought was that if a cashier rang up so many customers an hour, then some of them had had to wait in line and the cashier was at fault for not calling backup. (What backup? And what if they were just a really fast cashier?) Another was the obsession with collecting customers' email addresses. Cashiers were expected to collect so many email addresses a day or week or whatever or be threatened with losing their job.
My silly, between school semesters little retail gig had become very stressful towards the end because of the obsession with these metrics and a general attitude of "I could fire you today and have someone cheaper by tomorrow".
I think a lot of people could live OK in the Midwest on $10 / hour.
I wish more people would move away from the super high cost of living areas (California, New England, ...etc) and "vote with their feet" so to speak. If 10% of the populations of Cali and Massachusetts moved inward, I think that would drive house prices down and wages up. All the rich people are still around to buy stuff and no poor people left to work retail.
This is (and has been) happening for years now. Poorer people are reverse-migrating from the denser parts of the country to the Sun Belt.
And it's a problem. The high cost of living in many of the "desirable" parts of the country is artificially created by government regulation of housing (as well as other markets, thanks to the propensity of densely populated municipalities to be run by liberals). But with the services sector growing, it makes more sense for poorer people to live near the wealthy people (who are going to be in the desirable parts of the country), since those are the people who can and will buy services. It's very different from, say, manufacturing, which is far more location-independent.
I firmly believe the problem of high cost of living can be solved through more sensible housing policies and efficient public transit (among other things). See this (quite short, at 64 pages) book for more details: http://www.amazon.com/The-Rent-Too-Damn-High-ebook/dp/B0078X...
It's the services sector that is and will continue to be the most difficult to replace with outsourcing and automation (see Moravec's paradox: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox). It only makes sense that we try to create as many jobs as possible in this area. By lowering housing and transportation (and other) costs for people in the service industry, they can offer their services at a lower cost, allowing more people to purchase those services, which will drive down unemployment.
Yes, if nobody but tech workers come to San Francisco, the city will collapse. But that doesn't mean everybody else has to live there too. It's also awful presumptuous to say, "Well I'm wealthy, this is where I want to live. You are poor, you don't get a choice, live near me"
Actually, what's myopic is this:
> Un-wealthy people go out to eat and get their car repaired just as much as Richie Rich.
People who aren't wealthy don't eat out as much and don't spend nearly as much when they go out to eat. They buy food that has smaller margins and expect less in the way of service, meaning lower wages for the workers.
And of course service jobs have to be near the wealthy. When it doesn't matter where a worker is located, that job gets outsourced. Location-dependent jobs are the ones that are least likely to disappear in the future (or to have disappeared already).
> It's also awful presumptuous to say, "Well I'm wealthy, this is where I want to live. You are poor, you don't get a choice, live near me"
It's no more presumptuous than Henry Ford was when he expected workers to move to Detroit to work in the booming automotive industry, rather than setting up a bunch of small factories all across America so he could accommodate them. Moreover, in this case, such a policy would help to keep workers from having to move (to the Sun Belt, or another low-cost-of-living locale) away from their families and communities in the first place.
You can dream all you want of a utopia where people can live in the middle of nowhere and have their ideal job. But that isn't going to make it a reality.
My apologies, I didn't mean they spend the exact same $$$. Poor choice in wording on my part. My point is being poor doesn't mean your car never needs a mechanic.
And of course service jobs have to be near the wealthy. When it doesn't matter where a worker is located, that job gets outsourced.
Non sequitur. Plenty of un-outsourceable jobs exist serving people who are not wealthy.
You can dream all you want of a utopia where people can live in the middle of nowhere and have their ideal job. But that isn't going to make it a reality.
Where do I speak of dream jobs? I'm just saying it's awfully self-centered to think that the poor exist to serve the wealthy.
I know poor people who are decent at basic car maintenance (once again, the sorts of things where you get high margins). I also know wealthy people who are car enthusiasts, but they wouldn't want to get their hands dirty, so they'd rather pay someone to do it for them. You're speaking in absolutes when the market relies on relative differences.
This particular point isn't too significant though, since ideally, most poor people wouldn't need to own a car (they would use public transit instead).
> Non sequitur. Plenty of un-outsourceable jobs exist serving people who are not wealthy.
Non sequitur. The goal is to optimize new job creation. The service industry is one of the fastest growing in America, so it makes sense to harness that.
> Where do I speak of dream jobs? I'm just saying it's awfully self-centered to think that the poor exist to serve the wealthy.
And I'm just saying that worrying about whether the poor can have their dream job (where they don't have to serve the wealthy) is something you can worry about when chronic unemployment hasn't been dragging down the economy for the last several years.
I mean, one of the defining characteristics of being poor-ish to me is what a person is willing to put up with when driving junk cars. Cars which - when it inevitably gave up the ghost - would be replaced by another junker. Now, I was raised lower middle class, but for a brief period my parents got out of it; the defining turning point was managing to get financing on a new Ford Escort. It wasn't nearly as expensive to own as feared, partly due to incredibly better gas mileage, but also it drank less oil (two quarts every two days, and not a drop on the pavement... Well maybe one or two for good measure.)
Anecdata, to be sure, but I've met quite a few people with similar stories.
Presumably this is why Shanghai, Melbourne, Moscow, Singapore, and Hong Kong are so expensive. Because they're run by liberals.
Nothing to do with private markets. Nothing to do with issues related to installed bases. Nothing to do with market forces. Just liberal governments.
You libertarians are flipping hilariously stupid sometimes. Where by sometimes I mean always.
You really need to work on your reading comprehension. I said that liberals have caused the cost of living to increase in urban areas due to regulation in markets other than housing. Housing regulation is something that both liberals and conservatives engage in.
Chinese cities are the highest cost of living areas in China, but it's certainly not because of liberal regulation. But you ignore this, because it disagrees with your predispositions.
It would destroy your religious viewpoint if you were to admit that much of the high cost of living is just the market at work, and natural frictions within that market, so you blame something you hate instead.
You're a typical fundamentalist, you're mouth is open by your mind is closed tight.
And when somebody mis-reads part of your ignorant and utterly fact-free argument, you attack them on that, instead of admitting that I gave a list of examples that show that your entire premise is utterly and completely idiotic, and devoid of anything resembling logic.
Try failing harder. The primary factor that makes the cost of living high in Chinese cities is their property bubble, which is a direct result of government regulation. Foreign investment is restricted for Chinese citizens and weak property rights under the authoritarian government make other types of domestic investment risky.
[0] http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/wp/wp697.pdf [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/us/americans-migration-pat...
True.
> I think a lot of people could live OK in the Midwest on $10 / hour.
Ridiculously false.
Yes, the cost of living is cheaper in the Midwest, but a lot of people seem to have the idea that it's this land lost in time where a loaf of bread still costs a nickel and where gas is 25 cents a gallon.
Now it gets a bit better when two people are living together. But then that usually means a family (kids) eventually, so it then starts to get much worse.
Well that certainly sounds a lot more attainable than 10 bucks an hour with the 2200 - 2600 rental rates in San Francisco. (Last I heard, at least)
Speaking of couples living together with kids, I personally wish Americans, rich and poor, were vastly more open to adult living arrangements other than the "traditional nuclear family". Not that there's anything wrong with it, I just think the world would be a better place if there were a larger variety of equally "acceptable" living arrangements with no obvious default, to make people more comfortable seeking out the particular set of circumstances that work well for them. Some people might be happier living as an extended family, say, or communally, or alone or with platonic room-mates, even when in a committed relationship, if it weren't for strong societal pressures to conform. I'm not at all "dogmatically anti-dogmatic" about this, it's just a train of thought I've had on many occasions.
$10 / hour is $20,800 a year. At that rate your effectively paying 0% tax and you probably qualify for heat assistance, free insurance, etc.
I didn't say live like a King. I basically said meant live life.
Those areas are empty and emptying out because people don't want to live there.
The Protestant management ethic doesn't help here - the belief that if the rank-and-file are happy, they must be getting away with something and must therefore be screwed harder.
See also: http://www.thenation.com/article/177377/holiday-crush ("A woman from the agency hands each of us a time sheet. For the sign-in, she tells us to write 8:30. 'I know you were told to be here at 8:15,' she says, anticipating a protest that never comes, 'but that was just to make sure you got here early.'").
I'm a broken record on this, but: an unconditional basic income is the answer to this situation. The only way you can make sure every job has dignity is for every person to be able to quit their job without worrying about starving or being unable to afford any housing. Once everyone is guaranteed that bare minimum, employers have to treat their employees with a basic level of respect and dignity. Otherwise they'll quit.
I should say I also have no idea if that's what would happen. Just a concern.
(not sure it's clear: by basic standard of living, I mean the standard of living typical at the bottom end)
edit: I guess it's probably not great to compare the package of social policies to basic income though.
The people who really hate the idea of a basic income often have a religious background... how dare they be allowed a civilized level of charity without following religion, etc.
One way to work around price manipulation is to cut out the highly profitable middleman... Here's your bag of rice and block of cheese, see you next week. Need a safe warm place to sleep? Here have this empty unlocked jail cell. It would likely close resemble a long term version of natural disaster / hurricane aid, perhaps more formally run. In culturally inferior areas it'll almost certainly resemble the worst imagination (caricature) of the projects. In better cultural areas, it'll probably look a lot like a student dorm. People gonna be themselves, no matter if you like it or not.
If you want even the slightest tiny bit better, and most will, that'll cost a bit. In fact it probably will cost a bit more than now.
A couple things counteract that increase in price. For one, capital would flow more toward producing essential goods owing to a larger demand: this would prioritize research and development in those goods, and in hunting out inefficiencies that hamper their production and distribution, leading to a lower real cost. For two, most people already consume the bare essentials of life--the real question is just where that money comes from, be it a basic income, a demeaning job, a good job, or debt. (These two counteracting factors are at odds, btw: the more one is a factor, the less the other is. The second prevents inflation from being an issue at all, while the first merely mitigates against it. Two is the larger factor, imo.)
In addition, there's an individual psychological factor that helps. Not having a guaranteed income means that, at a moment's notice, you can have no financial ability to take care of yourself: this puts you into bad situations and leads you to make locally rational decisions that are globally suboptimal (where you do less-than-ideal things to survive today that cost you a lot more down the line than the benefit you got today). And this has a broader deleterious social impact: for instance, you might be forced to abandon all your social networks to move back home (if you have a home to go back to!), which significantly increases search costs and destroys valuable information, making labor markets less efficient. So even if there's been serious inflation because of a basic income, it still allows you to stay afloat instead of throwing your life into radical chaos.
I share your concern about the exact shape of what would happen, and the level of basic income that best improves social outcomes depends on such a number of factors that it seems very difficult to calculate. Phasing it in over a range of increasing values seems like one way to deal with that.
I'm going to do something I shouldn't and try to imagine myself as a teenager again (urgh), and whether or not I would have ever held down a job if I had guaranteed money to fall back on. There are times I think I would have done it, and times I could easily see myself throwing hands in the air and going home to play video games at the first sign of adversity.
The whole exercise leaves me wondering, even though I think the 'Basic Income' is an interesting idea for replacing needs-based programs, whether or not these individual choices, acted out en masse, would cause some severe productivity problems down the line. We aren't post scarcity just yet, after all.
Not that it matters. Most of us will be dead before something like 'Basic Income' ever makes it to the US. We are still hanging on to some pretty severe depression-era baggage.
Unemployment isn't an engineer or an MBA's fault. It's the fault of shareholders, executives and congressmen: they're the ones hoarding the money at the top. I guarantee you, if the money went to the engineers, we'd have 98% employment right now and the jobs would be a whole lot more interesting than retail. Heck, we'd have to start using graphical user interfaces for stores because we wouldn't be able to find enough people to work retail!
Papa John's founder said it'd cost something like $0.50 extra per pizza to offer his employees health insurance. I'm not even talking about a luxury like health insurance. What would it cost to let employees take a few extra sick days or be able to plan on when they'll work or the occasional unplanned bathroom break? http://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1djlt0/pregnant_tmobil...
The problem that you see here could also be characterized as a lack of demand for the labor services of the employees. Perhaps we should attempt to find more, new productive activities for low-skill workers.
Unless your software is giving those people something better to do you're lying to yourself if you think you've made things better for them. As miserable as these jobs are, they're still better than no job at all.
Of course, I'm not saying it's your responsibility to solve that problem. When you automate someone's job away, the person who benefits is the employer, not the (ex-) employee.
This isn't the fault of all MBAs or all engineers, but it's quite arguably the fault of the particular engineers who built the tools to manage that way and certainly the particular MBAs who chose to deploy those tools in a way that makes people miserable.
That's ripe. Pay your employees a low wage, treat them like shit, and then expect loyalty? Gimme a break. Loyalty is a two-way street and I don't see any reciprocation from corporate America (in this case, or in general).
I think it is fairly simple. The more in-demand your skills are, the better you can expect to treated by your employer because you have options.
Is this 'right'? I don't know. But it seems to be how things work.
There are plenty of manufacturing examples where unions demand higher than market wages, and companies simply relocate operations.
BTW, both of my parents are union workers. I support their goals, but I think the idea of a union is outdated and ultimately counterproductive.
All you have to do is sell your soul and abandon your own humanity. Cheap, right? You can learn a lot about someone, or a culture, by seeing how they treat those less fortunate.
I personally believe that low-skill/pay workers should be treated better in this country. The important question is: How do we accomplish this? Mandates like higher min. wage? Or, societal pressures of some sort? It doesn't appear that (most) corporations will treat employees better out of the goodness of their heart.
In Sweden there are 2 unions, One for white collar workers and one for blue collar employees. The salary rates/hikes are industry wide.They are usually determined by the competitive part of the economy - the export sector and than applied to everybody.
The unions understand their role as protectors of employees, but on the other hand, understand the need for Sweden to remain competitive and the huge responsibility put on them by representing so many people without hurting the economy. So they come with reasonable demands.
All this is supported by the Swedish mentality of fairness, which makes employees happy just taking their fair share.
Another thing about self-moderation: my consulting firm gets an occasional contract at a public school. I know it sounds terrible to say this, but if these kids are the future of the US, I want to move somewhere else. I went to public school myself, and the value system that the kids subscribe to nowadays is bloated by our celebration of people who make immense amounts of money. There's also this fucked up sense of entitlement, an addiction to social media, and a lack of desire to explore anything beyond the assigned schoolwork.
> fucked up sense of entitlement, an addiction to social media, and a lack of desire to explore anything beyond the assigned schoolwork.
Has it occurred to you that since your generation is responsible for the profoundly sad state of our economy, educational system, and justice system, you don't have much room to criticize Generation Y?
I'm a person. I didn't cause economic or education downturns, and my firm actually does the opposite - we create jobs in education and improve core standards. This is a classic situation of critic meets the generalist.
I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! don't do it!"
"Why shouldn't I?" he said.
I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"
He said, "Like what?"
I said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?"
He said, "Religious."
I said, "Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?"
He said, "Christian."
I said, "Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?"
He said, "Protestant."
I said, "Me too! Are you episcopalian or baptist?"
He said, "Baptist!"
I said,"Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?"
He said, "Baptist church of god!"
I said, "Me too! Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?"
He said,"Reformed Baptist church of god!"
I said, "Me too! Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?"
He said, "Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!"
I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off.
Then, they proceeded to spend the first really bad winter eating each other and when numbers picked up with more colonists, they got into the swing of hanging Quakers.
I suspect it is more to do with having a very long history of democratic and social decision making in Viking culture.
The Viking Thing was electing kings by vote a millennium ago.
Honestly there were tons of drugs, little motivation, and a happy yet seemingly poor society. The mom I stayed with complained endlessly about how her lazy son was throwing his life away.
Maybe I just had a misleading experience. But I just can't say I saw it the same as you do.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nom...
I don't think I quite experienced anything like this, but sometimes it was close. If I felt like a replaceable cog, it's because I was, and I was a replaceable cog in a machine already operating on razor thin margins, which means I had to be a good cog. The funny thing was that due to my Navy experience, I didn't perceive it as all that bad, though the pay was pretty miserable even at two dollars above minimum wage.
I'll say this - working retail was very motivating. I knew I didn't want to do that forever. But I don't know what the 'solution' is as applied to everybody, but I know the solution for me was to finish college and make myself valuable.
My admittedly very lofty goal is to reach a point in my mid-30s where I don't need a job. By no means do I plan on actually retiring at that point, but I want the peace of mind knowing that my career could end and I could lead a humble, comfortable-enough life without working, probably in the midwest.
> Even though I was living rent-free in a guest bedroom, my every-other-Thursday paycheck couldn’t help me climb out of my hole, particularly after the state took half my pre-tax, $300 weekly salary for child support payments.
> * got the opportunity to leave Sporting Goods Inc. for a temporary job as a communications director for a Capitol Hill nonprofit, a gig that paid twice as much per week as I’d earn in a month at the store. That salary still didn’t come close to my Politico paycheck, though it was a step in the right direction.*
- 300 * 52 = 15,600 annually
- 15,600 * 4 * 2 ("twice as much per week as one month") = 124,800
- "That salary still didn’t come close to my Politico paycheck"
So, at least $150K or even $200+K? Gah-damn! I know big beltway journalists get a decent salary, but Politico is a relative newcomer (though profitable and growing).
300 = retail pay per month.
300 * 2 = 600, which is twice the retail pay.
600 * 4 = 2,400, multiplying by four weeks to account for new job earning twice as much per week as per month in retail.
2,400 * 12 = 28,800, which is an estimate for the annual pay at his new job.
Politico most certainly pays more than that.
That's pay per week, not pay per month. So multiply everything by 4.
No, that was his pay per week. His monthly pay in retail was $1200.
What I am surprised by is how he ever ended up working retail with a salary like that. I'd expect him to have saved up enough to last a year or two of low expenses.
I make $15k annually as a student right now and I still have managed to save up enough that I could live for 3 or 4 months if I lost my job. It would just be a matter of being very careful with my spending.
Anything <$50 is also an impulse buy for me, but I've still managed to sock away a year or so of expenses.
$300 * 2 * 52 = $31,200.
So 300 * 2 * 4 *52 = $124,800.
I'm actually impressed that we don't (yet) have a chorus of people saying he's overpaid or that he deserves it.
[1] Until now, I guess?
Apparently, Politico doesn't remove biographies of people they fire (he was fired two years ago).
(edited to add, reporting that the emperor has no clothes is not just a firing offense, but an economic death penalty, or if not an economic death penalty its at least incredibly harsh... I saw that fable as a theatrical play as a child, and have often thought the inevitable conclusion, as shown in this example, is more interesting than the play as portrayed.)
Which I don't think is racist. Presumably, he also could have said "they're men", or "they're middle aged", but would not have been accused of being sexist or ageist.
This while article adds weight to my opinion that the USA is not a civilized country. Sure, there are the trappings. But a society that can afford to, but does not, look after those on the margins, is not civilized.
If we banned people for life for saying dumb things, we would have no politicians, movie stars etc left.
Or, sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day is really, really easy compared to having to actually DO something at a service job.
Luckily, due to the "retailapocalpse" or whatever its called, soon virtually no one will have to labor under those conditions, because there will be almost no positions like that. Not that Amazon's warehouses are some kind of workers paradise.
I worked my way thru school in retail supermarkets roughly contemporaneous with the author's youthful experiences a couple decades ago. I see things have gone somewhat downhill since then...
> Not that Amazon's warehouses are some kind of workers paradise.
What's the solution? Mandatory severance for every job?
At the risk of opening a-whole-nother can of worms.... universal basic income.
That said, if I was looking at the prospect of working in these shops long-term, I'd also be seeing what I could do to unionize the shop - they are a pretty crummy environment with abhorrent pay for anyone over the age of 16 (as the author points out).
I respect your optimism, but standard practice at big retailers for anyone who even breathes word of unionization is to fire them instantly. If that doesn't do it, they close the store. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Walmart#Labor_unio...
Wow, just wow - humiliating him by checking his bag every day, making him do extra work (after work hours) for free, restricting him to less than 30 hours so the store doesn't have to give him benefits .... Even after all this, the author seemed to have worked hard. All of this is still not enough.
Incredible.
[1] optional bonus: being slightly mocked by less educated people that will then ask you for hints about things they don't understand. Of course, I helped. Slave genes.
Retail internal theft really is a serious problem, though. According to the National Retail Security Survey at UF, it costs retailers (read: consumers) $14.9 billion annually [1].
What you may find surprising is that most major retailers do, in fact, have quite extensive controls in place to prevent and detect internal theft -- exception reporting, inventory tracking, etc. That these massive losses still occur should give you an idea of how complex the problem is.
The reason the store requires two employees to take out the trash has nothing to do with watching for thieves or "armed intruders." It's actually a simple and surprisingly effective deterrent to internal theft. Diverting merchandise through non-public exits is a common theft strategy.
Also, Ike was not "fired because [he] got a promotion." He was fired for lying on his job application about a previous conviction for theft. Ike's conviction strongly suggests a tendency to act dishonestly, which is further reinforced by his attempt to cover it up when applying for the job. This is precisely the type of individual that the background check is intended to screen.
Lastly, the author says it happened when Ike was a teenager, so it could only have happened when Ike was either 18 or 19. Juvenile court records are not available to background check services.
[1] http://investors.tyco.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=112348&p=irol-news...
I wouldn't make it out to be such a personal moral failing. Given the job climate described in the article, I wouldn't expect him to be able to get a job by telling the truth about his conviction. If they were actually concerned about producing profit instead of covering their butts, Corporate would sweep it under the rug with the realization that he is effectively required to lie about it in order to participate in society.
Ike's situation is what bothers me about the current criminal justice system, though. If you get a conviction on your record for anything moderately serious, you're just done. He could tell the truth, and get locked out right off the bat, or lie, and maybe get caught later. We've probably all done dumb stuff when we were young. If you happen to get busted for something at the wrong time, well, good luck ever getting a semi-professional job again. Years and years of dedicated service are nothing against some dumb mistake a decade ago.
I'll admit that I tend to think that a lot of petty thieves are doing it for the thrills rather than desperation for survival. But what do we really expect them to do after they get caught? Even if they do some time and learn their lesson, it looks like they have damn few options for making a clean living, no matter how skilled and dedicated they are. I don't have any idea how many ex-cons are making a legit effort to live a clean life after they do their time, but we sure don't seem to be making it easy for them. And we're surprised that most of them go back to crime and get busted again? I'm not sure exactly how to solve it, but it surely needs some work.
You can't prevent people from knowing who's an ex-con without making all of that stuff secret. But if all of that stuff is secret, then anyone who the police arrest would essentially disappear. Nobody would be able to find out if they were even arrested in the first place, much less what they've been charged with, what the evidence is to substantiate that charge, where they're being held and in what conditions, etc. So nothing prevents the police from arresting anybody they feel like on no evidence, and keeping them anywhere they want for as long as they want, because nobody would know about it in the first place. Even the much maligned Guantanamo Bay prison isn't that secret, and it's still widely considered an outrage. We've seen a lot of abuse of existing law enforcement powers lately; I'm not willing to essentially give them a massive level of new powers for the sake of giving ex-cons better opportunities.
It's probably the best paying job on the store premises.
Keep in mind their job is also to stop shoplifters in addition to "internal" theft, embezzlement, return fraud, etc.
It's good that he's not hiding the conviction, but I find it hard to empathize with someone that carries out violence against women.
His situation sucks, but he wouldn't have been in such dire straights if he hadn't been angry enough to hit his spouse. To me, that violence is the most urgent detail of this story.
Controlling the people through fear doesn't sound like the "free world", you know.