Comment by krstck | Hacker News Reader

Comment by krstck | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that working retail has gotten a lot worse since the recession. I worked retail after high school before deciding to go to college, and then worked the same job on summers home from school. What was interesting was that between when I started that job in 2005 and when I left for the final time in 2010, my coworkers went from being mostly high school and college kids to all sorts of folks of varying ages and backgrounds. That was the most telling sign of the recession to me. I strolled in to pick up my job where I'd left off in 2010 and I remember every single day people asking for job applications. I had thoughts like, why would you want to work here? This is a job for kids! But we even had a PhD biologist for a while.

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'd like to point out that this story takes place in one of the highest cost of living areas in the country. $10 / hour goes a lot further in Kansas than it does D.C.

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.

> 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.

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.

The crux of your argument is unconvincing. Service jobs have to be near the wealthy? What kind of myopia is that? Un-wealthy people go out to eat and get their car repaired just as much as Richie Rich.

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"

That situation also means that the lowest wage workers have to commute the furthest, often (as the author of the article experiences) spending most of their daily pay just getting to and from work. "Move further from your job" is rarely an option.

This can be solved with denser housing and more efficient public transit.

Which will likely not happen for a number of reasons, see the current Bay Area fight over tech/gentrification.

> The crux of your argument is unconvincing. Service jobs have to be near the wealthy? What kind of myopia is that?

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.

People who aren't wealthy don't eat out as much and don't spend nearly as much when they go out to eat.

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.

> My point is being poor doesn't mean your car never needs a mechanic.

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.

It could merely be the people I've known, but I think the un-wealthy actually do spend far less going out to eat and repairing their cars. To whit, I think it's more likely to say I've been duped by Poe's Law.

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.

The high cost of living is caused solely by liberals and their zoning policies?

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.

> The high cost of living is caused solely by liberals and their zoning policies?

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.

You really need to work on having any logic at all in your arguments.

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.

> Chinese cities are the highest cost of living areas in China, but it's certainly not because of liberal regulation.

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.

That's not true actually - migration between states is lower than it used to be and still falling. I can't remember where I first read about this, but here's a random paper on the overall decline of movement [0] and an NYT article specifically about declining migration to the Sun Belt [1].

[0] http://www.minneapolisfed.org/research/wp/wp697.pdf [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/us/americans-migration-pat...

It's not migration between states that's important, it's migration away from unaffordable big cities.

> $10 / hour goes a lot further in Kansas than it does D.C.

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.

Actually, the (foolish) idea that I have in my head is that when the median house price is NOT one million dollars (I'm looking at you, San Francisco), people who make $10 / hour won't have to devote nearly as much of their income to housing, dramatically increasing their spending power.

Apartment prices in the Midwest (I'm north of Chicago, but same goes for further south) are 600 - 1000 per month. 10 bucks an hour is 1750 a month before taxes -- fed, fica, and state taxes get you down to less than 1400. There is no public transportation to speak of (outside of big cities such as Chicago and Atlanta, etc), so kill another $175 for gas, plus $150 for a car payment (cheap used car, high interest). Not much left for food, heat, and lights.

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.

600 - 1000 per month. 10 bucks an hour is 1750 a month before taxes

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)

True. This is why people living on $10/hour tend to work more than 40 hours / week. Unfortunately, this increasingly means one or more part time jobs, because service industry jobs don't generally offer overtime.

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.

Definitely not "Ridiculously false". I've lived in the midwest most of my life. You can live ~1 hour within a major metropolitan area (minus chicago) and rent an apartment for $500-$800 a month.

$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.

And what will you drive? Living in prettymuch any Midwestern city requires driving (or someone to drive you around). Public transportation is abysmal, and distances are large.

A salary that qualifies for and requires public assistance is not a liveable salary.

Public assistance is offered to maintain livable conditions. It would seem that qualifying for assistance does the opposite of what you think it does- it produces a "livable salary".

no it doesn't produce a "livable salary", it pushes costs of "livable-salaried" employees to the public.

It's hard for people to move away from their kids. In many if not most of these cases, you'll find that that's a major reason why people don't move.

OK, you go first.

Those areas are empty and emptying out because people don't want to live there.

I live in a fairly low-cost area(a mid-sized town in the coastal southeast). $10/hr would be a stretch.

I've never understood the management attitude that seeks to create such an environment, because workers just end up rebelling against it in hidden ways. I worked in retail in college for a truly terrible company. The work environment was awful and exploitative, but the company wasn't very good at things like inventory control. So, largely in response to this, the people in the stock room would literally throw probably 10% of the merchandise that came off the trucks directly into the garbage compactor. If that's good business, then there's something seriously wrong with our economic system.

It's the sort of company where the people in charge enjoy subordinating their employees, and aren't themselves subject to good metrics. They can spend their time bullying the staff at the expense of shareholders.

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.

I had the same experience at Whole Foods Palo Alto as a cashier, 2008-12. WF management can take asking about the Whole Planet foundation and shove it up their ass.

They probably don't have to say that stores are closing everywhere. Every week there's news about possible store closings. This week it's Staples and Safeway, last week it was Guitar Center, before, Pennys, Best Buy, Disney Store etc.

I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, shopping in a physical store location is mostly a terrible experience these days and I greatly prefer to shop online. But on the other, these big box stores have long been the providers of many a teen's summer job or somebody's second income or just something to keep someone afloat between "real" jobs, so I hate to see that source disappear.

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