Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.
At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.
At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.
“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.
The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.
I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.
I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.
I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.
I’m not worth the cost of a watch.
Maybe if you develop talents and skills you’ll be worth more.
Fuck you in your presumptuous goddamn face.
If there is a desire for a job to be filled, then the person filling it should be paid enough to live.
No? Why should a job my 6 year old cousin could do be rewarded that much? Doesn’t make sense.
Because the job needs filling? Because there is a demand for that skillset to be employed? Because the business which sells $500 watches and obviously makes a significant profit has a need for an employee who can A) Sell a product B) Knows enough about said products to offer information on a range of options C) Can be trusted to handle large sums of money D) Maintains a positive attitude.
Retail IS A SKILLSET. And it is a job that needs filling. We as a society need people to work with customers to improve their experience, and that is evident by the fact that these jobs exist.
If everyone fucking decided they will “Develop” skills to be “worth more,” then who will perform this labor?
The fact is that in our economy, we need people at the base level to work retail. They put in the hours, they work hard, they put up with people’s bullshit, and they deserve to be able to survive.
What doesn’t make sense is creating the need for a person to work full time, and then not paying them enough to survive when working full time.
They don’t deserve to be paid over the odds to do a job that anyone else can. That’s simple economics, basically anyone can perform those roles, it’s not special or unique. Therefore it isn’t rewarded as such.
Being paid enough to eat at night isn’t some high-class goal. He’s not asking for a five bedroom three bath home. He is asking for enough money to pay rent and eat. That bare minimum to survive.
You want to talk economics? Let’s talk about forced scarcity. In America, for example, there is more than enough edible food to feed everyone. Period. Factual statement. There are enough homes that everyone could live in a house or apartment. Factual statement. There is an excess of the bare minimum, and it is forcibly destroyed because of this ideal that jobs that need to be filled still don’t deserve fair pay.
Tell me, what ‘economic sense’ is there in destroying so much food that the poor can’t eat? What economic sense is there in making good employees unable to work by denying them the ability to live on the most basic level? What economic sense is there in creating stagnant wealth pools where the poor can’t contribute to the economy because they lack the means to – even when working.
Here’s the short of it: If you need someone to fill a job, PAY THEM FOR THAT JOB.
Full time work should pay enough for the worker to afford to live in the area where the job is. That means housing, food, all the necessities, plus a little more for savings. That is the bare minimum that should be provided.
If you’re working full time and can’t afford to live, it’s the system that is broken, not you.
(not to mention people with disabilities/other circumstances that prevent them from being able to work full time are also people and deserve to be able to afford to live)
Demanding that someone give you hours of their life to do a task you are too busy or important to do requires that you pay them enough so that when they are not doing your tasks they can still afford to eat and have a safe, clean, place to sleep.
The crime of modern retail and service work is that they want people to commit large blocks of their time that COULD be spent learning marketable skills, learning useful information, doing other work, etc. They want to buy the majority of people’s economic capacity, prevent them from using that economic capacity in other ways – but they don’t want to actually PAY these people enough to cover the economic capacity that they ask for.
@declansoutherland98, you are a total dick – and not in a good way. As an experienced recruiting manager, I’d like to interview your 6 year old cousin for a job in retail selling high-end watches. Send her/him over, let’s see how it goes. Fuck, come over yourself, I’ll have a no-skill retail job waiting for you. Accepting bets how long you’ll last!
@inkskinned – I’d like to ask you to believe that you will do better; I’ve been where you are, and I did. I also hope you will NOT have to deal with dicks like declansoutherland98, ever.
Published
Steel Phoenix Studios 