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.
It should be socially unacceptable to come to work with a cold or similarly contagious disease.
It should be socially unacceptable to make your workers come to work with a cold or similarly contagious disease.
It should be socially unacceptable to pay your employees so little that they have no choice but to come in with a cold or similarly contagious disease.
Everyone going shopping on Black Friday, be aware of three things:
The retail workers are working 12 hours shifts. We are threatened with losing our jobs if we don’t show up unless we’re dying in the hospital. I had an assistant manager show up with fucking strep because he would’ve been fired otherwise. Yes, he did infect 7 and hospitalize 2 coworkers; who knows how many members of the public he infected.
The stores have, maybe, 5 of that special cheap thing you’re after. Corporate does this on purpose, and stores are not allowed to order enough. The prices aren’t even that much lower. They lie about how expensive something is to fool you into thinking you’re getting a discount. You aren’t.
Most of the workers you will come across will be new hires for the sole purpose of being bodies for about three months before they’re fired. They actually don’t know anything because they’ve been working there for maybe two weeks, and have had no real training. I was once hired at Staples a week before Black Friday and expected to know how to deal with phones, coupons, the online ordering site, and AS400 after five 6-hour shifts. This is the kind of person you will likely be dealing with at Black Friday.
Do me and my retail family a favor and don’t shop Black Friday. Any company that needs a sale day like Black Friday to get their sales out of the red doesn’t deserve to be in business.
This also goes for anyone that works shipment too. We’re suddenly expected to stay as late as they want you to even if they know you don’t have a car and rely on a ride to get you to and from work and know you can’t stay late. Shipment workers will suddenly start getting berated for not getting things done and it is by far the most stressful time to be a shipment worker for any store. Especially when they throw in new hires that don’t know how to process things and are expected to work at the same pace as the people that have worked there for a while.
Retail is shit around the holidays, especially Black Friday
ok fellow millenials, it’s time to kill black friday
At long last, The Chosen One has been discovered. Working as a cashier. With no interest in doing anything even slightly more difficult.
yeah because there is nothing more difficult than retail
tbh anyone who works/has worked retail would see the chance to go around saving the world in ways that could potentially kill them as a welcome vacation
“Does the position of Chosen One offer health benefits of any kind?”
“Well, our ragtag gang of world-saving underdogs has a doctor on-team.”
“Do I have to pay her out of pocket, is what I’m asking.”
“Gosh no! She’s an idealist, you don’t pay her at all!”
“Oh! That’s nice. But then I guess there’s no paycheck.”
“I mean, the secret cabal that dispenses our orders does make sure we have enough money to feed ourselves and keep a roof over our secret lair and such.”
“Hourly?”
“Hourly what?”
“Like have you guys ever had to punch a time clock?”
“We once had to dismantle a sinister time-freezing device in the shape of a clock….otherwise no.”
“Sold. Off we go.”
“do i have to be nice to people who are yelling at me?”
“we’re the good guys, you can’t kill random civilians just because they’re mean!”
“kill?? no, i mean, can i tell them off.”
“well, sure, of course.”
*rips name tag off shirt and tosses it over shoulder* “i’m your huckleberry.”
life tip whatever dumb ass name you get siri to call you is what your iphone automatically signs your emails as. i have been applying to jobs for 2 months as queef.
Hairdresser: We’re going to have to use a color remover to take out the blue pigment, then apply more pigment to allow for the proteins in the hair to adhere to it. Then possibly mix three different types of toners to reach the goal of your natural hair color.
Hairdresser: pretty simple
Me: this is chemistry
Hairdresser: yeah, but people don’t like when we talk that way
Hairdresser: so you’re a mortician?
Me: apprentice
Hairdresser: do you know why formaldehyde is used in clothing?
Me: I didn’t know that was a thing
Hairdresser: I think it’s due to the preserving qualities? But I don’t think that’s right.
Me: It’s not just a preservative, it’s also a disinfectant ‘cause it destroys bacteria as well as their food supply. It’s also a dehydrator.
Hairdresser: why not just use alcohol?
Me: good question. Formaldehyde is super cheap, so probably to cut costs
Hairdresser: is it really a carcinogen?
Me: yeah, I’m going to have so much cancer
Hairdresser: so you’re going natural to work at a funeral home?
Me: yeah
Hairdresser: while still in school?
Me: well we work in the funeral homes so we have uuuuh … experience with cases
Hairdresser: you can just say bodies it’s fine
Me: oh thank god
Five Minutes Later
Me: yeah so we don’t do autopsies it’s one of my pet peeves
Hairdresser: what if someone wakes up while you’re embalming them?
Me: there’s a huge difference between a living body and a dead one
second hairdresser: I think we should add more toner, but yeah I think rigor mortis would make it pretty obvious
Me: that and being in a fridge for a few days you will be dead by the time you get to us
Hairdresser: I think pumping them full of a carcinogen would help with that
Consider some facts about how American employers control their workers. Amazon prohibits employees from exchanging casual remarks while on duty, calling this “time theft.” Apple inspects the personal belongings of its retail workers, some of whom lose up to a half-hour of unpaid time every day as they wait in line to be searched. Tyson prevents its poultry workers from using the bathroom. Some have been forced to urinate on themselves while their supervisors mock them.
How should we understand these sweeping powers that employers have to regulate their employees’ lives, both on and off duty? Most people don’t use the term in this context, but wherever some have the authority to issue orders to others, backed by sanctions, in some domain of life, that authority is a government.
We usually assume that “government” refers to state authorities. Yet the state is only one kind of government. Every organization needs some way to govern itself — to designate who has authority to make decisions concerning its affairs, what their powers are, and what consequences they may mete out to those beneath them in the organizational chart who fail to do their part in carrying out the organization’s decisions.
Managers in private firms can impose, for almost any reason, sanctions including job loss, demotion, pay cuts, worse hours, worse conditions, and harassment. The top managers of firms are therefore the heads of little governments, who rule their workers while they are at work — and often even when they are off duty.
Wtf I love vox now
My mom wrote this article so I showed her all the notes and now she’s really happy and hopeful about our generation. Lmao
Not sure how it is now; worked part-time in retail in a Toronto clothing chain store, we were routinely searched before going home. Failure to allow the search was a cause for termination.
Steel Phoenix Studios 