Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

vice.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 753 posts

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#511

Post by apatters »

Spooky23 wrote: post #493
apatters wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can tell who was born with a silver spoon in their mouth by their response to this. The "why can't we just make all jobs great forever" responses crack me up. It's classic virtue signalling by liberal elites: demand that life be a perfect fantasy land for everyone, then put forward zero realistic proposals to achieve it. Doesn't matter that it will never happen because you've already gained your social capital wi…

It is funny that the dog whistle for conservatism these days are the immigrants whom are supposedly taking peoples jobs. When the Reagan administration changed the regulations around meatpacking to break the unions and ship the industry back to 1910 standards to rural places, none of the principled conservatives were complaining about cheap meat packing and illegal workers who didn’t collect workers compensation or h…

> It is funny that the dog whistle for conservatism these days are the immigrants whom are supposedly taking peoples jobs.

You have this backwards. My point wasn't that immigrants are taking American jobs, it was that Americans are giving them these jobs because Americans are being lazy, soft and cheap.

The immigrant is not at fault. It seems like you're responding to Fox News talking points, not to me. I would suggest doing that on foxnews.com.

At no point did I suggest that better labor standards are a bad idea, but I did observe that anyone who thinks society will eliminate all the jobs Hacker News perceives as shitty is drinking a lot of kool-aid.

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#512

Post by dang »

jijji wrote: post #460

the story of a 29-year old working in fast food sounds pretty disturbing. it sounds like a lack of planning more than anything. McDonalds is meant for kids in high school living with their parents. It's pretty disturbing that a 29-year old would have failed to plan for over 15 years wasting her time and working in a job meant for kids half her age. I would say she should start getting some real skills to get a higher…

Personal attacks are not ok on Hacker News, even when the person isn't in the room. Maybe you don't owe the subjects of media articles better than this (though maybe you do). But you certainly owe the HN community better than this, if you want to keep posting here. Putting people down for being in a difficult situation degrades this place. Please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#513

Post by ShinTakuya »

scarface74 wrote: post #488
ShinTakuya wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think the countries with minimum wages don't have these mom and pop shops? Hint: I live in such a country, and they're doing just fine. The prices are higher across the board, including the prices they sell their products for. The margin shifts, it doesn't disappear.

I bet your country also has universal healthcare and a better safety net.

Sure, and there's nothing stopping your country from doing the same. I mean healthcare is basically irrelevant since minimum wage workers can't afford to look after health conditions regardless of whether or not they have a job. Regardless, there's no observed correlation between minimum wage and unemployment if that's what you're getting at.

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#514

Post by eismcc »

duxup wrote: post #112

I worked a pizza (among others) job through high school and college. I've been overworked at many professional technical jobs in different roles before. I'm paid a great deal more now, and yet I was never more tired or worn out or found it hard to study than when I worked the ovens at the pizza place. I often work with people who have never worked such jobs. They're upset that they're 'overworked' and spend their tim…

Yes. Before college, I worked two years as a night shift machine operator in a cup factory. Try taking the SAT the morning after a full night of work.

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#515

Post by argonaut »

jackhack wrote: post #207
derg wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I often work with people who have never worked such jobs. They're upset that they're 'overworked' and spend their time in the fancy break room with all the perks. Many I suspect have no clue. Not that it's a realistic idea but damn if everyone had experiencing working in the demanding, underpaid, crappy jobs in the service industry, we might be more empathetic and better off as a whole.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. Everybody needs a &^%$ job once in a while to reset their empathy scale. Walmart does something interesting for their software development process. Say a developer is working on a warehouse automation system -- that dev. is then trained and works in the warehouse for a month. Same goes for checkout/cashier, or customer service, or whatever. You WORK that job for a month and you'll un…

That's commendable but also sounds like a great way to scare off potential software developer candidates.

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#516

Post by baroffoos »

gonational wrote: post #491
baroffoos wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is either a troll comment or a mountain of survivors bias. For every person who tries to "Pull themselves up by the bootstraps and start a business" Most of them failed and likely ended up with less money than before. You might as well advise people to buy lottery tickets because they give away $1M for only $5

This is neither a troll nor survivor’s bias. My brother also makes great money. What does it have to do with lottery? I’m suggesting that hard work and diligence makes you successful. Sure, I’m moderately intelligent (or I might not have been able to learn web dev, etc.), but if others are not intelligent enough to pull themselves up in the world, it’s not my job to pay them more for not being intelligent. People tha…

>Anybody who’s got $1000 phone (read: just about everyone)

The ignorance of this alone makes the whole comment worthless.

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#517

Post by Tehdasi »

soulofmischief wrote: post #508

I’ve worked in the fast food industry for 14 years—about half my life Can someone give me an anecdotal example of how this could come to be without some fault in Brown's decision-making process? For starters, I've always heard that commute time is inversely proportional to career mobility. I made it a rule not to work anywhere farther than half an hour away. And that is the absolute maximum which was necessary when I…

Well see the just world theory says that if they have spent 10 years in a low wage job then they obviously have a character flaw that makes them unsuitable for any higher position in society so certainly we don't need to look at any other factors apart from that to know that we won't employ her for anything else. /s

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#518

Post by ShinTakuya »

BurningFrog wrote: post #503
ShinTakuya wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes according to classical economics it'd result in a decrease in demand. But the reality is that these shops need the workers regardless. Moreover with a minimum wage people have more disposable income to spend at these shops, which can sometimes create more jobs than the increased salary destroyed. Most studies that have been done on minimum wage found no correlation to unemployment rate. The economics you learned…

Pretty much all changes in minimum wages are small. This makes it very hard to measure the effect with any precision. You have to remember that wages are not 100% of the compensation for employees. So if MW increases from $10 to $10:50, fringe benefits may be cut from $2 to $1:50, and you end up with no measurable effect. > But the reality is that these shops need the workers regardless. If their expenses become high…

Then why not implement it that way? Make the minimum wage small and bump it up a bit ahead of inflation every year. If things go south (this hasn't happened in any other country that has done it) it can always be reversed.

For what it's worth, here in Australia there's only around 10% less McDonald's stores per capita to the US, despite a $20 minimum wage. All these workers can afford to eat and live in some of the most expensive cities in the world and the country isn't collapsing under unemployment.

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#519

Post by seem_2211 »

Noumenon72 wrote: post #481
seem_2211 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems like the struggle for people in these jobs is mostly around the consistency in hours, and the miserly low pay. Both of which are deliberate choices by the firms that employ them. To some degree, serving the "customer" by cutting labour costs to the bare minimum (as a way to minimize the cost of everything), means we create an awful existence for the people who depend on these jobs for a living. The tyranny o…

I am with you on: * not having to cut labor to the minimum as a basic value * sooo many jobs would be unobjectionable at 8 hours per week. Almost any job. * professions should be designed to balance physical and mental labor, particularly to offer breaks from painful standing. I am not with you on: * Giving people 167% of the average hourly wage for an easy job like retail. As a society, we do not _want_ retail to be…

I'm not advocating for any specific policy change (although I think minimum wage should be raised and indexed to inflation), but rather am talking about cultural changes that need to be addressed.

Broadly, as a society, we want people to have jobs that pay them enough to survive, and with enough margin to do other stuff. Not everything can (or should) tie back to economic value. Otherwise we end up cutting off our noses to spite our own faces, as we focus on the short term rather than the long term health of a wider community.

More than anything, we want to reward diligence, professionalism and effort, in whatever form that might take.

Re: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

#520

Post by fphhotchips »

to1y wrote: post #279
matz1 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is different, I have plenty of friend who work in food service, they wouldn't want to trade for my developer job.

Perhaps you have some interesting friends, but to me this sounds like it is based in no real-life experience. It's a very stressful job for little reward that leaves you completely depleted at the end of the day to do anything to dig yourself out.

Plenty of people have no desire to apply creative thought or take further responsibility at their workplace. My best friend's boyfriend, for example. Has a university degree, works at a gas station. Was a manager at that gas station, didn't enjoy it, went back to being a team member. Leaves his work at work, checks off the boxes on the checklist while he's there.

He does have the relative security that comes with having a long term partner that does make a professional salary, but I don't think that diminishes the motivational piece. Not everyone is as ambitious as every one else. Of those that are, not everyone's ambition is pointed in the same direction. Some people just want to rock up at work for 8 hours a day, go home, watch some shit TV that they enjoy and then go to bed. Frankly, that's ok. There's not enough programmer/marketing professional/CEO/Founder roles for everyone to have them.

Post reply on HN