What struck me as really odd about his job was the obsession with anti-theft measures. How big is is this store that they have enough to hire a full-time loss prevention officer? I've never heard of any retail store giving employees bag-checks and pat-downs every time they entered and left the building either. It's been a long time since I've worked any job like that, but I've never heard of anything like that. From…
My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap
111–120 of 145 posts
Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap
#112And this is why I desperately save money. Even though I've only been out of college for less than a year and I know my parents would graciously take me back in for as long as necessary should something catastrophic happen to my career, I'm paranoid about depending so much on a job for my livelihood. 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 actu…
Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 mar…
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.
Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, what happens if the unconditional basic income becomes 'the new poverty' as the economy adjusts and the price of basic goods and services change? We'd end up in the same spot - they can treat you like crap, because you are replaceable, and you still need the money. I should say I also have no idea if that's what would happen. Just a concern.
An increase in the cost of living would occur, particularly for people for whom essential goods form the large part of their consumption (luxury goods, in contrast, would likely decrease in price). The details of extent, however, depend on the magnitude of the basic income. A couple things counteract that increase in price. For one, capital would flow more toward producing essential goods owing to a larger demand: th…
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.
Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Burdening these people by making fewer of them have to do crummy, hellish work? I'm soooo sorry for eliminating work no one wants to do. 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 mor…
I don't understand this comment at all. I don't even know where to start.
Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
Burdening these people by making fewer of them have to do crummy, hellish work? I'm soooo sorry for eliminating work no one wants to do. 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 mor…
> Burdening these people by making fewer of them have to do crummy, hellish work? 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 w…
Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand this comment at all. I don't even know where to start.
I have one possible suggestion; http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Fractal_wrongness
Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Burdening these people by making fewer of them have to do crummy, hellish work? I'm soooo sorry for eliminating work no one wants to do. 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 mor…
Service jobs aren't inherently crummy. What makes it crummy are the software systems that let managers schedule people on variable, on-demand schedules, and policies that micro-manage bathroom breaks and the like. There's an entire industry focused on getting additional tenths of a percent out of service workers. Papa John's founder said it'd cost something like $0.50 extra per pizza to offer his employees health ins…
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.
Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap
#119I accept that the market drives down the wages of service workers, but their working conditions are just outrageous to me. Automation and optimization has turned retail into a hellish job. On demand scheduling, zero tolerance policies, wage theft, etc. Its MBAs and programmers making a buck by burdening the people who are least equipped to find a job doing something else. See also: http://www.thenation.com/article/17…
Burdening these people by making fewer of them have to do crummy, hellish work? I'm soooo sorry for eliminating work no one wants to do. 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 mor…
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.
Re: My Life as a Retail Worker: Nasty, Brutish, and Cheap
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe you did not read the article, as less than one paragraph was on the topic of physical labor, and the rest of the article was about extremely toxic occasionally outright illegal employee / employer relations. 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 ware…
> Not that Amazon's warehouses are some kind of workers paradise. I read an article a while back (apologies for no links) that basically had a reporter go work at an Amazon warehouse as a stocker. It sounded like the type of hell I wouldn't wish on an enemy.