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A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier

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

#561

Post by mrtksn »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #555
pm90 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted as this is pretty accurate. American success has been predicated on the availability of these social goods which can change peoples lives.

Perhaps because of arguing that people choose this state. Some do, but many (most) are thrust into a particular direction.

Interesting, but I don't think that I said they choose it as if they choose fries over nuggets when asked.

What people choose is how comfortable they would like to be against their odds and people who choose to have nice social lives in their current circle end up staying in this circle.

Each circle have different failure modes, I won't argue that the lady in the article failed in her circle, she just didn't move up in the ladder. Failing in the low-income circle doesn't look like that, failing in that circle is overdosing in a meth den or ending up in jail. She actually seems to be doing fine but probably could have been doing much better if she had chosen to abandon her original social environment.

The life might give you fries but you can refuse that, stay hungry for a bit more and demand nuggets if that's what you want, ignoring your friends rolling their eyes for you being a drama queen. You may have to endure sitting on another table, being left alone by your friends who had their launch and left. This is the price you pay for jumping social circles and eating in a college cafeteria usually eases the pain.

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

#562

Post by jl6 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #542
School-Cotton wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> society has evolved Can you point to any point in human history (since the invention of farming) in which a smaller fraction of people worked menial jobs than now?

Shit jobs aren't synonymous to menial jobs. Shit jobs are ones where you suffer physically and mentally, and that suffering usually has little to do with actual job responsibilities, and more with a shitty boss (manager or entrepreneur) treating you like a consumable and trying to optimize you. E.g. flipping burgers at McDonald's isn't a shitty job because you're flipping burgers; it's a shitty job because you are pa…

The uncomfortable truth here is that foodservice/retail managers are also relatively low paid low skilled jobs and therefore have a tendency towards being populated by people without the skills to humanely manage their employees and employer.

One step up, the corporate managers putting the pressure on the local managers are themselves pressured by market conditions to cut cost and drive efficiency. And who drives those market conditions? You and I, my friend. We like cheap stuff. The consequence is that others suffer.

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

#563

Post by grecy »

mrguyorama wrote: post #193
justinsaccount wrote: post #28

> It’s 8 p.m. and my scheduled shift is over, but they asked me to stay later > The bus stops running at 10 p.m. on Sunday, but McDonald's asked me to stay until close at 1 a.m. They asked me to stay because they need my help. Thats not a job, that's an abusive relationship.

An employer's desire is to pay/benefit you as little as you will possibly take. It is ALWAYS an adversarial relationship. No matter how much you like your boss, someone up the chain is trying to screw you, somehow

I feel sad that you might not know this: What you said doesn't apply to many, many other countries around the world. Hundreds of millions of people don't live like this.

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

#564

Post by TeMPOraL »

seem_2211 wrote: post #519
Noumenon72 wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 no…

I'm increasingly of the view that we should have brakes on economic efficiency. The basic human values - friendliness, compassion, fairness, kindness, justice - they all wither and die when a business gets too efficient. They get optimized away in pursuit of that little extra margin.

Part of the reason software jobs are nice and comfortable is of course the pay and the agency, both coming from demand exceeding supply. But a big part of it is also, IMO, that it's impossible to tell how much contribution to the bottomline a developer has on a day-to-day, or hour-to-hour basis. When my coworker and I start talking shit on the job, does that contribute positively or negatively to the ultimate productivity? By how much? Nobody can tell, which is why we can get away with it.

Conversely, in retail or fast-food joints, you can track people's contribution to the bottom line at minute resolution. Which is why they're being treated like slave labor.

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

#565

Post by conjectures »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #555
pm90 wrote: post #547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted as this is pretty accurate. American success has been predicated on the availability of these social goods which can change peoples lives.

Perhaps because of arguing that people choose this state. Some do, but many (most) are thrust into a particular direction.

Some support for this:

1. Brain development of teenagers is not complete.

2. Information available to sub college age kids is not perfect.

If you don't believe in free will, the only question is what combination of mechanics and information serves to produce the observed outcome.

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

#566

Post by snowron6 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #482
ShinTakuya wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Low margin businesses fundamentally operate by exploiting low paid workers. What's wrong with making the playing field even by taxing them? The prices of food will go up, but that's okay. We do it here in Australia and nobody is crying over having to pay 12 AUD for McDonald's vs 9 AUD in the US.

> What's wrong with making the playing field even by taxing them? This turns the low paid workers into unemployed workers. I'm fascinated that people honestly think it's better that people make $0/h than $10/h while "exploited".

I'm fascinated that people honestly think that increasing the minimum wage will result in a large amount of job loss. Here's a thread from last month on a story about why this isn't true. A comment from jjoonathan links to an interesting study about how jobs negatively affected by minimum wage increases are disproportionately reported on when compared to jobs benefited by minimum wage increases.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21630679

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

#567

Post by asdff »

cnasc wrote: post #297
smileysteve wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 80 year old man was remarking how Gen Z (and late millennials) aren't even getting their licenses as teens anymore. It's amazing to think that he was the first generation of the ubiquitous automobile in the US and now can't comprehend how the generation before him got around.

> now can't comprehend how the generation before him got around. The generation before him _didn’t_ get around, relatively speaking. Widespread use of the automobile changed transportation patterns dramatically.

The streetcar to longbeach was faster in 1925 than the light rail train following the same right of way today. The redcar in LA county was larger than the nyc subway system today.

Ripped out 60 years ago and only now are the same right of ways being reconstructed at the cost of billions.

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

#569

Post by asdff »

gwbas1c wrote: post #474
kevinqiu1 wrote: post #230

Even though it seems like she lives in an urban area (or urban enough to be squeezed by rising home prices), the public transit is so poor that she spends 3-5x more time getting to work without a car than with one. Sometimes she can't even get home. That's crazy, the car dependence of America means that you need to pay for insurance + a car to even function in society. That is the opposite of freedom

Makes me think there is a business opportunity in urban areas?

You'd have to come in hard to withstand NIMBY lawsuits and outright bans from the councilmen they solely elect.

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

#570

Post by distances »

apatters wrote: post #511
Spooky23 wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sugge…

> 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.

Don't blame the American who doesn't want to do back-breaking work for pennies. It's the same everywhere: for example, Finland imports seasonal berry pickers from Thailand.

No sane local wants to work on the rates the market is willing to pay; mechanised agriculture has pushed the prices low enough to make manual agricultural work simply unsustainable. To make local work profitable we'd need to radically raise the product prices or provide subsidies.

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