On Work
I spent the last five years in the retail and foodservice industry, where I’ve spent the majority of my career as a manager. More importantly, however, I’ve spent over two decades as a consumer, and if you've lived in the US for any extended period of time, you'll likely share at least some of my sentiment of being absolutely appalled at the soullessness, mediocrity, and laziness of the service industry.
When they accidentally mix up your coffee order with one that has almond milk, but you have a nut allergy.
When you want to ask a question about a shirt you want to buy, they ignore you because they're in a rush and there's a line of customers to the door that they have to deal with.
When you spend over an hour on hold to speak with a customer service representative, and that phone call takes yet another hour to finish because they have to go down a checklist of what they have to say as instructed by the manager instead of just helping you get what you want.
When they forget the reservation cake for your five-year-old son's birthday party, but you're already running late, and rudely tell you to wait one hour, and after an hour, they forget to give you candles or a knife. And when you open the box, your son's name is misspelled.
Dealing with these situations is infuriating. Often we can’t expect to receive even decent service, let alone something we might call good or great, so many of us lower our standards and expectations; we're conditioned to think that mistakes on our order is normal, that rude or apathetic staff is normal, that subpar products and services are normal, that being frustrated when you go out to do your daily routine is normal. Something that is as integral to modern society as grocery shopping, eating at a restaurant, getting your morning coffee, or buying clothes is undermined by carelessness and negligence. I think we can all agree that the people that work in these industries are doing important work. So, why then, is it reduced to being the most miserable, lowest paid work in the entire country? Why has it regressed into a robotic, soul-sucking slog that eats away at the welfare of our society?
Unless you're part of the 1%—a high-level executive or a significant stakeholder in a company—the rest of us are playing a zero-sum game.
Mid or low-level managers within a dysfunctional organization become mired in what Zeynep Ton describes as the “vicious cycle of retail.”
It’s incredibly demoralizing to witness high turnover rates, good and bad employees alike leaving your organization left and right, a hapless sense of perpetual disorganization and instability. It is hard to not be distraught when your workers are brought down by low morale, constantly suffering, being disrespected by customers, and working long, grueling hours for a poverty-level wage that you didn’t decide on. These lower-level managers become powerless puppets to upper management, being assigned absurd deadlines and arbitrary targets for sales or productivity. They become scapegoats in corporate’s obsession with P&L's and audits amidst ear-chafing, repulsive buzzwords like the "bottom line" and the "best practices,” which are never characterized by a genuine desire to improve the service or product at hand nor the working experience for those involved. It’s no surprise then, that these managers get burned out themselves, only making the lives of workers and customers worse as they’re not able to properly do their job of leading teams and ensuring smooth operations without losing their own sanity.
Frontline workers have to endure horrible, oppressive working environments—poorly designed, dirty, and disorganized workspaces, a lack of essential tools or supplies, inconsistent schedules, insufficient staffing and training, and absurd, nonsensical workplace rules or conventions created by wholly incompetent or just unmotivated, burnt out managers. Furthermore, there is often a complete lack of investment into the working conditions or benefits for these frontline workers. You know there's a problem when you have to ask permission from someone in corporate to justify the purchase of a $2 countertop dusting brush because it affects "the bottom line." Then try asking for a raise.
However, chances are, if you asked most retail workers what the worst part of their working experience is, they will likely tell you it is having to deal with entitled customers, people that have somehow simultaneously attained moral superiority and the audacity to forego any standards of human decency or respect from the moment they walk through the door. It is this unconscious—though often conscious—bias against minimum wage workers that denigrates your worth and thus your commitment to the job. The social norm is that retail jobs are part-time, throwaway jobs that you use to get some side cash to help you pay for college and get a "real job." And the people that want to do the work full-time often are as underpaid as their disposable brethren, and they still suffer from that same ridicule and social perception that they just aren't smart enough or are just too poor to go to college and pursue a decent career. You're at the lowest rungs of the corporate ladder, and everyone will make sure to remind you of it.
As consumers, we have just as much to lose. It's not fun to interact with soulless zombies on your weekend trip to the mall or cafe. In fact, it's deeply saddening and can kill the vibe of your experience. And it certainly doesn't inspire confidence that your order will be made with care and attention. It's not fun to have to deal with frequent mishaps—wrong items, directions not followed, items not to standard, packaged or shipped poorly, etc. On top of this, the market has fewer and fewer products and services that are exceptionally well-built or meticulously well-executed, because it takes both generous, motivated employees and a company culture that is willing to sacrifice profits to uphold standards. We have a marketplace filled with mediocrity, not excellence. Instead of investing back into the product or service towards making improvements, or back into the employees that made the business possible in the first place, we are lining the pockets of corporate executives and shareholders.
Can we just agree that this is a plague on our society? Why are we accepting this as a fact of life? That this is just the way it's always been? Every day that we choose to live with the status quo, we are perpetuating unkindness and needless suffering to millions of people. Have we lost all compassion, let alone respect, for ourselves and the rest of the society we live in?
We've been tricked our entire lives into thinking that we should hold back—the notion that if you give it your all, the industrial system, solely interested in productivity, is just going to ask you for more. And so evolved this nonsensical notion of “keeping work and life separate,” wherein it is believed that at all costs we should avoid overcommitting ourselves to work to save time for our own happiness and enjoyment of life. This bifurcation of responsibility is a toxic, backwards belief that undermines the value and impact of our work; it makes us complacent, and it distances ourselves from the responsibility we have to take against profligate corporate greed. I’m not saying burn yourself out or think about work constantly; we should know that overworking is not productive or conducive to a sustainable career. I’m saying that regardless of the type of work we do, all work has an impact on the welfare and functioning of society as a whole and the specific communities we are a part of.
We spend half of our waking hours at work; when we consciously suck the humanity out of what we’re doing, when we make what we do soulless and selfish—solely as a means of making money or status for ourselves—we make half of our lives essentially meaningless when we could've contributed towards something greater. We need to stop being afraid. We are afraid of a change to our way of life, afraid to lose our job, afraid to lose our income—the same income the corporatists want us to squander on their mediocre products. We can’t just walk through the office door and decide today that we’re going to shut off part of our brains and forget that we had any responsibility as human beings. Our attempt to draw an invisible boundary with our work doesn’t actually extricate us from this human responsibility—to be kind, to be compassionate, to be understanding, to service one another in our quest to find happiness, fulfillment, meaning, and purpose.
