It seems to me that working retail has gotten a lot worse since the recession. I worked retail after high school before deciding to go to college, and then worked the same job on summers home from school. What was interesting was that between when I started that job in 2005 and when I left for the final time in 2010, my coworkers went from being mostly high school and college kids to all sorts of folks of varying ages and backgrounds. That was the most telling sign of the recession to me. I strolled in to pick up my job where I'd left off in 2010 and I remember every single day people asking for job applications. I had thoughts like, why would you want to work here? This is a job for kids! But we even had a PhD biologist for a while.
Conditions have been deteriorating for a while now. Extended hours on holidays, terrible scheduling, and peculiar "performance measurement" tools. At my particular store, they adopted a system of tracking how many transactions a cashier performed per hour and then penalizing them when those transactions exceeded a certain number. The thought was that if a cashier rang up so many customers an hour, then some of them had had to wait in line and the cashier was at fault for not calling backup. (What backup? And what if they were just a really fast cashier?) Another was the obsession with collecting customers' email addresses. Cashiers were expected to collect so many email addresses a day or week or whatever or be threatened with losing their job.
My silly, between school semesters little retail gig had become very stressful towards the end because of the obsession with these metrics and a general attitude of "I could fire you today and have someone cheaper by tomorrow".
I'd like to point out that this story takes place in one of the highest cost of living areas in the country. $10 / hour goes a lot further in Kansas than it does D.C.
I think a lot of people could live OK in the Midwest on $10 / hour.
I wish more people would move away from the super high cost of living areas (California, New England, ...etc) and "vote with their feet" so to speak. If 10% of the populations of Cali and Massachusetts moved inward, I think that would drive house prices down and wages up. All the rich people are still around to buy stuff and no poor people left to work retail.
I've never understood the management attitude that seeks to create such an environment, because workers just end up rebelling against it in hidden ways. I worked in retail in college for a truly terrible company. The work environment was awful and exploitative, but the company wasn't very good at things like inventory control. So, largely in response to this, the people in the stock room would literally throw probably 10% of the merchandise that came off the trucks directly into the garbage compactor. If that's good business, then there's something seriously wrong with our economic system.
I had the same experience at Whole Foods Palo Alto as a cashier, 2008-12. WF management can take asking about the Whole Planet foundation and shove it up their ass.
They probably don't have to say that stores are closing everywhere. Every week there's news about possible store closings. This week it's Staples and Safeway, last week it was Guitar Center, before, Pennys, Best Buy, Disney Store etc.
I 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/177377/holiday-crush ("A woman from the agency hands each of us a time sheet. For the sign-in, she tells us to write 8:30. 'I know you were told to be here at 8:15,' she says, anticipating a protest that never comes, 'but that was just to make sure you got here early.'").
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 more interesting than retail. Heck, we'd have to start using graphical user interfaces for stores because we wouldn't be able to find enough people to work retail!
"I guess [you] don’t care about hard work or loyalty." -- Stretch
That's ripe. Pay your employees a low wage, treat them like shit, and then expect loyalty? Gimme a break. Loyalty is a two-way street and I don't see any reciprocation from corporate America (in this case, or in general).
When a job is low skill, they have a huge pool of labor they can draw from. There really isn't any need to treat employees well, since there are so many applicants.
I think it is fairly simple. The more in-demand your skills are, the better you can expect to treated by your employer because you have options.
Is this 'right'? I don't know. But it seems to be how things work.
Sweden offers a nice solution to this: responsible unions.
In Sweden there are 2 unions, One for white collar workers and one for blue collar employees. The salary rates/hikes are industry wide.They are usually determined by the competitive part of the economy - the export sector and than applied to everybody.
The unions understand their role as protectors of employees, but on the other hand, understand the need for Sweden to remain competitive and the huge responsibility put on them by representing so many people without hurting the economy. So they come with reasonable demands.
All this is supported by the Swedish mentality of fairness, which makes employees happy just taking their fair share.
My first job was retail, and I worked it for about four years total, including during college and after service in the Navy. At the time I had skills that translated into being valuable enough to not work in retail that didn't involve a lot of risk (police, security, etc), so it seemed about the best option.
I don't think I quite experienced anything like this, but sometimes it was close. If I felt like a replaceable cog, it's because I was, and I was a replaceable cog in a machine already operating on razor thin margins, which means I had to be a good cog. The funny thing was that due to my Navy experience, I didn't perceive it as all that bad, though the pay was pretty miserable even at two dollars above minimum wage.
I'll say this - working retail was very motivating. I knew I didn't want to do that forever. But I don't know what the 'solution' is as applied to everybody, but I know the solution for me was to finish college and make myself valuable.
I'd like to see harder numbers on the hourly value the store gets from the employees. As a for instance, Dick's Sporting Goods has a per employee operating income of about $15,000. That isn't an amazingly solid number, but it's enough to say they have quite a bit of cash moving around after they pay wages.
And 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 actually retiring at that point, but I want the peace of mind knowing that my career could end and I could lead a humble, comfortable-enough life without working, probably in the midwest.
I feel the exact same way. Yesterday there were a bunch of questions about what happens to middle age programmers and those were depressing too. The answer for me (and sounds like you too) absolutely has been to save as much as possible and be able to "never need to work again" as fast as possible. I'll probably be mid-30s at that point too and I'll feel much much better about my life knowing that I don't need a job to survive.
> Even though I was living rent-free in a guest bedroom, my every-other-Thursday paycheck couldn’t help me climb out of my hole, particularly after the state took half my pre-tax, $300 weekly salary for child support payments.
> * got the opportunity to leave Sporting Goods Inc. for a temporary job as a communications director for a Capitol Hill nonprofit, a gig that paid twice as much per week as I’d earn in a month at the store. That salary still didn’t come close to my Politico paycheck, though it was a step in the right direction.*
- 300 * 52 = 15,600 annually
- 15,600 * 4 * 2 ("twice as much per week as one month") = 124,800
- "That salary still didn’t come close to my Politico paycheck"
So, at least $150K or even $200+K? Gah-damn! I know big beltway journalists get a decent salary, but Politico is a relative newcomer (though profitable and growing).
I'm not surprised that a journalist managing an 80-person team was paid $200k+.
What I am surprised by is how he ever ended up working retail with a salary like that. I'd expect him to have saved up enough to last a year or two of low expenses.
journalism has a power-law income distribution where most earn nothing but a tiny few at the top can earn 7 figures or more. Well-known bylines are supposed to bring the audience and not just crank out anonymous content.
A lot of this is just "person who's had white-collar job for years doesn't get how difficult service jobs are", but making your already low-paid employees do unpaid overtime work is s-k-e-t-c-h-y, and actively illegal.
Between ages 15-21 I worked a lot of retail. I had managers who would do the "on time is late" thing, or make me clock out and then wait for 20 minutes for them to unlock the door at closing time. I knew those things weren't legal, and I'd make a stink about it. I was an exemplary worker, which I'm sure afforded me some leeway, but more importantly I was young, white, and living at home with my middle-class parents. I didn't need the job. I wanted the job of course (56k modems aren't free!) but I didn't have the fear that I or my family might starve if I talked back.
What's the solution? Mandatory severance for every job?
When I did retail & fast food work, I don't recall having to do unpaid work. Showing up "on the floor" at time was expected, but that was no more than stuffing my bag in the break room and going out.
That said, if I was looking at the prospect of working in these shops long-term, I'd also be seeing what I could do to unionize the shop - they are a pretty crummy environment with abhorrent pay for anyone over the age of 16 (as the author points out).
True, but I'm betting more than a few HN folk qualify as a "person who's had white-collar job for years [who] doesn't get how difficult service jobs are."
I'm actually impressed that we don't (yet) have a chorus of people saying he's overpaid or that he deserves it.
I guess [you] don’t care about hard work or loyalty.
Wow, just wow - humiliating him by checking his bag every day, making him do extra work (after work hours) for free, restricting him to less than 30 hours so the store doesn't have to give him benefits .... Even after all this, the author seemed to have worked hard. All of this is still not enough.
I'm still surprised how close to my last job this is. The do everything, get nothing [1]. Same mindset about being robbed by employees. The worst part there, to me, was the absurdity of it. You have to be on 100% ~24/7 even when there's nothing to do. But you're certainly not allowed to change things in any way to simplify or increase productivity. Something any programmer will cringe at to death. This is something very different from other jobs like mcdonalds where the rush impose high productivity constraints meaning things are already quite optimized. No time's wasted: you're active and for some valuable reason. Helps a lot.
[1] optional bonus: being slightly mocked by less educated people that will then ask you for hints about things they don't understand. Of course, I helped. Slave genes.
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 everything I've read, most major retailers have little to no protection against employee theft. Is the neighborhood they're in that bad that they have to go to these extremes, or is the owner/manager just nuts about this issue for some reason?
Bag checks are fairly common, usually occurring at ends of shift or closing. Pat downs are less so, mostly because it's generally not a good idea to require employees to touch each other.
Retail internal theft really is a serious problem, though. According to the National Retail Security Survey at UF, it costs retailers (read: consumers) $14.9 billion annually [1].
What you may find surprising is that most major retailers do, in fact, have quite extensive controls in place to prevent and detect internal theft -- exception reporting, inventory tracking, etc. That these massive losses still occur should give you an idea of how complex the problem is.
The reason the store requires two employees to take out the trash has nothing to do with watching for thieves or "armed intruders." It's actually a simple and surprisingly effective deterrent to internal theft. Diverting merchandise through non-public exits is a common theft strategy.
Also, Ike was not "fired because [he] got a promotion." He was fired for lying on his job application about a previous conviction for theft. Ike's conviction strongly suggests a tendency to act dishonestly, which is further reinforced by his attempt to cover it up when applying for the job. This is precisely the type of individual that the background check is intended to screen.
Lastly, the author says it happened when Ike was a teenager, so it could only have happened when Ike was either 18 or 19. Juvenile court records are not available to background check services.
Doesn't surprise me. Many years ago my first job was retail security guard. One day I was assigned to a sporting goods store. I was the victim of a scam where some woman accused me of losing an expensive bag. Pretty sure the manager of the store was in on it. Another store I worked in sold baby clothes and was constantly being robbed regardless of which guard was on duty. I've heard that Target has its own crime lab. I imagine things have gotten worse since I had that job in 1998.
Having two friends who have careers in "LP", both who have worked at a litany of stores, pretty much any chain you've heard of has a full time loss prevention officer or two.
It's probably the best paying job on the store premises.
Keep in mind their job is also to stop shoplifters in addition to "internal" theft, embezzlement, return fraud, etc.
I'm a bit late to the game on this one, but I'm a bit saddened to see no discussion about the fact that this man assaulted his wife.
It's good that he's not hiding the conviction, but I find it hard to empathize with someone that carries out violence against women.
His situation sucks, but he wouldn't have been in such dire straights if he hadn't been angry enough to hit his spouse. To me, that violence is the most urgent detail of this story.
I recently heard from someone who worked at Target that each day the managers would lock the doors after the last customer left, and physically lock the employees in. Nobody was allowed to leave until they were done checking for theft. This would last 10-15 minutes, and they didn't get paid for this time.
Not to belabor the point, but could someone please attempt to explain what rational goal is served by our society's choices to keep entire segments of the population in conditions the well-off regard as absolutely terrifying nightmare lives?
Controlling the people through fear doesn't sound like the "free world", you know.
[+] [-] krstck|12 years ago|reply
Conditions have been deteriorating for a while now. Extended hours on holidays, terrible scheduling, and peculiar "performance measurement" tools. At my particular store, they adopted a system of tracking how many transactions a cashier performed per hour and then penalizing them when those transactions exceeded a certain number. The thought was that if a cashier rang up so many customers an hour, then some of them had had to wait in line and the cashier was at fault for not calling backup. (What backup? And what if they were just a really fast cashier?) Another was the obsession with collecting customers' email addresses. Cashiers were expected to collect so many email addresses a day or week or whatever or be threatened with losing their job.
My silly, between school semesters little retail gig had become very stressful towards the end because of the obsession with these metrics and a general attitude of "I could fire you today and have someone cheaper by tomorrow".
[+] [-] mox1|12 years ago|reply
I think a lot of people could live OK in the Midwest on $10 / hour.
I wish more people would move away from the super high cost of living areas (California, New England, ...etc) and "vote with their feet" so to speak. If 10% of the populations of Cali and Massachusetts moved inward, I think that would drive house prices down and wages up. All the rich people are still around to buy stuff and no poor people left to work retail.
[+] [-] glesica|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZanyProgrammer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fretless|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rayiner|12 years ago|reply
See also: http://www.thenation.com/article/177377/holiday-crush ("A woman from the agency hands each of us a time sheet. For the sign-in, she tells us to write 8:30. 'I know you were told to be here at 8:15,' she says, anticipating a protest that never comes, 'but that was just to make sure you got here early.'").
[+] [-] josephschmoe|12 years ago|reply
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 more interesting than retail. Heck, we'd have to start using graphical user interfaces for stores because we wouldn't be able to find enough people to work retail!
[+] [-] danielweber|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alistairSH|12 years ago|reply
That's ripe. Pay your employees a low wage, treat them like shit, and then expect loyalty? Gimme a break. Loyalty is a two-way street and I don't see any reciprocation from corporate America (in this case, or in general).
[+] [-] bequanna|12 years ago|reply
I think it is fairly simple. The more in-demand your skills are, the better you can expect to treated by your employer because you have options.
Is this 'right'? I don't know. But it seems to be how things work.
[+] [-] gyom|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mateo411|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hershel|12 years ago|reply
In Sweden there are 2 unions, One for white collar workers and one for blue collar employees. The salary rates/hikes are industry wide.They are usually determined by the competitive part of the economy - the export sector and than applied to everybody.
The unions understand their role as protectors of employees, but on the other hand, understand the need for Sweden to remain competitive and the huge responsibility put on them by representing so many people without hurting the economy. So they come with reasonable demands.
All this is supported by the Swedish mentality of fairness, which makes employees happy just taking their fair share.
[+] [-] dx4100|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nightski|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cobrausn|12 years ago|reply
I don't think I quite experienced anything like this, but sometimes it was close. If I felt like a replaceable cog, it's because I was, and I was a replaceable cog in a machine already operating on razor thin margins, which means I had to be a good cog. The funny thing was that due to my Navy experience, I didn't perceive it as all that bad, though the pay was pretty miserable even at two dollars above minimum wage.
I'll say this - working retail was very motivating. I knew I didn't want to do that forever. But I don't know what the 'solution' is as applied to everybody, but I know the solution for me was to finish college and make myself valuable.
[+] [-] pnathan|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nilkn|12 years ago|reply
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 actually retiring at that point, but I want the peace of mind knowing that my career could end and I could lead a humble, comfortable-enough life without working, probably in the midwest.
[+] [-] pilom|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danso|12 years ago|reply
> Even though I was living rent-free in a guest bedroom, my every-other-Thursday paycheck couldn’t help me climb out of my hole, particularly after the state took half my pre-tax, $300 weekly salary for child support payments.
> * got the opportunity to leave Sporting Goods Inc. for a temporary job as a communications director for a Capitol Hill nonprofit, a gig that paid twice as much per week as I’d earn in a month at the store. That salary still didn’t come close to my Politico paycheck, though it was a step in the right direction.*
- 300 * 52 = 15,600 annually
- 15,600 * 4 * 2 ("twice as much per week as one month") = 124,800
- "That salary still didn’t come close to my Politico paycheck"
So, at least $150K or even $200+K? Gah-damn! I know big beltway journalists get a decent salary, but Politico is a relative newcomer (though profitable and growing).
[+] [-] morgante|12 years ago|reply
What I am surprised by is how he ever ended up working retail with a salary like that. I'd expect him to have saved up enough to last a year or two of low expenses.
[+] [-] bhauer|12 years ago|reply
300 = retail pay per month.
300 * 2 = 600, which is twice the retail pay.
600 * 4 = 2,400, multiplying by four weeks to account for new job earning twice as much per week as per month in retail.
2,400 * 12 = 28,800, which is an estimate for the annual pay at his new job.
Politico most certainly pays more than that.
[+] [-] nerfhammer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nicholas73|12 years ago|reply
$300 * 2 * 52 = $31,200.
[+] [-] joshreads|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Domenic_S|12 years ago|reply
What's the solution? Mandatory severance for every job?
[+] [-] TheCoelacanth|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluedino|12 years ago|reply
Or, sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day is really, really easy compared to having to actually DO something at a service job.
[+] [-] pnathan|12 years ago|reply
That said, if I was looking at the prospect of working in these shops long-term, I'd also be seeing what I could do to unionize the shop - they are a pretty crummy environment with abhorrent pay for anyone over the age of 16 (as the author points out).
[+] [-] scarmig|12 years ago|reply
I'm actually impressed that we don't (yet) have a chorus of people saying he's overpaid or that he deserves it.
[+] [-] vijayr|12 years ago|reply
Wow, just wow - humiliating him by checking his bag every day, making him do extra work (after work hours) for free, restricting him to less than 30 hours so the store doesn't have to give him benefits .... Even after all this, the author seemed to have worked hard. All of this is still not enough.
Incredible.
[+] [-] agumonkey|12 years ago|reply
[1] optional bonus: being slightly mocked by less educated people that will then ask you for hints about things they don't understand. Of course, I helped. Slave genes.
[+] [-] ufmace|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valar_m|12 years ago|reply
Retail internal theft really is a serious problem, though. According to the National Retail Security Survey at UF, it costs retailers (read: consumers) $14.9 billion annually [1].
What you may find surprising is that most major retailers do, in fact, have quite extensive controls in place to prevent and detect internal theft -- exception reporting, inventory tracking, etc. That these massive losses still occur should give you an idea of how complex the problem is.
The reason the store requires two employees to take out the trash has nothing to do with watching for thieves or "armed intruders." It's actually a simple and surprisingly effective deterrent to internal theft. Diverting merchandise through non-public exits is a common theft strategy.
Also, Ike was not "fired because [he] got a promotion." He was fired for lying on his job application about a previous conviction for theft. Ike's conviction strongly suggests a tendency to act dishonestly, which is further reinforced by his attempt to cover it up when applying for the job. This is precisely the type of individual that the background check is intended to screen.
Lastly, the author says it happened when Ike was a teenager, so it could only have happened when Ike was either 18 or 19. Juvenile court records are not available to background check services.
[1] http://investors.tyco.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=112348&p=irol-news...
[+] [-] ilaksh|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nsxwolf|12 years ago|reply
It's probably the best paying job on the store premises.
Keep in mind their job is also to stop shoplifters in addition to "internal" theft, embezzlement, return fraud, etc.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] thornz|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZanyProgrammer|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] peteforde|12 years ago|reply
It's good that he's not hiding the conviction, but I find it hard to empathize with someone that carries out violence against women.
His situation sucks, but he wouldn't have been in such dire straights if he hadn't been angry enough to hit his spouse. To me, that violence is the most urgent detail of this story.
[+] [-] unknown|12 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] nicholas73|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OhHeyItsE|12 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eli_gottlieb|12 years ago|reply
Controlling the people through fear doesn't sound like the "free world", you know.
[+] [-] qiohqergvuhq|12 years ago|reply
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