In my experience, entry level retail work is absolutely soul-crushing and the pay is barely worth showing up for.
People imagine getting a job and moving out of their parents’ homes, living Melrose Place style in an apartment full of hotties, having a social life, hooking up, and building adult relationships. But OP’s experience seems more like the exception than the rule. A lot of these places have incredibly high churn, no upward mobility, and are a huge physical/emotional suck that leaves you feeling exhausted the moment you’re home.
Good for getting a leg up literally anywhere else, as they prove you can “be normie”. But horrendous for any kind of actual professional career advancement outside of a casual recommendation going into your next job. And the pay is so bad that it often doesn’t even cover the basic cost of living (car, food, utilities, etc). You’re still going to be living with your parents. You’re not going to have any kind of fuck-around money. There’s no promotion path that gets you out of this hole. Its not where you want to spend one more minute of your life than you absolutely have to.
what you say is true, but it beats NEET for mental health. Got to start somewhere. Also theres no reason to only apply to retail jobs. Reach out to every company you can find that fits your criteria (geography/industry/company size, etc .) a librarian can help with this.
what you say is true, but it beats NEET for mental health.
In my experience, it causes NEET-tier mental health. These rise-and-grind employment situations burn through people rather than developing them into more skilled and useful workers.
Reach out to every company you can find that fits your criteria
By all means, absolutely do that. But I see a ton of dysfunction on the corporate side of the coin that rarely gets acknowledged when we talk about “NEETs” as a social phenomenon. As though hundreds of thousands of young people just woke up one morning and all decided to be lazy at once. From my experience, people are being thrown into an economic wood chipper. Some of them escape. Some miraculously pass through. But a bunch are torn to shreds - physically, psychologically, emotionally - and then told to take responsibility for their mangled state.
I’ve seen this arc before, aimed specifically at minority youth groups (African Americans, in particular). From my experience, what comes next is a ton of brutal policing and human immiseration for anyone who can’t climb through successfully. And then you get another Ferguson.
My mental health improved considerably after I was fired from my basic retail job and was no longer spending 8 hours a day having panic attacks and dissociating. It’s not good, but it’s a lot better than it was and I can’t go back to living like that. Even a year later I still sometimes wake up in a panic from nightmares about working in that place.
I want to work and be productive, but every job I could reasonably qualify for has a sanity cost and I’m all tapped out.
My parents own a swimming pool company. They were willing to pick him up and drop him off at home while he worked for them and he refused to do it. I used to work there too and I will admit it can be labour intensive, but it was a good job, working outside in small teams. Its also a good enterance into plumbing or gas fitting trades and a lot of the labour experience could be used as experience for any trade/job.
The guy defintely has mental health issues as well, he barely does any chores or anything for himself. He wouldn’t have even needed an interview for this job, he could have just been ready to work one morning and started.
Yep, imagine that, work that anyone can do sucks balls.
Now let’s go back about 80 years or so, when simply growing enough food for your family was a real concern for a large portion of the “First World” nations.
My parents and grandparents were always hungry. Always. It’s why my grandparents emigrated to the US, and my parents moved from where they grew up to somewhere with opportunity, hundreds or thousands of miles away from family.
So yea, my soul-sucking jobs (usually 2 at a time until my 30’s, sometimes 3 at a time) sucked. But they were still better than what my parents went through, by a long shot.
I had heat, hot water, food, and a car. Multiple changes of clothes and shoes, not just one or two (or none). I didn’t have to sleep in the barn with the animals like my grandfather. Or in a cold house with nothing but a wood stove in the kitchen like my parents. And I could shit inside, not have to go to an outhouse in the winter (these still existed, even in cities in the US in the 50’s).
Yep, imagine that, work that anyone can do sucks balls.
Given the turnover rate, its not just anyone. The miserable nature of the work and the awful pay tends to make these jobs difficult to fill.
Now let’s go back about 80 years or so
Subsistence farming hasn’t been the primary means of employment in the US in over a century.
But they were still better than what my parents went through
The inflation adjusted minimum wage of 1950 was $2 more than it is today. By the 1970s, the min wage was an inflation-adjusted $12.60. And that was with housing at less than a quarter of the going inflation-adjusted rate and utilities practically being free. Americans saw an explosion in quality of life between the 1940s and 1980s, peaking in the 90s at the dawn of the information age.
I didn’t have to sleep in the barn with the animals like my grandfather. Or in a cold house with nothing but a wood stove in the kitchen like my parents. And I could shit inside, not have to go to an outhouse in the winter
My home town of Houston is in its second city-wide blackout in barely more than a month. If our grid degrades any further, or a big enough storm tears up enough excess infrastructure, we could conceivably be back to wood stoves and out-houses by the end of the year. And we’re hardly alone. From Flint, Michigan to Miami, Florida, core components of municipal infrastructure are failing in large part thanks to over-investment in consumer facing sales and under-investment in public works.
Well yeah, and that’s not the point of those jobs. The point of those jobs is to encourage you to skill up so you no longer have to do those jobs. Ideally, those jobs should mostly be staffed by teenagers, so they can learn that lesson before deciding to give up on school or whatever.
That’s a huge part of why I oppose raising the minimum wage. Minimum wage aren’t supposed to be where you go to make a living, they’re where you’re supposed to be where you get perspective so you realize you need to do something, anything different. Getting paid $20/hr for a crappy job doesn’t make it a career, and it just enables people to not try to improve themselves.
If you want a cool job, do the work to qualify for that cool job. If you want lots of money, do your research to see what pays well and put in the work to qualify. Etc.
The point of those jobs is to encourage you to skill up
The point of these jobs is to generate surplus profit for your employer. Nobody works the check out counter at Target as an educational experience and there is no path to promotion in a seasonal position.
Minimum wage aren’t supposed to be where you go to make a living
If you cannot afford to live, how the hell are you supposed to work? Have you tried showing up to a job on an empty stomach or without any sleep? Your productivity dips straight into the trash. Min wage rates exist to mitigate the negotiating power of unemployed people, absent a large labor movement. And while I agree they’re more of a band-aid than a structural benefit, and we might even be better off with them gone if it means a more united and militant labor movement, the idea that we shouldn’t raise them because entry level workers just deserve to be malnourished and homeless isn’t ethical or logical.
If you want a cool job, do the work to qualify for that cool job.
Ah, yes. Working for the experience. Or, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”. The American employment model that never ends badly.
The point of these jobs is to generate surplus profit for your employer
No, the point is to teach kids that working retail sucks, and they should do everything they can to never have to do that again. There’s only excess profit if you’re sticking around more than a year or two, otherwise the employer is likely not making much and you’re getting valuable life experience.
Retail is to get experience with working. You show up on-time, interact with people, learn to organize stuff, etc. You get a taste of the most unpleasant parts of almost everything society has to offer, so you get an idea of which parts to actively avoid the most. If you don’t mind dealing with stupid customers, go into sales. If you don’t mind organizing stuff, try accounting. If you don’t mind managing shifts, get an MBA. And so on.
If you cannot afford to live, how the hell are you supposed to work?
Exactly! If we try to solve that problem by increasing the minimum wage, we’re just enabling more people to stick to crappy jobs and live unfulfilling lives. If a minimum wage job isn’t enough to live on, people will be forced to look elsewhere and get decent jobs that pay better and have better working conditions.
Retail and fast food should be the domain of teenagers and college students learning valuable life lessons about never being stuck in retail or fast food.
And while I agree they’re more of a band-aid than a structural benefit
They’re worse than a bandaid, they’re a full-body cast. They bind you so you can’t get out. It’s similar to the welfare system, where the time you spend getting benefits or whatever should be spent looking for a better job.
We don’t need a labor movement, we need something like UBI. My preference is NIT (Negative Income Tax), which is basically UBI but limited to people below a certain income.
If everyone could afford to survive (basic needs like shelter and food) without having to work a crappy job, they’d be more selective about the work they take on. Here’s my proposal:
completely end the minimum wage - don’t just lower it, eliminate it entirely
institute NIT where you’re guaranteed to be at the poverty line at a minimum, even without working (poverty line is ~$15k for a single person, depending on area)
transform Social Security to fund this NIT, so it’s an actual safety net instead of a retirement program, and remove the income cap
Here are my expected results:
wages for retail and fast food would plummet, and most workers would be replaced by high school and college kids; prices for fast food would also fall
unemployment would go up, as would the number of people not looking for employment
enrollment in trades would go up, since people now have the time to try something new
unemployment would trend downward again after an initial shock, and average incomes would go up
automation of jobs would be slowed in certain jobs, and increased in others, depending on desirability of those jobs
Addressing the symptoms is just going to exacerbate the issue. I believe this proposal cuts at the root of the problems we have, which is that people don’t like working in jobs that don’t go anywhere, but they feel they have to in order to afford to live. Let’s socialize the cost of undesirable jobs so we can encourage people to create more desirable jobs instead and automate the stuff nobody wants to do.
Compare working at Target to working at Costco. Target is a “working retail sucks” job, whereas Costco is a “retail is a small part of a career” job. At Costco, you do a wider range of jobs, like driving forklifts, selling memberships, etc. At Target, you just restock shelves and occasionally help customers find stuff. Target wants disposable employees, so its onboarding process is streamlined to narrow roles (i.e. perfect for students looking for a part-time job).
So while those jobs may not have been created with that in mind, that’s how they’ve been optimized. Most retail jobs are intended to be disposable, which means they’re targeting the low-end of the market.
None of this changes the fact that a job’s purpose is to create profit for the employer and that any educational benefit to the worker is entirely coincidental. Target doesn’t care how many teenagers need to learn that “working retail sucks”. That’s not what the job is for. Target only cares how many people are required to keep their stores running well enough to make money for them.
If you think there should be some kind of work-study program specifically for teenagers so they can gain a bit of job experience as part of their education, fine. That’s something that can be discussed. But don’t lie to us that Walmart is this program.
“[job type] is intended for teenagers” is nothing but corporate propaganda to justify poverty wages. If it were actually true then why the hell is McDonald’s open during school hours? Which teenagers are supposed to be working those jobs?
Yes, nobody is counting the number of teenagers and creating that many jobs, that’s not a thing that happens in a market economy. The actual mechanics are that a certain amount of unskilled labor exists, so companies adjust how their businesses operate to take advantage of it. If labor is expensive, businesses find a way to reduce labor needs (e.g. automation), and if it’s cheap, they create jobs.
So, if we increase the minimum wage, businesses will hire fewer teens because they’re too expensive for the quality of labor and inflexibility of schedules. If we decrease the minimum wage, they may find a way to use more of that cheaper labor.
open during school hours
Yeah, that’s one of their busiest times, so they’ll make sure their labor needs are met. Maybe they’ll pay more, or use college students who have more flexible schedules. Teens tend to get less valuable shifts, like late nights, and that’s for a reason.
If labor is too expensive, they’ll also probably just close earlier because the labor costs aren’t worth the minimal business they’d get.
If we instead use something like a Negative Income Tax or Universal Basic Income, it won’t matter if wages go down because people will have enough to live on. And if we only provide NIT to citizens and permanent residents, we won’t have as much competition at the low end and can reserve those jobs for our teenagers. So a teen could make $5/hr and be happy because they don’t need to pay rent, and a college student could make $5/hr and receive $10/hr or whatever as NIT and be happy because they can afford rent and tuition. We don’t need a $15 minimum wage in that scenario.
I support UBI. I just have issues with the claim that jobs in a capitalist system exist for a purpose other than generating profit for owners. I also resent the implication that some workers don’t deserve a living wage. Without UBI, all jobs should pay at least enough to cover living expenses. If a full-time job (or job that expects full-time availability) doesn’t pay enough to live on then it’s not a job that needs doing.
In my experience, entry level retail work is absolutely soul-crushing and the pay is barely worth showing up for.
People imagine getting a job and moving out of their parents’ homes, living Melrose Place style in an apartment full of hotties, having a social life, hooking up, and building adult relationships. But OP’s experience seems more like the exception than the rule. A lot of these places have incredibly high churn, no upward mobility, and are a huge physical/emotional suck that leaves you feeling exhausted the moment you’re home.
Good for getting a leg up literally anywhere else, as they prove you can “be normie”. But horrendous for any kind of actual professional career advancement outside of a casual recommendation going into your next job. And the pay is so bad that it often doesn’t even cover the basic cost of living (car, food, utilities, etc). You’re still going to be living with your parents. You’re not going to have any kind of fuck-around money. There’s no promotion path that gets you out of this hole. Its not where you want to spend one more minute of your life than you absolutely have to.
what you say is true, but it beats NEET for mental health. Got to start somewhere. Also theres no reason to only apply to retail jobs. Reach out to every company you can find that fits your criteria (geography/industry/company size, etc .) a librarian can help with this.
In my experience, it causes NEET-tier mental health. These rise-and-grind employment situations burn through people rather than developing them into more skilled and useful workers.
By all means, absolutely do that. But I see a ton of dysfunction on the corporate side of the coin that rarely gets acknowledged when we talk about “NEETs” as a social phenomenon. As though hundreds of thousands of young people just woke up one morning and all decided to be lazy at once. From my experience, people are being thrown into an economic wood chipper. Some of them escape. Some miraculously pass through. But a bunch are torn to shreds - physically, psychologically, emotionally - and then told to take responsibility for their mangled state.
I’ve seen this arc before, aimed specifically at minority youth groups (African Americans, in particular). From my experience, what comes next is a ton of brutal policing and human immiseration for anyone who can’t climb through successfully. And then you get another Ferguson.
My mental health improved considerably after I was fired from my basic retail job and was no longer spending 8 hours a day having panic attacks and dissociating. It’s not good, but it’s a lot better than it was and I can’t go back to living like that. Even a year later I still sometimes wake up in a panic from nightmares about working in that place.
I want to work and be productive, but every job I could reasonably qualify for has a sanity cost and I’m all tapped out.
so what are you suggesting these NEETs do instead?
Not a lot they can do. They’re broke, unorganized, and incredibly vulnerable.
My parents own a swimming pool company. They were willing to pick him up and drop him off at home while he worked for them and he refused to do it. I used to work there too and I will admit it can be labour intensive, but it was a good job, working outside in small teams. Its also a good enterance into plumbing or gas fitting trades and a lot of the labour experience could be used as experience for any trade/job.
The guy defintely has mental health issues as well, he barely does any chores or anything for himself. He wouldn’t have even needed an interview for this job, he could have just been ready to work one morning and started.
Yep, imagine that, work that anyone can do sucks balls.
Now let’s go back about 80 years or so, when simply growing enough food for your family was a real concern for a large portion of the “First World” nations.
My parents and grandparents were always hungry. Always. It’s why my grandparents emigrated to the US, and my parents moved from where they grew up to somewhere with opportunity, hundreds or thousands of miles away from family.
So yea, my soul-sucking jobs (usually 2 at a time until my 30’s, sometimes 3 at a time) sucked. But they were still better than what my parents went through, by a long shot.
I had heat, hot water, food, and a car. Multiple changes of clothes and shoes, not just one or two (or none). I didn’t have to sleep in the barn with the animals like my grandfather. Or in a cold house with nothing but a wood stove in the kitchen like my parents. And I could shit inside, not have to go to an outhouse in the winter (these still existed, even in cities in the US in the 50’s).
Given the turnover rate, its not just anyone. The miserable nature of the work and the awful pay tends to make these jobs difficult to fill.
Subsistence farming hasn’t been the primary means of employment in the US in over a century.
The inflation adjusted minimum wage of 1950 was $2 more than it is today. By the 1970s, the min wage was an inflation-adjusted $12.60. And that was with housing at less than a quarter of the going inflation-adjusted rate and utilities practically being free. Americans saw an explosion in quality of life between the 1940s and 1980s, peaking in the 90s at the dawn of the information age.
My home town of Houston is in its second city-wide blackout in barely more than a month. If our grid degrades any further, or a big enough storm tears up enough excess infrastructure, we could conceivably be back to wood stoves and out-houses by the end of the year. And we’re hardly alone. From Flint, Michigan to Miami, Florida, core components of municipal infrastructure are failing in large part thanks to over-investment in consumer facing sales and under-investment in public works.
Well yeah, and that’s not the point of those jobs. The point of those jobs is to encourage you to skill up so you no longer have to do those jobs. Ideally, those jobs should mostly be staffed by teenagers, so they can learn that lesson before deciding to give up on school or whatever.
That’s a huge part of why I oppose raising the minimum wage. Minimum wage aren’t supposed to be where you go to make a living, they’re where you’re supposed to be where you get perspective so you realize you need to do something, anything different. Getting paid $20/hr for a crappy job doesn’t make it a career, and it just enables people to not try to improve themselves.
If you want a cool job, do the work to qualify for that cool job. If you want lots of money, do your research to see what pays well and put in the work to qualify. Etc.
The point of these jobs is to generate surplus profit for your employer. Nobody works the check out counter at Target as an educational experience and there is no path to promotion in a seasonal position.
If you cannot afford to live, how the hell are you supposed to work? Have you tried showing up to a job on an empty stomach or without any sleep? Your productivity dips straight into the trash. Min wage rates exist to mitigate the negotiating power of unemployed people, absent a large labor movement. And while I agree they’re more of a band-aid than a structural benefit, and we might even be better off with them gone if it means a more united and militant labor movement, the idea that we shouldn’t raise them because entry level workers just deserve to be malnourished and homeless isn’t ethical or logical.
Ah, yes. Working for the experience. Or, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us”. The American employment model that never ends badly.
No, the point is to teach kids that working retail sucks, and they should do everything they can to never have to do that again. There’s only excess profit if you’re sticking around more than a year or two, otherwise the employer is likely not making much and you’re getting valuable life experience.
Retail is to get experience with working. You show up on-time, interact with people, learn to organize stuff, etc. You get a taste of the most unpleasant parts of almost everything society has to offer, so you get an idea of which parts to actively avoid the most. If you don’t mind dealing with stupid customers, go into sales. If you don’t mind organizing stuff, try accounting. If you don’t mind managing shifts, get an MBA. And so on.
Exactly! If we try to solve that problem by increasing the minimum wage, we’re just enabling more people to stick to crappy jobs and live unfulfilling lives. If a minimum wage job isn’t enough to live on, people will be forced to look elsewhere and get decent jobs that pay better and have better working conditions.
Retail and fast food should be the domain of teenagers and college students learning valuable life lessons about never being stuck in retail or fast food.
They’re worse than a bandaid, they’re a full-body cast. They bind you so you can’t get out. It’s similar to the welfare system, where the time you spend getting benefits or whatever should be spent looking for a better job.
We don’t need a labor movement, we need something like UBI. My preference is NIT (Negative Income Tax), which is basically UBI but limited to people below a certain income.
If everyone could afford to survive (basic needs like shelter and food) without having to work a crappy job, they’d be more selective about the work they take on. Here’s my proposal:
Here are my expected results:
Addressing the symptoms is just going to exacerbate the issue. I believe this proposal cuts at the root of the problems we have, which is that people don’t like working in jobs that don’t go anywhere, but they feel they have to in order to afford to live. Let’s socialize the cost of undesirable jobs so we can encourage people to create more desirable jobs instead and automate the stuff nobody wants to do.
The retail industry does not exist to teach kids retail jobs suck.
The industry, no, but the jobs do.
Compare working at Target to working at Costco. Target is a “working retail sucks” job, whereas Costco is a “retail is a small part of a career” job. At Costco, you do a wider range of jobs, like driving forklifts, selling memberships, etc. At Target, you just restock shelves and occasionally help customers find stuff. Target wants disposable employees, so its onboarding process is streamlined to narrow roles (i.e. perfect for students looking for a part-time job).
So while those jobs may not have been created with that in mind, that’s how they’ve been optimized. Most retail jobs are intended to be disposable, which means they’re targeting the low-end of the market.
None of this changes the fact that a job’s purpose is to create profit for the employer and that any educational benefit to the worker is entirely coincidental. Target doesn’t care how many teenagers need to learn that “working retail sucks”. That’s not what the job is for. Target only cares how many people are required to keep their stores running well enough to make money for them.
If you think there should be some kind of work-study program specifically for teenagers so they can gain a bit of job experience as part of their education, fine. That’s something that can be discussed. But don’t lie to us that Walmart is this program.
“[job type] is intended for teenagers” is nothing but corporate propaganda to justify poverty wages. If it were actually true then why the hell is McDonald’s open during school hours? Which teenagers are supposed to be working those jobs?
Yes, nobody is counting the number of teenagers and creating that many jobs, that’s not a thing that happens in a market economy. The actual mechanics are that a certain amount of unskilled labor exists, so companies adjust how their businesses operate to take advantage of it. If labor is expensive, businesses find a way to reduce labor needs (e.g. automation), and if it’s cheap, they create jobs.
So, if we increase the minimum wage, businesses will hire fewer teens because they’re too expensive for the quality of labor and inflexibility of schedules. If we decrease the minimum wage, they may find a way to use more of that cheaper labor.
Yeah, that’s one of their busiest times, so they’ll make sure their labor needs are met. Maybe they’ll pay more, or use college students who have more flexible schedules. Teens tend to get less valuable shifts, like late nights, and that’s for a reason.
If labor is too expensive, they’ll also probably just close earlier because the labor costs aren’t worth the minimal business they’d get.
If we instead use something like a Negative Income Tax or Universal Basic Income, it won’t matter if wages go down because people will have enough to live on. And if we only provide NIT to citizens and permanent residents, we won’t have as much competition at the low end and can reserve those jobs for our teenagers. So a teen could make $5/hr and be happy because they don’t need to pay rent, and a college student could make $5/hr and receive $10/hr or whatever as NIT and be happy because they can afford rent and tuition. We don’t need a $15 minimum wage in that scenario.
I support UBI. I just have issues with the claim that jobs in a capitalist system exist for a purpose other than generating profit for owners. I also resent the implication that some workers don’t deserve a living wage. Without UBI, all jobs should pay at least enough to cover living expenses. If a full-time job (or job that expects full-time availability) doesn’t pay enough to live on then it’s not a job that needs doing.