Posted on 12/30/2023 10:43:55 AM PST by jfd1776
Try to buy anything these days – at a grocery or department store, at a discounter or specialty shop alike, from low end to high end – and you will likely have the same experience, especially in the busy hours of lunch hour, the early evening after work, and of course the weekend:
You are going to stand in line longer than you remember from before the so-called pandemic of 2020.
Why the difference? Why has so much changed in just a few short years?
We all have the same experience – more often in blue states than in red, more often in some types of stores than others, but across the country, by and large, it’s the same: The lines are longer than we remember. The stores have cash registers sitting unmanned, perhaps two out of four occupied, perhaps three out of eight, sometimes even four out of twenty. Why, we ask?
The questions are the same from coast to coast, but we usually can’t help asking ourselves in silence, or even muttering loudly enough for our fellow shoppers to hear, and to commiserate.
And we know the answers, though we may not admit them to ourselves, let alone say them out loud for our fellow shoppers to hear. Perhaps we ask the cashiers, but they usually hold their tongues rather than answer, for fear of offending.
So, most of the following Q&A experiences happen in silence, if at all:
Q: “Why don’t they open another register?”
A: “They don’t have any more cashiers.”
Q: “Why don’t they hire more cashiers?”
A: “We try; people won’t take the jobs.”
Q: “Why don’t they pay more?”
A: “We keep raising the pay scale; no matter what we pay, we still can’t get people to work.”
Q: “That can’t be true; I’ve seen new people in here!”
A: “Yes, sometimes we get somebody, then they’re overwhelmed because they’ve never really worked before – or they haven’t worked in so long, they’ve forgotten how – and they quit in a matter of weeks, or days, or even hours.”
Q: “Why is this cashier so slow?”
A: “Because he (or she) is still learning the ropes. People are new. They aren’t staying like they used to.”
Q: “Why does the cashier need his phone to make change from a $20 bill?”
A: “Because you’ve spent the last forty years voting for school boards that have banned real math and grammar textbooks in their districts, and wasted twelve school years on political poppycock, resulting in undereducated adults who can’t do basic arithmetic or carry on a conversation.”
Of course they can’t deliver these answers out loud, but you know that’s why.
The same few questions are asked, in hundreds of thousands of checkout lines, hundreds of thousands of times a day, from coast to coast. And with few exceptions, the answers are the same.
This writer went to one store today, in the Chicago suburbs, and was assaulted by no fewer than four big signs before even being fully inside the building: three announcing “Now Hiring, both full time and part time, $16/hour”… and one announcing “Hiring stocking associates, 5AM to 8AM, $18/hour.” The signs are always up; they are always hiring.
Or trying to, anyway.
The problem we suffer isn’t completely new; it’s been coming for decades. But until 2020, people could make excuses along these lines: “They don’t pay enough, they don’t have the right benefits, the hours aren’t flexible enough, they need healthcare, they need to offer discounts.”
The employment crunch of 2020, along with some political changes that were already underway beforehand, largely wiped out this list of excuses.
A virtual doubling of the minimum wage in many areas, either by law or by market pressure, has resulted in surprisingly high wage rates for entry level roles, in both retail and manufacturing. Still they suffer the difficulties of getting workers who are actually willing to work.
Retail almost always offers employee discounts, which can be extremely valuable in difficult economic times. Whether buying food for the household or school clothes for the kids, that twenty-percent-plus employee discount, often on sale items too, can be as valuable as the hourly wage itself.
And these places are so desperate for employees now, they can be incredibly flexible about which hours you work. You only have twenty hours to give us? Okay! Only ten? Okay! Only on these two specific days each week? Fine, we’ll make it work!
To anyone who was in the workforce just a decade ago, it’s shocking how flexible today’s employers will be for a good employee today.
And it’s not enough. Still, they can’t find enough decent help. Still, applicants are staying away in droves.
So, maybe it wasn’t the salary level after all?
Maybe there just aren’t enough people who want to work.
Consider:
In retail, you need to know your product and be able to converse about the product with your clientele. You need to be able to do math in your head so you can double-check the discounts applied by sales and coupons, and so you can give correct change. The young people coming up often can’t do math, or are afraid to talk to people, or don’t have the social skills and comfort with our formerly-common language to talk with the public. So they aren’t drawn to these jobs.
Retail used to depend on students in local high schools and colleges, looking for evening and weekend hours. Today, as kids either go away to college or skip college entirely, perhaps they don’t think they need the money badly enough to work during prime video game time, or movie time, or bar time. The jobs that depended on such students go unfilled.
Retail used to employ lots of part-time housewives and part-time retirees, looking for a sanity job or spending money on top of a pension. Such people flee Illinois for Florida, flee New York for Texas, flee California for Arizona. They are no longer here to apply for that job.
Retail was rarely a great career for most people, but it was always a great first job, a great part time job in school, a great second job when saving for a car or starting out in your main career. And for some, a small percentage, but still some, it’s a great career if you stick with it, because it can mean store manager, regional director, operations expert, buyer, distribution manager. There are a ton of good jobs in retail that can begin with a stint as a cashier.
Ask someone in retail today, however, and they will tell you that the bloom is off the rose, even after acknowledging that that bloom was always somewhat limited. Retail is good for an economy; the flexibility of retail jobs is great for a certain segment. When retail suffers, we all suffer.
As we look ahead to an election year, we must ask the hard questions. What exactly is making it harder now than years before?
In a nutshell, it’s undeniably that people don’t want to work. More people than usual. More people than historically.
Either people are happy with living in their parents’ basements, or living in public housing, or simply living with less.
Americans used to be – we were FOUNDED to be – ambitious, hard-working, energetic, entrepreneurial. Some certainly still are. Maybe the Left would put a negative spin on that, and say we were greedy, status-seeking, wealth-focused. But even if we were, to an extent, it worked. The ambition of an individual to climb from poverty to middle class, and from middle class to wealth, was good for the whole country. Our nation prospered because individuals worked hard to prosper.
And it is true, as Jack Kennedy said, that a rising tide lifts all boats. The broad workplace energy of past generations paved the way to America’s place as a world leader, and to our great grandparents’ rise from being destitute immigrants at Ellis Island to tenement dwellers in the city, to finally become happy homeowners in the suburbs by the end of their lives.
Raising kids in the American school system of old helped do that. Raising kids in the woke, anti-three-Rs school system of today does not.
A century ago, raising immigrant kids to be assimilated into the nation envisioned by our Founding Fathers helped do that; importing millions of foreign gatecrashers each year who don’t know or care about our language, history or culture does not.
And coming up from the bottom, giving everyone that same wonderful shared experience of working harried weekends in a Christmas season at the mall, helped prepare people for better jobs later in life. Simply importing millions of ingrates from abroad and handing them government checks does not.
What can we do to fix all this? Some of it is obvious and easy; some of it is complex and challenging.
But some things, at least, are clear: putting leftists in charge of our schools, our borders, our tax code, our public health departments, and our business world, for so many years, has done incredible damage to our society, and it’s going to take generations to recover from it.
It’s especially clear in the blue states.
Q: “Why aren’t there enough cashiers?”
A: “Because a hundred thousand people are fleeing this state every year, and the ones with a work ethic are not the ones masochistic enough to stay behind.”
Copyright 2023 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance professional and consultant. A onetime Milwaukee County Republican Party chairman, he has been writing a regular column for Illinois Review since 2009. His book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel) and his political satires on the current administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), are available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
“And then they want you to wait in line to get your receipt checked (Walmart).
I refuse this illegal search.”
They ask me as I walk toward the exit, “Sir, do you have a receipt?” I smile and say, “Yes, I sure do,” and keep walking. ;-)
A: “Yes, sometimes we get somebody, then they’re overwhelmed because they’ve never really worked before – or they haven’t worked in so long, they’ve forgotten how – and they quit in a matter of weeks, or days, or even hours.”
Q: "Have you considered hiring part time trainees? You can quickly determine who can't or won't be trained, AND the ones who can be trained have an opportunity to develop a work ethic on a starter schedule rather than being overwhelmed by a vertical learning curve!"
A: "uhhhhhhh..."
Calling BS on this one. They punch the number into the register and it shows how much change is needed.
As for the work conditions - poorly trained or petty "managers" are a large factor. Failing to back up the front line employees is another example. (Let's face it. The customer is (almost) always wrong, not right when attacking the front line employee over corporate policies. And there's no reasons they couldn't provide a stool for the cashiers. There's no need to make them stand all shift at the cash registers. That's just to 'put them in their place'. That last one, of course, isn't on the managers. It's on the executives.
Hourly retail workers treated like crap, and those of us who have had desk jobs our whole career shouldn't pretend otherwise.
Agree, I never saw these people earn their paycheck anyway.
Yup.
For decades, wages have not kept pace with inflation. Once upon a time, you could have a low-level job and afford an apartment, maybe even a house, and you could have a social life, meet someone, have kids. Being poor is never fun, but if you can earn enough to get started, then you have hope, you can work hard, you can rise up.
Now it’s different.
Wages are too low. Can’t rent an apartment, can’t have a social life, can’t meet anyone. Can’t get your life started, don’t see any point to working hard, because you just have no hope at all.
Wages need to rise. By quite a bit.
People say, “If wages rise, we’ll have inflation.” But the key problem with inflation is government monetary policy. The government spends trillions that it does not have, and prices of everything get inflated.
Wages NEED to rise in response. And they haven’t. Rising wages are NOT a cause of inflation. We need to find a way for low-level jobs to pay a decent amount. Like, maybe $30 an hour. If you pay enough, you will have workers.
What we have now is a society in which young people increasingly don’t see any light at the end of the tunnel. They have no hope. No reason to work hard. We need to fix that. Higher wages, IMO, is the only solution possible.
This is in Shoreline, WA, a suburb just north of Seattle. I didn’t say the security guards were armed, but that they are uniformed. Of course, actual police are increasingly called in to deal with various issues.
My daughter is looking for entry level work. She has little experience. When she goes into stores or fast food places, they tell her to apply online. She rarely gets a response. I think that businesses are afraid to hire.
I know a woman who is a grocery store clerk, and she also says they have a hard time getting new hires to stick around for more than a few weeks. Often, they don’t even formally quit, but just stop showing up.
Dont agree higher wages in the answer necessarily. I think lower taxes and much less gov spending will fire up production by the private sector increasing supply, increasing demand for workers, and lower prices. As demand for workers increases, wages will increase as well.
With all due respect I am calling your post BS, why check receipts and pay these unarmed security guards when you pay when ordering?
I would argue that the demand for workers is already here. Many business want workers and cannot find them. Waiting for wages to rise AFTER there is sufficient demand for workers just hasn’t worked out. But if you raise wages now, you would see workers apply for jobs.
Besides which you did not answer my question, which fast food chains are doing this?
Thanks for a great read!
I was at the drive thru at McDonalds about a year ago. My total was something like $7.67. I gave the young man at the window 6 one-dollar bills, 5 quarters, 3 dimes, 2 nickels and 2 pennies.
The fellow spread the money on the counter and stared at it at least 5 minutes. Amused, I waited but finally told him it was the correct amount.
He said, “Thanks, man” and gave me a receipt. He had no idea how to count money.
Target this morning: 2 cashier stations open. Out of 20 stations.
Cashier jobs used to be for teenagers, or married women to supplement their husband’s income.
Retail has trouble hiring competent people because the hourly pay offered isn't enough to keep your bills apart.
Retail has trouble getting competent supervisors and managers because corporate Stalinists "encourage" (threaten) store managers, using percentages and quotas, to promote mostly blacks and flagrant homosexuals and lesbians.
Retail also has trouble retaining competent people because employees grow cynical after being regularly required to sit in front of back-office computers to watch video propaganda denouncing and mocking whites, males, and people with traditional moral principles--and then being tested on giving the "right" (factually and morally wrong) answers to the questions on the Stalinist quizzes.
I’ve seen the math ignorance a few times . Ask for 3/4’s of a pound and see if they can figure that one out .
The Shoreline FM is in my neighborhood, too. I seldom go there but order Instacart food from them.
I think part of the decline in that store is due to the nearby Section 8 housing. If I actually go to the grocery store I go to the QFC down the hill. Small and well-run but they locked up the hard liquor near the cashiers a few years ago.
I heard the first part of that conversation out loud and almost verbatim at a Krogers recently. They said they can’t find anyone to fill the positions and those they do hire don’t stay. Around here the ‘now hiring’ signs are everywhere and stay up permanently. Things are very, very strange right now.
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