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.
My daughter manages a store and half the people who apply online for a job never show up for the interview. They must just be applying to keep their unemployment benefits going.
I refuse to play their receipt checking games. Title and ownership of the property transferred to me the moment I exchanged money for it it’s my property and they don’t have the right to make me prove that I own it.
A year or so ago I went into a Walgreen’s that is now closed. No one was in the parking lot and the clerk, about 55, was folding linens. She helped me find everything and showed me how to work the awful payment machine that is now the cashier. Terrific woman. I tried to hand her a five dollar tip, but she blanched like I was handing her poison. She told me they would fire her if she took it.
She also whispered that her car was the white chevy out back. I told her the five would be under the drivers’ side tire.
Fair point but given everything else cost more, not sure there is room to also increase wages. You see what pizza hut did when CA min wage increased just the other day - they terminated 2,000 jobs.
Can’t argue with that. I don’t see precisely how we get out of this mess, but I think government needs to adjust it’s tax policy for corporations and also for families. I really think wages need to increase, but if businesses layoff thousands of workers, or if families stop shopping at businesses where workers are paid really well, that obviously doesn’t really work out for anyone.
I guess in general I think the country ought to think back to, say, the 1950s when the man worked, the women stayed home with the kids, and life in suburbia was the American Dream. We have drifted a million miles away from that. Some thinking about how we might get back to that sort of life seems overdue.
And note — my feelings on this are not intended to sexist (”women should stay home”). My basic thought is: “I have a job. I earn money. I can survive and I see hope for my future”. I think that right now we are a million miles away from that.
There is absolutely no need to stand in a checkout line.
Just grab what you need and walk out the door.
Lots of people are doing it and nobody stops them.
The FM also locked up its liquor a few years ago and put all alcohol in a gated section with its own cashier.
Our Walmart only checks unbagged items.
I can see that...
That’s a typical liberal argument.
It’s also nonsense. Anyone in their 20s who can’t live comfortably on $3000/month has bigger issues.
I’ve experienced the money counting/making change issue a few times. One time, it was not a good day already so I told the cashier the answer & told him to be sure to tell his third-grade teacher how poorly he was educated. Like I said, not my best day.
Except after you pay for these items they are yours, do not want to be searched go out to the parking lot, no one will detain you unless you are a real shoplifter.
Good points.
In Italy for certain and other countries as seen on videos all cashiers are seated. No reason that can’t happen here.
Yes, desk jockies should not think retail clerks are treated well..Older lumber riders like myself used to do those jobs and remember just how crappy that experience was. It was a motivator, for most of us.
BUT...a lot of those folks don’t help themselves much with their “I don’t want to be here” attitude. We were never that way and most customers weren’t rude aholes either.
It does not matter what lane you used, self-checkout or not.
The Walmart near me typically has 2 employees in the checkout area, looking for stealing.
Retired spouse recently resigned from working the supermarket deli.
Got tired of doing all the work watching the younger help flirt, chat on their phones, take 20 minute smoke breaks, come in stoned, etc.
Final straw was the influx of a lot of rude, arrogant New Yorkers who moved here to get away from the other New Yorkers like themselves.
There’s a good reason for checking receipts. It’s called theft, shoplifting and sticker swapping.
I read about this. Thousands of pizza delivery drivers are losing their jobs in California.
Receipts are checked only for items not bagged, ie, cases of water under the cart which may have been forgotten, a big screen tv which someone is trying to steal, etc.
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