cashier: sorry for your wait. weâre short-staffed today
millennial: oh thatâs ok no worries :)
 baby boomer:
But listen thatâs the thing.Â
We are short staffed almost 97% of the time at my retail job. Because corporate has figured out you can overwork 4 people at minimum wage instead of paying for the 8 people you should probably have to be on the clock. Â
Baby boomers grew up with stores that were adequately staffed, with workers who most likely had weeks of training for their jobs as opposed to the 1-2 shadow shift training we get now. Also those workers most likely were able to be full time if they wanted. Now retail, except for management positions, is mostly made up of part time workers, because you donât have to give them benefits. So you have a workforce of perpetually underpaid, overwhelmed, undertrained people trying to do their best all while dealing with an entire generation of people who refuse to acknowledge that the system has changed and the average retail worker has NO control over that change and is being taken advantage of.
Like we got our customer surveys back, and almost every single one mentioned that they couldnât find someone to help them or we needed more people on register because it was TOO SLOW, but what did management tell us instead of scheduling more people? We need to be quicker on register and call for backup if necessary. Which makes no sense because we canât call for backup THAT ISNâT THERE.
Y'all my parents havenât worked retail since the 70s and they absolutely never believe me about the things that happen at work. I explain the schedule for next week gets hung up on the Friday before and they scoff and go âwell when i worked at X they had it a month up your manager is just lazy.â No mom, its company policy to only do âtwo weeksâ in advance. They wonât give you a full monthâs scheduling in advance cause it letâs you plan for a world outside of work. Or about the hours, workload or anything. They just assume its an individualâs failing instead of corporate mandate. Or, if they do believe me (that its company policy) they call it ridiculous and point out some survey that argues its Good Business to do (insert decent thing here).As if they think the higher ups donât know this and are simply ignorant of Good Business Practices. They donât understand that retail has completely shifted from caring about its employees to squeezing out every penny now instead of investing it for later.
Cause that isnât how it was when they worked and they just canât seem to see otherwise.
  I think there should be a âbring-your-parent-to-work-dayâ instead of âbring-your-kid-to-work-dayâ, it would shock so many parents and would probably make them finally realize how much retail indeed has changed in the US.
when i first got hired as a cashier, my manager who had been doing that since she was like 17 in 1975 told me that back in The Days, when you were hired as a cashier in a grocery store it was a) a well paid job & you could get full time work easily b) a respected career choice c) the store closed at 6pm and was closed on Sundays so the hours were a lot more pleasant d) they made you go to cashier school for 2 weeks, which was basically a fake grocery store and you just learned the trade completely before even meeting a customer now its like : you get like 20 hours a week, bullshit shifts like 3:45 to 10:15, a 20 minutes training before being thrown to the wolves, customers tell you you deserve your shitty lowlife job as soon as you donât thoroughly kiss their ass
The millennial experience is tied to growing income inequality and the indentured servitude of student loan debt
This applies to food service and quick service jobs as well. If youâre not making them money, youâre not working hard enough.
