excess-of-cats:

amemait:

rembrandtswife:

loneozner:

me: *waits patiently in a line in a busy establishment with limited employees who can only work so fast

every 40+ person in the vicinity: OHHHHHHH MY GOD THIS IS RI-DIC-U-LOUS why is the space time continuum not being broken to IMMEDIATELY ACCOMODATE me, The Most Important Person In The World,

As a person of 40+10, I think some (not all, certainly) of that behavior is due to our remembering when retail and food establishments were sufficiently staffed. Picture the supermarket you go to most often: How many registers are at the front of the store? How many of those are staffed on a weekday afternoon? On a Saturday morning? As a teenager, I worked as a supermarket cashier; out of half a dozen registers, I would say four were open at any given time, and all of them were staffed on Saturday, which was still the primary shopping day for a lot of full-time homemakers whose husbands got paid on Fridays.

Same thing with banks; my bank branch has at least six teller stations, but I’ve never seen more than half of them occupied at one time. The library where I work: My unit once had four people and now there’s only two of us. The Periodicals Department had fourteen employees when I was hired for it in 1994; now it has less than half that many people. Every single library department has lost staff as people retired and were not replaced because the budget would not permit it.

And the fault for that lies not with the impatient older customers nor with the Millenials or whoever may be behind the service counter; it lies with the 1% who won’t hire enough staff, won’t pay decent wages, don’t offer benefits, and basically sit on their wealth like a dragon on its gold. Our economy is basically at the mercy of Smaug.

Huh.

Makes sense. You hire as few people as possible, work them until they burn out, and then hire new people to replace them ad infinitum to minimize the amount of money you have to spend paying employees.