There was a delightful essay by Nichols Fox in the NYTimes on Saturday about how we Americans have permitted ourselves to be turned into unpaid employees of companies who charge us quite handsomely for the privilege:
It began in the 1970’s. Or at least that’s when I became conscious of it. People began cleaning up after themselves in fast-food restaurants. I had been living abroad and didn’t know about such things, but my children, faster to pick up on American cultural expectations, made sure I took back my tray and put my trash in the appropriate bin.
Cleverly, the restaurants made this choice not only easy but gratifying. Customers were given the sense of being good citizens or helping out the teenage minimum-wage workers who wiped off the tables.
I was never fooled. I knew what was going on. We were doing the restaurant’s work and if we didn’t we felt guilty. My children would shrink into their coats while people stared disapprovingly if I tried to abandon a cluttered table.
In fact, it was a manifestation of the Great Labor Transfer. Companies that had already applied every possible efficiency to their businesses were looking for other ways to cut costs and saw an entirely new pool of workers who didn’t have to be paid. Call them consumers.
Fox supports his thesis with a short history of other situations where we used to be served that we’ve willingly volunteered to do for ourselves, including
- Telephone operators used to dial numbers for us
- Grocery clerks used to gather our selections for us
- Attendants used to pump our gas for us (in New Jersey, actually, they still do)
- Attendants used to also check our oil, pump up our tires, and wash our windshields
- And the one he spares no scorn for, receptionists used to direct our calls to the appropriate person or department
One of the things I hadn’t thought about that Fox notes is how much of our own medical care we’ve taken on:
Consumers were found to be more medically skilled than anyone had given them credit for. They could take their own blood pressure, give themselves injections and enemas, and starve themselves before surgery. Then they could find someone to drive them to the hospital at 6 a.m., wait, and then take their tottering bodies, still exhaling anesthesia, back to their beds at home where another friend could care for them. In short, they could do what nurses had once done, allowing hospitals to concentrate on investing more heavily in machines to do what doctors once did.
And yet health insurance is still unaffordable for far too many of us.
Fox speculates that this trend cannot last.
So where does this leave us economically? A good part of the increase in productivity during the past two decades can be credited to the Great Labor Transfer. We’ve taken on more than anyone thought possible. But it can’t last.
Someday, consumers will become passive refuseniks or revolt. Or they will simply collapse with exhaustion, unable to take on one more task. I don’t know when that point will come, but when it does, expect a fierce downturn in the economy. Happily, it should be followed by an upsurge when companies have to hire people to do what we’ve been doing and everyone once again has money to spend.
There must be a threshold here…a point at which a "service" becomes nothing more than distribution. Between eBay and UPS, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone soon perfects a business model that seriously threatens most physical stores altogether. There’s virtually nothing in New York you can’t have delivered. The trick, of course, is for those delivering these goods to find someway to get us to do their work for free but still charge us for the privilege.
Give ’em time…they’ll find a way.
Add to this that many stores now expect the customers to be their own checkout clerk. It is most evident at our local Home Depot, where there are only self-service checkout lanes for anything which doesn’t require customer service, but our supermarket has self checkout available as well.
Hmm… So the proper consumer model is like those attending movie theaters — throw your trash everywhere and walk out.
And don’t feel guilty because you are providing employment.
I think the difference in price between self-service or full service gasoline says it all about this. Service is part of the cost, and less service that therefore transfers some obligation to consumers will affect price. Consumers can then decide how much service they want to pay for.
“The trick, of course, is for those delivering these goods to find someway to get us to do their work for free but still charge us for the privilege.”
Yes, Edward, back in the Good Old Days of Yore there was an antiquated term which expressed this meme perfectly:
In Olde Amurrican it was called “SHOPPING”
Ah, the easy life of olde………
“I think the difference in price between self-service or full service gasoline says it all about this.”
Phooey. This is another way of having the customer do all the work. The difference between self and full serve is typically over 10 cents per gallon. How many gallons per hour would it take to pay the attendants minimum wage and no benefits? All it takes is 2 SUV fill-ups per hour, and the rest is profit for the station owner.
We can be our own bank tellers, too! You’d think with all the tellers they were able to fire (after ATMs became prevalent that they’d be able to lower retail banking fees, but surprise, surprise, up they go.
And then there’s the pernicious practice of tip jars on the counter at places like TCBY and Subway. Not only are the employees spared the effort of actually writing down your order and bringing it to your table, but you’re asked to pay a gratuity despite that omission.
As much fun as these simplistic formulations can be, these runaway profits never seem to manifest themselves in real life. I’m going to guess that the profits from full-serve wind up underwriting some other expenses involved in the business.
It’s like the classic Nike formulation: it costs them a quarter to make shoes in sweatshops, and they sell them for $200. Yet somehow Nike’s posted profits are not 800% above their expenses.
Lord Buckley was there first:
“Remember the first supermarkets?
They said, “Ho, the supermarket!” . . .
And there you are pushin’ in the supermarket with the cart. You grab the cart and you go strolling up and down the aisles and you load up all your jazz and you’re working for them, see?
But it’s alright. It’s alright, because you’re getting – this is the beginning – very, very, low, low, low, low prices. Saving, you see. So you don’t mind, you know, pushing a little bit.
And then, a few swings of the pendulum. Same supermarket, same cart. Prices – whew!
And you’re still pushin’ the mother cart!”
Jonas,
“It’s like the classic Nike formulation: it costs them a quarter to make shoes in sweatshops, and they sell them for $200. Yet somehow Nike’s posted profits are not 800% above their expenses.”
No, Nike has expenses other than cost of goods sold, such as advertising, distribution and market research. That doesn’t mean that, using my example, the difference in self vs. full serve prices doesn’t far more than pay the cost of the attendant.
Grocery clerks used to gather our selections for us ?
I may be too young for that, but I do remember when the milk came to you, and not the other way around. Doctor too, sometimes.
Happily, it should be followed by an upsurge when companies have to hire people to do what we’ve been doing and everyone once again has money to spend.
Well, except everyone won’t, when companies have to make the choice between maintaining marginal profitability or paying full salaries and benefits to people for doing tasks that could be automated more cheaply or not at all.
I will freely admit to preferring diy over full-service in many cases, but that is primarily because many businesses no longer provide even the most rudimentary training for their employees and I would rather no help than incompetence.
Back in the day my first job was as a grocery clerk. I spent two days with a manager teaching me how to pack groceries in paper bags so that the frozen items stayed together and cool, the produce stayed together in one bag, the non-food items–especially those with perfumes–didn’t get mixed with the food items, and all of them stayed undamaged and well balanced. I think it was a full two weeks before I was turned loose on my own.
Ten years later I returned to the grocery business and training for bagging took up less than 1/2 hour.
It’s not even that they no longer hire enough staff to provide good customer service, it’s that they neither have enough knowledge of these skills to provide training nor the training staff to provide it. And that is far more damning in my eyes.
I get this…and yet, I prefer many of the instances described above. I like ordering items online and having them delivered. I’m not sure that “threatens physical stores” is all that much of a problem…if at all a problem.
Given how people react to the time they already spend in doctor’s offices and how loathesome it is to be in a hospital at all I don’t see how we’re not better off doing more of our own healthcare ourselves. If people were required to get to the hospital the night before and stay overnight for every procedure costs would necessarily be higher than they are now.
I also prefer the self-checkout at the grocery stores. Of course, that’s because I tend to prefer ways of completing transactions without having to deal with people.
Bottom line, the transfer of labor (which I’m not disputing, its pretty clear) isn’t necessarily bad. As the current KFC ad says, you can get largely the same meal with less service for about half as much as going down the street to Applebee’s and getting table service. At some point, there’s a tradeoff.
I think there’s a tendency to always romanticize the “good old days.” I’m not sure the previous ways were necessarily any better than what we’ve got now.
Movie Theaters- I now butter my own popcorn and fill my own drink. (fast food places to with the drinks)
And the worst offender – Pop can recycleing.. You buy it, pay a deposit and then drive it back to the store and sort it and feed it to the machine (all to get your money back)
Add to this that many stores now expect the customers to be their own checkout clerk. It is most evident at our local Home Depot, where there are only self-service checkout lanes for anything which doesn’t require customer service, but our supermarket has self checkout available as well.
I used to work for a large systems company and we found that while customers took longer to actually checkout themselves, they felt like they were going faster since they were doing it themsleves.
ATMs are the same thing. Americans would simply rather perform services themselves than wait in line. Of course, I still admit to wondering if the folks in front of me at the ATM aren’t refinancing their house or something.
Still, I’d say that all this became prevalent when price became paramount in people’s minds. We could just as well lament the loss of that piece of lettuce under our plate of non-existent airline food as someone to pick up after us at In-N-Out.
And to think that until now, it was a conservative thing.
These days, Slarti, it often acts as cover for a sort of low-grade anti-capitalism: “There are too many different kinds of jelly and ATMs are bad, therefore capitalism sucks.” Reason has had a few pieces examining this kind of thing, but I’m too lazy to look up the links right now.
These days, Slarti, it often acts as cover for a sort of low-grade anti-capitalism…”
I’d agree, except this conflates anti-capitalism with anti-corporatism. The two are not equivalent, and many of the complaints are not about capitalism per-se, but about the way in which corporations conduct their capitalism.
You know, I just can’t buy this thesis. If I want to go to a restaurant where the staff will clean up after me, such establishments are readily available. Of course, they cost more than McDonalds. Part of that cost does in fact go to pay the salary of those who clean the tables. During the transition from full-service to self-serve gas stations, most stations offered a choice of (slightly more expensive) full service or (slightly cheaper) self-serve. The consumers voted with their wallets for self-serve, otherwise there would still be more full-service pumps available.
For any basic product or service that someone offers for sale, there are a variety of auxilliary services that may or may not be included. Such inclusion is more or less arbitrary and subject to negotiation between the buyer and seller – it makes little sense to say that a particular auxiliary service must always be inherently included in the main purchase. Even such a basic aspect as actually assembling a product being sold is subject to negotiation. I may buy a new desk fully assembled, but if I find it significantly cheaper as a do-it-yourself kit, I might take the savings, depending on whether I valued my time or money more.
I certainly can’t buy the idea that I’m likely to collapse from exhaustion due to the effort of dialing my own phone numbers or pumping my own gas. I think I’m a little tougher than that.
I agree that health insurance companies are gouging on premiums compared to the value they offer. I’m not sure what’s going on there (possibly some sort of legally/ethically questionable price fixing behinds the scenes?), but I don’t think it quite lines up with the other examples.
Sheesh, I usually make comments on ObWi to defend liberal ideas. You’re out to make me sound like quite the libertarian capitalist!
Dantheman:
Actually, the bigger profit is with full service, and the cut-throat price competition is the self-service price.
It is skewed to think you are being cheated by a transfer of some labor to the consumer since it is being reflected in price. People prefer minimal service for a lower price — it has been true in countless industries that are subject to tight competition. To claim that this is an exploitation of consumers is nonsense.
Of course, that’s because I tend to prefer ways of completing transactions without having to deal with people.
That’s also one of my reasons. Like German tourists, the stupid are everywhere and you never know when you’re going to get someone who stacks your gallon of milk on top of the fresh strawberries.
All in all I’d rather take on the labor of bagging my own groceries than have to supervise someone else. (Not that grocery clerks are stupid per se, it’s just that I’d rather not have to find out the hard way)
Re: anti-corporatism. There may be many reasons to keep an eye on many large corporations. Exploiting workers in poor countries who have no choice in what jobs they accept might be one reason. Corrupting the political system with large donations might be another. Depriving the consumer of value for their money is not usually the problem. For most consumer products and services, the trend I’ve seen is for increasing choice and value for the dollar. Absent a monopoly, it’s one of the things that competition is actually good for. There may be exceptions (health care), but for most consumer products and service, the competition out there (by corporations) is pretty healthy.
Great stuff Edward. I understand the problem, but I would also note that a world where employees do a lot of the work is (usually?) a world that promotes a hierarchy that is not really a meritocracy. While one of the things that I loved/love about living in Japan was the fact that those sorts of jobs are still done by people, I have come to realize that it often supports a system that discriminates. While I don’t want to rush to a US DIY system, there is a balance.
The really interesting question is what is cause and what is effect. For example, could the deterioration of education standards be driving a lot of this? Here in Japan, high school kids are ‘trained’ to be able to do well in the kind of service environment, but the tradeoff is that Japanese students don’t seem to have the confidence to act independently. This is not some inability within the students, in that when they are given tasks that they have responsibility for, they are brilliant.
Slarti archly suggests that romanticizing the good old days was basic conservatism, but one has to remember that one of the reasons why the notions of conservative and liberal flipped in the US is that in the US, the fundamental notion is that progress is good. When that notion is basic, then the idea that being liberal equal supporting change loses meaning.
Check out Hesiod’s Works and Days and his spiel about the five generations if you really want to talk about the good old days.
Enough to make one a buddhist…
Ten years later I returned to the grocery business and training for bagging took up less than 1/2 hour.
ugh. the kids bagging today where i live are all about the One Item Per Bag method. i walk out of the store with 25 bags, all 1/4 full.
ugh. the kids bagging today where i live are all about the One Item Per Bag method. i walk out of the store with 25 bags, all 1/4 full.
That, I would guess, is less a “how to properly pack a bag” issue, than a “how to avoid a lawsuit” issue.
Hmm. I like some of these new things a lot. If I recall correctly, the very first ATM machines showed up sometime around my junior year of college. Until that point, all banking had to be done during normal banking hours, so if you didn’t withdraw enough cash on Friday to get you through the weekend, tough. (There were also almost no credit cards available to college students. Certainly no one I knew had one.) So suppose you suddenly got the urge to go to New York one Saturday, but hadn’t withdrawn the money to cover it: unless you could find a friend who had and could spare the cash, tough. When ATMs appeared, they really changed our lives.
Likewise, pumping gas: I am a patient person and don’t normally get annoyed by having to wait for stuff, but even I am happier when I don’t have to wait for something I could perfectly well do myself. (I also seem to recall that this particular case had to do with the women’s movement: I think the gas nozzle thingies used to be much heavier, and thus supposedly women couldn’t be hired for gas station attendant jobs; discrimination was protested, the thingies were then made lighter, and this spurred the growth of self-service gas stations.)
On the other hand, as I was driving to work this morning, I heard a story on all the things that parents used to do for themselves that they are now hiring other people to do, including a ‘consultant’ who trains kids to ride bikes(??!!). Likewise, dog-walkers, personal shoppers, caterers (who always existed, but are more common, as is prepared food and eating out in restaurants), and everything you can get via home delivery. Even baby-sitters are probably doing something that the extended family used to do for itself.
So my sense is that things are just being shuffled around, depending on what we do and don’t want to pay for. The main trend seems to me to be not shoving stuff off onto consumers, but (a) disaggregating products into things and different sorts of service, and (b) allowing us to pay individually for bits of service that used to be done by servants (who used to be hired as a person, not by the job, usually), leaving the choice about whether and what to pay for to us. And I don’t really know how much this affects productivity: certainly, when people walk other people’s dogs for a living, they are not counted as doing at serious expense something that used to happen automatically and for free, as far as the economy is concerned, but as inhabiting a new economic niche.
Interesting.
A story, starring an old roommate of mine named Ken. The year is 1980; the place is a McDonald’s.
[Ken eats his food, gets up to leave, and walks away from his trash.]
Employee: Hey, could you clean that up? If you don’t do it, I have to do it.
Ken: Isn’t that your job?
Employee: No.
Ken: Well, then..if it’s not your job, don’t do it.
[Ken leaves.]
hilzoy,
Are you sure about the women’s movement aspect of self-service gasoline? That sounds like an awfully dubious tale. How heavy could the pump handle be?
My recollection is that it started during the gas crunch. If you own a gas station, and have a long line of customers waiting to buy gas, why pay someone to pump it? Instituting self-service isn’t going to cost you anything.
Bernard: can’t find a cite, probably because ‘thingies’ is not the right word. My recollection, which may be completely wrong, is not that the women’s movement caused the switch to self-serve, but that it was at least one of the causes of redesigning the thingies, which in turn made the switch to self-serve a lot easier when the oil shocks happened. But since I can’t find any explanation of this online, it may all be an illusion.
This week’s New Yorker has a cartoon depicting a self-serve butcher. The customer stands in front of the glass case, wherein, as in a manger, lies a live steer contendedly chewing its cud. The butcher, or should I say facilitator, is handing a machete over the counter, although I thought a chainsaw would be funnier.
I don’t know about all of you, but I expect everything to be free, but I expect high pay for my services and products, such as they are. Whether its milk, meat or government, I see no reason why I can’t have all of those without paying for them, especially taxes. And what’s with my doctor demanding payment? I thought work was suppposed to be its own reward — another thing my grandmother got wrong.
Oh, and those people who open every fresh corn on the cob in the produce section to find six perfect ones: take a risk, shut your eyes, pick six and get the hell out of my way! Aren’t there melons that require palpating in the next aisle?
I can’t stand people who expect to be paid for labor, especially unskilled labor. Shut up, smile, and consider yourself lucky that you are helping me attain the American dream.
It’s hard for me not to relate this trend to the privatization of social services. Habitat for Humanity, for example, builds houses and projects not just in developing countries but also in the US. Faith-based initiatives are largely run on the backs of volunteers. When criticisms of the US govt’s donations towards tsunami relief aired, people were quick to mention private and religious donations.
I understand that jobs are being lost, but I think that some of these jobs can no longer be justified. I don’t miss baggers: I’ve lived long enough in Europe that the freedom of being able to shove my groceries willy-nilly into my cloth grocery bag or my bookbag seems now to outweigh the convenience of someone else’s placing my groceries into pre-manufactured bags for me.
And remember the older model of the market-fair, which still exists in many countries and communities, is much more flexible about bags, personal service, chit-chatting, and more. Political conservatives would be wrong to be shocked that leftists also mourn the decline of some of these traditions. One might consider the leftist championing of local organic markets, which bring the farmer to the city as of yore.
Obviously, there’s much more to be said about the modern expectation about the fully autonomous individual and all that, but I must get back to work.
Was ‘delightful’ sarcasmic?
Clearly if having other people wipe your mouth and clean your windows was valuable enough to justify paying for it, some company would offer that and people would pay for it. Since they haven’t, it isn’t. Remember MyLackey.com and Kozmo? Very popular.
Maybe it’s a good argument against the minimum wage.
This stuff is just silly, though:
“Or they will simply collapse with exhaustion, unable to take on one more task.”
Yes, dumping your basket of fries into the trash before you lumber into your air conditioned SUV is a sisyphean task. And as the tragically underweight population of America is learning, we’re all working out way too much.
I encourage all those complaining about the way in which we are “made” to do various tasks to spend some quality time in South-East Asia (Africa would do as well, and perhaps some of the poorer parts of the subcontinent) where labor is dirt cheap and automation is fiendishly expensive. It’s astonishing the things we take for granted.
hilzoy:
the real cause of the changeover in gasoline pump handles was the vapor recovery rules.
Eh? Vapor recovery wasn’t instituted until 1993. Hilzoy’s talking mid ’70s.
Having been paid to pump gas in the ’70s – the answer is shorter hoses and unleaded gas.
The nozzle for an unleaded gas pump is narrower than a leaded gas nozzle to prevent folks from putting leaded gas into their unleaded cars. (Yes, there was time when stations had both types on tap.) This results in a lighter nozzle. I’m not sure, but it may also have allowed the use of a smaller diameter hose.
Also, back in the day, most of the pumps had long hoses so that the attendant didn’t need to ask the bozo who pulled up with their filler on the wrong side to move their car. Lugging less hose around both lightens the load and reduces the chance of getting your clothes dirty.
Finding none of these explanations to be compelling in the least (only slightly less silly is they took the lead out of gasoline, so it’s lighter), I’m going to guess that it’s the pump activation. Remember when you actually had to muscle a lever over far enough to latch it, when there were only the non-electronic pumps? That’s my guess. The thingie.
Slarti – I was just funnin’ a bit – although both the nozzle diameter and the hose length bits are true, I don’t think that they made that much difference. BTW, as I recall, initially a lot of gas stations removed the latch from their self-serve pumps, so you had to stand there and hold the lever open.
I’m straining with all my might to keep from writing something explicit about women, self-service islands, shorter hoses, etc. But the voices keep telling me to!
You forgot nozzle diameters …