Hello!
While I greatly enjoy teaching, I have spent an equal amount of my working life in retail. When I was 16, I got my first job as a bagger at a large regional grocery chain. Bagging is a horrible job. The main problem with bagging is the stultifying boredom of putting groceries in a bag for hours at a time. There's relatively little mental or physical challenge to the job after the first month of learning how to bag.
About the only thing that breaks up the monotony is the sporadic angry customer. Occasionally, the customer has a genuine gripe - like when the bagger crushes their bread. Equally frequently, though, the customer either created the problem themselves by crushing the bread themselves - tossing a heavy purse randomly in the cart will do that - or by having major control issues. Yes, I'm thinking of the woman who chewed me out because the items were not bagged in the exact order that she placed them on the belt. That interaction holds a special place in my heart because after she went on for a bit I looked at her innocently and said "So - you wanted the eggs and bread under the canned goods. Got it. Will do." That seemed to shake something free in her brain that caused her to realize how bat-shit crazy her plan was...
Honestly, though, I have fond memories of "bag in the correct order, peon!" lady because I doubt she's slandering me on the interwebs to drum up sales for her vanity press ministry. That slimy job was left to Steven Maxwell who is back to maligning essential workers behind their backs. These quotes are from the article titled "Addictive" published on December 16, 2020.
First, there's no way that Steve Maxwell has sat down and worked out what a representative sampling of baggers from Dillion's Food Store, Price Chopper, and Eddie's Grocery Store should look like - let alone the Sam's Club or whatever wholesale club shopping experience they belong to is. Saying that he's found that all baggers are gamers is pretty unbelievable -and should be backed up with something more solid than "well, that's what I've noticed."
Second, even if the Maxwells are doing once-a-month style shopping, the total amount of time that Steve has to talk to the bagger is 5-10 minutes max. If he is running out more often, the cart size gets smaller and the amount of time to talk to a bagger drops to 3 minutes or less. When you have 3 minutes to greet a customer, ask if they want plastic or paper, bag the groceries and load them in the cart, you don't have time for very in-depth topics of conversation. Discussions about gaming work well for that time-frame because it's reasonably high interest and low controversy. Other similar topics include "your child is so cute!" and "I wanted to try (hold up item of interest) - want to tell me about it?"
Third - and this one should be obvious to Maxwell because he worked at a corporate company for decades - grocery store workers are at work. When at work, employees are not supposed to use company time to convert people over to their form of Christianity. If you started using "The Good Person Test" so beloved by the Maxwells, you'd rapidly be put on a performance improvement plan - e.g., stop it or you'd be fired. This is completely legal because the First Amendment prevents the government from interfering with religion; employers are legally allowed to prevent employees from converting people on the clock. As far as I know, each of those baggers might spend all of their free time hitting up random strangers to do "The Good Person Test" - but Maxwell should never be able to tell that from their discussions at the store.
Fourth, Maxwell has three adult daughters who are unable to support themselves independently - so I'm not sure where he gets off ragging on baggers who use their wages to buy video games instead of using their wages to buy fancy coffees, long running skirts, paying for illustrations for vanity press novels or drawing materials. The Maxwell daughters were raised to be wives and mothers, but Maxwell has failed miserably at getting any of his daughters married. Maxwell sees the baggers as unambitious and drifting - but the same words describe his three adult daughters who hold down two part-time jobs in their brother's companies between the three of them. Most adult women would need to do some serious rearranging of job and household duties to support a sister-in-law's five young children while she underwent chemo in a different state - but the Maxwell sisters were ready because they have no particularly important roles in any place.
This next section makes Maxwell look like a dick:
How long do you, dear reader, think I was a bagger?
If you guessed two years, you are right!
I started bagging at 16 because it was one of the only jobs available to a minor. I could not be a cashier before age 18 because my store sold alcohol and tobacco products. Legally, only adults can handle alcohol and tobacco sales so no minor aged cashiers.
Cashiering and working a department - which often has the same age-restriction due to using cardboard bailers and trash compactors - are far more mentally challenging and sometimes physically challenging compared to bagging. Most baggers who don't quit to get a better job at a different employer at age 18 transfer into either cashiering for a higher wage or a department for less customer service and more freedom.
Why, then, would a man in his twenties be bagging at a grocery store?
I can think of two reasons.
The more palatable reason - e.g., the one that makes Maxwell look like less of an ass - is that the bagger's main job is somewhere else in the store and he's filling in as a bagger because of high customer volume or unusually high absenteeism. At the store where I work right now, we have various people whose main job is to help with loading customers' cars and bringing in carts who are called "Lot associates" or "lot guys". When it's busy, though, nearly anyone in the store who doesn't have a lifting restriction can be helping load large orders or wrangling carts back into the store.
So the bagger Maxwell is ragging on may well be relatively high up in the store leadership and Maxwell just hasn't seen him as the receiving supervisor or grocery area manager since most of that work happens out of view of the customers. A frequent customer asked me one time who the new employee who helped me load her car was. I replied "My boss' boss. He's nice."
The less palatable reason - and the more frequent occurrence - is that the bagger has a cognitive functioning limitation from a disability that makes cashiering or working a department impossible. Every large retail store I've worked at has one or more associates who are excellent employees when doing repetitive jobs with low autonomy - bagging, lot associate, janitorial work - but is unable to do the faster paced and more abstract thinking required to cashier or function within the relatively high autonomy areas of a department.
When I read that section, I feel like Maxwell is taking cheap shots at a guy with a disability. Part of the reason I think that is that the adult-aged bagger told Maxwell the name AND the price of the game. In US middle class culture, people avoid talking directly about money like the plague - so telling a customer the price of something the bagger bought feels like the bagger might not be functioning the same way as the 'average' person. I can think of three former coworkers who did slightly off things like that; one survived a severe head injury in a car accident, one had high-functioning autism, and one had a mild cognitive impairment.
I wonder if Maxwell would be so blasé about that bagger if he realized that his daughters will likely be coworkers of that man when Maxwell dies or the family's money starts running out. Asking Nathan and Joseph to make up jobs for Sarah, Anna and Mary is a hard ask - especially since the girls have spent the last decade waiting to get married instead of doing any kind of employment training. On the flip side, I can't imagine trying to fill out an application for a retail or fast food job for any of the girls let alone making up a resume; they don't have any non-family work experience!
I wonder if Maxwell has ever heard of the saying that "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones......:
If you guessed two years, you are right!
I started bagging at 16 because it was one of the only jobs available to a minor. I could not be a cashier before age 18 because my store sold alcohol and tobacco products. Legally, only adults can handle alcohol and tobacco sales so no minor aged cashiers.
Cashiering and working a department - which often has the same age-restriction due to using cardboard bailers and trash compactors - are far more mentally challenging and sometimes physically challenging compared to bagging. Most baggers who don't quit to get a better job at a different employer at age 18 transfer into either cashiering for a higher wage or a department for less customer service and more freedom.
Why, then, would a man in his twenties be bagging at a grocery store?
I can think of two reasons.
The more palatable reason - e.g., the one that makes Maxwell look like less of an ass - is that the bagger's main job is somewhere else in the store and he's filling in as a bagger because of high customer volume or unusually high absenteeism. At the store where I work right now, we have various people whose main job is to help with loading customers' cars and bringing in carts who are called "Lot associates" or "lot guys". When it's busy, though, nearly anyone in the store who doesn't have a lifting restriction can be helping load large orders or wrangling carts back into the store.
So the bagger Maxwell is ragging on may well be relatively high up in the store leadership and Maxwell just hasn't seen him as the receiving supervisor or grocery area manager since most of that work happens out of view of the customers. A frequent customer asked me one time who the new employee who helped me load her car was. I replied "My boss' boss. He's nice."
The less palatable reason - and the more frequent occurrence - is that the bagger has a cognitive functioning limitation from a disability that makes cashiering or working a department impossible. Every large retail store I've worked at has one or more associates who are excellent employees when doing repetitive jobs with low autonomy - bagging, lot associate, janitorial work - but is unable to do the faster paced and more abstract thinking required to cashier or function within the relatively high autonomy areas of a department.
When I read that section, I feel like Maxwell is taking cheap shots at a guy with a disability. Part of the reason I think that is that the adult-aged bagger told Maxwell the name AND the price of the game. In US middle class culture, people avoid talking directly about money like the plague - so telling a customer the price of something the bagger bought feels like the bagger might not be functioning the same way as the 'average' person. I can think of three former coworkers who did slightly off things like that; one survived a severe head injury in a car accident, one had high-functioning autism, and one had a mild cognitive impairment.
I wonder if Maxwell would be so blasé about that bagger if he realized that his daughters will likely be coworkers of that man when Maxwell dies or the family's money starts running out. Asking Nathan and Joseph to make up jobs for Sarah, Anna and Mary is a hard ask - especially since the girls have spent the last decade waiting to get married instead of doing any kind of employment training. On the flip side, I can't imagine trying to fill out an application for a retail or fast food job for any of the girls let alone making up a resume; they don't have any non-family work experience!
I wonder if Maxwell has ever heard of the saying that "People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones......:
What should a 17 year old be saving up for instead of a game system? They can't make "pay tuition" money working part time minimum wage, and if they don't need to pay family bills, a little fun money they earn sounds great. They're kids, they don't need to know for sure they're going to study accounting or get a job at the manufacturing plant or get any degree to teach English in China in a few years. I saved up for fun stuff at that age, and then I got an education and I work and raise my kids. And I still play some video games.
ReplyDeleteHeck, I've known plenty of twenty-somethings working at retail jobs who managed to live independently and save up for a game system. The only thing that requires is letting go of the Maxwell obsession with owning your own home - no matter how run-down, impractical or expensive that choice is. I've got plenty of coworkers who have apartments with non-relative roommates or are essentially living in what we used to call a boarding house with several similar aged friends. It's an effective way reduce the overall cost of rent and utilities while still letting people live away from family.
DeleteI'm a software engineer and mother and I play video games. Maxwell is sure judgey about what people do in their spare time.
ReplyDeleteI agree - and I'll even raise that to being judgey about everything that doesn't align perfectly with what he likes. He would, in fact, judge you about being a mother while being a software engineer. Women aren't supposed to be working outside the house because their brood needs homeschooling. You know, like Teri Maxwell did while crushingly depressed for years! Sounds great for everyone, yeah? My mom struggled intermittently with depression during my childhood and I can only imagine how much harder it was for her kids without the outlet of school each day to get some time away.
DeleteMy husband got a Nintendo Switch and bought a copy of "Animal Crossings" because a coworker who has little kids told him that it's a great mellow game where Spawn can push any button at any time and not destroy the game. Spawn loves it - and I'm amazed how many new words he is using for things he sees on the game.
I'm also really enjoying the game. I like mellow games that show changes in day and weather pattern.
It's shocking how out of touch he is with everyday people, and tone-death to his own words.
ReplyDeleteI mean, he did write an entire book about how people should have conversations because he and his super-isolated family had a hard time conversing with their clients at the conferences they ran. Once you've become that lost to self-inspection, you are freed from any form of sense.
Delete