Why would it be sarcasm? Requiring someone to stand at work, when nothing about what they do requires it, and they prefer to sit, is pretty ridiculous.
I probably know some horrible people, actually, that would use sarcasm. My apologies, and thank you for clearing it up.
I do agree, completely, it is torturous. I've done it many times, and only at a school was I ever allowed to sit without getting written up. Weirdly, the employees comfort was rarely an issue.
When all you are obligated to do is man a cash register, yet you are required to stand up all day, it says more about what perceptions people have about other people in these roles.
Sitting implies to other people that you're lazy and lack a work ethic, because anyone with a drive wouldn't be a cashier. In reality people just need a couple moments relief from the back and foot pain. Not even slightly taking some weight off by leaning against a stool is permitted.
This type of perspective can easily start to infiltrate technology. Someone already made a comment about how they thought this would be about managers forcing people to use standing desks. Do you want to be passed over for a raise by management because you sat down at work while coding for most of the day, compared to co-workers using a standing desk?
At my local Aldi, the cashiers all have seats, but they work incredibly hard and efficiently. I don't feel like them sitting has a negative effect on perception.
(I don't know if this is normal for Aldi, but I mention the name because of relative uniqueness of Aldi in the U.S. compared to other grocery stores).
Aldi is a German company. Every grocery store I've been to in Germany has seats for the cashiers. Also, the cashiers wear name tags that read Mr. or Ms. Blah.
I suspect parent is correct about this being mostly an American cultural thing.
I should also add that it's not 100% that everyone has this perspective, and it could vary by region in the US. Sometimes it's employers who think that customers might perceive this. It might even just be the case of a vocal minority of people who think everyone else doesn't work as hard as them.
> It might even just be the case of a vocal minority of people who think everyone else doesn't work as hard as them.
I worked in a grocery store (in the US) back in the day. People complained about the smallest stuff -- that I wasn't as conversational as they wanted, or that I wouldn't process their coupons in the order that they expected, or even in one case that I wouldn't help them steal from the store.
Maybe 1 in 10 complaints I received was even remotely close to something a sane human would be even mildly inconvienanced by (and even for those I can't imagine ever caring enough to spend my free time complaining to a grocery store manager). It wasn't just me or just that store; management had an entire formal process passed down from the corporate office for figuring out which complaints should contribute to evaluations and which were spurious. I never had less than 10 complaints per quarter and only two of those were mentioned in my evaluations over a several year period. Other cashiers had similar numbers. Interestingly, friends who worked at non-grocery-stores encountered these sorts of things far less often.
I'll never understand the psychological reasons for why people behave like this. It's probably the same reason people troll. But I do wonder whether it's a US-specific phenomenon wrt grocery stores specifically.
I think unfortunately you're right with your thoughts about the perception, but this leads to very misguided customer happiness management crap.
Since it's well known that cashiers (especially at grocery stores, but in most countries this is a general thing) are not that well paid while the work is all about speed and efficency (aside all those unpaid overtimes, at least in German discounters), it tells much about prevalent work ethics.
It should be
"Why on earth should those people stand while doing this monotonous work everybody needs to get done?"
instead of
"Why are those lazy people are allowed to sit while taking my hard earned money?"
But I doesn't think that those customer happiness advocates do care much about those trivial considerations.
Or a little cubicle and a desk like the managers have. This way both the customer and the employee can both sit. The guy next to me in line doesn't need to know I just put $1000 in my pocket.
Here's a weird observation. I recently moved from the Seattle to Austin. In Washington State, every single bank I went to it was open air between the teller and the customer. Here in Austin, the credit union I use has a physical non-transparent wall and you can only see the teller through a video screen and microphone.
If they're in the rapidly gentrifying area(s) on the East, which have traditionally been rife with poverty and petty crime (they were 10 years ago when I was there and before real estate is what it is now), then I'd answer "A lot more, a lot more stabbier."
Use a bank that doesn't have tellers? You don't stand at First Republic Bank. The bankers have desks. You sit down with them for any transaction you need personal help with. Sorry if that sounds like an ad for my bank but so far, 9 years, I'm a happy customer
To be honest, that sounds annoying. I just need to hand the teller some papers, and have them give me back a receipt. I don't want to sit down and bond and feel respected; I want to go into a building and come out having accomplished my task, preferably in under five minutes.
I've been served faster at first republic than I ever have at a bank with tellers. It's possible I've just been lucky but I've never had to wait, something that can't be said for my experience and banks with tellers.
In the banks I've been to, the tellers are for quick in-and-out tasks like depositing or withdrawing money, and I'd no more expect to sit down for that than I would expect to sit down when ordering a cup of coffee or purchasing groceries. For longer tasks, like opening/closing/adjusting accounts, they have bankers with desks and chairs for all.
That said, I certainly would have no problem if the teller was sitting, even though I wouldn't expect to sit myself.
Do Americans really expect that a teller should have to stand all day because each individual client is only momentarily standing during the course of their transaction? It seems the most inane argument (or have I just fallen victim to Poe's Law?)
Reminds me of a couple paragraphs in this [1] story:
>Over and over again, I'd listen to someone's story of how back pain meant they could no longer work, or how a shoulder injury had put them out of a job. Then I would ask: What about a job where you don't have to lift things, or a job where you don't have to use your shoulder, or a job where you can sit down? They would look at me as if I were asking, "How come you didn't consider becoming an astronaut?"
>One woman I met, Ethel Thomas, is on disability for back pain after working many years at the fish plant, and then as a nurse's aide. When I asked her what job she would have in her dream world, she told me she would be the woman at the Social Security office who weeds through disability applications. I figured she said this because she thought she'd be good at weeding out the cheaters. But that wasn't it. She said she wanted this job because it is the only job she's seen where you get to sit all day.
It's easy to denounce things like this as a burden on employers. But I think it's certainly better for society than having a bunch of people not working because in order to work, you need to either have a college degree or be willing to stand for 8 hours straight every day.
I don't think anything can make a straight-faced argument that having to provide cashiers or tellers with a chair is a "burden." You can literally find a metal folding chair on the side of the road and buy a $1 pillow from a dollar store or Goodwill.
I know mlrtime's comment probably isn't conducive to a good discussion, but it's worth noting that his example isn't that crazy. There are lots of extremely expensive adjustable desks for folks who want to stand up while they work, and most are bought by government agencies or large lumbering firms.
It's not that courts mandate super expensive desks per se, but their mandate interacts with several other institutional disfunctions and, in real life, leads to mid- and lower-level employees buying $10k desks on someone else's dime.
It's a pretty large mental leap to go from "you have the right to sit down" to "you have the right to sit in this specific chair that [in the case of cashiers or bank tellers] costs 4-6 months of your salary"
Sort of funny how office jobs have the opposite problem: of people who are suffering pain because they have to sit without standing for long periods, and can be accomodated with adjustable, standing desks. (I suspect these will be standard in the future because of findings about the long term damage of sitting.)
Also funny, in a gallows humor kind of way, how people are being considered disabled (both by themselves and the social insurance system) despite the existence of trivial accommodations. It's like if someone's "dream job" were where they could move up close to the stuff they work with so they could see it better, since "the faraway stuff is so blurry".
I find it easier to drink lots of water while at work. It is difficult to remember to drink water and if I drink more water, I will use the restroom at least once every hour.
Thankfully, I've yet to work at a place that prohibited employees from going to the restroom every hour. If they want to check if I am really using the restroom, they're free to do so I guess (although I would start looking for a new job if this were the case).
I'm all for providing sensible working conditions for workers. There ought to be some minimums set by OSHA, sensible minimums, rather than bare minimums. Yet... There is a disparity between what people will put up from other people and from themselves.
Say someone set up a food truck. If they run their own food truck, they'll have internal minimum working conditions (I won't work more than 14 hrs per day and I'll take a couple bathroom breaks). But if they were working that same food truck but for someone else, even if the money in the bank were the same, they'd likely have different internal minimums.
I worked as a cook for about ten years before I got into tech, my back still hurts to the point that I have trouble getting out of bed about 5 - 10 times a year from 50+ hours of standing/running around on tile floors. I'm 27. If employers don't want to provide chairs then they should be on the hook for medical costs (and none of this "pay a lawyer and sue us and maybe in 3 years you'll get a partial payment provided we didn't go bankrupt" nonsense). The new American trend appears to be that business should never have to pay any of the externalities they cause and it seems to be a model that both the left and right agree with lately.
Weird that the headline and most of the story are completely at odds with the court decision they describe. Literally all the court seems to have said is that you have to make a decision about providing seats at cash desks on the basis of the task of working at the cash desk, and not based on the complete set of tasks the worker might have to do across the day. The employers are still free to argue that cashier will do better cashiering while standing up.
52 comments
[ 0.18 ms ] story [ 96.2 ms ] threadI do agree, completely, it is torturous. I've done it many times, and only at a school was I ever allowed to sit without getting written up. Weirdly, the employees comfort was rarely an issue.
Sitting implies to other people that you're lazy and lack a work ethic, because anyone with a drive wouldn't be a cashier. In reality people just need a couple moments relief from the back and foot pain. Not even slightly taking some weight off by leaning against a stool is permitted.
This type of perspective can easily start to infiltrate technology. Someone already made a comment about how they thought this would be about managers forcing people to use standing desks. Do you want to be passed over for a raise by management because you sat down at work while coding for most of the day, compared to co-workers using a standing desk?
(I don't know if this is normal for Aldi, but I mention the name because of relative uniqueness of Aldi in the U.S. compared to other grocery stores).
Aldi is a German company. Every grocery store I've been to in Germany has seats for the cashiers. Also, the cashiers wear name tags that read Mr. or Ms. Blah.
I suspect parent is correct about this being mostly an American cultural thing.
I should also add that it's not 100% that everyone has this perspective, and it could vary by region in the US. Sometimes it's employers who think that customers might perceive this. It might even just be the case of a vocal minority of people who think everyone else doesn't work as hard as them.
I worked in a grocery store (in the US) back in the day. People complained about the smallest stuff -- that I wasn't as conversational as they wanted, or that I wouldn't process their coupons in the order that they expected, or even in one case that I wouldn't help them steal from the store.
Maybe 1 in 10 complaints I received was even remotely close to something a sane human would be even mildly inconvienanced by (and even for those I can't imagine ever caring enough to spend my free time complaining to a grocery store manager). It wasn't just me or just that store; management had an entire formal process passed down from the corporate office for figuring out which complaints should contribute to evaluations and which were spurious. I never had less than 10 complaints per quarter and only two of those were mentioned in my evaluations over a several year period. Other cashiers had similar numbers. Interestingly, friends who worked at non-grocery-stores encountered these sorts of things far less often.
I'll never understand the psychological reasons for why people behave like this. It's probably the same reason people troll. But I do wonder whether it's a US-specific phenomenon wrt grocery stores specifically.
Since it's well known that cashiers (especially at grocery stores, but in most countries this is a general thing) are not that well paid while the work is all about speed and efficency (aside all those unpaid overtimes, at least in German discounters), it tells much about prevalent work ethics.
It should be
"Why on earth should those people stand while doing this monotonous work everybody needs to get done?"
instead of
"Why are those lazy people are allowed to sit while taking my hard earned money?"
But I doesn't think that those customer happiness advocates do care much about those trivial considerations.
Because the client is standing.
At my CU there is a teller there 24/7, it's just that after hours it is via video terminal integrated with the ATM piped to some remote office.
That said, I certainly would have no problem if the teller was sitting, even though I wouldn't expect to sit myself.
>Over and over again, I'd listen to someone's story of how back pain meant they could no longer work, or how a shoulder injury had put them out of a job. Then I would ask: What about a job where you don't have to lift things, or a job where you don't have to use your shoulder, or a job where you can sit down? They would look at me as if I were asking, "How come you didn't consider becoming an astronaut?"
>One woman I met, Ethel Thomas, is on disability for back pain after working many years at the fish plant, and then as a nurse's aide. When I asked her what job she would have in her dream world, she told me she would be the woman at the Social Security office who weeds through disability applications. I figured she said this because she thought she'd be good at weeding out the cheaters. But that wasn't it. She said she wanted this job because it is the only job she's seen where you get to sit all day.
It's easy to denounce things like this as a burden on employers. But I think it's certainly better for society than having a bunch of people not working because in order to work, you need to either have a college degree or be willing to stand for 8 hours straight every day.
[1] http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
http://store.focalupright.com/sphere-standing-desk-p/let-100... http://www.thehumansolution.com/uplift-950-electric-sit-stan... http://www.ergodepot.com/Focal_Locus_p/focal-locus.htm
It's not that courts mandate super expensive desks per se, but their mandate interacts with several other institutional disfunctions and, in real life, leads to mid- and lower-level employees buying $10k desks on someone else's dime.
Also funny, in a gallows humor kind of way, how people are being considered disabled (both by themselves and the social insurance system) despite the existence of trivial accommodations. It's like if someone's "dream job" were where they could move up close to the stuff they work with so they could see it better, since "the faraway stuff is so blurry".
It's about as funny as how companies are letting their employees acquire disabilities despite the existence of trivial accommodations.
Thankfully, I've yet to work at a place that prohibited employees from going to the restroom every hour. If they want to check if I am really using the restroom, they're free to do so I guess (although I would start looking for a new job if this were the case).
Say someone set up a food truck. If they run their own food truck, they'll have internal minimum working conditions (I won't work more than 14 hrs per day and I'll take a couple bathroom breaks). But if they were working that same food truck but for someone else, even if the money in the bank were the same, they'd likely have different internal minimums.