>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>My hypothesis is that poor service is an index of retail workers'
>>excellent quantitative literacy that is not measured by Adult
>>Literacy Surveys. When customers ask dumb questions about
>>products, retail workers's working-class calculators automatically
>>start crunching numbers, regarding the proportions of profit
>>margins on the products in question that go into their paychecks
>>and the probabilities of how their answers (and non-answers) would
>>impact their job security, chances of promotions, pay raises and
>>reductions, and so on. Working-class calculators tend to spit out
>>the following recommendation in a second: read the poor customers,
>>who must be functionally illiterate, the product labels that they
>>evidently cannot read, or just say to them, "I dunno."
>
>I disagree. In general people want to do the best they can and they
>take pride in "knowing" and gratification in being able to help.
You're right. Many of the Wal-Mart workers Liza talked to liked retail work - they liked helping customers, and want to do a good job, even if pay and working conditions suck. I remember from my days at wage labor that not only is the boss making money off your work, s/he's taking advantage of your desire to do a good job - a moral dimension to surplus value extraction.
Doug