Comment on Basic courtesy
bstix@feddit.dk 3 days agoThe CEO isn’t paying that salary. It’s a cost of business. A business you’re paying for as a customer. All the customers pay a percentage of a nickel extra for shopping in a store that has a cart returner on the payroll.
I suppose ithe job pays badly and isn’t very interesting. It’s not something I’d waste my life doing. I wouldn’t want my kids to do it either. Actually I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone. Life has much more to offer than pushing carts all day.
So, congratu-fucking-lations, you’ve created a job that nobody ought to do and made everyone pay for keeping a sorry ass kid on poverty wage.
Ok, so you’d argue that by pushing the cart back, then you’re the one doing the same meaningless job for free. Good point, right?
But here’s the catch: Nobody ever needs to return a cart.
There are at least two ways to do this.
One: We can all accept that the cart doesn’t have a home to be returned to and just leave them wherever and pick them up at the same place. This is obviously the chaotic neutral way.
Two: Pack your groceries in bags in the cart after (or while) paying. When you push the cart back towards the car, you walk by the cart corral, pick up your bags and walk to the car while leaving the cart in the corral. It’s fucking magic.
Tetragrade@leminal.space 3 days ago
Oh, first off to be clear the wealth is transferred to the shareholders, not the CEO. I can’t recall if I was trying to be evocative by saying CEO, or if it was just a slip of the tongue. Skill issue.
Cart pushing might sound like a silly example, fair enough. Though here it’s important as a debate battleground for the reality of labor struggle, I really doubt customers pushing carts is going to decisively shift the balance of power & destroy western civilisation. There is also the fact that the people doing this work might not be aware of their interests, and might get annoyed by people leaving carts out. That does harm.
You’re right that in theory the externality is split between the customers & shareholders. However, in reality when the costs are reduced the shareholders are generally able to pocket the difference as profit, since customers don’t have access to perfect information about how they’re being screwed. In theory this is counteracted by the free market’s ability to produce efficient prices (competitors will compete). But in reality it isn’t: Look around. Everything’s going up. They’re taking it.
It sucks that there’s low quality work. But what do you think will happen if that work isn’t available? If someone had that job, they could pay for rent & food. Without it? They will starve. That’s what happened in the 19th century. They. Just. Died. We, fortunately, haven’t seen what that looks like because the west is broadly still protected by the social welfare systems built in the 20th. My friend worked as a Walmart cart pusher, without that job he’d have had nothing.