Anonymous wrote:Because it's difficult to hire in those positions.
And if you're representative of the typical customer, why would anyone want the job?
Yes exactly. Customers treat you terribly, the job comes with virtually no social status.
I worked in retail and food service in college and actually really liked it. It's a puzzle with moving parts that you have to figure out how to make work as efficiently as possible while still satisfying intangible goals like making customers feel good about themselves. I could have seen myself staying on and working in a management position. But while most customers are okay, about 10 percent think you are just a member of the scummy underclass there to serve their every whim. And then when you tell people what you do, there's this visible let down, like "omg I can't believe an intelligent person would waste their time with that." I would have had to have a lot more self assuredness than I did at the time to deal with that. I became a lawyer instead, haha.
I'm still really nice to retail and food service workers, though. It's really not just about tipping (though those are always nice of course). I treat service workers which actual respect and it changes how they interact with me. The world could be a very different, better, place if we learned to respect and appreciate all work. If we treated the person at the counter at McDonald's or a daycare worker or a janitor with the same respect we treat doctors and lawyers. While the training and skills are different, the value of the work is honestly not much different. Often service work is much more valuable on a societal level because it makes society function. Yet we treat people in these roles as though they are barely human. It's very counterproductive.