So You Want To Support The Economy
Here’s how it works — you walk in and ask for an application. You fill out a couple meaningless questions that nobody will ever read — the only thing that matters is the hours of the week you say you’re available for. You might think the number you put in for “Desired Wage” matters too, but you’ll find out differently at the interview, where the owner tells you matter-of-factly that you’re going to make eight bucks an hour doing this, but you might get a 50 cent raise next year if you do your job well. Your opportunities within the company are limited — you can wait for one of the managers to have a psychotic break and flee the state, and if you’re the most senior employee who isn’t a manager and you’ve been volunteering for the worst shifts and the boss doesn’t just randomly hate you for no fucking reason, you might get the manager job (or you might get crowded out by a middle aged woman with strong opinions and no hustle). Alternatively, you can wait for somebody to open a new business somewhere around you, and then slide in with your resume before opening day.
One good thing is that you can lie on your resume. You’re supposed to list previous employers so the owner can phone them and ask if you do weed or ever shat in a customer’s coffee, but in practice most owners are lazy fucks and they’re willing to risk hiring a psychopath if it means skipping a phone call, so you can say whatever you want. You can put any kind of previous experience as long as you don’t get too crazy — shift manager across town is probably fine, store manager down the street might get you caught. It doesn’t really matter, because ultimately all the jobs are the same. You might get paid a little more to get yelled at more frequently, or get paid a little less so you get to slack off and let others take the fall for your fuck-ups, but other than that all the jobs are completely interchangeable.
You notice this on your first day, when you start the new employee training. New employee training is exactly the same everywhere you go, and it’s a thirty second conversation: “See what I’m doing right here? Now you do that.” Onboarding takes all of five minutes, and even though there are only about three documents that need to be signed for you to legally work there, often that won’t happen for weeks. It should be obvious why: every minute you spend on the clock not flipping burgers or scrubbing toilets is another 15 cents out of the boss’s pocket. I like to sit down and read every page I sign when I start a new job, and watch out of the corner of my eye to see the owner fidget and squirm imagining all of the dimes slipping between his fingers.
This is part of the usual duelists’ dance between employer and employee — the employer wants to get as much value out of you for as little pay as possible, while the employee wants as big a check as possible. Even for the most faithful employee in the world — if his manager was on fire he wouldn’t piss on her to put it out unless he was clocked in. The biggest privilege any service industry employee has is the ability to ignore anything that happens while they’re not clocked in, and the most common tactic of the conniving owner/operator is to manipulate his employees into forgetting that fact. Bumbling operators will use guilt, pleading and bribery to control employees who are off the clock, savvy operators will use cat’s paws, turn employees against each other and build cult-like hierarchies of social authority among their managers. Once you’re clocked in, it’s a different matter — you do what you’re told, and you do it quickly and according to Corporate standards.
Ah, Corporate. The owner/operator worships Corporate like a dog worships a nasty fry cook — to him, Corporate is omniscient, omnipotent and infallible. Everything you do will be guided by the rules and procedures laid out in the holy texts he receives from Corporate, especially the Franchise Operations Manual, which he has memorized front to back, and sleeps with under his pillow. He does this because he nurses a secret dream to one day become a big mover in the franchise world, and because he simultaneously idolizes and resents the suits who come by once a year to talk revenue with him — hates them for their arrogant contempt of everything he’s built, and envies them the power he imagines they must wield back at the Corporate offices. He wants to open five different locations around town and become a feudal fast-food lord, undisputed master of $4 chicken sandwiches in the upper D***** County region, and maybe then finally have the confidence to look those Corporate goons in the eye when they walk in with their manila folders — but for now he cringes when they come, and he hates them for the weakness they make him feel. He fears the wrath of Corporate and so he obeys Corporate slavishly. He will make sure you do the same, especially in the days leading up to a visit from HQ. He’ll chew you out for doing anything not according to Corporate guidelines, and especially for doing anything not according to government health inspector rules.
This is a problem, because the rules of the health inspector are designed to put you out of a job. If you did everything asked of you by the government and by Corporate for the sake of sanitation, food prep, worker safety, etc. the shop would become so inefficient it would prompt the owner to fire you and get someone else instead, someone who understands the game. So instead you cut corners, skip steps, let standards slide, and usually the owner pretends not to see — he knows as well as you that most regulations are a joke. There are two exceptions: if a customer gets sick or lodges a complaint, at which point you will be excoriated for not following customer safety regulations and fired, or if you or a coworker is injured, at which point you will be reprimanded for not following worker safety regulations and forced to take full responsibility. The regulations are a shield for the employer, so he can go on making profits from cutting corners while dodging the blame for anything bad that might result. This is flipped on its head roughly twice a year when the health inspector actually visits, and then everyone is expected to follow the regulations and revenue loss doesn’t matter. As soon as the inspection is passed standards slip again, and the shop goes back to the old dynamic.
As a floor level worker, you can probably make all of 300 a week if you work full time. There are a couple of problems with this. The first one is that no owner/operator in his right mind would ever schedule an employee for full time work unless he was severely understaffed, because no owner is going to risk letting you at the 1.5x overtime pay rate you’re legally entitled to. It’s not totally his fault, mind — the profit margin on most of these businesses is slim enough that he’s not sleeping easy any more than you are. The second is that it’s 40 hours of the most mind-numbing work on the planet and you’re forced to spend a quarter of your paycheck on weed, cigs and/or booze just to keep sane. I assume it’s possible to work service industry without substance abuse, but I’ve never seen it done and I wouldn’t recommend it for any but the most ambitious. You can get a little more as a manager, but you’ll need the drugs even more because now you’re not only putting up with an obstinate boss and stupid customers, but also with your braindead subordinates in the shop, who are usually teenagers doing even more weed than you and who can’t be trusted to do anything more complicated than empty a trash can without adult supervision.
So instead you’ll need a supplemental cash flow. Some people get a second job, which solves the not-enough-hours problem but not the low pay, so now you’re working 70 hours a week and smoking two packs a day and still barely covering rent, so more likely you’ll want a side hustle. For a lot of people that just means moving some weed on the weekends, mostly among friends and family. Some have ambitions, and they’ll make an Etsy shop or a clothing line and try to harass their coworkers into buying their merch. They have delusions of making a big break and going full time as an influencer, which becomes sadder and sadder the older they get. A few come up with easy ways to grift money off of wealthier people — consultancies, interior design, tutoring, feng shui — and they spend all their time hustling around neighborhood-based social media and driving through McMansion-festooned suburbs.
They do this because the pay from a minimum* wage job is not enough, because it’s not meant to be enough. “Those jobs are for teenagers, you should move on to something better as an independent adult.” The problem with this is that teenagers are worthless little shits as discussed above, and it’s commercial suicide to only hire high school students. The other problem is that somebody has to do the job, and there just aren’t enough teenagers around: Fred McSuit might act like the only people who should ever work for minimum wage are minors and felons, but he still expects his macchiato in under 4 minutes from when he places his order. The owner/operator might talk like he’s your friend while you’re working side by side in the shop, but he still won’t give you a pay raise even if you’re twice as valuable an employee as Junior, he simply can’t afford to. American society feels entitled to a certain way of living that requires someone get fucked over. There has to be someone underpaid and overbooked, someone to get all the shit from everyone else, someone who will do the boring, tedious, focus-consuming work. We need scapegoats. We are entitled to a level of efficiency which demands someone get it up the ass, and so once you’re minimum wage and already getting it up the ass, nobody really wants you to leave. Your boss won’t promote you unless he has no other choice. You won’t get hired at a “real job” unless you get some kind of education or “real” work experience, which you won’t do as long as you’re grinding two “fake”(?) jobs and/or a side hustle. Move back in with your parents, work one job, attend community college part time, and maybe in five years you’ll get to work as a data entry clerk or a cosmetologist.
The system is designed to hold you in your minimum wage job for as long as possible, and you’ll get shit kicked in your face day in and day out. Customers act like spoiled children, blaming you personally for anything they’re not satisfied with, constantly demanding to speak with your manager, always trying to get you fired (as if your employment wasn’t already precarious enough). Coworkers will sometimes be good people, but more often they’re washouts, drug addicts and kids, the absolute dregs of society. They can’t be trusted to do their work properly and if they fuck up you’ll probably take heat for it as well. Managers get more anal the higher up the totem pole they are, and the owner/operator is watching like a hawk for any slip-up so he can berate you and justify delaying your fifty cent pay raise another six months. The only surefire way to escape is to never wind up there in the first place. But regardless of whether you get out of minimum wage work or not, someone will always be there. Like Atlas holding up the world, there always has to be someone shouldering the burden of America’s lust for Big Macs. If not you, then the struggling artist who makes six sales a week on her Etsy, or the washed out 56 year old man who is hiding out from his ex-wife and a staggering backlog of alimony payments, or the Guatemalan illegal who got duped into signing on with the owner/operator and now gets to work overtime with no pay because his family’s safety is dependent on him not making a fuss. Someone has to get fucked in order to enable America’s consumer lifestyle. Think about that the next time your pizza is ten minutes late.
[*] I consider “minimum wage” to mean anything less than ~11.50/hr, which is the average across the country and also close to what the federal MW would be if it kept up with inflation. Many jobs pay much less than minimum wage, expecting the rest to be made up by tips, which usually means a dollar or two over MW at the end of the day. Some jobs, like delivery, actively cost you money. Regardless of the specific model fucking them, all of these people are equally fucked.
