I work at a nursery/lawn and garden/patio and grill furniture type retail place. A lot of our staff was older people just working there for fun, and while some of them are great some of them have been kinda pissy about certain changes that were made after we changed ownership, to the point some quit or moved to part time over it.
So we had a bunch of teens and 20 somethings move into their roles and there’s been a massive morale boost. There this one 17 year old immigrant kid who can assemble like a half dozen grills a day, a 20-something girl who took over the house plants department and has been doing gangbusters, some 22 year old guy became our delivery truck driver and he’s been totally on point. It’s been a relief for me cuz I’m an assistant manager and we used to get so many complaints about assemblies and deliveries being fucked up but now that these two whipper snappers took over I’ve barely gotten any calls from angry Boomers wondering why there fucking ceramic egg grill didn’t show up on time.
Turns out when you give kids something more stimulating to do than standing at cash register all day they actually can thrive.
Absolutely. It’s also worth pointing out that since about the mid 2000s workplaces realised they could fire a bunch of people and just make their younger employees do a bunch of roles in one job that used to be spread out over several employees.
I once had a old guy tell me that his first job in the 80s at a company was sweeping. Just sweeping. Not any other maintance or cleaning. Just sweeping.
One guy. Just sweeping. He bought a house with that job.
He used to constantly complain about the other employees being lazy too.
I’ve been advocating for all these younger people getting raises and promotions, and thankfully my boss isn’t a total ass and has been trying to accommodate as much as corporate lets him.
As a crab in the crab pot, it offends me to see other crabs climbing higher when it could instead be me standing atop some other crabs.
Look I crawled over a dozen crabs to get to the rim and goddamn the view of the kitchen is tantalizing
Every job you have to be a self-motivated, self-starter, go-getter, cos sure as hell nobody is going to spend the time to train you on the job. ‘Onboarding’ in the average role is a (metaphorical, usually) smack on the bum and someone to point you to where the break room is.