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.
I’ve anecdotally noticed that “generation war” bullshit has been increasing on social media.
I genuinely believe it is billionaire-funded “think tanks” astroturfing to redirect anger about billionaires not being taxed into a more vague “the boomers stole your inheritance” thing.
Millennials are being told “you are the smartest generation because you grew up digital native but without the brain rot of Gen-Z.”
Gen X are being told “you’re the last generation that weren’t a bunch of pussies.”
It’s all bullshit designed to make people tribalize against each other instead of seeing the obvious fact that about 10,000 extremely rich people are plundering everything and crashing the economy in the process.
It’s just triangulation done to billions.
They did this to Millenials in the 2010s: https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,2143001,00.html
Besides generational warfare of pitting proles against each other, it’s also just the old resenting the young - a timeless classic - in each iteration.
(e.g: Things like Skibbidi Toilet is generation Alpha/Z’s Nyan Cat or Annoying Orange; or in other words, nothing new under the sun.)
Youngest guy in our team basically glued himself to me the first time we met and he became my little apprentice. All he asked me for was agency and a little guidance so I gave him that and he flew. Anyway my work son is now moving to another company with a huge payrise… damn they grow up so fast.
Those i work with who are the same age as me or older literally cant be fucked and i hate them all. There’s nothing quite like that early 20s energy and some agency to do shit.
We heard the same thing about millennials and Gen X, of course it’s bullshit.
Personally I think a lot of this generation war stuff comes from the fact that many younger people are aware that the process of stripping the copper wires has left them with no future in sight. So there are all of these attempts to direct hatred/failure to conform with bourgeois morals against people whom the western promises of consumer goods are not accessible.
