SubscribeCapitalism with a Soviet Work Ethic
Today I was reading Lindsay's excellent running piece called "Adventures in Customer Service." They're pretty funny. Here are links to Volumes I - III:
Adventures in Customer Service: Volume I
Adventures in Customer Service: Volume II
Adventures in "Fanatical" Customer Service: Volume III
The thing she wrote about that strikes me is this part of Volume III:
We have these morning meetings where we talk about how much profit was made yesterday, and how that compares to last year, etc. The meetings go something like this:
"Comrades, yesterday we sold $20,000 worth of merchandise! That is a 5% increase from last year! We are well on our way towards fulfilling the 5-year plan in 4 years! The techs are our Stakhanovites, for they sold 10 extended warranties yesterday! Furthers congratulations are in order, comrades, for our store has become the largest seller of Belkin gold USB cables in our district! Now go forth, and perform your duties faithfully, comrades! Office supply workers of the world, unite!"
This is something I've been thinking about since I had my short lived job at Structure (or Express for Men) last summer. Her experience at Office Depot, with regard to filling quotas and selling warranties, is exactly what it was like when I worked at Structure: capitalism with a Soviet work ethic.
When I was at Structure the only incentive for selling a bunch of bad product was to get a bigger discount on those products and to not have the boss breathing down my neck. The clothing discount would have been completely useless to me had I known their clothes would turn out to be of such poor quality in the long run -- just about as bad as minor league baseball tickets for the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes in Lindsay's case.
What exactly drives people in retail jobs to sell their hearts out when they don't see any real return for their efforts? Pushing such a hard work ethic didn't make much sense to me at first but I guess I can kind of see how it works now. People sign on for a regular ol' non-commission job and get sales quotas thrown at them once they're hired. They do a cost-benefit analysis of actually helping to fulfill the quotas that goes something like this:
Benefits:
- Chances for promotion (maybe, depending on the worker)
- Bad material incentives (more of a store discount, etc.)
- Boss won't bother me
Chances for promotion only apply to people trying to climb the short retail ladder. I don't think there are many of these workers, so the category isn't really that usefull for figuring out what drives workers to sell.
Bad material incentives probably influence people who can't look past the real worth of the things with which they're being enticed. But hey, we live in a consumerist society, so it works.
Not having the boss on badgering you is probably be most important factor at play. All of your transactions are stored in a database and summarized for comparison to other employees. It's a lot like playing fantasy sports, and you know what happens in fantasy sports. If you under-perform, the manager keeps his/her eye on you and might eventually drop you.
I would venture a guess that the latter two categories are probably the most important ones for getting workers to sell like crazy.
If I have to do the retail gig again, the only thing I would (marginally) care about is the boss bothering me. I think I would just keep my stats around a satisfactory level and walk away with my $7/hour. I would totally maximize my utility. I would work as little as possible while earning the same as I would working hard. At structure I was selling $900 worth of clothes in four or five hours, putting my stats WAY over anyone else's. Did it make any difference for me? Absolutely not.
Wes Clark is totally checking me out. Don't ask, don't tell, General.
