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Paid my way through college working for Best. It was minimum wage. $3.05/hr at the time, unloading 60 ft trailers in 100 degree heat in the late summer. That n
by dver 8y ago
Paid my way through college working for Best.
It was minimum wage. $3.05/hr at the time, unloading 60 ft trailers in 100 degree heat in the late summer. That notwithstanding we actually had medical/dental and paid vacation time.
Often thought if they'd made it longer, it was a pretty close approximation to online shopping. Look at an example on the floor and then order from the warehouse upstairs.
- gniv 8y ago> Look at an example on the floor and then order from the warehouse upstairs. So.. like Ikea?
- function_seven 8y agoSorta. At Ikea (at least near me), you have to go find the items on the warehouse shelf yourself, and bring them to the registers still. At Best (and Service Merchandise) you collected tickets for the items you wanted and brought those up to the front. They'd enter your order, you'd pay and wait. The items would be picked and sent on a conveyor to the front.
- ginko 8y agoBetter than Ikea, then.
- rwmj 8y agoSo like Argos?
- nimchimpsky 8y agoThe laminate book of dreams
- LiquidFlux 8y agoDo Argos' have showrooms or open floors? My experience, 10 years back, was limited to a looking through a catalogue, punching in a barcode into their stock checking device, and waiting for our number to appear on the screen in the waiting area after having paid.
- rwmj 8y agoVery small and incomplete ones. It does sound like the Best store was slightly different in its model, more like an Ikea/Argos cross.
- nervousvarun 8y agoProbably the most successful example of this approach was Service Merchandise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service_Merchandise).
- dver 8y agoNever heard of them, but reading the link, yes same idea.
- wjp3 8y agoMore like Service Merchandise, if you remember those...
- appleflaxen 8y agoThe author of the article thought so. > ... They owned Best Products, a catalogue retailer that sold discounted goods in hybrid showroom/warehouses (sort of like Ikea). Selling everything from hair dryers to toaster ovens to doll-houses, they were proto-big box stores ...
- jtr1 8y agoAs a millennial, the idea of paying your way through college on $3.05/hr is mind blowing
- SpaceRaccoon 8y agoFor context, you need the cost of tuition.
- dver 8y agoMy first quarter at Cal Poly was about $90 if I recall correctly. Books were $150. Commuted to school and lived with my parents, who charged me small amount of "rent". It was close to $400 a quarter near the end.
- whyenot 8y ago$3.05 in 1974, for example, would be about $15.59 today, after adjusting for inflation. What is so mind-blowing about it?
- macintux 8y agoAre you being deliberately obtuse to be rude? Clearly the parent post was contemplating making $3.05 an hour in terms of today’s cost of living, just as I might contemplate how crazy it sounds to pay 5¢ a gallon for gas.
- zumu 8y agoHonestly, paying your way through college for on $15.59 an hour is still pretty brutal.
- ForHackernews 8y agoFor context: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/the-myth-of-working-your-way-through-college/359735/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/the-my... > A credit hour in 1979 at MSU was 24.50, adjusted for inflation that is 79.23 in today dollars. One credit hour today costs 428.75.
- 8y ago
- djsumdog 8y agoI've never heard of Best, but it sounds like it was like Service Merchandise?
- ConceptJunkie 8y agoFrom the descriptions above they do sound similar. I last remember going to Best in the early 90s somewhere in Northern Virginia. I have a boom-box CD player I got there, IIRC. The CD player doesn't work much, but 99% of time I just have a phone or tablet plugged into a cassette adapter, and it still sounds great. Best was replaced by Circuit City over the course of the 80s and early 90s and now that niche is filled by Best Buy, at least here in the mid-Altantic east coast.
- phobosdeimos 8y agoThere was an electronics retailer in my country who did this. It worked great for a few decades but online shopping killed it. A website has unlimited shelf space, physical retail doesn't. And e commerce has now been pretty much perfected with free next day delivery and internet banking.