When I worked retail, I was on-site, troubleshooting an issue with a store. It was getting late, and the store associates started their end-of-day procedure.

When I worked retail, I was on-site, troubleshooting an issue with a store. It was getting late, and the store associates started their end-of-day procedure. Since I was logged into the server, I could see that we were doing a LOT of database intensive processes and that the tables that we were pulling data from to generate the end-of-day reports didn't have indexes on them. I couldn't leave until all of the associates left (policy), so, I started looking at why we were doing what we were doing, and trying to figure out how to optimize it. Being stuck at that store helped me figure out that we were probably losing close to $(rnd(2-8)13.509400)/day -- at least 253,000 per day in labor costs just in the US by having the employees wait for this to finish up -- so, I can say that sitting there and watching them struggle to wait for it to finish up would have never alerted me to these issues, as, closing our test stores only took seconds with the few transactions that we'd do during the day for our testing. I think that this is a good thing, but, only because I've seen the benefits of getting a second perspective on things. Eliminating pain points leads to happier employees. Happier employees means you don't see posts about your company in /r/antiwork these days.