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All marketing is "keep people busy" work. In Australia, people don't like service-people. There's this weird pseudo-independence thing, where we'd like to beli

by wisty 15y ago

All marketing is "keep people busy" work. In Australia, people don't like service-people. There's this weird pseudo-independence thing, where we'd like to believe that we haven't oppressed any workers to get our cup of coffee. It's not a problem if the coffee was grown by plantation slaves, and made by a Philippino guest-worker on an exploitive H1B1 equivalent visa, but the waitress had better be quick, efficient, and get out of our way so we don't feel sorry for her. If it's a waiter, he'd better be even quicker, because we detest seeing men do degrading work even more. So all the marketing is depersonalised. Cafes might have lavish interiors which were extremely labor-intensive to build, but the work is all done behind closed doors. People will pay lots of money for seamless advertising and marketing, so you can't see that a real human being had to put the sign together. It's kind of strange. I'm sure service people hate their jobs, and do kind of meaningless stuff, but no less than the rest of us.

jacques_chester 15y ago
Having worked in retail and service jobs, I can tell you that a generous fraction of Australian consumers rely on the lowly checkout chick / salesman / service assistant / phone operator etc as someone to prop up their self-worth through condescension.
- wisty 15y ago
  If you want to do something bad to a person (i.e. slightly inconvenience them) it's a lot easier to justify if you hold them in contempt.
derefr 15y ago
Reminds me of store self-checkout scanning machines. A lot of the time, they aren't actually faster than waiting in one of the staffed checkout queues—especially if they have a queue themselves, as customers operating the machines are inevitably less experienced at it than the cashiers are at operating the POS. But people still prefer them. Why? I think it's a social anxiety thing. You don't want to think that you're wasting someone's time on your goods—showing them what you've bought, having them fuss over each item and acknowledge that you bought that—when you could instead check yourself out in relative anonymity. You don't have to make any small-talk, or even take out your headphones if you don't want to. It's really about eliminating the "friction" of the social norms involved with the manual checkout process as much as it is about automating anything.

by wisty 15y ago

jacques_chester 15y ago

Having worked in retail and service jobs, I can tell you that a generous fraction of Australian consumers rely on the lowly checkout chick / salesman / service assistant / phone operator etc as someone to prop up their self-worth through condescension.

wisty 15y ago
If you want to do something bad to a person (i.e. slightly inconvenience them) it's a lot easier to justify if you hold them in contempt.

derefr 15y ago

Reminds me of store self-checkout scanning machines. A lot of the time, they aren't actually faster than waiting in one of the staffed checkout queues—especially if they have a queue themselves, as customers operating the machines are inevitably less experienced at it than the cashiers are at operating the POS. But people still prefer them. Why? I think it's a social anxiety thing. You don't want to think that you're wasting someone's time on your goods—showing them what you've bought, having them fuss over each item and acknowledge that you bought that—when you could instead check yourself out in relative anonymity. You don't have to make any small-talk, or even take out your headphones if you don't want to. It's really about eliminating the "friction" of the social norms involved with the manual checkout process as much as it is about automating anything.