12 ms·
Rejected for a Job at the Container Store
- dang 12y agoUrl changed from http://www.nextavenue.org/article/2014-11/rejected-job-container-store http://www.nextavenue.org/article/2014-11/rejected-job-conta... to original source.
- morgante 12y agoThanks!
- gdilla 12y agoGreat story; great writing. I feel like the Container Store would reject anyone who seemed overqualified. If only because they know they'd bolt if something better came up. Of course, that's not a given, but you can understand where they're coming from.
- checker 12y agoYou make an interesting point. It seems like it might be a scenario where one might actually need to tone down the resume to get the job.
- jldugger 12y agoIt's seasonal help. People bolting is a Best Case Scenario.
- justathrow2k 12y agoThat's pretty close to the truth - people bolting after the seasonal rush is over is the best case scenario - they still want the people do they end up hiring for the period to stay on through the entire period.
- georgemcbay 12y agoWhile I think you're probably right about their motivation, I think a lot of companies seem to apply the "overqualified" classification in stupid scenarios. For example, this is a job for a seasonal door greeter at retail, by definition it is temporary. Even if it wasn't meant to be temporary, is someone who is "overqualified" really more of a statistically significant "flight risk" than some high school kid, an elderly retiree, or someone who somehow has made a career of being a seasonal door greeter? I suspect all classes of potential hires would be very nearly equally incredibly unreliable in the long-term for a job of this ilk, if you actually hired from all groups and did a study on job longevity.
- VLM 12y agoGoogle for "retail turnover rate". A quarter century ago when I was working retail it was about 100%, and according to google it remains around 100%. What you're worried about has been BAU for more than a quarter century. Training varies from an hour or so, up to maybe 10 hours for the most demanding cashiering jobs, although those are often hired from within. Its a little different from skilled trades or silicon valley programming.
- gdilla 12y agoturnover is always 100% given enough time. I think the more overqualified you are, the more they think you can bolt quicker than usual.
- VLM 12y agoThat stat is almost always expressed annually. So the average employment length is a year, but more realistically the "old" first shift people work there about four years and the kids and seasonal work there about ten or so weeks at most, its not a smooth bell curve.
- morgante 12y agoThanks to juanplusjuan for submitting! I'm the lead engineer at Cafe, so if you spot any issues please do let me know. (Also, if you want to help build top-tier tools for writers like Deb to publish online, we're hiring: http://cafe.com/careers http://cafe.com/careers)
- solaarphunk 12y agoHow is Cafe different from Medium? It looks identical.
- morgante 12y agoFor one thing, all our writers are paid. (We believe that great writing should be valued.) We're also trying to do a better job of driving targeted traffic to articles on our site. Since Medium accepts virtually all content, they can't make the smart investments in promotion and marketing that we're making. (We're also building some sophisticated technology for modeling these audiences across the web.) Also, we offer editing services to all our writers. Hopefully this manifests in higher quality writing.
- bensherman 12y agoThe pull quotes are annoying.
- morgante 12y ago> The pull quotes are annoying. Thanks for the feedback. I'm actually personally sympathetic to that viewpoint, but our writers like using them to break up stories. Would it be helpful if they weren't full width?
- warble 12y agoImages instead? Although peppering of stories with boring stock photos isn't great either. Original art is of course expensive, but that would be best.
- 12y ago
- steven777400 12y agoArticles like this seem to be among the best ammo to support single-payer healthcare and a basic income for all adult citizens. In addition to shielding workers from harm due to business changes, this would also enable more entrepreneurship since the risk of failure would be much lower for people starting new businesses. Small businesses would also be more enticing to work for, since they wouldn't need to directly provide health insurance and the specter of the business folding wouldn't be as much of a concern.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoI've always wondered if basic income would remove the need for VCs; everyone in your startup is essentially fully funded then (as long as you didn't need to live in an expensive locale) and your only cost is AWS (or whatever infrastructure provider you're running on).
- jonlucc 12y agoOr perhaps VCs would shift to more expensive fields like hardware, internet of things types of projects.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoDefinitely this. They'd move to capital-intensive projects (Tesla, SpaceX, etc).
- sanderjd 12y agoIt would probably still make sense to sell some equity for the ability to pay your employees a reasonable salary. Basic income isn't meant to be much.
- wutbrodo 12y agoThis effect would be attenuated by the fact that you could pay the equity to employees directly. You are of course correct that for those employees who would rather get a high stable income instead of equity, you would likely need a third-party that was interested in equity alone. But remember that the calculus for stability vs equity would be changed for the employee pool too, so it may simply become the norm to work for equity in a startup.
- ChuckMcM 12y agoI have read a number of these stories. Mostly people gripping with the realities of life. A lot of struggle, and a lot of pain. One thing that helps me is my faith. Not that I think some deity is going to rescue me from hard times, but to let go the frustration and anger at things I cannot change to a higher power where I don't have to worry about them.
- rayiner 12y agoI also thought about faith, but from a different direction. I think there are a lot of people, making decisions, who could do with a little fear of eternal damnation.
- zo1 12y agoI was going to respond to your magic-market fairy reference, but I see you removed it now just as I clicked reply. Oh well... I thought it was the norm around here to put little "Edit notes" at the bottom of your post if you edit it?
- jaredsohn 12y agoMy own personal rule would be to only mark that I edited a post if somebody actually replied to it and my change was relevant to that response. (It is unfair to make the response no longer make sense.) I've actually edited this response six or so times so far, but would expect few people to notice and marking it as "edited" would just introduce noise.
- dismal2 12y agolet go of frustration and what, die hungry in the streets?
- phaemon 12y agoFrustration doesn't fill your stomach as readily as you imagine.
- 12y ago
- mmanfrin 12y agoI don't understand how the Container Store fits in to this story, other than the fact that she was denied a job. Also, I disagree with this: Because seriously, if an Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad cannot land a job as a greeter at The Container Store—or anywhere else for that matter, hard as I tried—we are all doomed. Being an author does not qualify you to work in Loss Prevention. It may, as gdilla pointed out in another comment, even make you overqualified for the position. I sympathize with the author, and I think there is a compelling story here about healthcare, but the title undermines it severely by making it about how she failed one attempt to get an entry-level job; and it almost feels like a form of blackmail: The Container Store now has to deal with this widely-shared article about how they didn't give a poor, cancer-having mother a small little job.
- uiri 12y agoI agree that the Container Store (meaning the company, the physical store, the people who work there) doesn't fit into the story very well. I think that for the author, the Container Store is a symbol of order and control in the author's otherwise chaotic and out of control life. Containers allow people to organize their things, so, to the author, the Container Store symbolizes taking control of and organizing one's life; placing each piece of it into the right "bin". The author feels like their life is out of control and the rejection from the Container Store thus reflects that symbolically. The author should have expanded further on what the Container Store means to her, but I think I have a reasonable interpretation.
- dkrich 12y agoI agree. Given the fact that she mentioned multiple times trying to sell a novel and a tv pilot, I doubt that this was an earnest attempt to get a job, but rather an earnest attempt to get fodder for an overly-complicated article about being rejected from a menial job at the expense of somebody else (The Container Store). For all we know, they rejected her to give somebody who didn't have a Harvard degree a chance to earn some income.
- DavidAdams 12y ago
- cblock811 12y ago> most of us are just a single job loss, a single medical diagnosis, a single broken marriage removed from a swirling, chaotic, wholly uncontained abyss. I completely understand that. I was transitioning from my old industry into tech and was hit with some surprise medical issues. If I didnt have the luxury of a large savings I would have been de-railed completely. I was also lucky that Lyft was an option in SF because I got rejected by several companies along the way. Now that I have a start in a new career I'm pretty keen on rebuilding to ward off the next random disaster.
- Someone1234 12y agoWhy do authors/sites insist on doing this: https://i.imgur.com/aCAmbQ2.png https://i.imgur.com/aCAmbQ2.png It is super annoying and adds no additional content by design. There's like four or five of these throughout the article. As to the article most of the issues seem to revolve around a broken healthcare system (i.e. no public option, insurance through employers, unemployed pay more than employed, etc). Although the author does start to come across as a little entitled when she brought up her Harvard education and how people like her weren't meant to be in positions like this... I liked the first 2/3 of the article, just the end is kind of irksome. Harvard, CEO pay, gender gap, etc none of this came across like the author likely intended. I bet she didn't customise her resume for "The Container Store" job and just forwarded her normal/writer one.
- dkrich 12y agoWhy do authors/sites insist on doing this I suspect that apart from the uncontrollable desire to add something that is perceived to add some aesthetic value to the article, that there is some precedence to these enlarged excerpts actually resulting in increased readership. I don't have data to back this up, but I know that David Ogilvy regularly discussed his almost formulaic use of serifed bold headers, slightly smaller, bold subheaders, and images because they were shown to increase the readership of his advertisements. My guess is that these are used for a similar reason.
- zevyoura 12y agoThat technique is called a pull-quote[0] and is largely a relic from print publishing. It can still work well on occasion, but the example you cite is particularly bad because it's too long and interrupts the content rather than being floated to the side, allowing the content to flow around it. [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pull_quote
- morgante 12y agoThanks for the feedback! I actually definitely agree with you: that pull quote in particular added no value and I've removed it. We've had this debate internally (I'm personally not a fan of pull quotes), but a lot of writers like them for the ability to highlight key points and to break up the stories. Would it maybe be helpful if we didn't make the pull quotes full width? Or required that they be shorter?
- kazinator 12y ago> Because seriously, if an Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad cannot land a job as a greeter at The Container Store—or anywhere else for that matter, hard as I tried—we are all doomed. If she actually put "Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad", of course it was rejected. Such an application is overqualified, and it looks strange that someone who actually has those credentials would want to do something like that. If she didn't put that on the application, then it is not intellectually honest to say that an "Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad" was rejected. The person that was rejected was the character that is described in the job application, not the author who is hiding behind that character! The people doing the hiring for this type of greet-the-public job are usually looking for "fresh faces" who project a certain image, which means, of course, that the jobs tend to go to attractive young people. Nobody cares about your bestselling writing, Harvard degree or Emmy award: unless perhaps the latter is in an "Oustanding Lead/Supporting Actor in ..." category because then, doh, you're actually famous, in the sense that random people in the public recognize your face!
- jeffreyrogers 12y agoThe point is more that she exhausted her other opportunities and The Container Store was a last resort.
- kjs3 12y agoStill...that's probably not something to put on a Container Store application, for exactly the reasons cited.
- DMac87 12y agoThis rung a bell - the Container Store pays its retail workers extremely well (at least if you believe their numbers): http://www.triplepundit.com/2014/10/three-equals-one-container-stores-50000-sales-staffer/ http://www.triplepundit.com/2014/10/three-equals-one-contain... If they're really investing a lot in their workers, then they want a perfect fit or ideal type of background. If they believed the writer was a risk to pack up and leave a year down the road, it makes sense that they wouldn't take that risk...
- jprince 12y agoHonestly, it sounds like during the best of times she spent each and every paycheck in full, and then when hard times fell upon her, she had nothing to fall back on. This is a common symptom in our consumerist society. An author of her magnitude would have been making enough $ at one point to stow away at least a few years' expenses if she'd just sacrificed a little more during the fat period.
- DavidAdams 12y agoActually, it sounds like she had plenty of money and just ended up being desperate to be covered by health insurance.
- padraic7a 12y agoyeah, breast cancer will probably do that to a person.
- phillmv 12y agoEh, four kids, a breakup, work that was already seasonal in nature, cancer and laid off in a recession tho. Also, authors generally don't rake it in and certainly not at the magnitude of "a few years' expenses". Maybe she could've would've should've but fixed costs are sticky and you don't have to look around very hard to find people who can't absorb that many shocks in such a short period of time.
- zo1 12y agoThen, why not income-protection insurance? That would have solved all her unfortunate-circumstance problems, including the health insurance one. Especially so for someone with some sort of seasonal income. They're the type of individuals who should know better than to not have a reasonable buffer (in case work doesn't come in that season).
- TylerE 12y agoLOL. You think such a social safety net is available in the land of FREEDOM(tm)?
- DavidAdams 12y agoThis article brings up a very important point that I don't think the author intended to make: do not sign up for COBRA. If the author had signed up for an individual plan under Obamacare within the 60 day period from when she lost her job, she would have at least had health insurance, and if she remained unemployed, she would qualify for increasingly large subsidies. In the olden days (before 2013) you had to sign up for COBRA to stay insured unless you were healthy enough to qualify for individual insurance. But now you can't be turned down, but you can only sign up during specific enrollment periods. Problem is, COBRA is still around, and companies are still required to offer it to you, even though for most people it's going to be way more expensive than individual insurance (because it's unsubsidized), and if something goes wrong or you become unable to afford the premiums, you can end up like the author, unable to sign up for an individual plan because you're out of the enrollment period. This is one of a few holes and pitfalls that were created by the Affordable Care Act. I know a lot about this stuff because my startup helps companies save money and design health benefits programs that take advantage of recent changes in the health care law (benefitter.com). If you have any Obamacare questions, let me know.
- wspeirs 12y agoYou can also retroactively sign up for COBRA. That's what I did when I left my job; went "uninsured" for 60 days then got my own insurance. In that 60 day window if something had happened, I would have retroactively signed up for COBRA (having to pay both months) and used the coverage. It's certainly a roll-of-the-dice, but for a younger healthy person like myself, I was really only worried about freak accidents and needed the money.
- numlocked 12y agoI did the same thing. I had the paperwork filled out and the check ready to go. Then I told a family member where it physically was in my apartment. In the off chance I did actually get hit by a bus and hospitalized -- at least someone could get the paperwork turned it for me. I felt sort of silly doing it, but realized that if I really was mostly worried about some kind of freak accident, then i should actually ensure that the insurance could kick in following said freak accident.
- Mikeb85 12y agoSeems to me like the author is seriously overqualified to be working at the Container Store. That's probably why she was rejected. Also, the whole article is a great example of why single-payer socialised health care is a good thing. Living in Canada, I don't have to worry that a job loss means no health coverage.
- phillmv 12y ago>Living in Canada, I don't have to worry that a job loss means no health coverage. I wouldn't be that smug; you're still one accident or one cancer away from destitution. The surgery may be fully covered, but you're shit out of luck if you're unemployed and need physio/cancer drugs. I'm still baffled by the complexity Americans have to put up with, but we still got pretty large cracks in our system.
- Mikeb85 12y agoThere's also employment insurance from the government, disability insurance, etc... I grew up knowing someone who's been legitimately disabled for 20 years. She owns a house and gets on fine, not rich by any means, but lives a decent quality of life, without any family to speak of. Our social net isn't ideal, but its much better than most Canadians think (I know its a Canadian quality to be critical of ourselves)...
- VLM 12y agoSpeaking of Canada, in her situation, I'd think about trying to get refugee status in Canada. If her cancer comes back from lack of treatment she's just doomed her kids to becoming orphans. Its not like she'd be leaving a vibrant economy behind, if there's basically nowhere to work. There must be jobs somewhere, and if not in the USA anymore, gotta be somewhere... Where I live, everyone is underemployed, so I know without looking that she's a coastie. If coasties want to see their future, look around "the greater Chicago area". Everyone is like a former tool and die mechanic working as an oil changer, or a math degree holder working in a call center, or a biz grad working food service, or a former K12 teacher working as a waitress. If overqualified people were not hired, pretty much no one would be hired. Its pretty nuts.
- SimpleXYZ 12y agoThe actual content aside, what a fantastic writing style the author has! It's so... engaging.
- rasz_pl 12y agoThis should be titled "Life was good while I was rich". US healtcare is so fucked up :/
- peterwwillis 12y agoI really don't understand how this got to the front of HN, but okay, i'll bite: Articles like this make me ashamed to live in a country where we have so much, and yet feel the need to complain when things don't go exactly our way. As if the world owes you a lack of breast cancer, or a stable marriage, or a steady, decent job. Ask the migrant worker who's here illegally, far from his family, who works a soul-crushing routine, saving pennies to send home, with no visible end in sight, with absolutely no form of health care, with virtually no rights as a non-citizen, about finding a job. Maybe he's lucky that he doesn't look for white-collar jobs. That he only has to stand outside a home depot in the rain and hope to get randomly selected, jump into the pick-up, and head off to whatever manual labor might make him a few bucks that day, so he can put a small portion away for his family and use the rest to buy something from the dollar menu. Poor us, we starving, huddled, highly educated, successful, safe, free, white middle-classes. Jobless? Cancer? Kids to support? Even with all of that, there's still so many options and opportunities afforded to this person. Sometimes things won't be perfect. Bumps in the road happen to everyone at some point or another. But that doesn't mean you have to wallow in your misfortune. You can also take stock of how much good there still is, and how much worse off you could be. Be thankful for the bumps and keep on rolling.
- wutbrodo 12y agoPerhaps other people have standards higher than rock-bottom? You could just as easily point to people 500 years ago and say how much better off we are than them, so why every try to identify shortfalls and improve them?
- ja27 12y agoIf you think that having an Emmy, degree from Harvard, and a slot on the NYT best-seller list makes you any more qualified for a job at the Container Store than a 19 year old high school dropout with 2 years of McJob experience, you might be a classist.
- crpatino 12y agoAgreed. College educated people tend to never think much about the overwhelming amount of tacit knowledge needed for less prestigious and apparently simple jobs. Still, I can feel the pain of the author, having gone through several months of unemployment at the beginning of my marriage. You did everything the elders told you to do, and still you end up getting the short stick and thrown to the sidewalk. I was able to pivot my career and bounce back, in part due to being still youngish... in part thanks to the support of my family. But I can clearly see what a shipwreck that would have been 20 years later, minus a spouse and plus a couple of teenager kids.
- wutbrodo 12y agoSeriously...I find the implication that all retail work is just being a warm body is pretty damn insulting, and I've never even worked retail.
- JonFish85 12y ago"For years we Americans have been fed the convenient lie: study hard, work hard in your chosen field, work hard at your marriage, save money, organize your flour, salt, and sugar into labeled bins, and you will be in control of your life and your destiny." I'm officially starting to get sick of hearing this. Yes, it's an interesting story, and yes, US Healthcare is in need of some serious fixing, whatever that may mean to you. But nobody ever guaranteed that you'll be in control of your life and your destiny. Freak things happen; life isn't fair. All of these things (work hard, save, study, etc.) are good to teach kids, because it increases the odds of being in control of your own destiny. But that's it--it tilts the odds slightly in your favor. What else would you rather teach your kids? The author mentions her own child is paying his/her way through college. Is that a bad thing? If higher education is a part of this "convenient lie", perhaps you should tell your child: it doesn't matter if you study hard or work hard--just sit back and wait for things to happen. Perhaps sitting down and talking with her children about career paths. No one ever guaranteed that she'd be financially independent regardless of what she chose for work (that I know of, anyways). If she chose to go into a field that she LOVES, but that doesn't pay much, she needs to be aware of that. Writing is a difficult field, I am sure. And yes, doing what you love is important, but so is being able to do the things outside of work that you love. The article talks about "massive nooses of debt" that affect the economy. Nobody forced her child to go to a college where he/she had to take out massive loans. State schools are excellent choices! Outside of the top 10-ish in the country, I'd be surprised if the higher-cost schools are "worth" their cost. Talk to your children about their college choices! Yes, there are things that need to be addressed about our economy. Yes, our healthcare system is in a bad state. But I am sick & tired of hearing people blaming the lie that "some anonymous person/society told me to work hard and study hard, but now I'm not where I want to be--it must be society's fault". She had to downsize your apartment, she can't pay for her child's college. So what? Is that society's fault?
- briandear 12y agoOf course it is. Even worse, it's the CEOs' fault. Because we all know they didn't actually work hard to get their position, they were anointed by the king. All rich people cheated their way to the top and they should be paid more closely to the assembly line worker because after all, assembly lines are hard work. It isn't fair! It isn't fair! I blame Canada first and CO2 emissions a close second. Now someone reading this please send me $1000, I deserve it and besides, why should you keep any of it? You didn't really earn it and you don't need it. You only have it because you are a white male. I think that summarizes a large number of people's thinking on the subject.
- bequanna 12y ago"For years we Americans have been fed the convenient lie: study hard, work hard in your chosen field ... and you will be in control of your life and your destiny." Surely a nice idea, and maybe I'm a cynic, but what rational adult actually believes this? Some fields are inherently more stable and well-paying than others. "Now, in this new gilded age, where profit takes precedence over people, and commerce takes precedence over art" When in the history of the United States has this not been the case?
- solarmist 12y agoI dunno growing up in the 80's I always heard 'Get a job do that work for 40 years (with only a couple of company changes) and retire'. 'Changing a job more often than every 5 years is job hopping and that's a bad thing.' 'Most people only have a couple of jobs over their working lives.' Basically all kinds of baby boomer propaganda that was considered 'conventional wisdom'. And I pretty much believed it until I actually started working in the private sector.
- bequanna 12y ago>And I pretty much believed it until I actually started working in the private sector. Indeed. There is usually a pretty large difference between what people are told about the world growing up and reality. In my experience, people who never figure this out externalize blame when things go wrong: Greedy corporation fired me, CEOs make X when I only make Y, someone should have made sure I had healthcare, landlord raised my rent, etc. Where in this article does she take ownership of her life and decisions?
- michael_h 12y agoThe "in your chosen field" part was new to me. If your chosen field is buggy whip manufacturing, well...you're going to have to work hard at something else.
- bequanna 12y agoExactly. She was in print media and television, two industries that are quite obviously dying. Yet, she shows little interest in adapting or retraining, she simply externalizes blame and resists change. Not really a recipe for success.
- boonez123 12y agoYou can only consider you've tried to get a job if you put out 100+ cv's. Sharpen the tool (ie. Make your CV perfect), then send out 100 resumes. Good luck.
- jqm 12y agoI've found it's harder to get a job you are massively overqualified for than to get one you are barely qualified for. If you need a job which you are massively overqualified for, dumb it down and do your best to appear no sort of threat. Bosses in entrenched organizations love people who are just smart enough to push the levers, but not smart enough to appear promotable, or to become bored or feel unfulfilled and cause some sort of trouble or to notice obvious abuses and have the mental capacity and wherewithal to seek remedies.... In these types of situations, appearing dumb and predictable is your best bet. And that's a very hard act for some people.
- otakucode 12y agoWhen the Industrial Revolution came around, the amount of value a worker could produce increased a great deal. But society saw that increase as belonging to the business owner who purchased the machine. Wages fell and fell as worker productivity increased. Entire families, including children, had to work just to survive. After a great deal of fighting, and not a little bloodshed, we got the definition of a 40 hour workweek, and society came to see it as proper that a single person working 40 hours a week should be paid a wage high enough that they could comfortably support an entire family. Society expected employers to share the increased value workers were generating with the workers. We're facing a similar situation now. Computers and automation technology came into the workplace around 1980 or so. And society sees the increased value workers create thanks to these tools as belonging to the company, not to the worker. The idea that a worker should be paid enough that they can work 40 hours and provide for an entire family comfortably has vanished. Now the concern is only that no one be paid above the market rate for their position, and that the market rate be kept low. Society and the business world was entirely unprepared with the breakneck pace of productivity growth that computers brought about. The idea of having wages keep pace with the productivity gains simply seemed absurd, as it would require large and frequent raises. And now we've gotten so far behind, with wages stagnating for decades while companies have grown accustomed to ludicrous profit margins, that any reasonable correction seems ridiculous. Will we see society come around and consider it proper that a worker once more is entitled to a good portion of the value they create? Or will companies devalue jobs to the point where taking one costs more than they pay? Will we be able to avoid bloodshed this time?
- iconreforged 12y agoHere's something outrageous that a reader might have missed: An MRI doesn't have to be $6000. The marginal cost of one more MRI is pretty low (they go for under $200 in Japan, and people get them way more frequently), but the price tag quoted to insurance companies is inflated, so that the insurance companies can bargain the hospitals back down. Only the uninsured end up paying a needlessly large sticker price for things like MRIs.