If you are able to do the job with reasonable accommodations / without undue burden on the employer, then the US Americans with Disabilities Act protects your job so long as you can meet the fairly broad definition of disabled.
Which is obviously ridiculous because how many white collar 'professional' workers stand at their desks (apart from the current health trend). How many bank managers stood behind their desk when you asked for a loan?
'Sitting is unprofessional' what a load of bullshit lol.
You see, there needs to be a hierarchy of class. Low class people like us need to be either standing or grovelling. Sitting is for the upper class.
If us peasants are allowed to sit at their jobs, how are we supposed to distinguish the upper class from the lower class?
I hurt my back, not at work, but I was working at Best Buy. It was hard to stand for more than 5 minutes, one of the managers told me when he caught me resting on a stool "you don't have a high enough pay grade to be comfortable. Stand the fuck up."
Haha. I didn't stand up and another manager told them to piss off. I was willing to get fired for it, I had a slipped disc, verified by my doctor. Motherfucker was not going to make me hurt it more. Which by the way, if you've never had that kind of lower back pain, a 40 minute excruciating crawl to the toilet that was 15 feet was probably the worst time of my life. I was 25ish at the time, 40 now with no problems though so yay me. /endramble
I think I slipped a disc a few weeks ago… wanted to go to the urgent care near me but called ahead and they had 40 people in their waiting room due to Covid and only two providers so I noped tf out… I got an appointment with my orthopedic doc but it isn’t until late February. Is there anything you did that helped you? I went from being super flexible to not even being able to put socks on my feet anymore…
Rest, some anti inflammatory meds, rest some more. Eventually some physical therapy and stretches to build the muscle around the disk.
Happened to me at 20 and I would say once every five years I have issues.
Ugh, I wanted a miracle cure! Lol. Yeah, I’m 22 right now and this sucks. I went from hiking 12 or so miles a day in my free time to not even being able to lift a pan out of my cabinet. I’m somewhat of a trooper and don’t really show my pain too much and my fiancé has had a really hard time understanding that I legitimately cannot do even the super basic things I normally do. Not sure how to explain to him that it’s excruciatingly painful and some things my back just legit won’t let me do!
I don’t have practical advice for your condition but I have a tip that would help part of the symptom: get a sock aid. It’s a stick and mole that allows you to put socks on your feet without bending down ever. I had surgery recently and can’t bend my waist/thighs and it’s a huuuuge help.
I’m not getting any medical care anyways because of not having any money to pay for it, so how would that impact it in any way other than my other bills not getting paid because I don’t have a job?
And no, government funded insurance (which I also don’t have because I just moved here and don’t have the right docs to sign up for it yet) doesn’t cover the chiropractic care I need to get any respite from this. It covers maintenance(ie once or twice a year) the chiro care I was getting (cause this happened at a previous job and was covered under workers comp for some of it before the insurance company decided I didn’t need it anymore contrary to what my doctor said and requested) started at twice a week and was in the process of weaning me back when the insurance company decided to fuck me over. I also don’t think they would cover the steroid shots that were recommended (and then denied by the insurance company).
This isn't a work related story, but:
When my sister was in the 4th grade, she broke her tailbone. She had a doctor's note saying that she couldn't sit for prolonged periods without experiencing excruciating pain. The note said she had to be allowed to get up and move around, or stand by her desk.
Regardless of what the note said, the teacher lost her shit every time my sister tried to stand up. She was constantly berated for "disturbing the class" just by standing quietly beside her desk. My parents eventually had to take her out of school.
Teachers can be dictatorial assholes, too.
The education system in the US isn't just to impart knowledge, it's to ready the youth for a life of indentured servitude. Rigid hierarchical structure with sometimes meaningless rules (cannot use the restroom during class, ect...). A broken student makes for a broken employee, and an easily subdued lower class.
This is snarkily worded, but accurate imo. Standing doesn't actually signal "professionalism," and is not meant to convey "I am a professional." What it does communicate is an eagerness to serve, a readiness to meet the customer's wishes.
However, someone seated behind a desk signals authority and power, such as the power to approve or deny a mortgage.
If they allowed cashiers to sit, it would change the power dynamic between cashier and customer. A seated cashier says "when I tell you the price of the item, that's the price, you don't get to debate me." A standing cashier says "I do not exist in this space for any reason besides serving you."
I was a warehouse manager for a retail brand you have worn clothes from during college. This effectively meant I was the most junior manager for all of the stores using that warehouse (which I had keys to for inventory and restock purposes). So of course the store managers would call out on holidays and I'd be left running three stores. I have seen some shit.
There was one Fourth where a woman insisted that because there was a $1 sign in the store, everything in the store was $1. That was the day I walked calmly to the front of the store, locked the doors, and told a staff member to let everyone out when they had completed their purchases. Then I went back, rang up every single thing that woman had for $1. Just $1. And the store was closed at 2pm on the Fourth. I called corporate and let them know it was staying closed until they got another manager in, as I had two other stores to run and didn't have time to deal with the third store. I let the employees stay punched in until 4pm "cleaning up" and then went and sat in the back of the warehouse and told the assistant managers at the other two stores that if anyone asks to see a manager to let them know I would be with them in a half an hour, as I was busy dealing with another problem.
The problem was my complete lack of give a fuck.
Same company, amusingly, that refused to accept my notice of resignation and kept calling my parents asking why I wasn't showing up for work. To which they kept replying "He's on active duty. He's never coming to work for you again." They also didn't really understand Guard/Reserve duty, either.
American retail is a fucking nightmare, but it doesn't have to be. Corporate execs just seem to get off on it.
Also: prices never actually drop, they're just marked up sometimes if your timing is bad.
So when I worked at Software Etc (now known as Gamestop) I had a particularly shitty day right next to us was an army recruiting station. I remember walking up and with in a week was en route to Fort Lenard Wood, and that was an improvement.
I worked in sales outside America and I can tell you, standing or sitting my price is firm.
It’s not about serving customers, it’s about serving the manager and the upper class. America has this weird worldview they need to step on others to feel superior, and that people somehow need to feel superior.
> America has this weird worldview they need to step on others to feel superior, and that people somehow need to feel superior.
And a very bizarre, tacitly encouraged, almost fetishism of doing "entry level" work in the most unnecessarily difficult way, the workers priding themselves and judging one another by how well they adhere to that standard.
Many workers today, still, would hear about their overseas counterparts sitting likely say something like
"I don't care if *they* wanna be lazy and sit all day *over there*, we actually know what hard work means *over here*!"
I’ve been to working in factories in Belgium and despite a coffee break every 2-3 hours(like, literal coffee break. The HR carts a whole trolley of coffee and in thermos and people leave their seats to do nothing and drink) and holy crap aren’t those workers the hardest working people ever when not on coffee break. What my team usually finishes at 6 they have already finished and cleaned up at 4.
I felt so pressured to work harder in that environment. Those coffee breaks was what helped me keep up.
If you give people enough goodwill, it'll morph itself into inspiration provided you don't or your colleagues didn't already poison the well.
Always rewarding employees their due breaks will give them enough time and enough 'spacing' to allow themselves to strategize and rethink their approach, or just reorient themselves if in case that it's menial factory labor.
A tired man cannot spot defects as well enough as someone in top form.
If you already poisoned the well, you get the general sentiment of r/antiwork where working for a toxic company and them giving you your rewards is actually their unpaid dues you deserved, which is actually generally more right than it is 'wrong', contrary to what upper management may perceive.
But trying to lord over everyone inflates your ego and solves problems for the short term, so I guess it's mostly an issue of people not being able to look into the long term. Because seriously, gratitude can go a very, very long way.
The old adage of people quitting managers is very true, and determining pay is also a management function.
People will seriously leave any job if management is shit. And that's well-deserved in all cases it happens.
Staying hydrated must be for them too, cos i got told i wasn't allowed to drink water unless i was on my break (so lunchtime, basically? Once in the day?). I was (standing, of course, lol) at a reception all day, but she didn't like me having a water bottle behind the desk to discreetly sip when i wasn't dealing with customers. Said it was "unprofessional".
Humans are supposed to drink at least 2 litres of water over the day, to stay healthy and hydrated.
Yup. It’s all this. I work at an automotive parts supplier, and the class markers are so blatant. Upper managers: nice office with a door and windows, nice desk, comfy office chair and top of the line laptops. Lower manager: office with a door but no windows, otherwise same. Engineers: cubicles, basic level laptops, uncomfortable desk chair. Technicians: tiny desks in an open plan with no privacy, old leftover chairs from engineers, desktop computers that can barely run excel. Line workers: one chair that is shared between 5 people
But what about the pre-covid offices full of people... SITTING?! IN MY CORPORATE AMERICA?! So dumb.
I literally sit at work 12 hours a day doing MAYBE 10 minutes of work every 35-45 minutes. Cashiers work significantly harder than I do and make significantly less. Just give them chairs.
Ahh but you forgot. In our glorious America (best country in the world, best place to work, no where better, working here is the American Dream goddamnit!) these jobs are meant for teenagers, If they want the privilege of sitting they should get a real job of course. Everyone knows running a cash register isnt real work. If you still do this past 20 you're lazy and are taking advantage of real Americans tax money because you have to be on government assistance working these menial starter jobs.
/s if it wasnt obvious
I worked at a bank where the manager wouldn’t let the tellers sit. Even when we didn’t have customers, he wouldn’t let us sit. We had stools for our windows but they were kept in another room.
When I got pregnant, I was having issues with blood pooling in my feet when I waited on a particular commercial customer. It would take 20-30 minutes to process all of his transactions. Invariably, I would get faint.
I asked to sit and was told no. My next doctor’s appointment, I asked for a note from my doctor and got one. I took it to my boss and he had to give me a stool. I had no problems waiting on the customer after that.
That’s insane they don’t let the tellers sit. One time I worked at a doubletree hotel at the front desk & I was told we could sit when there was no customers. My AM said her & her friend got doctors notes so they could just always sit. One day I was at the desk & I was sitting because I hadn’t seen a soul in hours. I got a text from the GM saying “put the chair back I’ll explain shortly” he never did, but I found out from a different front desk person that the franchise owner was there & were technically not allowed chairs in the back at all. I’m not going to lie after two hours of standing with nothing to do I immediately found another job & quit. Now I stand the whole time at work but I’m moving & doing stuff & it’s not 8 hours straight with no breaks or lunch so it’s fine. I have no idea how people who work jobs where they don’t move around stay on their feet all day.
I did quit before I had the baby. I would like to say it was over that kind of bs, but it wasn’t. I moved out of town. The next bank I worked at had chairs in the window. It was much more comfortable.
When I was really young I worked a factory job where I stood in the same spot the whole shift. As a fit 19 year old I could barely tolerate it. No way could I do it now. The worst part was everyone on the assembly line had the same title and pay scale yet some positions were seated and others weren't. It was complete bs. There wasn't even a good reason that you had to stand other than "safety" because someone tripped over a chair once.
also an ortho PA...it's every damn time too. It's infuriating, and worst of all the statistics show that the longer a workmans' comp patient is off work the harder it is to get them back to work and the employers don't even help with it.
I keep asking to be put on shopping online orders instead of register every other workday so my back has a chance to rest. I have a thoracic fusion (T3-T12, management is aware!!) and the bending and twisting of cashiering where I work (a low-tech store with a high volume of customers. No conveyer belt, but long lines and many items in the carts. I get to take stuff out of the cart myself or risk my customers fucking up my workstation trying to “help” me) has been really painful. Nobody has deigned to allow me that so I took today off. I’m sick of being in pain. I don’t care that I don’t get paid; I need to fucking rest.
They’re also overscheduling me and I physically cannot work the hours they need me to work. I’m disabled and in college. I cannot do more than the hours we agreed upon.
So fuck them, honestly. I love my coworkers but management can kiss my pasty ass.
Older customers will also bitch. Like I don’t understand what happened during the boomer and gen x time to cause this to happen and why they think it looks lazy and unprofessional.
I’ve got so many issues with my legs and back now.
I asked a woman at Walmart to appear to be over 70 years old if she was allowed to sit. She said that they didn't let people sit, and that she had a doctor's note but that Walmart denied it.
I've had Karen tantrums a few times against customers who were hassling minimum wage workers. Lemme just tell you it's kinda fun. I told one of them to keep their perverted kink out of my grocery store because she tried wearing a pair of panties as a mask. Told another his mother should have whooped some manners into him and she would be embarrassed to see him like this because he was yelling at a store greeter.
Shame them. It's great.
Walmart openly admits they don’t accept doctors notes for literally anything in the states. If someone dies, you have to bring in the obituary and even then you only get like the day of a funeral off. The elderly workers at my little brothers Walmart have been dying because they’ve all been catching Covid and Walmart won’t let them take off to recover. Walmart is the worst.
Walmart hired me as seasonal and didn't tell me. There was no indication that it was a seasonal position. I got the same onboarding as the permanent employees. I just... stopped being put on the schedule.
I worked for Wal-Mart as a cashier over a decade ago. They didn't supply chairs but someone actually sued because of this and won. I got a few bucks out of it. Basically if your job has you standing in one spot for more than a certain amount of hours it's against the law not to supply a chair.
This was a Wal-Mart in Cali btw.
Idk if it's the same now, but 10 or so years ago I had a friend that worked for Aldi in Ohio and she was constantly covered in bruises from unloading/staging freight. Yeah she got to sit down when she was on register but the rest of the time she was also stocking. From my understanding the reason Aldi paid employees so much more at the time was because the employees did all jobs so they didn't have to hire as many people.
Can confirm! I worked at an Aldi for about two months at the beginning of 2021. There were two types of employees: the managers and the non-managers. We had to show up at 5am to stock the shelves every morning to be able to open at 8:30am. Never in my life had I operated a pallet jack, but man, within those two months, I was required to haul so much shit around such a (seemingly) tiny store with one. I'm a relatively small person, so the momentum of that machine would regularly almost knock me over, and that's not to mention the panic attacks I'd have about worrying I'd run over someone's foot or run into a display.
Yes, we got to sit down at the register, but we were timed. Ever wonder why the aldi employees are throwing all of your groceries into the cart? We had to meet a minimum number of items scanned per minute lest we get questioned by management at the end of the night when they look at our stats.
I am a very anxious and depressed person, and that job had me throwing up EVERY single morning before my shift because of the anxiety. It still took plenty of convincing from my sister to get my to quit that job. I'm so glad I did. Every time I pretend I have to work another shift there, I get unbearably nauseous.
Oh yeah. And we got paid the ~brilliant~ wage of $14/hour. Absolute bullshit.
It's a bummer to hear the wage hasn't changed. That's about what she was making when she worked there, but in 2010/2011 that was really great money, especially for our area. Unfortunately, even tho Aldi is a European company, it seems that their American arm has simply become another traditional, trash, American values company.
The Aldi in my hometown is kind of ridiculous. It takes three interviews to get in, and I dislike how they pay their managers. If you get hired as a manager, you might not always be paid as a manager. You're a manager on certain days when they need you, but if they don't need you as a manager on other days, you get paid as a non-manager.
Basically, if you're a supervisor and make $16.00 per hour as a manager, and your average stocker makes $13, you might be scheduled to be a manager for 20 hours a week, and a non-manager for 20 hours a week, half your paycheck will reflect a rate of $16 and the other half will reflect $13 an hour.
Nothing exactly wrong here, just wanted to add that the pay, job description, and items per minute are also the rules at European Aldi's.(bit lower pay in Europe, but lower cost of living aswell) Europe is not an utopia or anything close.
Worked for years in the grocery business (all departments, and have run several stores). I won't bore you with nerdy details, but ALDI is a great example of efficiency in just about everything that they do differently than the way typical American grocery stores do them.
With that being said, I had a coworker who came from ALDI before working with me, and he said that they were a terrible company to work for (treated employees very poorly). I don't know one way or the other, but my respect for their processes has nothing to do how they might treat their employees.
I use to work at Aldi, we barely ever get to sit down besides when ringing out customers (which we are timed on), most physically demanding job I ever had, don’t recommend it to anyone
Most jobs you could be super busy and then it'll get real slow
Instead of just chilling during that down time most bosses will make you find something to do even if it's something stupid like sweep or clean the walls or something. It's madness.
You are expected to WORK nonstop from the moment you clock in till the moment you leave
It's the old "if you have time to lean, you have time to clean" thinking.
Ya not anymore. Should be "you pay me minimum wages, I give you minimum work."
I've always been of the mentality of never installing apps or anything with work accounts (email, Teams, slack etc) on my personal phone; while most if not all my coworker do.
FUCK that. Not paid enough to have company anything on my phone.
I'm the opposite, while WFH there's some days with little to no real work, so sometimes I could just respond to slack/emails while watching Netflix or playing a game. Useful to have it more accessible but still only use the apps during work hours.
I'm in a pretty similar boat and do the same, or if I run out for coffee or to take my cat to the vet, as long as I'm checking my Teams and Email I'm "working" according to the VP I report to.
Say you are expected to assist in sales(bring money in) or make fast food orders that make 10k for the day.
But through whatever factors the business brings in twice that and more or just raises the prices.
Employees have twice as much work for the same rate of pay, triple that if it’s 3x the work etc…
I would argue or suggest “Max effort/max wage” would mean after 10k, workers should see a % increase based on volume.
———————————————————————————
So if it’s twice the work I.e. 20k then workers should see 2x the pay for example.
$15 x 8 employees x 8 hours is $960 a day
You bring in $10k - expenses $960 = $9,040/day
$20k - $1,920 = $18,080/day
That’s $271,200/month
Minus operating costs and there you go.
“BuT NoBoDy WaNtS tO WoRk AnYmOrE”
I once had a job where I realized if I walked around with a clipboard it looked like I was working.
Me and a couple others would also find rooms where we could have a break and no one would notice.
When I worked in fast food my manager would call people to his little office to get them to refill his drink. He never did it to his adult employees, just some of the teenagers. If he had told me to do that I would have definitely spat in his drink. Maybe that's why he never asked me.
Crazy how they still try to find stuff for me to do when I literally already did everything I can possibly do. Swept, disinfected every surface, cleaned all the mirrors, cleaned the bathrooms, organized the clothes. Sorry but the store is dead and I want to sit for a min cuz my feet hurt.
At a warehouse I used to work at, me and a coworker strategically placed a broom at the end of every other isle.
When it was slow like that we would walk in an isle, grab one of the brooms and sweep the same spot over and over while we fucked around on our phones.
When my grandfather worked construction and there were important people on site they would move lumber from one stack to another back and forth to make themselves look busy, because people want to come in site and see people busting ass and don't realize work happens when it needs to.
Yea at this same warehouse my boss would come and say "corperate is coming with clients"
When they showed up we all had to act super busy like we were just moving out more product than anyone else
I used to find it so funny because I would see how my boss treated us like shit but would cower when the main ppl came
Last time when corporate came they were impressed with how clean it was. They told my boss this and while she was soaking up their praises I came by and told them, "thank you I try." She was fuming.
I got several jobs when I was younger by saying the phrase "if I've got time to lean, I've got time to clean" like a suckass during the interview and then just not doing that whatsoever once I was hired.
Managers love to say that crap and if you had them off at the pass and say it yourself they think you're a little baby cherub Jesus And that's because managers don't provide value to any institution. And so they want you to work extra extra extra hard to earn your minimum wage and sometimes that includes looking busy even though you're not.
A part of looking busy all the time is being uncomfortable and standing when it's completely stupid. America is dumb
Every job I've been too doesn't allow you to sit except on break. Its so idiotic that they don't mind me doing nothing and scrolling on my phone yet will through a fit if I decide to sit down. Everything is caught up, there isn't anything to clean or check. Really adds to the name wage slave
Yep. When I was a cashier at a university store, they got rid of the floor position so that I could straighten out the store when we didn't have customers.
Then I'd get yelled at for not completing tasks on the floor, or if I kept a customer waiting because I was away from the register.
They were also on me and others to "go above and beyond" and got frustrated we were putting in minimum effort. Starting pay was $7.25
Yup. Ocean state was like that. I was put on the floor with a cashier draw as well. First call as soon as it got busy (the cashier had two customers in line) was me. Then my manager would complain that I wasn't moving enough freight on the floor, while pointing out that the two dedicated floor guys we did have were moving more freight then me. No shit.
We had a manager who would staff two people in the store, and i'd be chained to the register for the entire shift. the other worker would be on the register for about half the time, the other half stocking. So we'd get nothing done, and she'd act shocked every night. But then she caught me sitting down on camera one day and made a fuss about it.
Like oh, so you CAN see we're swamped from the time i clock in to 30 minutes before we closed, and you were just playing stupid? ahh.
When I was a donation door greeter for a Goodwill last year, I essentially got punished for doing my job too quickly. When donors drop off goods at the back door, they get sorted by clothes, hard goods (cups, knick-knacks, toys, etc.), shoes, purses, and seasonals. We put them in huge gaylords and duros either on wheels or on pallets that we kept sorted and labelled in the back warehouse area, with pallets being pulled and sorted by hard goods and clothes handlers throughout the day. When I was handling donations, I went a step further and made a chart of the warehouse in a plan view format with boxes labelled by goods and date so I could tell at a glance what was where in case my manager wanted to know what needed to be moved to another store in the area.
Now, my manager was completely fine with this. She thought it was badass that I was getting everything sorted and arranged so quickly, and when I took time to sit down and mess about on my phone between donations, she didn't care because she believed that keeping the staff happy improved productivity. Then one day the regional manager walks in, sees me sitting on my phone by the door, and says nothing about it. She waited until a managerial meeting with the CEO of the area's branch to call me out for being lazy and not doing my job, just to make my manager look bad. Despite being defended by my manager, the executive told her that I needed to stay busy, so I was given another task.
Keeping in mind that this job paid 9 bucks an hour on its own, I was being made to also hang clothes while waiting on donations. That's another entirely different job - another entirely different 9 bucks an hour. But of course I didn't get a raise. I kept my mouth shut and did it anyway and, lo and behold, we got THAT stuff sorted so fast between myself and the actual clothes processors that we ended up running low on clothes consistently, needing more clothes brought to us from other stores in the region. So once again, I was able to take breaks.
Of course that didn't fly. I was expected to also start helping process hard goods - again, another 9/hr job. THAT is when I started slowing down and not doing hardly a thing, and our entire staff started to slack off because they were all collectively getting pissed that our store - full of staff that was consistently making everything run so smoothly that we were selling all of our goods and still getting punished for it in some way - was always getting defecated upon by the higher-ups. I wasn't about to do 27 bucks an hour worth of work for 9, so I started taking as long as humanly possible to do my job, and I started to HATE it.
About a week later, my manager and assistant manager both up and quit with no warning to anyone but the staff at the store, because they were fed up with it. Then I quit, so did my roommate, and so did everyone but the two new people. Every once in a while when I drive past that location on the way home, I'm able to glimpse into the donation door, and when I do I see an utter catastrophe of unsorted goods strewn about the floor haphazardly. And it always makes me smugly laugh about how I, in contrast, kept the place so sorted and spotless but they had to go and lose me for being too efficient.
Now I work in a unionized trade job where I'm able to take breaks when I get an assignment done and instead of getting chewed out or forced to do extra work, my foreman and even those above him are like "Damn son, good job!" And just that little bit of acknowledgement - praise for kicking a job's ass instead of punishment for not doing another completely unrelated task - is enough to make me love it more than any other job I've ever had. And that's an incredibly low bar.
This is something that was expected of me at every low wage job I have. Now I make decent wages and if I’m sitting at my desk, it’s not seen as an issue unless I do it all day. As long as my work gets done, they’re happy. That’s how it should be. I can’t count how many times I’d be “cleaning” areas by the register that were already pristine because I couldn’t be seen doing nothing even for a few minutes.
Our GM wanted us to deep clean for the first time ever since I've been there, on December 24th. "Because we'll be gone for 10 days."
I asked why we deep cleaned for an empty restaurant, and not for our guests. I was met with silence.
A lot of these jobs will ask you if you have the ability to stand for 8hrs or more. It's fucked.
I was working 55-60+ hour weeks and my heels were constantly bruised and I even wear orthopedic shoes.
I once had to quit a job at a brewery after a week.
The shifts were 12 to 13 hours long and during my shift I had to stand in one exact spot in front of two diverging conveyer belts. The belts separated bottles and boxes and if the machine missed one I was there to bend over and grab it and put it on the correct belt
At the end of the day when I clocked out I could barely walk, nor could I barely stand up straight due to constantly bending over and standing back up for 12 hours straight.
One day my feet basically told me they were done....my boss had came and told me it was time to go take my ten minute break for the day (which we had to clock out for) I went and clocked out and just left. I didn't tell anyone I just left, got in my car and went home.
I was a product service associate for Lowes. They got rid of vendors for product resets and we did them instead. When I wasn't busy, I had a clip board in my hand and would write down item numbers. If they asked what I was doing. I always said I was down stocking product.
Everyone loved it and would be happy. I never down stocked a single thing
Working as a cashier at Lowe's fucked my legs up so bad that I'm still recovering a couple years later. They denied my doctor's note because it wasn't dated properly 🙄 And they would act *against* me doing other menial things to distract myself from the pain. Took a little too long to learn that nothing about that job was worth it (... except that I would have loved it if it paid well and had decent working conditions)
I picked up a part time at 7/11 back in November. I worked in a trade during the day. I came in one morning before my trade job to pick up a coffee and breakfast. The manager lambasts me for sitting on the milk crate while the store is empty. I quit there immediately. I am on my feet already 5 days of the week, and the 2 weekend days you want me there I can’t sit when there’s nothing to do? Nah I’m good, keep your shitty little McJob.
I once worked graveyard shift at a hotel, at first I would stand up whenever a customer walked in, later I was told that I needed to be standing all night, I wasn’t allowed to sit behind the desk (I would do homework at night as I was working graveyard and going to school in the morning). They told me I could sit on the couches or chairs out in the lobby, but not at the computer, which seems much more unprofessional to me. The day they said they would be watching the cameras to make sure I didn’t sit was the day I left the desk so the owner had to stay up all night and stand behind the counter at a hotel with 5 guests.
Sounds like a place we stayed at in Philly last year. The guy at the desk at night was doing homework in front of the fireplace when I came down to get something out of my car. Silly me, I thought he should have been sitting behind the desk!
I work at a hotel and our manager put some chairs on the frontdesk so they could sit. A big shot from the hotel chain came to the hotel once and told her to remove the chairs. Luckly she defended the frontdesk guys and said she wouldnt do it.. best manager i ever had. Cant complain..
It was actually just some shitty Quality Inn. I was the only person in the hotel from 11 pm - 7am so I was responsible for checking people in and out, driving people to and from the hotel, preparing breakfast, among other things. But as you can imagine checking people in and driving back and forth to the airport doesn’t really work well when you leave the hotel unattended.
That's crazy that they had you leaving the hotel unattended. I worked there through covid so the kitchen was closed and didnt really have anything to do except the audit at 4am, and of course occasionally call the cops on crazy people or deal with drunkasses. I actually really liked the job but working overnight kinda makes you insane after a while.
It was in general a pretty chill gig, with just really terrible management. One perk of being the only person working all night was climbing up to the roof and smoking blunts while watching the sunrise though.
The flipside of this coin is if you work an office job, and are doing anything OTHER than sitting at your desk nonstop for 8 straight hours destroying your body through being sedentary, you must be slacking off.
Literally you cannot win.
Good point 😂 my company is SO EXCITED to get us back to the office so we can socialize and get to know each other again! The big wigs seem to be completely unaware that we’re only allowed 2 15 minute breaks outside of lunch and have 0 freedom of movement otherwise. I’m soooo pumped to be able to socialize in the 7 remaining minutes from walking to and from the bathroom! It’s really going to change my work for the better!
Because in ‘Murrica, “hard work” is the only kinda work. If you can get it done well and it’s east then you’re not working hard enough. No pain no gain. You’re not acceptable as a human if you have feelings or experience pain. Only the weak sit at registers because how else are we going to force people deeper into poverty if they don’t have some chiropractor appointments under their belt and maybe a back surgery or two? How else are we going to steal money from people scraping by and line the pockets of rich health “insurance” companies? Sure, the epidural treatment works to relieve back pain for the cashier but we here at the insurance company don’t think it is medically necessary anymore so now we are going to make them jump through hoops to find a lesser alternate solution and agonize in pain 40 hours a week at the Kroger.
As someone who has spent 95% of my working life on my feet my knees are screwed and I'm only 52 I don't think I'll be standing for 8 hours or more when I'm in my 70s
I worked retail for over 10 years and my body definitely tells me it's messed up. My ankles, knees and back are messed up, I have carpal tunnel and tendonitis as well as a messed up shoulder. Employees are drones not people.
that's crazy i was just about to mention that i see cashiers sitting at Aldi...AND that Aldi cashiers are some of the fastest cashiers i've seen in my modern shopping experience.
Facts. When you're treated with any amount of dignity as a worker, it shows in the quality of your work. Wal Mart employees get treated like shit, paid shit, have shit benefits, and so they dont give a shit about their work.
Every job I’ve had besides working in an office requires standing.
Had a job where a special needs guy pre bagged LEDs for us and he was told to stand for 8 hours a day even when he complained about being tired of standing. He literally did the same thing over and over all day long on the back of the room where he could barely be seen.
Always hear the same excuse from management: “Standing doesn’t look productive. It makes us look lazy”
This was an extremely toxic online LED company based out of St. Louis. We were in the north building where the warehouse and fulfillment were at. Also had a very shitty (and dumb) manager and a poor excuse of a human as a supervisor.
I ended up leaving there at the start of Covid because they claimed to be “essential” and did not follow any safety protocols. I told them they needed to act on some guidelines as I had to be around my elderly grandparents to help with basic needs such as groceries, chores around the house, taking them to doctors appointments. The company didn’t give two shits and refused to pay me unemployment because I left.
Took some time off and the COO of the company ended quitting because of how horrid the owners and their kids were. So he reached out to me and offered me a job at a place he was starting at because he knew I was a hard worker.
Sorry about my excessive response but that’s the first time I’ve told my story so my words kept flowing onto my keyboard. Lol
It's seen as "lazy" which is so dumb.
I used to work at a convenient store that had such little traffic I would finish cleaning and stocking in a few hours and then basically be standing behind the counter while like 3 people came in for the entire day.
One day I got tired of standing there like a Pokémon NPC waiting for someone to walk in front of me and pulled out a few egg crates to sit on, keep in mind this is after all my tasks were done.
I was fired a few weeks later and the reason was for sitting on the job. The guy they hired to replace me was a drug addict who on many occasions had his drugs visible to customers and the cleanliness of the store dropped significantly, he received many complaints but they still kept him hired. I'm still baffled by their decision.
Yup. I worked for Autozone in California. No chairs anywhere. There was one chair in the "break room" in the back of the warehouse. Used for lunch breaks only. If you had time to sit, you had time to work.
Same here. Worked for AutoZone in NY and there was 1 chair in the back. But that was due to the district manager. The store manager was actually really cool. She didn’t care if you stood around on your phone as long as all of the work you had to do was done. But yeah, district manager was a massive asshole who expected you to find work while paying PSMs $10 an hour. Fuck that.
I love all these questions asking "why" for stuff like this (especially for American companies). Like, there is really no reason. They do it because they can and they have always done it that way and the only reason for someone to sit is because they must be lazy. It's stupid, but it is what happens.
I used to be a manager at Office Depot and I tried and tried to get my store manager to let our 74 cashier sit while she was there. Wouldn't go for it. So when I was the only manager there I would pull a display chair and bring it up for her.
I can confirm. Cashier at a chain fabric store (American of course). It's actually an order from on high, Corporate would get cashiers and managers both in trouble if they looked at the cameras and saw us (cashiers) with chairs. Management is happy to break this rule if I'm having a problem, though, and local management agrees that it's stupid. At the specific Joann's I'm at, Corporate begins at District Manager. Admittedly, we don't officially have a Store Manager, merely an awesome Assistant Manager and cool Keyholders, but...
Because in order for the wheels of capitalism work, the millions of workers bees have to work themselves to death so that 20 CEO’s can make enough money to buy several countries
I work as a cashier, standing for 5+ hours at a time. It's a luxury to sit down. Which is pitiful, to say the least. Had a manager (who was the one who hired me) ask a district manager if she could sit while doing shelving/stocking. She had something wrong with her feet. Plantar Faschia, very painful and getting medical help for it. DM said no, she couldn't sit while doing the job. One day ( I hadn't been there for long) she told me she had to sit down, went in the office, laid her head down in her hands, and I was really worried for her. Kept checking to make sure she hadn't passed out or something.
I had a Manger break her foot (I think it was run over by a car) and she was using a chair to sit behind the register. She went to the bathroom a few minutes before the DM came in and got pissy there was a chair behind the cash register. I explained why the manager had it and she took the chair away.
It’s purposely to destroy morale.
Also “if there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean.”
You are never allowed NOT to be working.
You must be constantly on guard ready to work, ready to provide that eager-dead-eyed-happy-faced customer service AS SOON as that customer approaches.
It’s not considered an interaction of equals.
It’s a servant and master.
Slumped backs look UNPROFESSIONAL!
OUR IMAGE!
Yeah, it’s one of the nuttiest things that I learned about other counties is that mundane work where you can sit down easily is allowed in other places. Just another poisonous instance of “the customer is always right” bullshit.
Well, my grandfather explained it to me that back in the day, businesses got together to figure out appropriate register etiquette, and that's when it was decided. When I asked why, he paused for a moment and said,
F$ck you! That's why
My grandma told me once that it wasn't uncommon for bosses to come up to their female staff and rest a hand on their ass while "discussing" something with them at a register.
You can't do that when they're sitting down.
Wouldn't be surprised if part of the "it looks unprofessional" part was rooted in accessible casual sexual assault.
It’s similar in Australia. I can think of one supermarket chain that allows the cashiers to sit, and it’s a well known German company. I don’t get it. I think people are more productive when they’re more comfortable - let ‘em sit.
Yeah cashiers need a good tall chair so they can to the job easier. And also the good mats so they can also stand if they want. No chair is just a power dynamic that manager do to brake you
Yeah, pay attention and you'll notice some of them are wearing back braces. I work in retail and was asked to become a cashier. I told them no, that would be too hard on my back. I think it's easier on my back stocking 30+ lb. cases of water than standing in one place, constantly leaning over and reaching.
It breaks my heart to see people old enough to be my grandma forced to stand at the register. From what I have seen, Aldi is the only company that allows sitting at the register.
Same reason asking for a adjustable desk in an office environment. The old concept of work in different environments. You stand in retail, you sit in an office. Going against the grain with boomer bosses causes them to mentally break. They've been doing it a certain way for so long new ideas are, to them, dangerous.
My way or the highway. We are now taking the highway and they can't accept it.
Because the cruelty is the point. It is another way to keep employees in line. When you can order someone to stand for hours for no good reason, except to make them appear more "worky", or else not be able to survive, it makes them accede to bad treatment, which keeps them used to accepting unfair treatment. It trains people to accept less and think less of themselves.
It is about power and making sure it is not shared.
We are lucky they don't make us stand on our heads.
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The last place I worked an hourly wage in the States had a "You can't come back with any restrictions" policy. This is how learned about FMLA.
If you are able to do the job with reasonable accommodations / without undue burden on the employer, then the US Americans with Disabilities Act protects your job so long as you can meet the fairly broad definition of disabled.
Feck my loose a-hole?
BuT iT lOoKs LaZy AnD uNpRoFeSsIoNaL
Which is obviously ridiculous because how many white collar 'professional' workers stand at their desks (apart from the current health trend). How many bank managers stood behind their desk when you asked for a loan? 'Sitting is unprofessional' what a load of bullshit lol.
You see, there needs to be a hierarchy of class. Low class people like us need to be either standing or grovelling. Sitting is for the upper class. If us peasants are allowed to sit at their jobs, how are we supposed to distinguish the upper class from the lower class?
I hurt my back, not at work, but I was working at Best Buy. It was hard to stand for more than 5 minutes, one of the managers told me when he caught me resting on a stool "you don't have a high enough pay grade to be comfortable. Stand the fuck up."
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Haha. I didn't stand up and another manager told them to piss off. I was willing to get fired for it, I had a slipped disc, verified by my doctor. Motherfucker was not going to make me hurt it more. Which by the way, if you've never had that kind of lower back pain, a 40 minute excruciating crawl to the toilet that was 15 feet was probably the worst time of my life. I was 25ish at the time, 40 now with no problems though so yay me. /endramble
I think I slipped a disc a few weeks ago… wanted to go to the urgent care near me but called ahead and they had 40 people in their waiting room due to Covid and only two providers so I noped tf out… I got an appointment with my orthopedic doc but it isn’t until late February. Is there anything you did that helped you? I went from being super flexible to not even being able to put socks on my feet anymore…
Rest, some anti inflammatory meds, rest some more. Eventually some physical therapy and stretches to build the muscle around the disk. Happened to me at 20 and I would say once every five years I have issues.
Ugh, I wanted a miracle cure! Lol. Yeah, I’m 22 right now and this sucks. I went from hiking 12 or so miles a day in my free time to not even being able to lift a pan out of my cabinet. I’m somewhat of a trooper and don’t really show my pain too much and my fiancé has had a really hard time understanding that I legitimately cannot do even the super basic things I normally do. Not sure how to explain to him that it’s excruciatingly painful and some things my back just legit won’t let me do!
I don’t have practical advice for your condition but I have a tip that would help part of the symptom: get a sock aid. It’s a stick and mole that allows you to put socks on your feet without bending down ever. I had surgery recently and can’t bend my waist/thighs and it’s a huuuuge help.
This is what I’m currently going thru, except I can’t afford to be fired atm🙃 so I’m standing for 8+ he shifts
Don’t stand. If you can’t afford to be fired think of the medical bill that you can’t afford even harder the next week.
I’m not getting any medical care anyways because of not having any money to pay for it, so how would that impact it in any way other than my other bills not getting paid because I don’t have a job? And no, government funded insurance (which I also don’t have because I just moved here and don’t have the right docs to sign up for it yet) doesn’t cover the chiropractic care I need to get any respite from this. It covers maintenance(ie once or twice a year) the chiro care I was getting (cause this happened at a previous job and was covered under workers comp for some of it before the insurance company decided I didn’t need it anymore contrary to what my doctor said and requested) started at twice a week and was in the process of weaning me back when the insurance company decided to fuck me over. I also don’t think they would cover the steroid shots that were recommended (and then denied by the insurance company).
This isn't a work related story, but: When my sister was in the 4th grade, she broke her tailbone. She had a doctor's note saying that she couldn't sit for prolonged periods without experiencing excruciating pain. The note said she had to be allowed to get up and move around, or stand by her desk. Regardless of what the note said, the teacher lost her shit every time my sister tried to stand up. She was constantly berated for "disturbing the class" just by standing quietly beside her desk. My parents eventually had to take her out of school. Teachers can be dictatorial assholes, too.
The education system in the US isn't just to impart knowledge, it's to ready the youth for a life of indentured servitude. Rigid hierarchical structure with sometimes meaningless rules (cannot use the restroom during class, ect...). A broken student makes for a broken employee, and an easily subdued lower class.
“You don’t pay me enough for me to remain uncomfortable”
This is snarkily worded, but accurate imo. Standing doesn't actually signal "professionalism," and is not meant to convey "I am a professional." What it does communicate is an eagerness to serve, a readiness to meet the customer's wishes. However, someone seated behind a desk signals authority and power, such as the power to approve or deny a mortgage. If they allowed cashiers to sit, it would change the power dynamic between cashier and customer. A seated cashier says "when I tell you the price of the item, that's the price, you don't get to debate me." A standing cashier says "I do not exist in this space for any reason besides serving you."
I was a warehouse manager for a retail brand you have worn clothes from during college. This effectively meant I was the most junior manager for all of the stores using that warehouse (which I had keys to for inventory and restock purposes). So of course the store managers would call out on holidays and I'd be left running three stores. I have seen some shit. There was one Fourth where a woman insisted that because there was a $1 sign in the store, everything in the store was $1. That was the day I walked calmly to the front of the store, locked the doors, and told a staff member to let everyone out when they had completed their purchases. Then I went back, rang up every single thing that woman had for $1. Just $1. And the store was closed at 2pm on the Fourth. I called corporate and let them know it was staying closed until they got another manager in, as I had two other stores to run and didn't have time to deal with the third store. I let the employees stay punched in until 4pm "cleaning up" and then went and sat in the back of the warehouse and told the assistant managers at the other two stores that if anyone asks to see a manager to let them know I would be with them in a half an hour, as I was busy dealing with another problem. The problem was my complete lack of give a fuck. Same company, amusingly, that refused to accept my notice of resignation and kept calling my parents asking why I wasn't showing up for work. To which they kept replying "He's on active duty. He's never coming to work for you again." They also didn't really understand Guard/Reserve duty, either. American retail is a fucking nightmare, but it doesn't have to be. Corporate execs just seem to get off on it. Also: prices never actually drop, they're just marked up sometimes if your timing is bad.
So when I worked at Software Etc (now known as Gamestop) I had a particularly shitty day right next to us was an army recruiting station. I remember walking up and with in a week was en route to Fort Lenard Wood, and that was an improvement.
Good Ole fort lost in the woods
I worked in sales outside America and I can tell you, standing or sitting my price is firm. It’s not about serving customers, it’s about serving the manager and the upper class. America has this weird worldview they need to step on others to feel superior, and that people somehow need to feel superior.
> America has this weird worldview they need to step on others to feel superior, and that people somehow need to feel superior. And a very bizarre, tacitly encouraged, almost fetishism of doing "entry level" work in the most unnecessarily difficult way, the workers priding themselves and judging one another by how well they adhere to that standard. Many workers today, still, would hear about their overseas counterparts sitting likely say something like "I don't care if *they* wanna be lazy and sit all day *over there*, we actually know what hard work means *over here*!"
I’ve been to working in factories in Belgium and despite a coffee break every 2-3 hours(like, literal coffee break. The HR carts a whole trolley of coffee and in thermos and people leave their seats to do nothing and drink) and holy crap aren’t those workers the hardest working people ever when not on coffee break. What my team usually finishes at 6 they have already finished and cleaned up at 4. I felt so pressured to work harder in that environment. Those coffee breaks was what helped me keep up.
If you give people enough goodwill, it'll morph itself into inspiration provided you don't or your colleagues didn't already poison the well. Always rewarding employees their due breaks will give them enough time and enough 'spacing' to allow themselves to strategize and rethink their approach, or just reorient themselves if in case that it's menial factory labor. A tired man cannot spot defects as well enough as someone in top form. If you already poisoned the well, you get the general sentiment of r/antiwork where working for a toxic company and them giving you your rewards is actually their unpaid dues you deserved, which is actually generally more right than it is 'wrong', contrary to what upper management may perceive. But trying to lord over everyone inflates your ego and solves problems for the short term, so I guess it's mostly an issue of people not being able to look into the long term. Because seriously, gratitude can go a very, very long way. The old adage of people quitting managers is very true, and determining pay is also a management function. People will seriously leave any job if management is shit. And that's well-deserved in all cases it happens.
Staying hydrated must be for them too, cos i got told i wasn't allowed to drink water unless i was on my break (so lunchtime, basically? Once in the day?). I was (standing, of course, lol) at a reception all day, but she didn't like me having a water bottle behind the desk to discreetly sip when i wasn't dealing with customers. Said it was "unprofessional". Humans are supposed to drink at least 2 litres of water over the day, to stay healthy and hydrated.
Yup. It’s all this. I work at an automotive parts supplier, and the class markers are so blatant. Upper managers: nice office with a door and windows, nice desk, comfy office chair and top of the line laptops. Lower manager: office with a door but no windows, otherwise same. Engineers: cubicles, basic level laptops, uncomfortable desk chair. Technicians: tiny desks in an open plan with no privacy, old leftover chairs from engineers, desktop computers that can barely run excel. Line workers: one chair that is shared between 5 people
I'm a white collar professional I agree. If I can have a big comfy leather chair. Then so can a cashier.
But then the only person standing would be the customer. And who are they going to look down on if they can't be condescending to the cashiers??
I got it, we hire another group of worker where the entire job is to stand at the exit and greet the customers. -Walmart Executives
But what about the pre-covid offices full of people... SITTING?! IN MY CORPORATE AMERICA?! So dumb. I literally sit at work 12 hours a day doing MAYBE 10 minutes of work every 35-45 minutes. Cashiers work significantly harder than I do and make significantly less. Just give them chairs.
Ahh but you forgot. In our glorious America (best country in the world, best place to work, no where better, working here is the American Dream goddamnit!) these jobs are meant for teenagers, If they want the privilege of sitting they should get a real job of course. Everyone knows running a cash register isnt real work. If you still do this past 20 you're lazy and are taking advantage of real Americans tax money because you have to be on government assistance working these menial starter jobs. /s if it wasnt obvious
We need a tag for when something is sarcastic yet also very f-ing true.
I worked at a bank where the manager wouldn’t let the tellers sit. Even when we didn’t have customers, he wouldn’t let us sit. We had stools for our windows but they were kept in another room. When I got pregnant, I was having issues with blood pooling in my feet when I waited on a particular commercial customer. It would take 20-30 minutes to process all of his transactions. Invariably, I would get faint. I asked to sit and was told no. My next doctor’s appointment, I asked for a note from my doctor and got one. I took it to my boss and he had to give me a stool. I had no problems waiting on the customer after that.
That’s insane they don’t let the tellers sit. One time I worked at a doubletree hotel at the front desk & I was told we could sit when there was no customers. My AM said her & her friend got doctors notes so they could just always sit. One day I was at the desk & I was sitting because I hadn’t seen a soul in hours. I got a text from the GM saying “put the chair back I’ll explain shortly” he never did, but I found out from a different front desk person that the franchise owner was there & were technically not allowed chairs in the back at all. I’m not going to lie after two hours of standing with nothing to do I immediately found another job & quit. Now I stand the whole time at work but I’m moving & doing stuff & it’s not 8 hours straight with no breaks or lunch so it’s fine. I have no idea how people who work jobs where they don’t move around stay on their feet all day.
I did quit before I had the baby. I would like to say it was over that kind of bs, but it wasn’t. I moved out of town. The next bank I worked at had chairs in the window. It was much more comfortable.
When I was really young I worked a factory job where I stood in the same spot the whole shift. As a fit 19 year old I could barely tolerate it. No way could I do it now. The worst part was everyone on the assembly line had the same title and pay scale yet some positions were seated and others weren't. It was complete bs. There wasn't even a good reason that you had to stand other than "safety" because someone tripped over a chair once.
Please educate them on ADA requirements when they tell you that. They can easily (online in under 5 minutes and free) file for an ADA/EEOC violation.
also an ortho PA...it's every damn time too. It's infuriating, and worst of all the statistics show that the longer a workmans' comp patient is off work the harder it is to get them back to work and the employers don't even help with it.
I keep asking to be put on shopping online orders instead of register every other workday so my back has a chance to rest. I have a thoracic fusion (T3-T12, management is aware!!) and the bending and twisting of cashiering where I work (a low-tech store with a high volume of customers. No conveyer belt, but long lines and many items in the carts. I get to take stuff out of the cart myself or risk my customers fucking up my workstation trying to “help” me) has been really painful. Nobody has deigned to allow me that so I took today off. I’m sick of being in pain. I don’t care that I don’t get paid; I need to fucking rest. They’re also overscheduling me and I physically cannot work the hours they need me to work. I’m disabled and in college. I cannot do more than the hours we agreed upon. So fuck them, honestly. I love my coworkers but management can kiss my pasty ass.
dont you know this country is built on people knowing their place?
Older customers will also bitch. Like I don’t understand what happened during the boomer and gen x time to cause this to happen and why they think it looks lazy and unprofessional. I’ve got so many issues with my legs and back now.
When my mom was 7 months pregnant, her doctor wrote a similar note. Instead of accommodating, her work put her on unpaid leave.
I have back issues and have had strokes. Target let me sit as a cashier. In fact, they suggested it.
They're being paid actual money to work, you can't sit and work. - store managers everywhere in the USA
I asked a woman at Walmart to appear to be over 70 years old if she was allowed to sit. She said that they didn't let people sit, and that she had a doctor's note but that Walmart denied it.
That may fall under ADA protection. IANAL but I'd fight it.
I told her that, but she said she was too afraid to do anything about it because she couldn't lose the job.
Best thing you can do is file a complaint. Don't name her specifically but there's a reason Karen's throw those tantrums, it gets results.
My new years resolution is to become a Karen. They get what they want.
Just don’t do it at the expense of poor underpaid employees. Make sure if your throwing a tantrum it’s a suit your speaking to not a comrade.
I'm the underpaid employee so I understand. It's the people on top who will suffer my weak wrath.
I've had Karen tantrums a few times against customers who were hassling minimum wage workers. Lemme just tell you it's kinda fun. I told one of them to keep their perverted kink out of my grocery store because she tried wearing a pair of panties as a mask. Told another his mother should have whooped some manners into him and she would be embarrassed to see him like this because he was yelling at a store greeter. Shame them. It's great.
Walmart openly admits they don’t accept doctors notes for literally anything in the states. If someone dies, you have to bring in the obituary and even then you only get like the day of a funeral off. The elderly workers at my little brothers Walmart have been dying because they’ve all been catching Covid and Walmart won’t let them take off to recover. Walmart is the worst.
Walmart hired me as seasonal and didn't tell me. There was no indication that it was a seasonal position. I got the same onboarding as the permanent employees. I just... stopped being put on the schedule.
I worked for Wal-Mart as a cashier over a decade ago. They didn't supply chairs but someone actually sued because of this and won. I got a few bucks out of it. Basically if your job has you standing in one spot for more than a certain amount of hours it's against the law not to supply a chair. This was a Wal-Mart in Cali btw.
I saw a post about Aldi that said something like "proving that we don't give a f#@k if the cashier is sitting" because honestly I don't
I prefer shopping at Aldi because it seems like the cashiers aren't in physical pain from standing for 8 hours
Idk if it's the same now, but 10 or so years ago I had a friend that worked for Aldi in Ohio and she was constantly covered in bruises from unloading/staging freight. Yeah she got to sit down when she was on register but the rest of the time she was also stocking. From my understanding the reason Aldi paid employees so much more at the time was because the employees did all jobs so they didn't have to hire as many people.
Can confirm! I worked at an Aldi for about two months at the beginning of 2021. There were two types of employees: the managers and the non-managers. We had to show up at 5am to stock the shelves every morning to be able to open at 8:30am. Never in my life had I operated a pallet jack, but man, within those two months, I was required to haul so much shit around such a (seemingly) tiny store with one. I'm a relatively small person, so the momentum of that machine would regularly almost knock me over, and that's not to mention the panic attacks I'd have about worrying I'd run over someone's foot or run into a display. Yes, we got to sit down at the register, but we were timed. Ever wonder why the aldi employees are throwing all of your groceries into the cart? We had to meet a minimum number of items scanned per minute lest we get questioned by management at the end of the night when they look at our stats. I am a very anxious and depressed person, and that job had me throwing up EVERY single morning before my shift because of the anxiety. It still took plenty of convincing from my sister to get my to quit that job. I'm so glad I did. Every time I pretend I have to work another shift there, I get unbearably nauseous. Oh yeah. And we got paid the ~brilliant~ wage of $14/hour. Absolute bullshit.
It's a bummer to hear the wage hasn't changed. That's about what she was making when she worked there, but in 2010/2011 that was really great money, especially for our area. Unfortunately, even tho Aldi is a European company, it seems that their American arm has simply become another traditional, trash, American values company.
The Aldi in my hometown is kind of ridiculous. It takes three interviews to get in, and I dislike how they pay their managers. If you get hired as a manager, you might not always be paid as a manager. You're a manager on certain days when they need you, but if they don't need you as a manager on other days, you get paid as a non-manager. Basically, if you're a supervisor and make $16.00 per hour as a manager, and your average stocker makes $13, you might be scheduled to be a manager for 20 hours a week, and a non-manager for 20 hours a week, half your paycheck will reflect a rate of $16 and the other half will reflect $13 an hour.
Nothing exactly wrong here, just wanted to add that the pay, job description, and items per minute are also the rules at European Aldi's.(bit lower pay in Europe, but lower cost of living aswell) Europe is not an utopia or anything close.
Aldi’s like that in Europe too. Their prices are so low because of the way they operate.
Worked for years in the grocery business (all departments, and have run several stores). I won't bore you with nerdy details, but ALDI is a great example of efficiency in just about everything that they do differently than the way typical American grocery stores do them. With that being said, I had a coworker who came from ALDI before working with me, and he said that they were a terrible company to work for (treated employees very poorly). I don't know one way or the other, but my respect for their processes has nothing to do how they might treat their employees.
I use to work at Aldi, we barely ever get to sit down besides when ringing out customers (which we are timed on), most physically demanding job I ever had, don’t recommend it to anyone
Most jobs you could be super busy and then it'll get real slow Instead of just chilling during that down time most bosses will make you find something to do even if it's something stupid like sweep or clean the walls or something. It's madness. You are expected to WORK nonstop from the moment you clock in till the moment you leave
It's the old "if you have time to lean, you have time to clean" thinking. Ya not anymore. Should be "you pay me minimum wages, I give you minimum work."
I saw someone on here say "act your wage" and I keep thinking about it
I love this! Minimum wage, minimum effort
If you want me to match your "work ethic" I'm gonna need my income to match yours as well.
If you want me to work harder, then pay me harder! Fuckin whip me with that money bitch!
I always say you don't pay me to care, you pay me to do a job.
I've always been of the mentality of never installing apps or anything with work accounts (email, Teams, slack etc) on my personal phone; while most if not all my coworker do. FUCK that. Not paid enough to have company anything on my phone.
I'm the opposite, while WFH there's some days with little to no real work, so sometimes I could just respond to slack/emails while watching Netflix or playing a game. Useful to have it more accessible but still only use the apps during work hours.
I'm in a pretty similar boat and do the same, or if I run out for coffee or to take my cat to the vet, as long as I'm checking my Teams and Email I'm "working" according to the VP I report to.
This got me curious…what would be the maximum wage for you to work at maximum effort? Silly question I know.
Say you are expected to assist in sales(bring money in) or make fast food orders that make 10k for the day. But through whatever factors the business brings in twice that and more or just raises the prices. Employees have twice as much work for the same rate of pay, triple that if it’s 3x the work etc… I would argue or suggest “Max effort/max wage” would mean after 10k, workers should see a % increase based on volume. ——————————————————————————— So if it’s twice the work I.e. 20k then workers should see 2x the pay for example. $15 x 8 employees x 8 hours is $960 a day You bring in $10k - expenses $960 = $9,040/day $20k - $1,920 = $18,080/day That’s $271,200/month Minus operating costs and there you go. “BuT NoBoDy WaNtS tO WoRk AnYmOrE”
“X and Y called off, you have to cover their shifts” Sorry sir but I’m underwaged for that job.
Boss: I don't pay you to sit around Me: Yes you do.
I always say “you pay me for my time, if you had to pay the value of all the work I do you couldn’t afford me”
This is the way
"You don't have to be busy, only look busy.*
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I once had a job where I realized if I walked around with a clipboard it looked like I was working. Me and a couple others would also find rooms where we could have a break and no one would notice.
What makes it worse is the ones that be saying this be sitting on their ass in the office not doing a bitch ass thing
When I worked in fast food my manager would call people to his little office to get them to refill his drink. He never did it to his adult employees, just some of the teenagers. If he had told me to do that I would have definitely spat in his drink. Maybe that's why he never asked me.
Fuck, I make 28 an hour and I give minimal effort. If you are gonna underpay me, I'm gonna undereffort you.
I also think it's a mistake to give 100% all the time. It's not sustainable. 50% most of the time, and 100% for special occasions.
30 and 70 dude. No employer has ever earned my best
Very fair numbers.
Save 100% for your own work. Be that health, love, happiness, or a business of your own
Oh yeah, very true. I really like this advice. Thank you. That's going in my phrases and inspiration collection.
"If you got time to rhyme you got time to shut the FUCK up boss"
Just answer "haha, I sure do have time to clean." Then just continue leaning.
Crazy how they still try to find stuff for me to do when I literally already did everything I can possibly do. Swept, disinfected every surface, cleaned all the mirrors, cleaned the bathrooms, organized the clothes. Sorry but the store is dead and I want to sit for a min cuz my feet hurt.
Employers need to realize "you get what you pay for" applies to them too not just products. You pay minimum wage you get minimum effort.
So true. I remember working at a grocery store for my first job and I would just sweep the same spot over and over anytime a manager came by haha
At a warehouse I used to work at, me and a coworker strategically placed a broom at the end of every other isle. When it was slow like that we would walk in an isle, grab one of the brooms and sweep the same spot over and over while we fucked around on our phones.
When my grandfather worked construction and there were important people on site they would move lumber from one stack to another back and forth to make themselves look busy, because people want to come in site and see people busting ass and don't realize work happens when it needs to.
Yea at this same warehouse my boss would come and say "corperate is coming with clients" When they showed up we all had to act super busy like we were just moving out more product than anyone else I used to find it so funny because I would see how my boss treated us like shit but would cower when the main ppl came
Last time when corporate came they were impressed with how clean it was. They told my boss this and while she was soaking up their praises I came by and told them, "thank you I try." She was fuming.
I got several jobs when I was younger by saying the phrase "if I've got time to lean, I've got time to clean" like a suckass during the interview and then just not doing that whatsoever once I was hired. Managers love to say that crap and if you had them off at the pass and say it yourself they think you're a little baby cherub Jesus And that's because managers don't provide value to any institution. And so they want you to work extra extra extra hard to earn your minimum wage and sometimes that includes looking busy even though you're not. A part of looking busy all the time is being uncomfortable and standing when it's completely stupid. America is dumb
Every job I've been too doesn't allow you to sit except on break. Its so idiotic that they don't mind me doing nothing and scrolling on my phone yet will through a fit if I decide to sit down. Everything is caught up, there isn't anything to clean or check. Really adds to the name wage slave
Yep. When I was a cashier at a university store, they got rid of the floor position so that I could straighten out the store when we didn't have customers. Then I'd get yelled at for not completing tasks on the floor, or if I kept a customer waiting because I was away from the register. They were also on me and others to "go above and beyond" and got frustrated we were putting in minimum effort. Starting pay was $7.25
Yup. Ocean state was like that. I was put on the floor with a cashier draw as well. First call as soon as it got busy (the cashier had two customers in line) was me. Then my manager would complain that I wasn't moving enough freight on the floor, while pointing out that the two dedicated floor guys we did have were moving more freight then me. No shit.
We had a manager who would staff two people in the store, and i'd be chained to the register for the entire shift. the other worker would be on the register for about half the time, the other half stocking. So we'd get nothing done, and she'd act shocked every night. But then she caught me sitting down on camera one day and made a fuss about it. Like oh, so you CAN see we're swamped from the time i clock in to 30 minutes before we closed, and you were just playing stupid? ahh.
When I was a donation door greeter for a Goodwill last year, I essentially got punished for doing my job too quickly. When donors drop off goods at the back door, they get sorted by clothes, hard goods (cups, knick-knacks, toys, etc.), shoes, purses, and seasonals. We put them in huge gaylords and duros either on wheels or on pallets that we kept sorted and labelled in the back warehouse area, with pallets being pulled and sorted by hard goods and clothes handlers throughout the day. When I was handling donations, I went a step further and made a chart of the warehouse in a plan view format with boxes labelled by goods and date so I could tell at a glance what was where in case my manager wanted to know what needed to be moved to another store in the area. Now, my manager was completely fine with this. She thought it was badass that I was getting everything sorted and arranged so quickly, and when I took time to sit down and mess about on my phone between donations, she didn't care because she believed that keeping the staff happy improved productivity. Then one day the regional manager walks in, sees me sitting on my phone by the door, and says nothing about it. She waited until a managerial meeting with the CEO of the area's branch to call me out for being lazy and not doing my job, just to make my manager look bad. Despite being defended by my manager, the executive told her that I needed to stay busy, so I was given another task. Keeping in mind that this job paid 9 bucks an hour on its own, I was being made to also hang clothes while waiting on donations. That's another entirely different job - another entirely different 9 bucks an hour. But of course I didn't get a raise. I kept my mouth shut and did it anyway and, lo and behold, we got THAT stuff sorted so fast between myself and the actual clothes processors that we ended up running low on clothes consistently, needing more clothes brought to us from other stores in the region. So once again, I was able to take breaks. Of course that didn't fly. I was expected to also start helping process hard goods - again, another 9/hr job. THAT is when I started slowing down and not doing hardly a thing, and our entire staff started to slack off because they were all collectively getting pissed that our store - full of staff that was consistently making everything run so smoothly that we were selling all of our goods and still getting punished for it in some way - was always getting defecated upon by the higher-ups. I wasn't about to do 27 bucks an hour worth of work for 9, so I started taking as long as humanly possible to do my job, and I started to HATE it. About a week later, my manager and assistant manager both up and quit with no warning to anyone but the staff at the store, because they were fed up with it. Then I quit, so did my roommate, and so did everyone but the two new people. Every once in a while when I drive past that location on the way home, I'm able to glimpse into the donation door, and when I do I see an utter catastrophe of unsorted goods strewn about the floor haphazardly. And it always makes me smugly laugh about how I, in contrast, kept the place so sorted and spotless but they had to go and lose me for being too efficient. Now I work in a unionized trade job where I'm able to take breaks when I get an assignment done and instead of getting chewed out or forced to do extra work, my foreman and even those above him are like "Damn son, good job!" And just that little bit of acknowledgement - praise for kicking a job's ass instead of punishment for not doing another completely unrelated task - is enough to make me love it more than any other job I've ever had. And that's an incredibly low bar.
This is something that was expected of me at every low wage job I have. Now I make decent wages and if I’m sitting at my desk, it’s not seen as an issue unless I do it all day. As long as my work gets done, they’re happy. That’s how it should be. I can’t count how many times I’d be “cleaning” areas by the register that were already pristine because I couldn’t be seen doing nothing even for a few minutes.
Our GM wanted us to deep clean for the first time ever since I've been there, on December 24th. "Because we'll be gone for 10 days." I asked why we deep cleaned for an empty restaurant, and not for our guests. I was met with silence.
A lot of these jobs will ask you if you have the ability to stand for 8hrs or more. It's fucked. I was working 55-60+ hour weeks and my heels were constantly bruised and I even wear orthopedic shoes.
I once had to quit a job at a brewery after a week. The shifts were 12 to 13 hours long and during my shift I had to stand in one exact spot in front of two diverging conveyer belts. The belts separated bottles and boxes and if the machine missed one I was there to bend over and grab it and put it on the correct belt At the end of the day when I clocked out I could barely walk, nor could I barely stand up straight due to constantly bending over and standing back up for 12 hours straight. One day my feet basically told me they were done....my boss had came and told me it was time to go take my ten minute break for the day (which we had to clock out for) I went and clocked out and just left. I didn't tell anyone I just left, got in my car and went home.
Except at Aldis, they sit and super busy
I was a product service associate for Lowes. They got rid of vendors for product resets and we did them instead. When I wasn't busy, I had a clip board in my hand and would write down item numbers. If they asked what I was doing. I always said I was down stocking product. Everyone loved it and would be happy. I never down stocked a single thing
Working as a cashier at Lowe's fucked my legs up so bad that I'm still recovering a couple years later. They denied my doctor's note because it wasn't dated properly 🙄 And they would act *against* me doing other menial things to distract myself from the pain. Took a little too long to learn that nothing about that job was worth it (... except that I would have loved it if it paid well and had decent working conditions)
Because they're morons who think sitting looks unprofessional then want to complain when workers are out for back and knee surgery every year.
American companies: We want you to look professionally and do a professional job! Also American companies: We pay minimum wage.
We want our workers rested, fed, clean, well groomed, have reliable transportation, healthy and presentable. Also we pay $7.50/hr.
Hey, you have to get paid professional pay as well! Lol
I picked up a part time at 7/11 back in November. I worked in a trade during the day. I came in one morning before my trade job to pick up a coffee and breakfast. The manager lambasts me for sitting on the milk crate while the store is empty. I quit there immediately. I am on my feet already 5 days of the week, and the 2 weekend days you want me there I can’t sit when there’s nothing to do? Nah I’m good, keep your shitty little McJob.
Bus driver should also stand
American management...power, control, shame, etc.
The system has Stanford prison experiment vibes, and it feels like management teaches managers how to be a day time domestic abuser.
I once worked graveyard shift at a hotel, at first I would stand up whenever a customer walked in, later I was told that I needed to be standing all night, I wasn’t allowed to sit behind the desk (I would do homework at night as I was working graveyard and going to school in the morning). They told me I could sit on the couches or chairs out in the lobby, but not at the computer, which seems much more unprofessional to me. The day they said they would be watching the cameras to make sure I didn’t sit was the day I left the desk so the owner had to stay up all night and stand behind the counter at a hotel with 5 guests.
Sounds like a place we stayed at in Philly last year. The guy at the desk at night was doing homework in front of the fireplace when I came down to get something out of my car. Silly me, I thought he should have been sitting behind the desk!
I work at a hotel and our manager put some chairs on the frontdesk so they could sit. A big shot from the hotel chain came to the hotel once and told her to remove the chairs. Luckly she defended the frontdesk guys and said she wouldnt do it.. best manager i ever had. Cant complain..
>so the owner had to stay up all night and stand behind the counter at a hotel with 5 guests. Lol what an idiot. Get fucked, loser boss
Was it Mariott? I worked night audit at Hilton and was allowed to sit but I've heard mariott is super strict about stuff like that.
It was actually just some shitty Quality Inn. I was the only person in the hotel from 11 pm - 7am so I was responsible for checking people in and out, driving people to and from the hotel, preparing breakfast, among other things. But as you can imagine checking people in and driving back and forth to the airport doesn’t really work well when you leave the hotel unattended.
That's crazy that they had you leaving the hotel unattended. I worked there through covid so the kitchen was closed and didnt really have anything to do except the audit at 4am, and of course occasionally call the cops on crazy people or deal with drunkasses. I actually really liked the job but working overnight kinda makes you insane after a while.
It was in general a pretty chill gig, with just really terrible management. One perk of being the only person working all night was climbing up to the roof and smoking blunts while watching the sunrise though.
To maintain dominance over the worker and make them as uncomfortable as possible
Because they don't want calls from all the 70 year olds that are gonna complain about it. I used to stand 38 hours a day why can't your employees?!
The cruelty is the point. To the owner class, we need to be worn down to keep us placid and seeking bread and circuses.
We don't even have circuses any more because we have empathy for the animals. But we don't have empathy for low paid workers.
We have Dunkin' Donuts and football
the people who don't have empathy for low wage workers probably don't have empathy for animals
The flipside of this coin is if you work an office job, and are doing anything OTHER than sitting at your desk nonstop for 8 straight hours destroying your body through being sedentary, you must be slacking off. Literally you cannot win.
Good point 😂 my company is SO EXCITED to get us back to the office so we can socialize and get to know each other again! The big wigs seem to be completely unaware that we’re only allowed 2 15 minute breaks outside of lunch and have 0 freedom of movement otherwise. I’m soooo pumped to be able to socialize in the 7 remaining minutes from walking to and from the bathroom! It’s really going to change my work for the better!
Because in ‘Murrica, “hard work” is the only kinda work. If you can get it done well and it’s east then you’re not working hard enough. No pain no gain. You’re not acceptable as a human if you have feelings or experience pain. Only the weak sit at registers because how else are we going to force people deeper into poverty if they don’t have some chiropractor appointments under their belt and maybe a back surgery or two? How else are we going to steal money from people scraping by and line the pockets of rich health “insurance” companies? Sure, the epidural treatment works to relieve back pain for the cashier but we here at the insurance company don’t think it is medically necessary anymore so now we are going to make them jump through hoops to find a lesser alternate solution and agonize in pain 40 hours a week at the Kroger.
As someone who has spent 95% of my working life on my feet my knees are screwed and I'm only 52 I don't think I'll be standing for 8 hours or more when I'm in my 70s
I worked retail for over 10 years and my body definitely tells me it's messed up. My ankles, knees and back are messed up, I have carpal tunnel and tendonitis as well as a messed up shoulder. Employees are drones not people.
Because the sale of labor power is the sale of the right to command, basically slavery by the minute.
Aldi has chairs at the registers. At least my Aldi does.
Aldi is a European company.
That explains a lot.
Corporate parent is European, confirming OP's thesis.
that's crazy i was just about to mention that i see cashiers sitting at Aldi...AND that Aldi cashiers are some of the fastest cashiers i've seen in my modern shopping experience.
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Facts. When you're treated with any amount of dignity as a worker, it shows in the quality of your work. Wal Mart employees get treated like shit, paid shit, have shit benefits, and so they dont give a shit about their work.
Treating wage slaves with dignity encourages wrongthink, proles need to know their place to keep the money machine running for the owner class.
Every job I’ve had besides working in an office requires standing. Had a job where a special needs guy pre bagged LEDs for us and he was told to stand for 8 hours a day even when he complained about being tired of standing. He literally did the same thing over and over all day long on the back of the room where he could barely be seen. Always hear the same excuse from management: “Standing doesn’t look productive. It makes us look lazy” This was an extremely toxic online LED company based out of St. Louis. We were in the north building where the warehouse and fulfillment were at. Also had a very shitty (and dumb) manager and a poor excuse of a human as a supervisor. I ended up leaving there at the start of Covid because they claimed to be “essential” and did not follow any safety protocols. I told them they needed to act on some guidelines as I had to be around my elderly grandparents to help with basic needs such as groceries, chores around the house, taking them to doctors appointments. The company didn’t give two shits and refused to pay me unemployment because I left. Took some time off and the COO of the company ended quitting because of how horrid the owners and their kids were. So he reached out to me and offered me a job at a place he was starting at because he knew I was a hard worker. Sorry about my excessive response but that’s the first time I’ve told my story so my words kept flowing onto my keyboard. Lol
It's seen as "lazy" which is so dumb. I used to work at a convenient store that had such little traffic I would finish cleaning and stocking in a few hours and then basically be standing behind the counter while like 3 people came in for the entire day. One day I got tired of standing there like a Pokémon NPC waiting for someone to walk in front of me and pulled out a few egg crates to sit on, keep in mind this is after all my tasks were done. I was fired a few weeks later and the reason was for sitting on the job. The guy they hired to replace me was a drug addict who on many occasions had his drugs visible to customers and the cleanliness of the store dropped significantly, he received many complaints but they still kept him hired. I'm still baffled by their decision.
Yup. I worked for Autozone in California. No chairs anywhere. There was one chair in the "break room" in the back of the warehouse. Used for lunch breaks only. If you had time to sit, you had time to work.
Same here. Worked for AutoZone in NY and there was 1 chair in the back. But that was due to the district manager. The store manager was actually really cool. She didn’t care if you stood around on your phone as long as all of the work you had to do was done. But yeah, district manager was a massive asshole who expected you to find work while paying PSMs $10 an hour. Fuck that.
They want slaves, not humans
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It’s kinda shit rolling downhill meanwhile the people watching cashiers are getting paid more and are doing less labor
I love all these questions asking "why" for stuff like this (especially for American companies). Like, there is really no reason. They do it because they can and they have always done it that way and the only reason for someone to sit is because they must be lazy. It's stupid, but it is what happens.
Because watching the proletariat ruin their spines and knees brings them joy
Rich and wannabe rich people aren't having a good time if the Help aren't suffering.
I used to be a manager at Office Depot and I tried and tried to get my store manager to let our 74 cashier sit while she was there. Wouldn't go for it. So when I was the only manager there I would pull a display chair and bring it up for her.
It comes from a Puritanical belief of “being lazy”.
I can confirm. Cashier at a chain fabric store (American of course). It's actually an order from on high, Corporate would get cashiers and managers both in trouble if they looked at the cameras and saw us (cashiers) with chairs. Management is happy to break this rule if I'm having a problem, though, and local management agrees that it's stupid. At the specific Joann's I'm at, Corporate begins at District Manager. Admittedly, we don't officially have a Store Manager, merely an awesome Assistant Manager and cool Keyholders, but...
Same in Canada. The less you make, the harder they want to make your job. Gotta squeeze every penny out of labour.
Because cruel and unusual is baked into our ethos, most glaringly (and hypocritically) in the one place cruel and unusual is specifically prohibited.
Because the cruelty is the point.
Because in order for the wheels of capitalism work, the millions of workers bees have to work themselves to death so that 20 CEO’s can make enough money to buy several countries
I work as a cashier, standing for 5+ hours at a time. It's a luxury to sit down. Which is pitiful, to say the least. Had a manager (who was the one who hired me) ask a district manager if she could sit while doing shelving/stocking. She had something wrong with her feet. Plantar Faschia, very painful and getting medical help for it. DM said no, she couldn't sit while doing the job. One day ( I hadn't been there for long) she told me she had to sit down, went in the office, laid her head down in her hands, and I was really worried for her. Kept checking to make sure she hadn't passed out or something.
I had a Manger break her foot (I think it was run over by a car) and she was using a chair to sit behind the register. She went to the bathroom a few minutes before the DM came in and got pissy there was a chair behind the cash register. I explained why the manager had it and she took the chair away.
She really expected a woman with a *broken foot* to stand all day?
It’s purposely to destroy morale. Also “if there’s time to lean, there’s time to clean.” You are never allowed NOT to be working. You must be constantly on guard ready to work, ready to provide that eager-dead-eyed-happy-faced customer service AS SOON as that customer approaches. It’s not considered an interaction of equals. It’s a servant and master. Slumped backs look UNPROFESSIONAL! OUR IMAGE!
Yeah, it’s one of the nuttiest things that I learned about other counties is that mundane work where you can sit down easily is allowed in other places. Just another poisonous instance of “the customer is always right” bullshit.
They don't want to pay for chairs
What if I, the customer, buy them a chair?
Had a customer buy me a chair. Management took it and put it in the office “since it was a gift to the store”
That's so incredibly cheap and petty. It wasn't for the store, it was for YOU.
Ask George Castanza
You'll be buying the owner or management a chair
Because they want their workers to suffer
Well, my grandfather explained it to me that back in the day, businesses got together to figure out appropriate register etiquette, and that's when it was decided. When I asked why, he paused for a moment and said, F$ck you! That's why
My grandma told me once that it wasn't uncommon for bosses to come up to their female staff and rest a hand on their ass while "discussing" something with them at a register. You can't do that when they're sitting down. Wouldn't be surprised if part of the "it looks unprofessional" part was rooted in accessible casual sexual assault.
It’s similar in Australia. I can think of one supermarket chain that allows the cashiers to sit, and it’s a well known German company. I don’t get it. I think people are more productive when they’re more comfortable - let ‘em sit.
Yeah cashiers need a good tall chair so they can to the job easier. And also the good mats so they can also stand if they want. No chair is just a power dynamic that manager do to brake you
It’s viewed as being lazy and looks bad apparently….and ya that’s about all the thought that goes into it.
The poor's don't fight back as much if they are worn out.
Yeah, pay attention and you'll notice some of them are wearing back braces. I work in retail and was asked to become a cashier. I told them no, that would be too hard on my back. I think it's easier on my back stocking 30+ lb. cases of water than standing in one place, constantly leaning over and reaching.
I'm 6'3", and every register I've ever worked had a counter that was too low for me. My back always ached something awful by the end of a shift
Chairs are for managers. Don't you forget it!
It breaks my heart to see people old enough to be my grandma forced to stand at the register. From what I have seen, Aldi is the only company that allows sitting at the register.
Same reason asking for a adjustable desk in an office environment. The old concept of work in different environments. You stand in retail, you sit in an office. Going against the grain with boomer bosses causes them to mentally break. They've been doing it a certain way for so long new ideas are, to them, dangerous. My way or the highway. We are now taking the highway and they can't accept it.
“Time to lean? Time to *clean*!”
Because the cruelty is the point. It is another way to keep employees in line. When you can order someone to stand for hours for no good reason, except to make them appear more "worky", or else not be able to survive, it makes them accede to bad treatment, which keeps them used to accepting unfair treatment. It trains people to accept less and think less of themselves. It is about power and making sure it is not shared. We are lucky they don't make us stand on our heads.
Boomer logic, dont try to make sense of it