[Note from the administration: In the past six months, I left my 9–5 office job and took on something with a flexible schedule and a remote work setup so I could have more time for learning, thinking, and writing. In an effort to feel a little bit less like a girl is No One, I’m going to start forcing myself to document more of the output of those activities here on a semi-regular basis.
If you’re a fan of Game of Thrones and have read the books that the show is based on, you probably remember the Kindly Man, to whom Arya reports with three things she’s learned each day as part of her training at Ninja Face-Changing Academy. I doubt my reports will be as exciting as Arya’s — they’ll probably feature less brothel talk, for one — but maybe some kindly soul in this big ol’ world will also find them interesting.]
- Is there an overall decrease in labor demand in the U.S.? It certainly seems likely, given that automation has eaten the manufacturing sector. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing? National productivity is still inching up each year — amazingly, even during the recession! — so why do we all want jobs, anyway? With self-driving cars, self-service grocery stores, and delivery drones all coming for the service industry in the next 5–10 years, I think it’s a safe bet that we’re about to find out…
- Counter-revolutionaries are real! A prankster set up a fake Women’s March page in Berkeley and got a hundred protesters to show up, siphoning them away from the large Oakland and SF protests. (They marched around campus anyway, so not exactly a protest-busting win.) The Russian in his message is clearly the output of Google Translate, by the way, so I seriously doubt the claim that he’s some Putin puppet.
- Have you ever wondered why cashiers in the U.S. stand, while cashiers in Europe and other parts of the world typically sit at the job? I got curious and found a Reddit thread full of current and former cashiers weighing in on this question. (It seems the answer really is as simple as: American business owners don’t want their cashiers to look lazy.) Within said thread, I also found this amazing management book. Apparently, Nordstrom was and maybe still is considered a paragon of good customer service in the business world? Anyway, boy does it offer some gems:
At Nordstrom, the sales process is considered to be high-contact: customers reacting to the sales associates. To optimize sales results, the company has developed numerous tools and techniques, including: 1. Personal customer books. In a loose leaf binder, sales associates list every customer’s name, telephone number, charge account number, sizes, personal preferences, previous purchases, vendor preferences, likes and dislikes, special requirements and other characteristics. The binder also includes room for daily, weekly and monthly calendars, goal lists, daily to-do lists and a phone directory for every department store in every Nordstrom store in the country.
I think I speak for everyone aged 35 or younger when I say YIKES.
It’s ironic, given the supposed customer obsession, that what’s killing Nordstrom is not realizing in time that most people don’t want “high-contact” interactions with salespeople. (Or any people. Texting overtook voice communication ten years ago!) Turns out, customers don’t have time for that shit and machines are much better at keeping track of customer demographics, past purchases, likes/dislikes, etc. Enter Amazon (which, probably not intentionally ironically, has adopted very similar business principles as the ones pioneered by Nordstrom: ownership, earning trust, and of course, customer obsession).
