The Death of the Working Man: As told by Abercrombie & Fitch
The great plague of the modern workplace is that employees are constantly enduring boredom. In a 2012 article entitled “Bored In The Office: Is It The New Productivity Killer?” Forbes reports that “71% of American workers are either not engaged or actively disengaged from their jobs, with highly educated and middle-aged workers the least likely to feel involved in and enthusiastic about their work.” The article simply poses that “speaking up” to a higher position is the most effective solution for changing the boredom of a job. However, if it was that simple from the employers side, this grand-scale boredom wouldn’t be so prevalent. Boredom, menial labor, and pointlessness are culturally ingrained into the American workplace.
I, for example, am a brand representative at an Abercrombie & Fitch store. This means that I am the person who wanders aimlessly around the store all day and offers the faked cheerful “How are you? Can I help you find anything today?” each time a customer walks into the store. Besides that, my duties as a “brand rep” is to spend my time on my five hour shifts folding clothes, working the register, unlocking changing rooms and offering my valuable knowledge to every customer. However, this task list fails to include the tasks that I spend the majority of my time doing; pretending to be folding clothes, smelling fragrance samples I’ve smelled hundreds of times before, and pacing in between the men’s and women’s section. After all, there simply aren’t many customers who enter an Abercrombie and Fitch, or even a shopping mall, on a Tuesday from 9:30AM to 2:30PM. The culmination of all of this is that the majority of my time spent at the store consists of me wandering around vaguely creating the illusion that I am busy to please my boss, while in reality I am purely bored.
Abercrombie and Fitch, like most corporations, has a cliche code of conduct and system of behavior for their employees to ensure that they are being as effective as possible. At Abercrombie & Fitch, it all revolves around the “GIFT” approach. The GIFT approach is, as my boss systematically reminds me at the start of each shift, a way to speak with customers that “is proven to make customers more likely to purchase items” from the store. G is for greeting, which means to introduce the customer into our store. I is to inform, or let them know of any sales or promotions going on. F is to follow up, meaning to literally stalk them around the store and attempt to wait an appropriate amount of time before asking them for a second time if they have any questions. T is to thank, meaning to say “thank you” to every customer leaving the store, whether they’ve purchased an item from the store or not. The GIFT approach is infuriating to me as an employee for several reasons. First of all, its brutally banal in the sense that these are things any retail employee would know to do without having it explained in a degrading acronym. Secondly, my boss reminds me at least once per shift that the GIFT approach “is proven to make customers more likely to purchase”. Where this “proof” comes from is as unknown to him as it is to me. This goes back to the first infuriating point, that the GIFT approach could easily be explained and carried out by just having brand representatives rely on common sense and basic politeness and the acronym wouldn’t have to exist at all.
The GIFT approach is just designed to create the illusion that each brand representative should be busy performing at a task at all times during the shift. Of course, the brand representative in general already spends a large deal of their time pretending to look busy to avoid being scolded by a manager for not doing “work”. Even the name “brand representative” is designed to make it seem as if the employees are somehow modelling the image of Abercrombie & Fitch’s culture through their wandering around the store. Abercrombie & Fitch is far from the sole corporation utilizing these odd managerial techniques though. It is a common phenomenon at almost every single corporation that the employees at the start of their shift have to go over some specifically niche set of training techniques in order to provide some type of structure to each employees time. For example, Walmart, which is easily the most depressing place in the world, has the employees opening the store take part in a “cheer” in which employees chant about the great service they will provide as part of the Walmart family. Just as the GIFT approach is meant to make it seem like my unstructured time has meaning, the “cheer” is designed to combat the depressing setting that is a Walmart. The Walmart website addresses the “cheer” by sharing the story of how Walmart founder Sam Walton witnessed employees doing a cheer at a tennis ball factory he visited in Korea, and he decided he would try to incorporate this into a workday at Walmart. “My feeling is that just because we work so hard, we don’t have to go around with long faces all the time — while we’re doing all of this work, we like to have a good time. It’s sort of a ‘whistle while you work’ philosophy, and we not only have a heck of a good time with it, we work better because of it.” In a similar vein, McDonald’s and Wendy’s famously have “raps” that were used as training videos in some effort to connect to the trainee. These strange managerial methods seem as if they are efforts to connect with the employee and offer advice, but the truth is they are combating something about the workplace whether it be boredom, a depressing environment, or tediousness.
All of these complaints of working at Abercrombie & Fitch revolve around the boredom and pointlessness of the job. The wandering, the GIFT approach, the glorified titles all seem to be attempts to create the illusion that there is actual work to be done and eliminate the idea of the boredom and pointlessness. However, when I find myself feeling a sweater for the fourth time in one hour to see if it’s soft as it looks (it never is), this boredom is undeniably present. Boredom and the feeling of pointlessness aren’t phenomenons of working at Abercrombie & Fitch, or even retail.
It’s simple to write off this boredom as the natural result of being a member of the working world, but that shouldn’t be true. After all, it is called “work” but what I’ve described in my experiences doesn’t seem like very much “work” at all. Rather, it revolves around the idea that if I stay in Abercrombie and Fitch for x amount of hours while following a protocol that seem to have no effect on the consumer, it will result in me getting paid. The nature of the job is designed to foster my boredom, perhaps in the hopes that if I am bored for the majority of my time, it will result in me offering more at the few moments when I do have to work. However, this simply isn’t how humans and their relationship to “work” functions at all. Author Cal Newport offers a potential solution to the issue of boredom at work in his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World where he discusses the potential any given worker can achieve by utilizing the skills of “deep work”. Deep work is a methodological way of viewing work that allows the worker to stay focused and productive. Essentially, Newport offers various concrete solutions to being productive in the workplace. He criticizes sites like Buzzfeed and Reddit, and the addiction to smartphones as the plague to productivity. He advocates for the usage of written documents, recording exactly how much time is devoted to “focused work.” “To produce at your peak level you need to work for extended periods with full concentration on a single task free from distraction.” However, I’d like to offer Newport with the offer that maybe I, along with many others, don’t want to participate in this system of “deep work.” After all, no matter how much focus, customer care and precisely folded sweaters I create at my day at Abercrombie and Fitch, I can’t force people to purchase items they don’t want to buy. Worse than that, even if I can, the compensation for my work isn’t updated to reflect my “deep work” as promotions and raises aren’t an aspect of my part-time work. Of course, this is applied to my specific situation, but the points I raise extend far beyond just myself. If a worker feels that their increased effort warrants little to no results, why resist the distractions?
Newport doesn’t leave this question unanswered though. Rather, one of the core aspects of his “deep work” philosophy already answers the question for the reader: the distractions don’t specifically distract workers from their jobs, but rather their “work”. The distinction between the job and “work” here is that the job is what the worker is compensated for, while the “work” is “activities of cognitive worth”. This is where the issue of boredom arises. The GIFT approach, the memorization of sales and promotions, the feeling that I’ve become a broken-record as I ask the fifteenth customer that shift if I can “How are you doing today? Can I help you find anything today?”. None of these tasks are “activities of cognitive worth”. They are activities that foster and enhance the very boredom that comes out of constant repetition and the depressingly linear patterns of the workplace.
Boredom is a result of the fact that this job, like many, is mainly comprised of bullshit. “Bullshit” is a broad term so lets condense that a bit. In 2013, David Graeber released the essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs, in which he poses that the workplace should have evolved in a different trajectory than it did. “It’s as if someone were out there just making up jobs for the sake of keeping us working.” He poses that telemarketing, financial services and much of the administrative services are composed of unnecessary tasks just to keep the world employed. Meanwhile, “ancillary jobs” that have a seemingly real value at first like pizza-delivery, window-washers and brand representatives at Abercrombie & Fitch only exist and seemingly have some value because everyone else is too occupied with their bullshit jobs. Its bullshit that piles upon itself until the pile is so high nobody wants to look at it and clean up the mess.
This isn’t an easy notion to immediately accept, but Graeber offers a perspective of the past that could have actually become reality. While the rest of the world in the 1930’s imagined that the 2000’s would be the years of flying cars, economist John Maynard Keyes imagined a technological world so advanced it enables the creation of the 15-hour work week. Graeber offers that technology has entered this realm, but instead of embracing it, the world kept building around it, creating new sectors of unneeded paperwork, administrative, and financial bullshit.
The one thing about these bullshit jobs that has kept them alive is that even if the tasks being performed were menial administrative nonsense, they were still nonsense that only a human, or perhaps an incredibly well trained ape, could perform. However, humanity is escaping that point in history and automation is becoming a real and fiscally advantageous option.
In early 2017, right after the election of President Donald Trump, he spouted brags about how he was meeting with top airline executives across America, convincing them to save hundreds of jobs by keeping manufacturing in America. Mark Cuban, American businessman billionaire, then appeared on Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News to discuss why this was essentially an attempt to micromanage a national problem. Cuban claims When upwards of “five million” jobs per month have the potential to be replaced by technology. However, it’s so easy to act as O’Reilly does and guise this massive oncoming issue and tout about the few thousand jobs that are being saved by the micromanagement of President Trump.
Be aware, automation leaves nobody out. The day is coming when it will attack the workforce in absolute totality and millions will suddenly be without a job. Just this March, my workplace of Abercrombie & Fitch announced sixty stores to close in 2017. Computers are able to recognize problems and create solutions in ways they never could before. The ability to perform calculations and record without human input will eliminate so many financial, administrative, and record-keeping jobs purely on the stance that they were bullshit jobs. Elon Musk predicts that within ten years the majority of cars will be automated, eliminating so many driving jobs. In 2016, McDonald’s responded to proposals of a $15.00 minimum wage by claiming it could automate restaurants in order to avoid complying with the wage boost on a large scale. No job, ancillary or administrative is going to be safe from the monster that is automation.
So the worker is left with the question of whether or not their human touch actually can correspond to some added benefit for a corporation? What about the GIFT approach? Isn’t it possible that perhaps one day, my routine greeting-informing-following up-thanking cycle is going to spark some purchases that wouldn’t have otherwise been made? Of course they will! People like Bill O’Reilly may even praise the human touch as a necessary component of a thriving store. However, the truth is we’ve reached a point where my service has already been outmatched by technology.
That is a link to Abercrombie & Fitch’s online website. If you visit it, you will be greeted by the interface and aesthetic design and then informed about the most important new arrivals and sales. You won’t even need the “follow up” as the website is literally on your browser, meaning it is by nature dedicated entirely to your shopping experience. At the end, if you decide to make a purchase, the website will send you an electronic receipt which includes a thank you for the purchase. The entire GIFT approach condensed down to the individual’s experience, redesigned so they can do exactly what they want. This isn’t a necessarily a bad thing for me either. If this website was the sole method for how shoppers received the GIFT approach, I would have never had to deal with that immense boredom this essay stems from. The McDonald’s cashier never has to be annoyed by angry customers. The Walmart stock manager never has to sing a degrading song to aid his depression. The truck driver never has to be lonely as he drives his truck across the country. Along with this, so many of the administrative jobs that are focused around performing one specific task and are plague the employee by boredom the rest of the time could be replaced by one computer.
But what happens to me when Abercrombie & Fitch is a purely online shopping experience and shopping malls no longer hold a candle to online shopping? What happens to any of the aforementioned jobs once automation is the standard? Nobody seems to know. This is the danger of people like Bill O’Reilly ignoring people like Cuban and Musk as they threaten a very real and upcoming future. People need money to survive, and we have chosen to evolve society in a way where a job is the way to earn it, even if the job is built on minimal work, and mostly pointlessness. Now a computer can do the little bit of work and never even question the pointlessness.
A New York Times article from 2013 by Hiroku Tabuchi records about how in Tokyo, there was a Sony plant that employed many workers and each of them had a specific task to complete. Japan, in its efforts to embrace new technology, welcomed automation and many of the jobs that used to have meaning became pointless. The technology was more precise and more efficient. However, the workers did not get fired. Rather, the article interviews Shusaku Tani, an employee whose job became useless and was replaced by a machine. However, Tani’s employment agreement meant he couldn’t be fired. Instead of refusing to show up to work, Tani instead joins a whole crew of workers each day in the “boredom room” of his plant. Here, he sits, reading newspapers and studying engineering textbooks. The workers are allowed to go there as their “work” but the rooms are specifically designed with the goal of leading them to be “so bored and shamed that they just quit.”
Is that the answer then? Are all the bullshit, administrative, and useless ancillary jobs going to be subjected to rooms designed to foster the very boredom the jobs created in the first place? The idea of technological automation is that it could be a win-win for everyone, not just those at the top purchasing machines and making money off the product. Is it time to shorten the work week to something more reasonable like fifteen hours a week, with the hope that the shorter time-frame will result in only the actual important work to be done? I am not necessarily posing any of these solutions, as the implementation of them is far too complex for a mere brand representative at Abercrombie & Fitch to figure out. Nonetheless, I am proposing that the discussion of this issue is needed sooner than later. If it is not discussed, we may wake up one day to find that all the cashiers, data-entry jobs, and drivers among many others may be subjected to sit in a “boredom room” just to receive money. The automation of the working world opens up a world of artistic, scholarly, and pleasurable doors for the worker to utilize a newfound free time to advance the world, and it would be a shame if we threw them in cages just because we hadn’t discussed whether or not they could enter.
Works Cited
Goudreau, Jenna. “Bored In The Office: Is It The New Productivity Killer?” Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 19 June 2012. Web. 07 May 2017.
Graeber, David. “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs.” STRIKE. N.p., 17 Aug. 2013. Web. 07 May 2017.
Tabuchi, Hiroko. “Layoffs Taboo, Japan Workers Are Sent to the Boredom Room.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 16 Aug. 2013. Web. 07 May 2017.
Wang, Simon. Wal-Mart China : The Wal-Mart Cheer. N.p., n.d. Web. 07 May 2017.
Young, Molly. “Don’t Distract Me.” The New York Times. The New York Times, 26 Jan. 2016. Web. 07 May 2017.
