this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2026
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I would argue that you're not thinking about working hours at a high enough level. The notion that someone can tell you that the negotiation for labor exchange is hourly is just simplifying the negotiation. For example, I make $70 an hour after you calculate it annually, but I'm not an hourly employee. I also work from home, which is a net positive because I'm a more laborious worker when I do this which is a benefit to the employer, and it's a stress reducer for me, which is a benefit to me, the employee.
But there's a secondary aspect of this situation which is that I do not have someone else "watching" me and making sure I'm working all the time. That concept is antiquated. It isn't that there's X amount of hours of work to do in a day, it's that there's Y amount of labor that needs to be done, but we don't know what that Y variable is. We fundamentally understand the overarching goal - it might be something like, how can we increase efficiency? But it's a problem solving concept where we need to utilize time (labor) to think up strategies to how we can solve that problem while connecting objective information to those strategies so we can better understand how they can even be implemented.
After all, if I can increase my own efficiency by 5% but doing so requires 6 months of my time, that isn't going to have a payoff for many years and is likely not in the best interest of either myself or the business.
In addition, working more hours doesn't correlate to more work getting done. One man might push a boulder up a hill in 8 hours while another might be able to do it in 6, or even 4. Do you want to pay them both the same amount? Would you want to be paid the same amount if you were the man pushing the boulder in 4 hours as the man pushing in 8? Of course not.
And do you always receive additional reward each time your labor correlates to some kind of improvement? Well no, of course not. Sometimes you do, and sometimes you can go years without seeing anything outside of your salary. The reason is simply because life and human relationships and interactions are complicated and there's a lot more going on than you're going to give credit for.
I make a decent income, but I also have to prove my value to my company. What I do can be in no small part measured, so if I'm not producing value, the business won't want to keep me on the payroll, and if someone cheaper - thus, less credentialed/experienced - can do much of, or even all of the value I can provide, they will just swap me out for that person, and rightly so. Wouldn't you leave a company who's only paying you $40 an hour for work that another would pay you $70 for?
Most of the people complaining about why we still have to work so much isn't seeing the bigger picture, and likely works a shitty job where the average employee needs to be monitored and probably doesn't have the expertise to be doing anything that isn't more or less transactional (meaning, you are asked to specifically perform very informed tasks like on a conveyor line). This is just a byproduct of people without high-level modern skills complaining that they're sick of pushing boulders up hills all day every day.
I mean, I haven't pushed boulders up hills for 20 years.
Yes, it’s antiquated because we used to be factory workers, where we’d just have a start-stop time because we weren’t automatons that could work anytime. The factory had a beat because product Z takes N steps.
But a cashier is basically in a sales factory; they mediate sales between shoppers and the department store. So, your “antiquated” is just a privileged perspective.
I've worked as a cashier many times in my life. I would not say that my perspective is privileged.
That said, I will continue to argue that it is antiquated. I'm talking about from the perspective of the business as well, mind you. The notion that we have to pay someone who stands at a register for X number of hours Y salary per hour is antiquated. There are so many other ways to handle that kind of trade for labor. Per person who goes through your line, for example, or just salary.
The problem is though that like it or not, the kind of people (this is a generality, mind you) who end up working a cash register for any length of time don't often have the same kind of mentality to hold the ability to provide high value to a business. If your biggest value is your ability to scan items, there isn't a position I can hire you for in my structure where I can't find simply far too many others with more experience and skill who will provide more value. It goes back to, can you push that boulder up the hill in 4 hours, or does it take you 8? I don't want to hire two people who it takes 8, I want to hire 1 that can do what both of you can do combined. The fact that you have to compete with that other person isn't unfair, it's just rational.
I used to work for an internet retailer where we had this thing happen that we called the 50/50/50 rule. Every year we would hire a bunch of warehouse workers. The company even invested in a bussing system that would drive these individuals to and from work every day and the pay was very fair for a warehouse role of this caliber. Everyone we interviewed had to take two tests. The first test was a VERY simple math and reading test. We're talking adding and subtracting of 2 digit numbers and basic multiplication and division and simple reading. The second was a more complex test but I'd have placed it around an 8th grade level, at most. Of those we interviewed, 50% failed the first test, of those that passed that, 50% failed the second, and of those who did not, 50% didn't show up to work the first day.
Keep in mind I took the tests and scored 100% on both and this was before I ever went to college.
Like it or not, there ARE calibers of people in this world. We want to think of everyone as equal, but they're just not. Everyone should be treated equally under the law, but that doesn't make them equal. If you are someone who cannot pass a simple math and reading test, and by simple I mean like 2nd grade stuff here, then I can't hire you - not for the simplest job we have a need for.
There's a firm point with what I'm saying here: Many businesses find that it makes more sense to pay hourly to a casher because if not, the casher is a lot more likely to not show up for work, not do their job when they do, and not do it correctly when they do their job than someone in my field. Same with the kinds of people who applied during my anecdotal warehouse example. Police were called every week due to fights and illicit drug use as well.
Again, there simply ARE calibers of people and there's nothing you're going to do about that. If that's not you and you work at a register all day, then I've confidence you won't be for long and maybe that antiquated way of trading for your labor will change, as it should.
I hate how the word "privileged" comes with a passive aggressive moral accusation. We all operate in the circumstances of our times.
Yes, basically all of these missives and thought experiments implicitly exclude retail while studiously avoiding admitting that this is the case. Retail stores need to be open a sufficient number of hours at the right time(s) of day to capture their potential customers. Unless you're not able to handle your checkout line or your restocks for whatever reason, "efficiency" doesn't really enter into it. Not in the sense of employee time, anyway. Maybe the world's best 7-11 clerk could check out a thousand customers in an hour but just because he can that doesn't mean it makes sense to close the store at 4:00 PM or only keep it open three days out of the week.
Edit: And to add to this before anyone pops out of the woodwork to state the obvious, this does not preclude the store from having more employees who work shorter shifts. In fact, this is often already the case not for any altruistic reason (to put it mildly) but rather to prevent anyone from achieving full time status such that the company would then owe them benefits.
Working for time is standard because working for a production quota was too easily gameable by the employer as it was used to pay workers less than a survivable wage and then claim it's their fault for not working hard enough. It's not antiquated.
But at the end of the day you can refuse to work for an employer and they run the risk of going out of business.
How do you become rich legally and morally if you cannot hire any staff because you're being selfish?
You do understand right, that this is all our responsibility in a free society? Granted, no society in today's age (or ever) has truly been free. We run a mixture of freedom and tyranny and we're not wholly a free market but a partially controlled one, but if we WERE a free market then if say, McDonald's suddenly stopped paying their employees, you could just opt to stop buying McDonald's and they would go out of business. It actually is that simple.
I have stopped shopping with entire companies due to my principles. I for example will not buy Apple products because I do not agree with their business. Apple isn't about to go out of business anytime soon from that, but that's not because of me, that's because of other people. If the overarching society is too stupid to be responsible enough to make good choices and the downstream effects are bad for them, that's kinda just too bad.
You can either be free and responsible, or irresponsible and governed. There's no third option. Are you an adult, or a child? That's about what it is.