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It's odd working a job where you have no real complaints about the work itself. sure, every workplace has that one guy that is a total dbag, but as far as work involved goes, I am as happy as a clam.

I don't have much time at home now, working 10 or 12 hour shifts 6 days a week, which in some respects, is good. I never leave work feeling unsatisfied. I never get home and think to myself "what a waste of a day." It is quite different from retail, where just about everything is terrible. The customers, corporate breathing down your neck, poor or underskilled management, slacker coworkers. Why does it have to be when someone works retail, the goal in that person's life seems to be how to burden others more. Ultimately, it makes everyone feel shitty. If everyone just did their fair share of work, without complaining or devaluing labor, retail would not be so bad.

Retail jobs are almost a direct byproduct of the consumerism that has engulfed western society. Nearly every retail employee is automatically the lowest form of life to every customer. Its no secret that everybody needs to shop, but it seems that retail has a disproportionate amount of assholes. Either there is a statistical incongruence, or people just let the worst out when shopping. And in a society where the majority of free time is spent shopping or doing activities directly related to or descendant of shopping, this is quite a social burden.

Take for example fast food. There is an extreme level of expectation because of the relative high price of fast food. If fast food became popularly rejected overnight, there would be a large influx of underemployed or unskilled laborers. I've always approached fast food with three tenets in mind; 1) I am paying for the convenience 2) I am paying for the image or entertainment and 3) I am paying for whatever (in most cases poor) nutrition in the food.

Now, if anyone of those three assumptions are unsatisfactorily fulfilled, the entire experience is terrible. I must enjoy fast food on those principles; the convenience is that "hey, I don't have to make my own food and its available on demand." its never the fact that I have to make fast food that comes to a grinding halt on its way to satisfaction, its the "on demand" portion. Waiting 10 minutes for Taco Bell is instantly comparable to waiting over an hour at sit down restaurant and begs the question "what could I have prepared in 10 minutes." The overall experience is terrible. 10 minutes, to most people, is 1/3rd (or 1/6th) of their break at work, etc. We have become accustomed to freely interchanging all labor across incongruent labor/time scales. 20 minutes of television becomes 1/3rd of what one might make in an hourly wage. But what is not seen is the exploded lineage of production of consumed products.

A careful examination of any single object currently within your current reach could undoubtedly take days to explain. The very keyboard I am typing on, with its various components, have factors so complex between the raw extraction of earth materials, processing of those materials, production of components and manufacturing of the unit itself (not to mention all accessory necessities in a consumer society; packaging, design, etc.) that it is boggling to the mind. Then to equate all that based on its retail price to some form of labor--its no wonder so many people adopt a structuralist approach to economics and thus mistakenly interchange trade value and human value.

It is our very inability to perceive the "goings ons" that lead us to reduce everything to labor.

well i forget where i was going with this... but it feels good to just vomit out some vague block of text no one will ever read. yep.