* not having to cut labor to the minimum as a basic value
* sooo many jobs would be unobjectionable at 8 hours per week. Almost any job.
* professions should be designed to balance physical and mental labor, particularly to offer breaks from painful standing.
I am not with you on:
* Giving people 167% of the average hourly wage for an easy job like retail. As a society, we do not _want_ retail to be a great career. You don't develop the job skills or provide the same value as jobs that are more challenging, and the more valuable things you could have produced are lost. Retail should pay less than other jobs, _because_ it's more fun to interact with people all day than to work at a hot grill.
When you are that poor, you need every hour of work you can get to make rent, buy food etc. You can't take time off to interview for a better job, or to study for a new career. You are stressed from a thousand extra decisions about money that the cushion of a little extra cash could save you. Also you are one emergency or injury or illness away from losing your apartment, or going hungry.
That's why advocates call for a living wage, a wage that people can make enough to live on. If they have the capability to do more, then that gives them a better chance to achieve it.
Though there will still need to be people working retail.
As for how fun it is to interact with people... that definitely depends on who you are and who you are interacting with. If you know someone working retail, ask them how it is.
Broadly, as a society, we want people to have jobs that pay them enough to survive, and with enough margin to do other stuff. Not everything can (or should) tie back to economic value. Otherwise we end up cutting off our noses to spite our own faces, as we focus on the short term rather than the long term health of a wider community.
More than anything, we want to reward diligence, professionalism and effort, in whatever form that might take.
Part of the reason software jobs are nice and comfortable is of course the pay and the agency, both coming from demand exceeding supply. But a big part of it is also, IMO, that it's impossible to tell how much contribution to the bottomline a developer has on a day-to-day, or hour-to-hour basis. When my coworker and I start talking shit on the job, does that contribute positively or negatively to the ultimate productivity? By how much? Nobody can tell, which is why we can get away with it.
Conversely, in retail or fast-food joints, you can track people's contribution to the bottom line at minute resolution. Which is why they're being treated like slave labor.
And everyone needs to shop. Retail isn't just interacting with people all day: You are filing shelves. Sometimes you are a pharmacist or a pharmacy tech. Sometimes you are doing payroll or managing. Sometimes you are ordering product.
You are also cleaning up the shit someone smeared on the wall of the bathroom and the puke the kid left in the isle. There is no real way around that.
Not everyone thinks it is more fun to interact with people all day long. I'd argue that most factory work - lots of which is paid fairly well, comparatively - takes no more intelligence or training or knowledge than retail. In both, once you have experience, you can get another job. Same for call centers... which again, are usually paid better than retail or fast food (yet still treated poorly). I don't know why retail should pay less than these sorts of jobs. Most folks just wind up with retail jobs because that's what they started with and it is hard to get out of the cycle.
I don't like interacting with people but it is way more cushy than the factory work I did for fifteen years. I guess you're right about not taking more intelligence or training, but it takes so much more physical stamina and risk of accident.
Most folks don't do retail for fun. Those that do will also do a number of other part-time jobs for fun or whatever reason. Most folks working retail, though, are doing it to eat and pay rent. Sometimes having a flexible schedule is necessary. A great number of places have chances to move into management, sometimes moving out of poverty wages.
None of this means the folks aren't ambitious or motivated. You simply don't recognise it as such because they are doing what you consider to be a "lower" job or not doing enough to meet your personal criteria.
I will grant you that selling garden soil might be as physically demanding as working in a factory, and miles walked could add up too. But I never woke up in retail wondering if I'd be physically able to continue working my job much longer because of the wear and tear.
There's a reason every rich country got there by manufacturing and not retail, and in part it's that you don't build human capital by sitting in a chair scanning price tags. Manufacturing productivity increases steadily so workers have to become steadily more skillful to keep up. It's also far from a dead-end job, as productivity is easily measured and the cream can rise.
People in retail can be ambitious and talented, but their talents are wasted there. We can't get every ambitious, motivated person out of retail and into the job where they would do the most good just by offering them money, because money isn't everything. But we can avoid screwing things up by _pushing_ those people into jobs where their talents are wasted, by offering them too much money. I've worked lots of mandatory overtime because people wouldn't come work for my employer, so I feel the pain of jobs that need good people but can't get them.
Your response screams, "I've never worked a retail job in my life!!". There's nothing easy about working retail in the United States, and interacting with the majority of retail customers is far from "fun".
To some degree, serving the "customer" by cutting labour costs to the bare minimum (as a way to minimize the cost of everything), means we create an awful existence for the people who depend on these jobs for a living. The tyranny of their lives is dictated by a consumer base who constantly demand lower prices and will shop elsewhere to save a dollar or two.
I worked in a supermarket for four years, but it was part time, while I was in High School and in my first year of University. I didn't need the money in the way someone working full time needed it. I was given consistent hours every week.
Working retail for a modest wage (say $25 an hour), with consistent hours would be a really great career for a huge swathe of the population. Lots of people (myself included) enjoy interacting with people all day.
A lot of more traditional professions have a better balance between physical work and mental work (skilled crafts, engineering in the traditional sense, or being a doctor all come to mind). Modern knowledge work doesn't have enough physical movement involved.
I wouldn't like to do it full time, but sometimes I wish I could spend 20% of my time doing something enjoyable but menial like stacking shelves. I think I'd hate doing it full time, but one day a week? Practically sounds like fun!