It's a little bit... weird to think of "working in a grocery store" as indentured servitude. You know, not everyone has to be a software engineer or full-stack whatever. There's absolutely nothing wrong with working in a grocery store, it's a fine way to make a living!

> it's a fine way to make a living!

The problem is that they don’t make a living. People who work in grocery stores aren’t working there because they want to, but usually just because it’s their only option. If they quit their jobs they would be homeless by the end of the month. Do you understand what their living conditions are like? It’s really sad and it makes me uncomfortable to talk to them. Minimum wage workers in high cost of living cities are just slavery as a service.

No one's forcing you to be full stack dev, you could always hang out with the mole people. Errr... I mean linux sysadmins.

People aren't indentured to work in Sweden. They don't have to work and have choice of where to work.

It's also nice, to talk to people, instead of talking down to them.

I have done plenty of jobs that are shit pay in the same tier of manual labour (stockist, hospitality) and have never met anyone in that field who didn't want to do somethinge else if possible.

In the Nordic countries, those manual labor jobs are union jobs. Sure, pay is lower than other jobs, but thanks to collective bargaining and the union having your back in case of unforeseen overtime, it isn't "shit pay" like it might be in, say, the United States. I worked some of those jobs when I was in uni, and many of my coworkers were older people who had decided to stay for the long haul, because it does feel like a stable, acceptable working environment.

In the USA, we used to have union grocery stores.

It seems like every year we are loosing more union jobs than ever.

Safeway has always been a hated place to work, but it used to pay their employees a decent salary with benefits.

Now—they have a weird semi union status. They load up the stores with desperate people, and still manage to make them maybe the most angry workers I have seen. I overheard one manager tell an employee yesterday to drive to a store two hours away, and be there by 7:00 am! The employee just looked crushed. That kind of crap didn’t happen in union shops.

I guess the future will be self checkouts, security cams everywhere, and facial recognition to track.

That there is more than one facet even something as simple as a shop? Kinda like chatting with a Cab Driver.

Don't underestimate the satisfaction of a job where you don't have to prostitute your brain and where you can send a smile to people a couple of times a day.

worked in restaurants for years before moving to software engineering. despite being 'good' at coding, it screws me up a bit that I was a lot happier in many ways while working at a restaurant. i felt I had a lot more brain bandwidth for my personal activities outside of work, too

Isn't people work at these jobs because there's no other options available for them?

Where I'm at, the vast majority of employees working "grunt" positions in supermarkets are high schoolers along with some elderly and disabled folks. Given those demographics, I strongly suspect most of them are not working there to make a living.

Disabled people work for fun in grunt, manual labour, positions?

Seems hard to believe.

I never said anybody was working for fun. The disabled people to which I am referring are certainly dependent on others for their care. The livelihoods of most people in the demographics I mentioned are not dependent on a part-time job like that.

You may want to brush up on the concept of 'service' before you start a business selling to the public

Or that the government could subsidize these jobs if they have positive output not captured by the businesses.

Thanks for posting