Readit NewsWhy is that? I love take-home assignments. At least, if it's just an initial get-to-know-you interview, and then the assignment. What I utterly despise is the get-to-know-you interview, then a tech interview with the entire dev team, then a take-home, then a meeting with the CTO.
I will never, ever, ever go through with any job that has an interview process like this again. I always ask up-front what their interview process is like.
If you want early stage bulk screeners, go for it, I'm sure you need them, but don't take much of my time or the math don't math.
That's how he won, he exploited the gap between Republican voters and Republican politicians. As soon as I heard him sounding exactly like your average R voter chattin' at a diner, I knew he was dangerous and we were in for a wild ride.
That was a good idea. But we stopped.
This isn't recent; we've been heading this way for decades, and not by accident.
I think one of the author's main issues is that they want to feel special, and that feeling can only come through external validation like the exclusion of others.
Also, they seem to take the easy and lazy way out by seething instead of acting.
Also, they lie a lot. Nobody has hassled people with clipboards to save the whales for 26 years.
> The only thing still alive is the endless, humiliating upsell and self-service. The drugstore, the bank, the dentist
Yeah.
Lazy way out.
When I had a bad experience at a chain pharmacy 10-ish years ago I spent less than an hour, googled "independent pharmacies" and found the National Community Pharmacists Association. They have a locator for locally-owned independent pharmacies and I switched to one of those. Now I know my pharmacist's name (not the tech, the actual pharmacist, though I know the techs too) and I don't even have any pressing or complicated medical issues. The only thing they've ever tried to upsell me is a self-published book on local lore and history written by a woman who lives in my neighborhood that was in a stack next to the register.
Yes I bought it. I'm a hoe for that shit.
Same with shoes. My feet are large and weird and shoe buying sucked, not to mention the clueless staff. Often a store would have one pair in my size so I would have to take what I could get. So I took a little time, did some research, and found that specialty running shoe stores exist, staffed by experts, locally owned and operated.
You can do this with many things. Banks (though I prefer credit unions, mine is so small that nearly every member can fit in a large ballroom for our annual meeting and we have an App and digital wallet and everything), doctors, dentists, clothing retailers, anything.
But instead of acting, the author chooses to seethe.
And before you say "there's no other option" you're wrong, unless you live in a deep rural area where the nearest store is 20 minutes away and is a Dollar General, you are wrong.
You just don't care enough to do anything about it, which is a goal with most businesses: plotting the pain/rejection envelope and operating as close to it as possible, to appease the shareholders. You may have to travel a little farther or spend a little more but like I said: pain/rejection envelope-- "how shitty can we be because we're in the main shopping center and the independent guy is on the edge of town?"
An easy way to avoid the race to the bottom is to exit the race.
Don't seethe.
Act.
It isn't hard.
The sole local thing I've been missing around here is a pharmacy that's not fucking CVS, which is awful (and Walgreens isn't better). I hadn't been able to find one using Maps.
Just tried this tool, very hopeful. There are six CVSs closer than the nearest independent pharmacy, literally a dozen towns closer to me than any of these independent pharmacies, and not a one with a non-megachain pharmacy in it :-/ Not driving 25ish minutes each way when we have to go two or three times a month (kids with regular prescriptions). Bummer. I really, really hate CVS.
> And before you say "there's no other option" you're wrong, unless you live in a deep rural area where the nearest store is 20 minutes away and is a Dollar General, you are wrong.
This varies greatly regionally. From what I can tell the places with the healthiest local business options are ones where not just some neighborhoods or a town or two are (relatively) rich, but the whole area is rich, and at least somewhat densely populated. Which makes sense, but is sad for all the small towns out there with people really ideologically dedicated to "local business"—there's a reason those struggle and often fail within a year or two, in those places, and it's because there's no money in the area.
Corporate surveillance is government surveillance. Always has been.
$300 full-retail for two pairs of sneakers in the downtown of a major city is not rich people money anymore, the goddamn trash-tier sneakers for my kids at Kohls often cost like $50+ a pair—on clearance. That's dead-center middle-class spending now, and the middle class has had shit service a long time.
I get it. $100 sneakers should be premium. $150? Pft! If you're somewhere that stocks those, it's gotta be nice, right? I mean damn. But not so much any more.
I suspect there's something similar going on with the rest of what they're seeing. Though yes, I agree that the middle class once again receiving any amount of actual service instead of constant attempts to fuck them over and nickel-and-dime them would be rad.
[edit] Aldi did automate the management of getting shoppers to do that work, because there’s not a person standing there taking and handing out quarters, but (very simple) machines. Without those machines they might need a person, so that hypothetical role (the existence of which might make the whole scheme uneconomical) is automated. But they didn’t automate cart return, all that work’s still being done by people.