'A generation had gone to work that day expecting to do nothing."
These are minimum wage workers or maybe a little above. No way can they live on what they make. Let's put it this way - you get the workers you pay for.
How do corporations expect people to buy their products, if they pay diddlysquat?

As someone who used to work a minimum-wage job, allow me to point out that the teenyboppers behind the counter were likely still in high school. Which is to say, the income they're earning isn't designed to support them or a family. It's designed to buy them CDs and new clothes.

I am sick of people thinking that simply because they work for a low wage, this entitles them to not work at all. Yes, Starbucks only pays $8 an hour. Guess what? That's a couple hundred dollars a month, plus tips, all for doing the back-breaking labor of making a latte for eight-hour shifts, three days a week. I know. I did it.

You should NOT earn money for showing up. Ever. Ever ever.

That said, I am all for there being jobs that pay workers more for their labor. I just request that they be paid what they're worth. Sarcastic teenage counter help isn't worth diddly. And that is what they should be paid.

fascinating.....i too have experienced the service-workers-lolling-around phenom. yes, most of them are young. that's called, low-paying entry-level service jobs, which is the honorable way to get walking-around money when you are a kid or lacking in education or skills enough to get something better (honorable, as opposed to, mooching money on the street, which i also see an appalling number of middle-class teenagers and young adults doing, another toxic sign of the times). i have worked plenty of these jobs. and let's face it, you stand around yammering and giggling with your co-workers every chance you get-----when there are no customers, that is. when it is a sign of a greater sickness and dysfunction is the situation the columnist described, and in the last couple of years i have been dumbfounded to encounter it over and over again. the place is empty. there are more than one employee posted at the counter. they are doing nothing. they see you and know you are there. but you have to demand that one of them wait on you. i hadn't made a connection between this phenom and a larger pathology in the economic equation of the employment market and thus the economy, (my own meta-theory was more sociological), but i think the writer here is on to something....

I'd like to point out the bad-management component of slacker teen workers.
Why aren't the teens, who need to learn how to work, being mixed with experienced and motivated workers who will show them what they ought to be doing?
My first fast-food job, when I was a teen, I was part of a shift that included a very hard-working mother of three who lived out of her car (a Pacer, if you can remember those). She had never finished high school, but she worked harder than anyone I had ever met before.
So I learned from her, and believe you me, I finished high school and college, and still carry the horrifying memory of her house/car in my mind.
That was life for a minimum-wage worker in 1982. I don't think prospects have improved.

I think some managers get it. At a McDonalds earlier today I saw a manger ask at least 4 times for something from someone who had earphones from an Ipod in his ears. Why should he get to listen to the newest song while he works? Since when is that sensible for a job that involves having conversations with those around us. No one ever got away with this with Sony Walkmen. The manager I witnessed told the young man to remove the earphones while he was working. Hopefully this young man wasn't driving home in the same manner; he'd never hear an ambulance!

I manage a large staff of teen aged loafers and am working VERY, VERY hard to undo the damage that Barney did by telling these kids that they were "special" simply by virtue of their birth. When they whine at me that they are not having fun at work, I reply, "Fun is something you pay for, Work is something you get paid for."

I have experienced the same thing.

I have also experienced worse, cause I technically was hired as a higher skilled worker, and worked among people who were working for minimum wage, and I made that time a little bit more than they did. I was targeted all the time, especially when it was found out I made 10cents more than the manager did upstairs, who was really the head clerk.

I also had more freedom than the people upstairs, I could listen to what I wanted to, because I wasn't serving customers, directly.

I have always wondered about the shorting, I think it is really dangerous. It gives us the short end of the stick too, doesn't it?

I meant I made 10cents more AN HOUR than the manager did upstairs, who was really the head clerk, and of course had to spend more time on her hair.

You know what really scares me, it is not who sells me shoes, or who serves me a treat, I usually go to self serve places now to fulfill those needs, but who handles my personal information. It just amazes how little respect people can have for privacy and related matters.

For example one of the tellers, I think off the cuff, said to me, I am sure people in line could have heard her comment though, I would sure like your account balance, then I said, I would have your car. I decided then, to transfer that money into a GIC in another currency, cause I wondered how easy it would be for someone to take it if there was no real paper trail. Then I gained on the translation, and one of them said, it must be nice to get free money, as if the risk had nothing to do with it.

It is the same in the walk in clinic, I noticed on some printout they had, written sort of like this "a reminder that medical information can only be shared under a court order" who knows what brought that memo on, I would not want to venture a guess.

I think the economy and related failings is about people, not just about numbers.