Comment by andrepd
4 months ago
In the year 2025 the zeitgeist is decidedly against any considerations beside crude profit. Like someone pointed out: a park generates less revenue than a café. And a neighbourhood café probably less than a hyperoptimised gigachain. But is an urban park not an important part of quality of life? And is not a neighbourhood café with its crowd of regulars and familiar faces and accessible prices a better thing that yet another chain store #28174? [1]
No space in 2025 for any such considerations.
[1] Case in point: I just read a news piece announcing that an 85 year old café in downtown Lisbon will be closed down to make way to yet another generic gentrified """brunch place""" for tourists. The regulars, many of them elderly and for whom the friendly place was basically a living room to help stave off lonelyness; many of them working people used to stopping by for fresh bread and a chat on their way home from work, are dismayed of course. But it's more "economically efficient" to cater to tourist jerkoffs and sell them the same overpriced egg on croissant that they can have in any large city in the world...
One kind of worker the chains are better for is the people who work at the chain. Large businesses treat their employees better because they're more professional and can eg afford an HR department.
Sole proprietorships can be okay, but employee-hiring small businesses are run by tyrants and have fewer protections against worker abuse. After all, they're only small businesses because they aren't good enough to become big businesses.
Or maybe they stay small because big business made it impossible for new businesses to grow through consolidation, regulatory capture, and other contemporary business practices that decidedly do NOT make them a better place to work (the HR department isn't there to protect the employees - it's there to protect the company from the employees).
Please don't reply with platitudes. If your coworker is sexually harassing you then your coworker is the person the HR department is protecting the company from. Not you. You won't make it in the middle class if you can't navigate basic politics like that.
If you have an issue with payroll I hope you don't avoid getting it fixed either, because that's HR.
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