Are People Bad At Their Jobs....or Are The Jobs Just Bad?

A Bed Assembly Drama

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Last month, a friend of mine who we’ll call Jane bought a nice mid-century modern bedframe from Wayfair. She was moving into a place of her own and had to buy several items to outfit the space, so she decided to spend more on the couch and less on the bedframe. Wayfair’s looked nice, the reviews were good, and best of all, they didn’t charge for shipping.

The bed parts would arrive, unassembled, in a few big boxes. This friend has some physical limitations that make it difficult to lift or maneuver heavy objects, so she knew she couldn’t put it together herself. But right there on the Wayfair site there’s an offer for professional assembly — for just $84.99?

Sounds GREAT. The FAQ explains that the assembly will be performed by an “assembly pro” from “one of our trusted partners, Wayfair Home Services or Angi.” Assemblers are “background-checked and highly rated by customers.” All you have to do is add-on assembly when you buy the bed, then schedule it using the app.

So Jane paid $84.99 and scheduled assembly for the day after delivery. The boxes were dropped by FedEx at the wrong apartment door, a common occurrence with FedEx in this area, and Jane’s elderly neighbor had to push them down the hallway to her door. The next day, the Angi assembler arrived and began assembly. After several hours, the assembler told Jane she couldn’t finish: Wayfair had sent the wrong part.

Jane sent a photo of the bed to Wayfair, who promised to send a replacement part. But then the photo made its way to the Wayfair parts department, where someone looked closer: it wasn’t the wrong part. The assembler had just assembled the bed incorrectly.

Jane got in touch with Angi and asked for a new assembler to come reassemble the bedframe. She kindly requested that they send a different person than they’d sent before. A few hours later, Jane received notification that her assembly had been scheduled. With the same assembler. Who then failed to show up for the appointment.

She was at wit’s end. She cancelled the assembly. She’ll eventually have the $84.99 refunded, but only after she fills out an online form and waits several weeks for a check to arrive in the mail.

Jane was telling a friend about the whole fiasco, and they volunteered to come reassembly. He quickly discovered that the entire frame had been assembled incorrectly, beginning with step one. The Angi assembler was probably good at all sorts of other things in her life. But she was not good at assembling.

Jane’s bedframe saga reminded me of a conversation I was having with a different friend last weekend, about the Apple Store’s inability to get her iPhone to ring with an incoming call. After a two hour phone call and a visit to the store, the phone remained broken. She started trying different Google queries — and fixed it herself.

After that conversation, I checked our island NextDoor to see that several FedEx packages had either been delivered to bushes or the wrong house — a frequent occurrence. Soon thereafter, my prescription was refilled incorrectly. At Fred Meyer, our local Kroger-owned grocery store, a bagger in his 70s put all my frozen items in a normal bag, and my chips in the cold storage bag I’d brought from home.

Small stuff, all of it. None of it super inconveniencing. But a series of inconveniences add up. Maybe you’ve experienced something similar over the last few years, contributing to a vague conviction that people are bad at their jobs.

People are bad at their jobs is a sibling, of course, to no one wants to work anymore: the refrain of peak pandemic years. But both are deflections from what actually makes people “bad” at their jobs — or disincentivizes people to work. The truth is: the jobs are bad.

What makes a job bad? Take a look at Angi, which, like food delivery apps, Thumbtack, Taskrabbit, Instacart, and hundreds of other “gig economy” employers, promises consumers cheap ease: just a few clicks, and some part of your life will be easier. In reality, the business model that creates both the cheapness and the ease makes the end product significantly worse: the only way the company can make a profit is by taking a significant cut off the top of the service and by exclusively hiring part-time “independent contractors” (and thus circumventing labor laws; economist David Weil calls this phenomenon “the fissured workplace.”)

As a result, the majority of people who sign-up to do the work are making very little money. At Angi, assemblers report making around $25 for a single assembly. A bed is scheduled to take two hours. Add in transportation, gas, and/or parking costs, and you’re making less than minimum wage ($16.66 in Washington State). So who’s doing this work? Someone who’s desperate for some control over their schedule. Someone who’s desperate, generally. Not someone who can market their skills themselves — like a local handyperson, working for themselves, who’d charge their hourly rate (mine charges $50 an hour) or a local furniture assembly specialist (the one I called charges $150 minimum for assembly; more for a larger project).

If you wanted to reverse engineer a job to ensure that the people doing it would do it badly, you’d build something like Angi. It doesn’t provide training. It doesn’t provide tools. It doesn’t provide benefits, or job security, or anything close to a living wage. If you get better at assembling, or if you’re so good you amass a client base, you can bet you’re not doing those jobs through Angi anymore.

Or take the example of FedEx — delivering to the wrong door and throwing packages in the bushes. We’ll start with FedEx’s primary competitor: UPS. UPS is unionized and directly employs its hundreds of thousands of U.S. workers. The average pay for a UPS driver is $95,000 a year, plus over $50,000 in healthcare and pension contributions. Part-time workers receive the same benefits. Working for UPS is a good job — and that’s part of why UPS workers are good at their jobs.

Delivering for FedEx, by contrast, is a bad job. It subcontracts its routes to smaller entities that then hire their own drivers; a scrape of job listings for drivers shows an average pay of $22 an hour. Most subcontractors pay their drivers using a “fixed daily rate,” which means they’re paid the same no matter how long the work takes. If they’re done early, they go home early; if they take longer, they’re not paid overtime. For a route like the one here on the island, they’re not receiving any extra pay for the time spent waiting in the ferry line on both sides.

It’s a bad job, which is part of the reason we have new drivers all the time — drivers who don’t know the island, or where to leave packages, but are desperate to finish the route as soon as possible. Again, the parameters of the job itself make it far more likely for whoever’s doing it to be “bad” at it.

Then there’s the botched prescription refill. I use the Walgreens Pharmacy out of convenience — but Walgreens, like every other chain pharmacy in the US, has been significantly understaffed for years. Chain pharmacies are now forced to negotiate with Pharmacy Benefit Managers (PBMs), who serve as middlemen between insurance companies and the pharmacies themselves, ostensibly saving insurees millions by negotiating lower prices from the pharmacies themselves. In practice, PMBs save the insurance company millions — but not necessarily the insuree, who, even if they do save a few dollars on a prescription, is paying for “low cost” drugs by spending endless hours on hold or in line to get their prescription filled.

At the same time, the non-pharmacy parts of the drugstores themselves are pulling in less money, placing even more pressure on the pharmacy as a profit center. Thousands of chain pharmacies have closed since the pandemic, effectively funneling more customers into fewer outposts. (Or, as happened with me, the PMB that represented my insurance company offered my previous pharmacy at Fred Meyer a “take it or leave it” deal; when Fred Meyer declined, I could no longer have my prescriptions filled there. Hence: Walgreens, along with thousands of other local residents who can no longer fill their prescriptions at Fred Meyer).

More customers + more pressure to create profit + stagnant wages = fewer employees working more hours for less pay, which also leads to burnout — and people being bad at their jobs. And as for working in an environment that effectively forces you to be bad at something you’re good at — that leads people to leave the industry altogether. Cue: even more understaffing, even more pressure on the people who remain, and a much higher likelihood of a prescription renewal getting screwed up.

Okay, but what about the Fred Meyer bagger? Working at Fred Meyer is actually a pretty okay job: you start at minimum wage (again, $16 an hour here in Washington) and then get bumped up when you become part of the union. A full-time gig offers full medical benefits, paid vacation and sick leave, even Sunday overtime ($1 more an hour).

The vast majority of baggers I encounter are actually quite good at their job, but I also encounter fewer and fewer baggers, because Fred Meyer has decided that the best way to lower costs is to only have one checkout with an actual checker open and funnel all other customers to self check-out. This particular bagger was bad at this job because he probably shouldn’t be working this job, but it’s one of the few jobs available to someone who has to work into their 70s. (The bagger couldn’t get hired at Costco, which is right across the street and a very good job).

As for my friend’s iPhone — well, working at the Apple Store is also a good job. Even if you start at the bottom of the pay scale, they promote from within, offer full health benefits for full-time employees, 401k matching, and stock discounts. The Genius Bar appointment system is unrivaled. I recently messed up my computer and since I live two hours from the nearest Genius Bar, they sent me an overnight box (via FedEx, that time they got the delivery right) to ship it to them, did the repair, and shipped it back (also via FedEx, but this package didn’t get here overnight because the weekend delivery person couldn’t find my front door. Yes, she was new.)

Sometimes the product is just weird — or, as we used to say about certain cars, a lemon. But we’ve had enough experiences with people in bad jobs that it sure feels like everyone, no matter the industry, is doing bad work. We blame it on lack of ambition, lack of pride, laziness, rudeness, whatever, because it’s always easier to blame the individual who made our life difficult, instead of the systems that don’t just foster but incentivize bad work.

As a society, we have decided that we want more for less: more convenience, more purchases, more technology, but none of it at prices that render it out of reach. For years, we allowed immediate gratification to blind ourselves to the reality that making something cheaper and more accessible almost always makes it worse. It didn’t matter if the shirt fell apart or the couch collapsed — you could always buy a new one and survive on the glow of its novelty until it had to be replaced as well.

The exploitation (of workers, of natural resources) that made that abundant cheapness possible was largely invisible and thus ignorable. Some people paid the time tax and figured out new homes for their discarded items, but most people pile it into Goodwill or the dumpster, telling themselves a story about how it’d find a second life, or telling themselves nothing at all.

A badly made pair of sandals is annoying but survivable. But people being bad at their jobs in your everyday life is far more difficult to ignore. It adds unanticipated rupture. It blows up your carefully planned day. It exacts a stiff time tax — and while you have money (in part because everything is so cheap!) your time has become far more precious. You’re just standing there in line at Walgreens, stewing about how there has to be a better way, absolutely indignant that they can’t manage to figure out one prescription that refills every three months seriously how hard can it be. Our hunt for the frictionless deal turns a purchase into a quagmire that takes weeks to fully undo, restore, and solve.

Even if you don’t personally hold these values, the vast majority of us are members of societies that do. But resistance is very possible. If everyone’s good at their job, shop there. If you need help with something, find a local company or self-employed person to pay directly — and tip them. If something feels like a massive deal, someone or some part of the earth is paying steeply for it, and chances are high you will pay more for it (in replacement costs, in labor, in time) later. And if you’re forced to use a company with bad services and bad products, the fault is very rarely the worker themselves, but the organization that makes it so difficult for them to be good at their job.

I’m not saying we should all spend more money on everything. Or that we should collectively lower our standards and accept shoddy work. I keenly understand that part of the reason we rely on these exploitative services is because we, ourselves, are subject to the demands of the same economy: one that tells us our time is always better spent working or recovering from work, instead of helping others with their bedframe assembly or, say, shopping in person.

But I do think it’s worth wondering: what would happen, how might the paradigm shift, if we continue normalizing paying far more for far less? ●

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Just want to be clear here that companies and consumers are all part of this — but if you’ve found yourself in the position of buying something like the Wayfair bedframe, I don’t think you’ve done anything wrong. I have ALSO bought a Wayfair bedframe!! (Although my assembly saga was far less fraught than Jane’s). I’m not trying to make anyone feel like shit; instead, I’m trying to have us think about our reactions to “bad” products and “bad” service.

So, for today’s discussion: What have you paid less money for — product-wise, service-wise — but ended up paying more in other ways? What are your strategies for normalizing (receiving) less for (paying) more, particularly in the US, which valorizes (receiving) more for (paying) less?

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