An old excuse

It was ten til seven in the morning and I was at the store to pick up some repair items for a toilet in my house needing its lever and flapper replaced. As I walked past the toy aisle towards hardware a voice came over the PA system from a supervisor. At that time customers were outnumbered by preparation employees and the supervisor was making an announcement in regard to the time and a goal that was to be met by seven. In the distance the announcement was met by an employee stating “shut up already”.

I rolled my eyes at the disgruntled employee and it reminded me of a similar event the day before. We took our nineteen month old son to a restaurant with activities for children to meet a friend and their son who is about the same age whom because of where they live, doesn’t get to that kind of place too often. We thought arriving in the late afternoon, well past lunch and a bit before dinner, would spare us from the typical crowding. We were wrong; apparently there is no good time to visit that place on a Sunday. Every unoccupied or unreserved table, and there were few, was absolutely disgusting and in desperate need of cleaning. My wife went to find some help and we camped out at a table large enough to seat our party. Ten minutes later the one employee charged with cleaning at this place packed with several hundred people stopped by. He quickly wiped over the table with dirty water. After a decidedly subpar effort this employee informed us that that was all he was going to do and mumbled some excuses inaudibly under his breath.

After they left I remarked to our group, “Well, obviously his level of give-a-crapness is lacking.” To which one of our group exclaimed, “What do you expect, he probably makes minimum wage.” I rolled my eyes again, gathered my thoughts momentarily and replied, “With that attitude, why should anyone ever pay him a cent more?” My heckler was forced to concede my point.

Today we all too often use compensation or lack thereof as excuse for an utter lack of effort. It is an old and completely irrelevant excuse. Chris Rock was right when he said that when someone pays you minimum wage that they would pay you less but they can’t because it’s against the law. But that doesn’t excuse doing a job poorly.

In this country jobs are applied for and chosen, not assigned. Certain jobs can be done by more people and the more applicants available the less that an employer can offer them in terms of compensation. Either at the department store or the restaurant, if the disgruntled employee did not agree to work for a given wage they could have refused to apply and looked for something else. It’s reasonable to assume that their respective skill sets are commiserate with their current positions, which means at this time that’s the level of compensation which they can expect.

Of course, how they perform at that level of compensation and the skills, both job and employment related, that they acquire there are meant to serve them later. The whole point of a market economy and what is known as the American dream is to strive to and work to success. It takes time to learn and then master the types of skills that employers are willing to pay more for. Complaining over menial tasks and blaming a lack of performance on low compensation will only lead to one never learning enough to do anything else.