Our shop rat has moved on to higher paying gigs. We even upgraded his title to Respected Repair Rodent, but the prestige was not enough to overcome our meager pay scale.
Shop rat also served as lab rat for my grossly amateur sociological observations. Based on a totally random sample of one home-schooled teenager, added to broad generalizations and jumbled recollections of other part time coworkers, I reached the stunningly predictable conclusion that someone working multiple jobs will have trouble paying full attention to any of them.
The type of job makes a difference. Specialty retail means working in a toy store for a certain target clientele. Part time workers who enter that realm probably have some degree of personal interest. In the bike business, intense interest can lead to frustration and a quick departure, if the shop's customer balance doesn't provide enough outlet for the enthusiast's personal satisfaction. For instance, a shop in a nearby town, run by a hard-core mountain biker, had to cater to the full range of bike shop customers, which made it hard for the owner to keep mechanics who only wanted to work on the cool stuff. The majority of repair work in most bike shops does not focus on the cool stuff.
Side note here: the cool stuff is much more time consuming and precise to service than repair work on the contemptibly primitive machines scorned by the technolemmings. Forced to find a balance between an hourly rate that actually covers the overhead and a competitive price that attracts customers, shops probably make a lot less money on high dollar repairs for tech addicts compared to tune-ups and traditional services on simpler machines.
Even a good and interested Respected Repair Rodent is likely to have distractions, since the role often attracts school-age youth in their first jobs. Our previous trainee was a sponsored young racer still in high school. He rated everything on the basis of athletic challenge, but having been in bike racing from a very young age, he also understood and respected the machine itself. After high school he went on to join the Marine Corps because it appeared to offer the most satisfying athletic challenge among the services vying to recruit him. His first choice was rescue swimmer for the Navy, but he just barely failed the eye test. The bureaucracy made it needlessly complicated to retake the test. His distractions from work consisted not only of academic needs as he worked toward graduation, but also his training days, first with the Navy pre-induction group, then preparing for the Marine Corps test. Bike racing does not provide complete fitness.
We do have an unlikely part timer who had only ridden a bike much before he was old enough to drive, and had never been beguiled by the later forms. His main thing is climbing. Our shop is not a pure bike shop. Cross-country skiing during the Telemark ski craze merged with a lot of mountaineering technique and technology, and the local tourist economy favors a bit of light hiking merchandise. We have been able to offer the climber access to deals on gear for his primary interest. In return, he has mastered a range of bike skills, and is willing to cover a couple of crucial days of the week reliably.
The masters of the financial universe have decreed that workers shall be insecure, and that many shall stitch together their incomes from multiple sources. As a result, workers don't feel invested in the success of any company, and they pick their favorites to receive anything approaching their full attention. Management has been trying to make labor obsolete since the dawn of industrialization. Labor-saving devices aren't meant to ease the crushing physical burdens on the toiling masses. They're purely meant to reduce payroll expenses. Management may frame your layoff as the gift of free time. "Now you can go find that dream job, or start your own small business! Don't think of this as the terrifying revocation of your financial lifeline! Think of it as an opportunity for self-actualization."
Motherf*ckers that moved your cheese want to give you a cheesy book about adapting to changing times, when the aspiring autocrats haven't evolved their outlook toward the general population for centuries, if not millennia.
Evolution is not survival of the fittest. It's survival of the most adaptable. When it comes to humans, however, that really means survival depends on being able to use intelligence and ingenuity to repair the consequences of massive group stupidity. We have faced mostly self-created problems for centuries. Disease challenges us because pathogens evolve. Weather challenges us, but its intensity has increased because of greed and obstinacy. Our mania for "productivity" keeps us gouging and gashing at the earth in a frenzied grab to exploit resources for profit, when profit exists nowhere in nature. Other than that, interpersonal conflicts at every level are humans creating problems for other humans.
In my own working life, I have tried to maintain space for self expression that I hoped would become marketable. The financial channels that irrigate the creative world have changed drastically over those years. I never managed to put more than a small siphon into the main reservoir at the best of times. Regardless of the near certainty of poverty and obscurity, I haven't been able to reconcile myself to shutting up completely. I can add my own lived experience to the profile of the distracted gig worker.
Drawing on the example of friends of mine who make things, I did try to take jobs in areas that interested me, so that I could earn while I learn. They had practical skills in mechanics and machining, so they fared better financially. I didn't always manage to score the most interesting part time jobs, and they typically paid as little as an employer could get away with paying. Paying as little as an employer can get away with paying is Payroll 101. Pay as little as possible for any service. That may not mean taking the lowest bid, if a little more money will bring in someone less likely to incur extra costs by making stupid mistakes, but it will always be as little as the employer can be forced to pay.
For a super small business like our shop, the entire pay range is limited by the gross revenues of the business itself. This time of year, with its Small Business Saturday, and admonitions to support small businesses helps very little when the economy remains stacked against small businesses at all. You can't send a flood of customers to a struggling business and expect a miraculous recovery. Look at what happened to the bike industry in the Covid surge: an already struggling industry, further crippled by the pandemic's attack on production and delivery, had nothing to sell to the suddenly interested public until the public had moved on a year later.
There's more insecurity than security in the economy that real people inhabit. People are really good at seeing only what is right in front of them, so an individual who is doing well will not look to the dark precipice just coming into view. A successful person in the moment will scorn the less successful and relegate them to their fates.
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