Let Them Sit!!!
Why It’s Time for Retail Giants To Let Their Clerks Take a Seat
If you truly want to gain an understanding of what it’s like to work a retail checkout counter, here’s an experiment you can do in the privacy of your own home.
Go to your kitchen counter, and just stand there. For eight hours.
Oh, you’ll get a 30 minute break to eat somewhere in there, and a couple of 15 minute breaks to rest and pee — unless you work at Amazon, where they actually time how long it takes you to empty the ol’ bladder, and dock your pay if you take too long. I’m 52, so I’d probably lose money every shift.
Not fun? Imagine if you had to do it every time you went to work.
Yet, every day, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 4.6 million Americans who work in retail sales, and 3.4 million more who work as cashiers — making up nearly six percent of total U.S. employment — are forced to be on their feet for hours upon hours at a time.
But here’s the real kicker — there is actually no good reason for it, at all. None. Nada. Zip.
Of course, retailers try to make arguments to keep their cashiers standing, but they all lack a certain je ne sais quoi — you know, substance.
First, we have a retail giant Safeway. A customer took pity on the cashiers, and donated a shipment of stools for them to use at their stations. A Safeway spokesperson told the Washington Post in 2007 that they wouldn’t be using the stools on the grounds that allowing cashiers to sit down would risk injury. Seriously. From the Post:
Safeway won’t let its cashiers sit down. Sullivan “can come by and pick them up so she can return them or donate them to charity,” says Craig Muckle, a spokesman for the supermarket chain.
“We do appreciate the customer’s thoughtfulness and generosity,” he says. “But sitting on a chair could potentially expose employees to injury. Part of their job requires them to lift heavy objects — laundry detergent, frozen or fresh turkeys, cat or dog food. Their checkstands are designed to be conducive to standing.”
And while Safeway worries about cashier injuries from tripping over a tub of kitty litter, the American Association of Epidemiology is more concerned about little things like heart disease.
People with jobs that require them to primarily stand — think retail sales clerks, cooks, bank tellers, waiters, gate agents, cashiers — are twice as likely to develop heart disease as people who spend their working day parked in a chair, a recent study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology found.
That may be happening because as you stand for hours at a time, blood pools in the legs, forcing your body to work harder against gravity to move it back up to the heart, increasing pressure in the veins, said lead author Peter Smith, a senior scientist at the Institute for Work & Health in Toronto. Over time, that can increase your risk of heart disease.
“If we can recognize that standing for a long period of time is just as bad for you, if not potentially worse, than sitting for a long period of time, maybe we should reconsider whether it’s worthwhile as a society to force certain occupations to stand for long periods of time,” Smith told TODAY.
Walmart is currently embroiled in a class action lawsuit with its California-based cashiers over the sitting vs. standing issue, and their point is that they’d lose business if customers see cashiers sitting, because they claim it gives the impression that the employees aren’t engaged enough.
Just to prove I’m not making this up, this is from the Courthouse News Service just this past July:
Walmart also presented a study by Dr. Jerry Wind, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, whose survey of 1,209 California Walmart shoppers suggests a preference for standing cashiers, whom customers perceive as more friendly and efficient. Of course, the cashiers challenged Wind’s study, claiming the video footage he relies on does not show actual California customers, but Walmart employees in Arkansas posing as shoppers.
They might have a case if not for the fact Walmart still ranks #1 in consumer complaints, but is still the most profitable retail chain in the industry.
Plus, the 2016 California Supreme Court ruling in a similar case brought by CVS cashiers will serve to confound Walmart’s arguments in this case.
In a unanimous ruling Monday, the court clarified labor law in a way that is likely to make it more difficult for companies to deny workers a chair.
“There is no principled reason for denying an employee a seat when he spends a substantial part of his workday at a single location performing tasks that could reasonably be done while seated, merely because his job duties include other tasks that must be done standing,” Justice Carol A. Corrigan wrote for the court.
At the end of the workday, there is copious medical evidence — not to mention common damn sense — to confirm that standing all day is a health hazard in a wide variety of ways. Moreover, there is no defense of the standing practice brought by retailers that in any way justifies these risks by proving that seated cashiers cost retailers sales or reputation in any measurable form.
Without any logical or fact-based reasons to rationally support standing over sitting, we’re left with only one prevailing thought about retail giants like Walmart and Safeway: TV was right.
From the cowardly manipulations Bewitched’s boss Larry Tate to Craig Ferguson’s devilishly sadistic Nigel Wick from the Drew Carey Show to Steve Carell’s self-absorbed nitwit from The Office, we know one thing.
Bosses really suck.
(Tony Panaccio is a 30-plus year media veteran, and currently a senior counselor with Wilson Media in St. Petersburg, Florida.)