Actioning a blue-skies approach outside the box

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
the last one is deeply sinister, but absolutely true. That could be Apple's tagline. Let's create more empty desires for things, people, so that no-one is ever satisfied!

You heard about this, right?

Noel_304_3.jpg


selfridges.jpg
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I'm presuming that's photoshopped! Though advertising is increasingly knowing, so maybe not...

(After googling) Goodness, it's actually real. Is there anything that will stop the zombie hordes?
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Is there anything that will stop the zombie hordes?

Shotguns and fire are the canonical solutions...

Edit:

Job candidates must show that they have a natural flair for the ‘Pret Behaviours’ (these are listed on the website too). Among the 17 things they ‘Don’t Want to See’ is that someone is ‘moody or bad-tempered’, ‘annoys people’, ‘overcomplicates ideas’ or ‘is just here for the money’.

Because, naturellement, one should want to work for Pret for the sheer life-affirming joy of selling coffee and sandwiches to commuters. :rolleyes:
 
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I think someone coined the phrase 'emotional labour' for the demand that not only should employees do work well, but that they should look like they are enjoying it. Sinister colonisation of the mind, making tedious tasks unbearable.

The creation of a new 'corporate moralism' through these kind of things (the Pret Behaviours list) is simply unbearable. "Communicates sensitively"? ABOUT A FUCKING SANDWICH??

And of course an "informal style", achieved through a Stasi-like monitoring of a strict system of rules. "Agrees blandly with others" seems to have been placed int he wrong column.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/03/pret-a-manger-success Several times in the article and comments, the 'smiling friendly faces" are praised. Can these people ever have witnessed a genuine smile - Pret counter service is pure bodysnatchers.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
So aside from gormlessly grinning twats writing in CiF (is it noteworthy that he's wearing the same shit-eating grin as the Pret sandwich monkeys?), does anyone actually like this kind of service? I mean fair enough, no-one wants active surliness from people who work in shops and cafes - with the exception of those occasions when someone is actually so surly it's hilarious - but I cannot fucking stand that fakey American over-familiarity, that "Hey, how ya doooin'?" as if you're childhood bestest buddies being reunited after many years.

Normal, old-fashioned politeness is fine. I came in here for a sandwich, not to have my whole day lit up with rainbows and pixie dust.
 
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e/y

Well-known member
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baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Ah yeah, still have a copy of Empire somewhere, but never been able to get through it.

@Tea, I'd personally separate this new over-friendliness from the more 'traditional' American customer service schtick, which tbh I've always found fine, because with the latter it seems to happen more when the person serving genuinely has time to talk, and ends up in a conversation. Which, while banal, is at least a simulacrum of genuine human interaction. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I often liked that aspect of 'US culture' when going to the States. I mean, when I've worked in shops in the UK (which, alright, is ages ago now, so before the age of affective labour perhaps), sometimes it has been nice to engage a customer in brief conversation just to make the day go that bit quicker/out of genuine interest. I certainly wasn't doing it to impress/satiate a middle manager.

The thing with the Pret affective labour is that it makes everyone talk exactly the same, off virtually the same script, and the interaction is so brief that there is no genuine engagement whatsoever, cos there's a queue of 30 people behind you just waiting impatiently - it's a kind of knowingly post-human pseudo-interaction. Plus it involves the dreaded false smile.
 
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Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Oh yeah, I'm all for shop/cafe/bar workers and customers recognizing their shared humanity and having a bit of small-talk and a laugh (shame 'banter' has been so contaminated by association, because that was once exactly the right word) when the occasion arises. I just don't particularly want them to pretend they're my new BFF.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
I liked this sentence from the article e/y posted about Pret:

"One’s very ability to get along with others is alienated and quantified, made into something you would only do for money rather than from basic human solidarity."
 

Slothrop

Tight but Polite
I think the issue here is that it's a nice experience if the people in the shop / cafe / whatever that you're going to are reasonably chatty and friendly because they're actually comparatively happy and relaxed and enjoying their work but a bit unsettling if they're chatty and friendly because they've been told that they'll be out on their ear if they aren't...
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
absolutely,and for me the clincher is that most people seem to be so alienated that they think this kind of service is a positive thing (how else to account for the fact Pret constantly pushes its staff to be over-friendly, if it didn't mean they sold more as a result?), that even manifestly fake friendliness is in some way viewed as a good, something to make one's life slightly better/more bearable/less alienated.

it says something terrible about the quality of human relationships within the working day (given that Pret seems predominantly oriented towards office workers, given its locations) for most people.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I liked this sentence from the article e/y posted about Pret:

"One’s very ability to get along with others is alienated and quantified, made into something you would only do for money rather than from basic human solidarity."

Yeah, there's a real catch-22 here, isn't there? Workers are expected to behave like they're "not just in it for the money", and to (ugh) incentivize them they're offered a financial reward!

A po-mo bind of Zizekian proportions.
 
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zhao

there are no accidents
thoroughly enjoying this thread, especially the agency wankery... from my office at sky tv. did i tell you guys that i had to take the blue pill for a while? well anyway, no shortage of corporate wankery here i can assure you. wish i could remember some of them printed on big posters during the year end meeting... "good enough is not good enough" (that one they bit from Chiat Day). there were 30 or so of these inspirational messages, and at meeting's end, the entire creative services dept. had to team up in 3s or 4s, and each choose a poster and say something about it.

oh there was another that said "don't challenge the status quo, destroy it" or some such. which is of course PRECISELY opposite of how this entire huge company, each of its hundreds of departments and each and every director and the employees under them ACTUALLY operates.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
"don't challenge the status quo, destroy it" - brilliant! Like saying "It is compulsory to disobey this order". You could have some fun with that.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
"don't challenge the status quo, destroy it" - brilliant! Like saying "It is compulsory to disobey this order". You could have some fun with that.

yeah i'd like to see the results of anyone stupid enough to actually follow the orders on this one.

this is what is troubling about this stuff, is that it is exactly like the ideological apparatus of oppressive regimes. we all implicitly know that a shit is a shit, but everyone knows, without even instruction, to explicitly toe the company line and call it a rose.

reminds me of old GDR jokes like

cop 1: what do you think about our government?
cop 2: the same as you.
cop 1: you are under arrest.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Ultimately people are so desperate for jobs that they will put up with corporate wankery ad infinitum, and perform as they're supposed to when they're supposed to, while bitching about it as soon as they get out the door.

Comparisons to the GDR are pretty apt in a lot of ways. Dissent is made, if not impossible, incredibly difficult by gradually wearing people down.
 

zhao

there are no accidents
Like Zizke's postulation that the old school dogmatic authoritarian father who says "you have to visit your grandmother." is better than the post-modern liberal father who says "you have to visit your grandmother and you will like it!", because with the former the possibility of revolt, which of course can land you a harsh belting, at least exists.

perhaps the unashamedly square corporation is in many ways better than the hip agency which pretends to be cool but actually approximates a creepy, "uncanny valley" fake cool. in some ways i'd rather have a pinstriped boss with a broomstick up his ass than some tattooed fashionable young neo-con who sports irony as an accessory telling me what to do.

or maybe i'm just trying to make myself feel better about working at sky.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
Absolutely, traditional authoritarianism gives you something to push against as you say, which makes it vulnerable. Modern corporate authoritarianism increasingly doesn't, by denying that it is authoritarian and coopting the signifiers of revolt (the tattoos, irony etc), and by stating that it is doing exactly the opposite of what it is doing. Creepy as fuck.
 
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