Tippets by Taps - Issue #115
Happy holidays! This week we look at the changing nature of a retail employee’s job requirements, the best decade in human history, the reason Chinese restaurants keep closing, children induced decision fatigue and more. Enjoy!
Her Job Requires 7 Apps. She Works Retail.
Retail is going through a radical transformation as it competes with the ecommerce experiences. Now, as retailers try and bring more technology into the stores, the role of a retail worker has changed as well.
This is the job of a retail clothing worker at the end of 2019: dashing back and forth between stockroom and fitting room and sales floor, online and in-store, juggling the hats of cashier and cheerleader and personal shopper and visual merchandiser and database manager. As brick-and-mortar stores scramble to justify their continued existence, they’re trying to be all things to all customers, to blend instant gratification and infinite selection. And it falls upon the workers on the front lines to make it all happen.
As we enter 2020, the bifurcation between the haves and have nots of retail will further crystalize. Retailers that can take advantage of technology to create happier environments for their employees who will subsequently create better experiences for the customer will find themselves defying the retail apocalypse.
We’ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously
The end of the year is often a time for reflection. The end of a decade doubly so. As we look back at the 2010s, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the second decade of the 21st century was a bad one. We are constantly seeing negative stories stories- deaths of women and children in needless wars, senseless acts of terrorism that seem to be a common occurrence, a climate crisis that is only getting worse, a growing socioeconomic divide, a partisan political environment that isn’t addressing any of the real problems facing society and more. It’s easy to be a pessimist. Well, Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist, is here to remind you that “we’ve just had the best decade in human history. Seriously,”
We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. Extreme poverty has fallen below 10 per cent of the world’s population for the first time. It was 60 per cent when I was born. Global inequality has been plunging as Africa and Asia experience faster economic growth than Europe and North America; child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline.
As we enter the third decade of this century, I’ll make a prediction: by the end of it, we will see less poverty, less child mortality, less land devoted to agriculture in the world. There will be more tigers, whales, forests and nature reserves. Britons will be richer, and each of us will use fewer resources. The global political future may be uncertain, but the environmental and technological trends are pretty clear — and pointing in the right direction.
Chinese Restaurants Are Closing. That’s a Good Thing, the Owners Say.
The share of Chinese restaurants has fallen in metro areas across the country in the last five years. Now, this is not because they are unhappy with the business or customers are complaining about the quality of the food. Instead, many owners are facing a succession challenge: their children don’t want to take over the businesses from their parents. The kicker: owners are glad their children won’t be taking over.
Across the country, owners of Chinese-American restaurants like Eng’s are ready to retire but have no one to pass the business to. Their children, educated and raised in America, are pursuing professional careers that do not demand the same grueling labor as food service. Instead, a big reason seems to be the economic mobility of the second generation.
“It’s a success that these restaurants are closing,” said Jennifer 8. Lee, a former New York Times journalist who wrote of the rise of Chinese restaurants in her book “The Fortune Cookie Chronicles” and produced a documentary….“These people came to cook so their children wouldn’t have to, and now their children don’t have to.” “They were not precious,” Ms. Lee said. “These people did not come to be chefs; they came to be immigrants, and cooking was the way they made a living.”
Other immigrant groups follow a similar pattern. With social mobility and inclusion in more mainstream parts of the economy, the children of immigrants are less likely than their parents to own their own businesses.
As Netflix star Hasan Minhaj says in the below video, “That’s the big difference between our generation and our parents’ generation. They’re always trying to survive…when dad came in ‘82 he survived for us but I’m trying to live.”
Why tennis balls are yellow -- or maybe green
What color is a tennis ball? Is it yellow? Is it green? Really think. It turns out it depends on the person looking at it, much like the color of the dress saga from a few years ago. But get this: tennis balls didn’t get their distinctive neon hue until nearly a century after the game was invented.
After many iterations, including balls made of cork, wool and even human hair, the tennis ball found what was then its ideal form: a ball made of a rubber core encased in white or black melton, a tightly woven and felted fabric.
For nearly a century, tennis balls were white or black. It wasn’t until 1972 that tennis balls took on their bright neon hue.
The reason for the change? Television. Once the sport started being televised, the white balls were hard to track. So the change to green. Or is it yellow?
The Last Word On Nothing | Redux: Every decision my kids made me make in one day
Decision fatigue is real. Decision fatigue is the mental exhaustion and reduced willpower that comes from making many, many micro-calls every day. My modern American lifestyle, with its endless variety of choices, from a hundred kinds of yogurt at the grocery store to the more than 4,000 movies available on Netflix, breeds decision fatigue. But it is my kids that really fry my brain.
At last I understand that my own mother’s penchant for saying “ask your father” wasn’t deference to her then husband but the most desperate sort of buck-passing–especially since my father dealt with decision fatigue by saying yes to pretty much everything, which is how my brothers and I ended up taking turns rolling down the steep hill we grew up on inside an aluminum trash can.
I decided to write down every question that required a decision that my my two kids asked me during a single day. This doesn’t include simple requests for information like “how do you spell ‘secret club’?” or “what is the oldest animal in the world?” or the perennial favorite, “why do people have to die?” Recording ALL the questions two kids ask in a day would be completely intractable. So, limiting myself to just those queries that required a decision, here are the results.
A hilarious piece that is sure to have you parents out there nodding your heads. My son can’t talk yet, but I can only imagine how this plays out for us given every time we sit him in his high chair for a meal my wife and I need to put on a three part play complete with singing and dancing to get him to eat anything. Also, for anyone wondering, the total number of questions asked was 108.
Quote I’m thinking about: “The point is this: When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity still dominates our worldview.” - Peter H. Diamandis