Reading the WSJ

We Financial Times readers don't often get stories like this. Our mornings are more likely filled with ruminations about the Federal Reserve, the European Central Bank, or the world economy. The Wall Street Journal does that too (though not as well I would contend; and of course its reactionary op-ed page pales next to the brilliant pink (salmon?) of the FT), but one thing it does do well is cover business. I read that story on a plane the other day, and it struck me that I wasn't sure how I as a WSJ reader (for the day) was intended to respond to this:

"Daniel A. Gunther has good reason to keep his checkout line moving at the Meijer Inc. store north of Detroit. A clock starts ticking the instant he scans a customer's first item, and it doesn't shut off until his register spits out a receipt.

To assess his efficiency, the store's computer takes into account everything from the kinds of merchandise he's bagging to how his customers are paying. Each week, he gets scored. If he falls below 95% of the baseline score too many times, the 185-store megastore chain, based in Walker, Mich., is likely to bounce him to a lower-paying job, or fire him...

Interviews with cashiers at 16 Meijer stores suggest that its system has spurred many to hurry up -- and has dialed up stress levels along the way. Mr. Gunther, who is 22 years old, says he recently told a longtime customer that he couldn't chat with her anymore during checkout because he was being timed. "I was told to get people in and out," he says. Other cashiers say they avoid eye contact with shoppers and generally hurry along older or infirm customers who might take longer to unload carts and count money....

By calculating a standard time for each task, a retailer can more closely monitor worker performance and figure out how and where to reduce labor, the single biggest controllable expense in retail. OWO says its methods can often cut labor costs by 5% to 15%.

The approach is rooted in the time-motion theories of Frederick Taylor from the early 20th century, which were used to break down tasks into units to determine the maximum work a person could do. Harold B. Maynard, the company's founder, began his career in 1924 as a time-study engineer at Westinghouse, then formed his own company. For 70 years, that company worked primarily for manufacturers.
In 2000, after demand from manufacturing industries declined, the company shifted into retail. These days, about 80% of its $20 million in annual revenue comes from retail.

"As manufacturing gets shipped overseas, many people thought that would be the end of engineered standards," says John Lund, a professor of industrial engineering at an extension program for workers at the University of Wisconsin. "In fact, we are not seeing that at all. We are seeing a renaissance of engineered standards in the retail industry."

My initial reaction was to think of all sorts of 19th and 20th century touchstones. I thought of Max Weber's iron cage and Marx the younger (alienation) and elder ("Owing to the extensive use of machinery, and to the division of labor, the work of the proletarians has lost all individual character, and, consequently, all charm for the workman. He becomes an appendage of the machine, and it is only the most simple, most monotonous, and most easily acquired knack, that is required of him." and "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.")



I can only assume that many a New York Times reader would have the same impression as I did were the article in the Times. But I can only surmise that a WSJ reader is intended to get a little thrill of discovery in a new more efficient system--even if the darker (and absurd: checkers explain how they cheat to make their times) sides are exposed within the text itself. There are practical reactions as well: Consider the CEO in a recent New Yorker profile of uber-optimist Thomas Friedman who admitted that when he read The World is Flat he started writing down names of firms in the outsourcing busines--since he figured he ought to be outsourcing too. By way of inference, I kind of assume that many WSJ readers will do the same with such an article. They figure that they ought to get their firms a state-of-the-art timing system to reduce costs (cost of labor in this case) in the service industry (or invest in firms that do etc.). And the thing is, they are right. If it makes the firms more "productive" without sacrificing too much in customer service (measured by higher profits after the "improvement" relative to what they would be without the system), then they should, and will. That is how the capitalist system works, after all: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." (Of course that will suck for both the customers and employees, but our complaints are insignificant in the face of that sort of logic.)