Incidentally, one of the reasons retail is so bad is because the biggest part of the job is extremely high-impact emotional labour

Most of what people think of 'as retail' is not actually the job. Swiping things in front of a scanner, putting things on shelves, that's not the work. That's the easy stuff.

It's being required to be an immediate sudden emotional respondant to people both above and below you

With a customer you have a tenth of a second to absorb their state and you have ten seconds to make the best positive spin on their emotional state you can, within the confines of the job you've been given. Fuck it up, you can get in trouble. All day.

Lots of working class jobs have enormous emotional labour components that we just don't reward or incentivise, but do punish their absence

Imagine a retail store that's 100% automated, just vending machines or tokens or stuff like that. The official jobs of the people are handled by an automation. Easy. That can be done by a machine.

What do you do when a kid gets lost in there

Incidentally, as a uni tutor, I know I'm not doing 'Working Class' shit, but a lot of what I need to do isn't dump facts on my students but helping them find the context of the work they can catch. That involves understanding how they think and feel about things.

Btw, that automation/lost kid example isn't mine, that comes from a guy called David Graeber, who also is the dude who first framed retail work as emotional work in a way that clicked for me.