Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. Quitters

McKinsey & Company has published new research on the surge of American workers leaving their jobs. The findings are reverberating through corporate HR. More than 15 million workers in the US have quit since April 2021, many without new jobs. The report also suggests that company leaders “don’t really understand why their employees are leaving in the first place”:

Employees are tired, and many are grieving. They want a renewed and revised sense of purpose in their work. They want social and interpersonal connections with their colleagues and managers. They want to feel a sense of shared identity. Yes, they want pay, benefits, and perks, but more than that they want to feel valued by their organizations and managers. They want meaningful—though not necessarily in-person—interactions, not just transactions.

2. Cheeseburger in Paradise?

Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville Resort opened a new location in Times Square. The change in latitude prompted Eater to serve some serious New York straight talk in its review:

The 5 O’Clock Somewhere Bar does not open until 5 O’Clock, which puts a crimp in trying to live out the metaphor of its name. The whole point of the phrase is a justification to start drinking early, before the workday is done, because somebody, somewhere is off work. But no, for the 5 O’Clock Somewhere Bar, one of four restaurants and bars at Manhattan’s new Margaritaville Resort Times Square, you must wait until the workday is over. I am furious about this. Sure, the License to Chill Bar opens at 2, but it’s the principle of the thing. Jimmy Buffett would not wait until the boss says you can go home.

3. Completely Trashed

San Francisco has undertaken the “bizarre pursuit of the perfect trash can.” Lydia Chavez of Mission Local reports:

In late 2018, San Francisco had embarked on a quest to design its own garbage can — from scratch. By the summer of 2021, two-and-a-half years later, an industrial design firm had completed the conceptual drawings for three models. In July, the Board of Supervisors would vote on spending $427,500, much of it to manufacture and test five prototypes of each model. The price tag for each prototype was estimated at between $12,000 to $20,000 apiece.

4. Talk Is Cheap

Back in June, a Robert Woods Johnson survey asked American workers what they would do if employers mandated vaccines. 48% said they would quit. A Kaiser Family Foundation survey found similar results. But new research shows that very few employees are voting with their feet. Scientific American reports:

While it is easy and cost-free to tell a pollster you’ll quit your job, actually doing so when it means losing a paycheck you and your family may depend upon is another matter. And based on a sample of companies that already have vaccine mandates in place, the actual number who do resign rather than get the vaccine is much smaller.

Delta Airlines didn’t mandate a shot, but in August it did subject unvaccinated workers to a US$200 per month health insurance surcharge. Yet the airline said fewer than 2% of employees have quit over the policy.

And at Indiana University Health, the 125 workers who quit are out of 35,800 total employees, or 0.3%

5. Bad Apples

Throughout the summer, the buzz from Cupertino was that some Apple workers didn’t like the idea of returning to the office, even for three days a week, as Tim Cook had ordered. Now, a New York Times story reports that work-from-home activists within Apple have taken over an internal Slack channel to “complain about their work environment.” Veteran Apple-watcher Jean-Louis Gassée makes sense of the situation:

Historically, a major success factor for Apple has been a reciprocal pact of loyalty: You treat us fair and we’ll do the same. Perhaps as the company has gotten bigger, individuals feel less connected to a vaguely articulated common goal. Or maybe employees feel an early onset of “bozo cancer”, a disease where mediocre individuals are hired by accident and allowed to metastasize by recruiting even more mediocre workers that don’t threaten them and thus discourage others to try harder because “why bother?”

6. Life in the Fast Lane

The most important development for city restaurants during COVID-19 was not food delivery. It was food delivery by the electric bike. The Verge goes in-depth with New York’s army of food delivery workers to understand what life is like on an $1800 battery-powered Arrow mountain bike:

Delivery workers now move faster than just about anything else in the city. They keep pace with cars and weave between them when traffic slows, ever vigilant for opening taxi doors and merging trucks. They know they go too fast, any worker will say, but it’s a calculated risk. Slowing down means being punished by the apps.

Websites Worth Reading

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Feeds We Follow

@AgnesCallard: Popularizer of philosophy

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@ebwhamilton: All things urban zoning