The Slacker Barista

…could be your next boss

The “slacker barista”. The “McJob”. The Liberal Arts “Basket weaving” degree. These terms are routinely used to make fun of people who work hard in the food service industry, or who pursue education that does not seem to have a direct path to a set career. In all cases, these people are thought of as unmotivated and unsuccessful. But despite the fact they are working hard to make a living, there is great career potential that can come from the experiences gained in food service and other types of jobs. There are skills and lessons there that can apply to other jobs, including many that didn’t even exist a few years or months ago. They could even become your next boss.

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Transcript

When the Biden administration announced its student loan forgiveness program in the summer of 2022, there was the predictable outcry from the segment of society who hate seeing non-rich people get a break. But this episode is not about the rights or wrongs of tuition debt relief. Instead I want to talk about the perception held by some about students and education in general. Among the many insulting terms largely hurled by populist conservative politicians was the term “slacker barista.”

I have heard this kind of terminology before in other versions, most famously, as the McJob. In all these cases there is an assumption that the people who work in fast food service are essentially unemployable and don’t really want to do anything with their lives.

It is true that many people do not want to work on the front lines of a fast-food restaurant for their entire lives, but the fact is, most move on to other things. They pay their way (and I was one of them) as best they can as they struggle to improve their own situation through hard work and determination. What could be better than that?

Politicians who make such disparaging remarks tend to conveniently forget this fact, largely because many of them never had to go this route, and of course, it would weaken the foundation of their sound bite. But these hard working people are indeed building a future, not only for themselves and their families, but also for the economy. The taxes that help pay for infrastructure and politicians’ indexed pensions come straight off the paychecks of these hardworking people before they ever see it.

Many of these baristas and food servers get up really early in the morning or work late into the night to ensure that coffee and meals are ready for the consuming public. While they do this, they also learn a range of other skills. These include customer service, quality control, brand management, occupational health and safety, staffing, franchising, leadership, team management, restaurant management, personal financial management, even conflict management. They are learning these skills on the job, as they work, often for minimum wage.

This is a far cry from the slacker mentality. These people (and again, I was one of them), learn their business and life skills while enduring front line conditions. No matter what career or industry they choose to work in next, their experiences in working on these fast-food front lines will remain invaluable and extremely relevant. I would challenge any politician who makes condescending remarks about food-service people or minimum wage workers, to try it out for themselves. Not as a one-hour photo-op, but for months, not just simply working the job and trying to keep the job, but doing so while worrying about making the rent, feeding the kids, being able to care for the kids and being at risk of losing it all due to one mistake or complaint. Handling the pressures required to keep a job under these conditions requires a fortitude far from a slacker mentality. Learning how to do this is another vital like skill.

Working these types of high-demand, low reward jobs generates the type of knowledge that quality management skills are built on. The McJob was a term that reflected directly on McDonald’s restaurants, even though it can be applied to many other jobs in fast food or retail. Colloquially, it implies a dead end on the career path, but in truth, aI have just described, it can be the complete opposite of that.

In fact, McDonald’s has its own management school – Hamburger U – which provides short but intense courses in management and leadership for McDonald’s employees who have worked their way into a management role at one of the chain’s 36,000 plus outlets worldwide. It’s called Hamburgerology. Attendees obtain a degree upon graduating from the course at one of the five campuses worldwide.

This is no mere novelty. This is a certification of real skills obtained in a higher learning environment, paired with years of real experience. The degree does not simply have value within the McDonald’s community, but in my mind is on par with other business degrees in terms of relevance. Those who dismiss McDonald’s as a mere fast food outlet are forgetting it is also one of the biggest commercial landlords in the world, one of the biggest toy distributors in the world, and of course, has enormous influence in agriculture, packaging, logistics, and human resources, having more than 1.7 million employees worldwide.

That person who serves you your coffee through the window of your drive through is no more likely to be a slacker than in any other profession, including politics. Whether they are taking the first steps along the path of their career, or taking on the honorable role of providing for their family, these are people who deserve far more respect from wealthy politicians who deride them in the name of a sound bite.

The Curse of the Liberal Arts degree

Then there is the whole underwater basket weaving thing. The next thing that is so often picked on by those in positions of privilege is education, especially the type that does not seem to have a direct focus on particular career, like law school or med school. Anything that smacks of a more lateral awareness is then blasted as a waste of time.

But when you look at the biographies of successful people – and I don’t mean just the super-rich financially successful types, but anyone who has had enjoyable and fulfilling career that has provided a degree of security and comfort – part of what helped them move ahead was a broad education, both academic and in life, that helped them frame their expertise in often unexpected but valuable ways.

As just one example, the film director Chris Columbus, known for movies like Home Alone, Mrs. Doubtfire and Harry Potter, started out working the night shift in an aluminum mill in his hometown in Pennsylvania, writing screenplays during the downtimes. He has stated in interviews that he not only pursued film studies, but also liberal arts, because he didn’t just what to know the technical aspects of how to make a film; he wanted to make sure he knew something about life, so he had something to make films about.

One of the most famous examples of a success story from a liberal arts degree of course, is Steve Jobs, who dropped out of university and dropped back in, randomly taking courses such as calligraphy. What he took from that course was instrumental in pushing through the technology that would create different fonts, in an age when laser printers were still a novelty and anything other than courier typeface was deemed unnecessary.

The point of education is not primarily to prepare an individual for a specific job, but to give individuals an awareness of the world and to instill the capacity for critical thinking. Often this leads in surprising and powerful directions. In fact a great many people in charge of hiring for an organization look for diverse backgrounds and experiences in order to strengthen and deepen the overall community.

The politicians who react with vitriol to the prospect of student loan forgiveness always bring up the underwater basket-weaving thing. They never mention the veterinarian who cares for their dog – who may also have a taken a liberal arts degree before choosing veterinary school. Or their accountant, their lawyer, or the press agent, all of whom are smart professionals and whose path may have taken some interesting turns and made them better people because of it.

Education is never wasted. When you see someone who is sitting on a classroom or even on a workplace Zoom call bored out of their mind, it’s not their fault. If what is being taught does not connect with an individual, then it needs to be taught differently, and in a way that matches an individual person’s learning style. Unfortunately, so much education – corporate and academic, is designed to be as economical as possible, often packing groups into a space – in a classroom or online – with expectation of a bell curve – a few bright people come out of it and do well on the exams, and the others flail and or fail.

When people make fun of someone who seems to be drifting through school, unfocused and disengaged, they once again seek to blame the individual, rather than the system. It’s easier and cheaper to do that.

The Professional Waiter

The last point I wish to make here about the slacker barista and the McJob is the stigma of manual jobs as being beneath one’s dignity. Frankly there will always be a need for skilled tradespeople – plumbers, electricians and mechanics, for example. And so too will there be a need for serving staff at food outlets. Some of these people will takes the skills and the lessons learned in food service to help discover their interests and build their careers. Others can use the stability of employment to build personal credit and advance themselves financially. And still others will discover that there is a thing called a professional waiter – a person who has worked in restaurants all their lives and who has perfected the art of “waiting,” turning it into a highly profitable career, mostly through tips and an well-honed skill of knowing precisely when to appear and how to maximize the art of making guests feel special.

When I hear haughty politicians insulting hard-working people for not having such a lofty position as they have, I know it is done to appeal to a voting base and to leverage fear – the fear of educated people swaying the vote or the fear that these same voters might have of losing their current jobs and ending up themselves having to don an apron and start serving coffee to survive. It always comes down to fear.

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Keywords: Tags/Keywords: mcjob, barista, slacker, gig economy, solopreneur, networking, career