The best retail job I ever worked was at a high volume liquor store. Sure, it was soul crushing to see teachers buying pints of vodka on their lunch breaks or to load the old widower’s truck with his weekly case of Carlo Rossi, but there were some upsides.
We were legally obligated to refuse a sale to anyone acting suspicious since our jobs were literally on the line - selling to a minor or selling to someone you knew was buying for a minor meant that you could get fined, jailed, fired, or some combo of all three. That gave us a lot of power to control the point of sale interaction. Liquor stores and check cashing business are heavily regulated so there are frequent sting operations to ensure stores follow the various laws and regulations; this made for a wonderful way to disarm cranky customers.
We also were told to not sell to unruly or obviously inebriated people. We had a “banned customers” binder with people’s pictures from the security cameras sitting on the desk at one of the registers.
We had strict hours because it was illegal to sell outside of the hours of 8am to 11:59pm on week days, or 8am to 8pm on Sundays. If you’ve never worked retail, you don’t know the absolute joy of being able to say, “make a purchase or leave; no customers in the store after midnight,” especially if you’ve worked at restaurant. I remember dealing with someone who was banging on the door at 7:50-something in the morning demanding to be let in and calmly telling them through the locked door, “it’s not 8am on our clock and that’s the only clock that matters.”
While I’m not a fan of the police or calling them unnecessarily, the passive threat of the police occasionally being in the parking lot for DUI enforcement regulated a lot of people’s behavior without us having to say anything or make a phone call.
I’d never work at a liquor store again, though.
As with remote work, it really depends on what you’re doing. Some jobs and classes are tailor made for remote, some are nearly impossible to accomplish remotely. COVID inspired some really creative uses of technology but at the end of the day, it was an augmentation not a drop-in replacement.
I think online courses should be available as much as possible whenever practical, but what we all have to realize is that designing an effective online curriculum is expensive and difficult. We also have to realize that certain activities will never transition to online and we just need to accept that. Taking a lecture with 300 students? Put that that thing online. Learning an instrument? You need to be in-person for your lessons and ensembles.
What needs to change is how in-person workers are compensated and how institutions support the development of online programs. It’s not either/or, it’s both/and.