[freeflight]

> You could never employ somebody as a greeter here, or to pack your groceries, or to pump your gas, or other extremely menial and near useless jobs.

Well, not full time.

Some German grocers have started to employ very young people during Fridays and Saturdays as packers. They look young enough to be still in school, also collect tips with little boxes, but they are not full-time employees but rather "mini-jobbers".

Which is just such a weird transition considering that many of the jobs I did in my youth have now been turned into their own weird job sectors like that.

While delivering papers is now something exclusively done by adults in cars, as an extra income stream for unemployed on social security. I don't know how that can be economic but I see it happening all the time.

> Personally I think it's a big step backwards to have people do extremely basic stuff as busy work.

Some would argue that's been happening on a rather massive scale for a while already. Our productivity constantly increases, so do our numbers, as such it's only a matter of time before we end up with a whole lot of "surplus" humans in terms of labor demand for keeping everything going.

[Symbiote]

That's odd. In the UK and Denmark, you get youths who look about 16 working in supermarkets, doing the normal tasks: restocking and tidying the shelves, running a checkout. They certainly don't get tips!

The more expensive shops employ more youths, I think the budget stores don't use enough staff to have an older person nearby if the teen is stuck somehow.