the hidden cost of good service (from an ex-waitress)

4:05 wait… is that the vsauce theme?

Also: Sentiment analysis!

When I worked as a waiter, I had a dumbass who waited for about five minutes (a bit over) and he made a scene that he was waiting for 25 minutes and noone served him. My colegue almost fought him, but I took him to the camera monitor and showed him on cameras that we were doing serving in order of appearence and that he was there for just over five minutes. He left

I have to disagree there is the term "your friend is not your therapist" due to people using there friends for emotional labor. I agree the the message was harsh sounding however, you should be able to tell your friends if you yourself are already overwhelmed.

Give this girls raise for reading through all those reviews

I understand your perspective at 4:40 when you say that's a misuse of the term emotional labour. I disagree with you that there is something off about what the tweet says or that it's unreasonable. That would more appropriately be called setting and maintaining a boundary. In the example message, the person doesn't have time and/or emotional and physical energy to help their friend and they are communicating that clearly and offering alternatives. To ask if someone is available for as much time as is required and if they have capacity for what you need is recognizing that they may not be ready to hear upsetting things (for example) and asking permission before unloading heavy and upsetting things on them.

7:44 Sabrina and Taha are GOATs for doing all this work.
Thank you.

i actually love the animation, it depicts the emotions so well that it ends up being creepy

Great video. Brilliant, engaging, well done.

One could spend a whole nother video talking about sexism– the society treating women's attention, smiles and labor as a public resource that all are entitled to for free. And in every concrete way, women are more economically vulnerable worldwide, so they have more to lose from dropping "the facade" at work. This issue is decidedly NOT gender-neutral, though I understand why you framed it this way for the video…

Love and solidarity

I gotta know how Tom Hanks made it into the special thanks

yall make the best fucking videos

In the future, if you want to analyze something like a ton of words… use something like EdWordle which allows you upload massive blocks of text & create a word cloud which will show you which the most frequently used words are. If you can filter out the noise of the "filler" words, you'll be left with the meaningful ones that convey intent. I have found when using this for research, I find trends I didn't expect. (I use it a lot for sociological research because people respond well to visual representations of data that don't feel "mathy"… especially when you're focusing on a topic that is inherently people-focused & not STEM-focused)

i never liked hyper friendly. Just be polite and i'll do the same. You're pretty & a bit geeky btw. Lovely mix

I haven't yet read Hochschild's book so I don't know whether she covers this or not but I think a big part of the shift in online conversation about emotional labor is in acknowledging emotional labor as an unpaid labor which exists outside the context of employment. The process of assessing someone else's emotional state and catering your behavior and "service" to enable their happiness, wellbeing, and relaxation is a skill that marginalized people practice constantly. I have mixed feelings about extending this into friendships but I know that when my friends handle personal conversations in the way the tweet demonstrated, that it's actually a sign of mutual respect and that they are likely countering personal habits of jumping to help at the first sign of need even when it's bad for them to do that.

I'm really glad that you touched on the mutuality of emotional labor in interactions with service workers. Having worked in retail and food service for a number of years, I always try to be extra nice to the service workers I interact with. More than once, just being pleasant, polite, and accommodating to the service worker results in not just great service but in them going above and beyond, offering discounts etc. Sometimes it makes me very sad when I see how little effort I have to put in to achieve this kind of response, because it says some pretty terrible things about how everyone else treats them.

Oh, people absolutely do not leave reviews because they had a pleasant experience. As far as good reviews, go, things have to be absolutely exceptional for someone to leave a good review.

Anthropology has some super cool research about this, a lot of which draws on and expands on Arlie Hochschild's work! We call it 'affective labour' and there's so much cool reading out there looking at all the different industries that are dependent upon it

Here, in central Europe, where it's actually not so common to tip (the service workers just get paid a fair wage), people in service are fairly friendly, but if you are a dick to them, they will sometimes let you know. I feel like the culture of excessive smiling is one of the reasons why so many entitled people (or Karens, if you will) exist, since they can experience someone being nice to them even without putting in the effort to reciprocate. Although there are Karens all over the world, they are arguably more prevalent in the US and other countries where the "the customer is always right" mantra is a rule above all.

In Spain, waiters are not (by default) as friendly as in the US. They are friendly and nice, but in a different way. I've always found the stereotypical "niceness" of service workers from the States to be borderline creepy. And I feel the same way with overly nice waiters here ("overly" from my point of view, of course). My friends might think they're being nice but I really just want to leave. Maybe it's me and my neurodivergence, though.

Anyways, I've always tried to be nice to workers, as long as they're not rude. I think it's common sense, but apparently it's not.