A few days before I left for Shanghai, the New York Times published an interesting report on China’s slowing economy, and its unforeseen impact on retailers and manufacturers. As the economy stopped growing at the untenable rate at which it had been for the past decade, people stopped buying goods like cars. This has left dealers and suppliers with the newfound problem of surplus inventory, and the question of what to do with all of these goods on which people can no longer afford to splurge. You can read the article here (shameless plug: Geoff Broderick, quoted toward the end of the article, is my boss).
I’m reminded of this idea of surplus inventory as I think about the subject of this post. In addition to having an apparent excess of cars and other goods, China may also now have an excess of, well, jobs. One of the nice things about living in a still-Communist society is that basically everyone is put to work. I can’t speak intelligently about the unemployment rate here, and there certainly is inequality (I pass homeless people on the street every day, though not nearly as many as in New York). The system isn’t perfectly Communist, but it’s certainly Communist, and it manifests itself in somewhat amusing ways.
Put simply, the citizens of Shanghai are tasked with some pretty useless things to do, presumably in the name of universal employment. Take this guy, for example:
I pass him every day on the way to and from work. He stands at the top of a staircase that leads down to both a mall and the Metro station near my office. His job: to say hello. Period. End of job description. Every time I pass him going up or down those steps, regardless of whether I make eye contact or not, he says, “Ni hao.” Other than that, he stands there. As far as I can tell, he doesn’t carry a walkie talkie, and he certainly isn’t packing heat, so I can’t classify him as a security guard. He’s a greeter. I would assume if I asked him where the bathroom was, he would tell me, though I can’t be sure, because in three weeks of passing him multiple times daily, I haven’t heard him say a single thing other than “Ni hao,” which he says constantly. With all due respect to the poor bastard, is that really an indispensable job?
Descending down into my particular area of expertise – the Metro – we find two more examples of jobs found here the need for which escapes me. First, our friends the bag checkers:
At each and every Shanghai Metro station, all of the entrance gates are preceded by security guards, who are tasked with running everyone’s bag through a scanner before they enter the Metro. 1-2 people wave their hands at you to put your bag on the belt, while another one sits and watches the screen. Now, I don’t mean to scoff at legitimate security measures. We live in a post-9/11 world, one in which mass transit systems have already been the targets of terrorism several times. So if the Chinese government has deemed it worthwhile to set up security checks in the subways like we do in airports, who am I to say that’s unnecessary. I’d rather be inconvenienced a little bit than have bombs in the Metro. That’s obvious.
The problem is, the entire operation is conducted in the most farcical way imaginable. Here’s how it works: Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum wave their arms at everyone carrying a bag, and almost everyone carrying bag does absolutely nothing. They just walk right past Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum as towards the turnstiles, as if they were selling comedy show tickets. For the few people that follow their gesticulations (I’m usually one of them, both because I’m a good citizen and because I just feel bad for the clowns), bags are put on the belt, presumably to be scanned, except the idiot watching the screen is never ever EVER paying attention. I wish I had a good picture of what the screen-watchers do, but it’s always some combination of talking to Tweedle Dee/Dum, reading a book or a magazine, or just staring off into space. One place they are not staring is at the screen showing the x-ray of my bag.
So if the whole security checkpoint thing is just a big joke, then why even bother? I can’t imagine it’s cheap to install and maintain all of those scanners, let alone pay the thousands of Tweedle Dees that pretend to man them. If you’re going to have security in the Metro, fine. Personally, I think the notion of checking bags for the millions of people that ride the Shanghai Metro every day is somewhat unrealistic. But if you’re going to do it, do it. This is just plain silly.
Moving on down to the Metro’s platform, we meet my favorite practitioner of a useless job. Meet Flag and Whistle Guy:
His job is to blow his whistle incessantly whenever a train is coming. That’s helpful, considering a) everyone can see the train, b) everyone can hear the train, c) everyone can feel the wind created by the train’s motion, and d) there is an automated announcement a minute before every train comes that’s literally impossible not to hear. So I’m grateful for this guy’s added warning. When the train has arrived, he waves his flag (you can't see it because I'm a bad photographer, but it's in his raised hand). I assume the flag waving means something, like “okay! Everyone get on the train!” or “okay! Everyone is on the train now, it can leave!” But boy does it look dopey. And even if he is serving to somehow increase passenger safety, a worthwhile endeavor most surely, there’s no way he does it effectively. He’s one dude, on a really long platform full of people, and he doesn’t move or give any indication that he’s there to help. And you guessed it: every single Metro platform has at least one of these eager beavers, on each track.
Further manifestation of China’s nearly universal employment guarantee include things like this monstrosity:
This is a mall. We have them in the US too. It’s actually where Mr. Ni Hao works. These things are literally everywhere in downtown Shanghai: at virtually every Metro station, and all over the major pedestrian thoroughfares. They build these things with alarming speed and frequency (there’s another one across the street from this one), and fill them with all of the world’s fancy brands. You can see the Gucci store in this picture. The problem here is twofold. First, most Chinese people can’t afford Gucci, especially considering most of the stuff is priced higher than it would be in the US because of all the taxes that the Chinese government levies on sales by foreign companies. Second, if I or anyone else wanted a bag that said Gucci, I could go buy a fake one from a merchant for literally 4 US dollars. The result: lots of malls, with lots of empty stores. I’ve walked through places like this before, in search of food (to be fair, the food establishments set up in these malls are often quite good, and quite crowded). When I pass by, all of the salespeople in the various fancy shops eye me desperately, as if to say “please come in and pretend to buy some of my overpriced crap…no one has been in here all day!”
So what to make of all this? I’m not really sure I have a “so what” here. But seeing all of these seemingly useless jobs has gotten me thinking about the inherent differences between free market and communist societies. American politicians probably say more about job creation than anything else. Unemployment is a huge concern for millions of people in the US and elsewhere. You would think that China’s response to the kind of unemployment that we have in the US would be to hire more Greeters and Flag Wavers, and build more malls. And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, putting good people to work so they can provide for their families. But I can’t help but think that there are better uses for people than saying hi to me twice a day. Is it possible that a society ultimately is more efficient and benefits from a finite job supply? I think it may be.
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