Most Jobs Shouldn't Have 8-Hour Shifts

My regular coffee place in college would close for no reason whenever the managers felt like it. It was between my parking spot and my morning class, which was perfect. I'd be running late and have no time to pack food and it made me crazy when I'd try to grab something right before class but they were closed with no explanation.

The hours listed were something like "7ish to whenever", that was what the sign said on the front door. Or it might have said "closed whenever we feel like it", there was some funny sign like that. What a horrible business model, right? Who can expect to build a customer base with that attitude?

No, it made people want to go there more. Every successful trip to this place was a rare event and made you feel lucky. The frustrating closings made people more determined to get in, like they had to settle unfinished business. Their hours became this shared joke around campus, but only for people that went to that school, weren't brand new students, and had to go to the super early classes. They got constant free publicity out of it and students were always talking about them.

I had no idea why they were closed. It's possible they strategically closed during peak business hours so that the greatest number of people would see their sarcastic signs, but I don't think it was anything calculated like that. I think the manager would just run errands or go eat somewhere or whatever and close the place whenever he felt like it.

My favorite neighborhood bar right now has this weird ass bartender that will start singing or dancing for no reason. But he knows a ton about beer and gets right to business whenever you have questions or if you look ready to order. He said they have no set closing time, if things are busy they stay open til last call (4am around here), if things are slow they could shut down at 11pm. A four hour difference! He said "sometimes I'll stay here until 3am even if it's slow, if I'm having a good time."

At my current job, which if you work in an office is probably a lot like your current job, you stay for eight hours no matter how busy things are. You can sit there doing nothing for five hours on the off chance a customer walks in the door and spends $5, while the business owner spends thousands on operating costs. I have a finite amount of work to do every day, and if I'm done in three hours, I have to find five hours worth of whatever to fill the time. This is not only accepted, but encouraged. Just find something to do, get a head start on tomorrow's stuff, learn a new skill for the company.

It makes no sense for a company to pay for electricity, heating and cooling, security, janitorial crew, overtime, and a million other things because someone decided the job takes 8 hours no matter how much work there is to do. If a cubicle job announced that employees can leave for the day whenever they've finished their work, two things would happen: they would never ever be short on applicants, and their workers would increase their pace to superhuman speed to jam through everything and leave by 11:30am.

Workers would become ultra efficient. No one would want to quit. They would be the most loyal employees ever. If the company dumped extra work on them, they would work even harder in order to get all that done and still leave early. They would learn whatever they had to, and get as good as possible, to get everything done early and error-free (they could be fired for too many mistakes). They'd be less stressed and more excited to go to work. They'd drive less.

But jobs with hourly pay don't work that way. You're here for 8 hours even if you have one hour of work to do. Let's say you were hired at a $15 hourly wage to do customer service. If you're the superstar of your department, you get $15 for that hour. If you're the very worst customer service person in the building, you still get $15 for that hour. Every workplace has this person. By definition someone has to be the worst in the office.

Since you're getting paid the same no matter the quality of your work, why not reward the more efficient people by letting them leave? No one wants to be there, that's why it's called a job. And it's basic math that you won't be paid totally fairly, because the entire premise of employees is that you have to pay them less than the value they generate, otherwise there are no profits for the business. So it only makes sense to let people leave if they've done the amount of work that management has decided needs to be done. Real tasks don't follow a 24hr clock. They start at the beginning, and they end when you're done.

There are plenty of articles showing an inverse relationship between GDP of a country and the length of their workweek. Google it yourself, I've only got a few hours of weekend left before the next 8 hour shift.