Like most American neighborhoods, mine has a Starbucks. One of my neighbors even works for Starbucks. But, she doesn’t work at the store near us; rather she works at one about 6 miles away. This got me thinking, so I conducted a brief and non-scientific survey of the employees at the nearby store. It appears that many of them live nearer to other Starbucks. I’m guessing that a barista could easily work at any store in the chain without further training, and that there are tens of thousands of jobs like this in my city, and indeed everwhere: chain stores whose employees are largely interchangeable, and drawn from a pool of labor spread across the metropolitan area. If they could be shuffled such that most employees work at the store nearest to them, the workers would gain in terms of a shorter commute, and society as a whole would gain in the form of fewer cars on the road and less resultant pollution. The only people who don’t benefit from this are the employers, who are the only ones who can make it happen.
So, the debate is: is there any way to encourage employers to seek such efficiencies for their workers that does not invite abuse (eg shuffling workers around inefficiently so they can be re-arranged for a tax credit, etc?) Is this even desirable? Is there a market-based solution? Am I completely out of my mind?
Then why do it? If I am an employer, all I care about is that my employee shows up when and where he’s supposed to. I don’t want to spend time and money negotiating with other Starbucks for specific resources from the regional labor pool.
What happens if the local labor pool is filled up yet I am willing to commute extra distance to work?
A market solution is already in place. Each employer and franchise does its own hiring. Employees want to limit their commute time. Somewhere there is an equilibrium point that matches employees to employers.
But there is a benefit to the employer. An employee who lives closer to their place of employment is less likely to be late or miss work due to transportation problems. If my car won’t start, it’s about a 5 hour walk to work for me, so I stay home or show up several hours late. If it were a half hour walk, I’d be there a half hour late at most. And of course, a shorter commute means I’m less likely to get stuck in traffic and be late.
Is Starbucks a franchise? If so, those nearby stores may not have the same owner.
A related part of ** msmith537 ** 's market solution would be that if the employees are prone to driving POS’s or otherwise having automotive problems, they’d self-select to the point that they could either walk to work, ride public transportation or get better cars.
In this case, the company has the advantage in that there are more people than jobs, so people will either conform or work somewhere else. Maybe if workers were really scarce, they’d resort to other measures to ensure they’d keep coming in- pay more, be more lenient, etc… again, part of that market solution.
Or, if someone was sufficiently valuable to the company, they’d come up with ways to make sure they could get to work on time- you’ve heard of companies moving people and subsidizing housing, right?
Aren’t Starbucks stores franchised? If so, each store is likely to be a different employer. Franchisor A thinks Emily Employee is a top-notch food service employee, but there’s no interchangability if Franchisor B already has all the employees he needs.
I don’t know whether Starbucks is franchised or not. How about Aldi, Blockbuster, CVS, Denny’s, Enterprise, First National Bank, Giant, Hollywood Video, IHOP, JC Penny, Kohls, Lowes, McDonalds, Nations Bank, Outback Steakhouse, Papa Johns, Quiznos, Radio Shack, Sears, Tower Records, UHaul, WalMart…there are a ton of companies that have many locations throughout any given area.
There is someone in Seattle named Gene Mullins who has been looking into the situation in the OP for years, and has coined the term “proximate commuting” to address this issue. He is with a firm by the same name, which works with companies with multiple retail outlets/offices/branches, etc. to switch employees to the location nearest their home. This helps relieve some highway congestion, saves energy, and improves quality of life of the employees (shorter commute times). Googling “proximate commuting”, I came across this article about him and the concept. Too bad it’s an idea that hasn’t caught on.
Actually. consulting works very similar to what Emilio suggested. We are based out of an office near where we live. The company then sends us out to a client wherever we are needed. It’s expensive though. The company has to foot the bill for our travel and lodging.
This is an important fact. Large-scale minimum wage employers want to spend as little as possible per employee. (Which is why some companies lobby hard against safety regulations which would rquire capital investment.) These companies know that if Jane Doe quits because the job is too far away from home, Jane Roe is waiting for her spot to open up. Not to mention the tax credits that employers get for each new employee hired. There’s just not a lot of incentive to try to help out the employee.
Also, as ** minty green ** said, these stores are franchised a lot of the time. Owner A has no incentive to send his employee over to Owner B just because its closer to the employee’s home. These two owners are likely competing a bit in the first place.
It’s true that transportation is the employee’s problem. I’m sure a lot of employers couldn’t care less if you have to drive an hour to get to work, just as long as you show up on time. And if you don’t, they can hire someone who will. Minimum wage workers are imminently disposable and replaceable.
I knew someone who worked at a McD’s 12 miles away because the staff the local one were so bad to work with.
I’m not saying that there are no efficiency gains to be had, but I’m skeptical. If everyone is optimizing, then changing the situation by fiat will only do harm to society. If the current solution is sub-optimal, i.e. there’s a market failure, then you need to figure out what the market failure is so that we can come up with a means of correcting it.
Perhaps the firms in question could create a central clearing house for employing people. But would that be better? The local manager might very well say that the corporate hiring agency can’t get people where they need to be, for example. That harm to the corporation may outweigh the greater commute time for the employees–don’t forget that the owners of corporations also include people with retirement accounts and investments, etc. They count, too.
A better question is “why does such a result obtain?” Then we can start to ask, “is there something better?”
Along the lines of the rephrasing proposed by js_africanus, I’m wondering why the OP assumes that something is wrong with the present situation. Each employee chooses to commute to work at a more distant store. If traffic congestion, etc., got too bad, then presumably each employee would look to work closer to home.
So, we shouldn’t start with “Something is wrong here simply because each employee could commute less.” We should start with “Is something wrong here?”
People choose to comute to a different store because there are 118,00 unemployed people in Maryland who will take those jobs if they don’t. Something is wrong here because commuters in the DC area spend, on average, 82 hours per year in traffic. DC’s roadway congestion index is 1.43, where a score of 1.0 indicates problematic congestion. So, yeah, it seems to me that reducing peoples commutes is a good idea all around. Sure things could be worse, but why wait until you hit rock bottom before looking for solutions to your problems?
Because those facts don’t imply that a change can be made for the better. While reducing commutes may be a good idea in a vacuum, it doesn’t occur in a vacuum. What trade-offs need to be made? Why does this situation exist? Is it sub-optimal? People face the world and they optimize. It could very well be that the traffic in DC, or anywhere, is part of a trade-off made for something else that people want.
Basically you have two possibilities:[ul][li]The situation is optimal in light of the givens, orThe situation is sub-optimal in light of the givens.[/ul][/li]If it’s the first, then we need to ask questions like, “Is it really a problem?” I may not like X, but it may be worth it if it gets me Y. “What constraints can be loosened to raise welfare?” “Is franchise commuting a big part of the problem?” “Is the cost of reducing franchise commuting greater than the benefit of reducing it?”
If it’s the latter, then we need to figure out what is the failure in the market, and how expensive will it be to fix.
Instead of looking at what seems to be a problem and saying “there’s got to be a better way,” we need to look and see why the situation exists, how expensive is it to change, and could our time be better spent some where else.