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Starbucks' music is driving employees nuts. A writer says it's a workers' rights issue | CBC Radio
You may not give a second thought to the tunes spinning on a constant loop at your favourite café or coffee shop, but one writer and podcaster who had to listen to repetitive music for years while working in bars and restaurants argues it's a serious workers' rights issue.
"[It's] the same system that's used to ... flood people out of, you know, the Branch Davidian in Waco or was used on terror suspects in Guantanamo — they use the repetition of music," Adam Johnson told The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti.
"I'm not suggesting that working at Applebee's is the same as being at Guantanamo, but the principle's the same."
Earlier this year, irritated Starbucks employees took to Reddit to rage about how they had to listen to the same songs from the Broadway hit musical Hamilton on repeat while on the job. One user wrote that if they heard a Hamilton song one more time, "I'm getting a ladder and ripping out all of our speakers from the ceiling."
Johnson argues it wouldn't take years of research to understand that "yes, playing the same music over and over again has a deleterious effect on one's mental well-being."
(Score: 1, Insightful) by cykros on Monday March 04 2019, @04:06PM (13 children)
The amount of whinging this sounds like after the amount of jobs in retail I've had where either the over the air radio or a Sirius XM station was used just speaks to the snowflake syndrome the up and coming generation exhibits. They've always had a repetitive rotation, day in and day out, and nobody questioned it; did you expect your boss to maintain a whole spindle of audio CD's to mix things up? Is is a bit annoying? Absolutely. But you're at work. You're PAID to deal with things that are a bit annoying. And at the end of the day, I'd say if there's a real workers' rights issue going on, it's having to deal with Starbucks customers, not the music. But if this is the kind of employee they have these days, it sounds like they're perfect for each other.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday March 04 2019, @06:06PM (9 children)
Wow, somebody modded this "troll" just for expressing a less popular opinion? Yeah, I generally frown on the "snowflake" rhetoric too, but in this case it seems a little deserved. This is an article where employees are repeatedly comparing canned music in a workplace to Guantanamo-style torture. Yes, read that again. They're comparing having to listen to a Hamilton playlist repeatedly periodically over a couple weeks with being in a dark room with headphones on full blast playing a single song for DAYS on end, without stop. The latter is what torture is. If we were being reasonable, the article should be modded "flamebait" for that.
Canned music on repeat has been standard in workplaces for generations. Employers often do it even outside of situations with customers because there are numerous studies showing the appropriate music can increase worker efficiency. Is it annoying? Yeah, I think so. I'd guess many people here think so -- because this site attracts personality types that are non-conformist. But you put most people in silent situations, and they start to get nervous or anxious sometimes. You want to have a conversation at a cafe, but everything's quiet around you? You start to get paranoid -- you whisper. And malls don't pipe in music for no reason -- again, numerous studies show that MOST people shop differently (and generally spend more money) with piped music.
I'm not arguing in favor of this stuff. I'm just agreeing with the parent that this is commonplace in many workplaces, for all sorts of reasons. I'll agree with the Starbucks workers that having a single very circumscribed collection of music (like Hamilton) on repeat every hour could be a bit more annoying than the typical workplace. But the receptionist in the dentist's office has likely been listening the to muzak equivalent of that for generations. For Starbucks employees to come out and compare this to actual torture situations is a bit over-the-top, and I think it's reasonable to wonder whether it's something generational or about the culture of the employees at a place like Starbucks that is leading to such hyperbolic comparisons.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday March 04 2019, @06:35PM
I'm shocked! Just SHOCKED! How can you think such a thing? ROFLMAO!!
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @07:56PM (2 children)
It's not simply a less popular opinion, it's needlessly dismissive and unresponsive to the actual situation. Yes, canned music has been around since forever, but if KISM played the exact same playlist every day, they'd be out of business in eight of them.
Not really generational, except in as much as millenials are getting the shortest end of shitsticks that any generation in living memory has gotten, and were raised to think that it was normal (rather than commonplace). Bosses aren't used to kids fighting for fair working conditions, and maybe you aren't either?
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday March 04 2019, @10:07PM
His point was that it's over-the-top to compare actual torture to repetitive store music. Like how a person isn't an actual Hitlerian figure because he or she disagrees with you on some comparatively minor topic. It's an extension of godwin. That's not a troll.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Tuesday March 05 2019, @04:01AM
I beg to disagree.
Many years ago I worked in a small IT business - basically the boss and me in a single room. He had a particular radio station that was his favourite, so guess what? We always listened to that station.
It wouldn't have helped that I didn't like any of their music anyway, but the playlist became excruciatingly obvious in a few short days. The same effing songs every single day for months on end. Worse, the playlist started to repeat during the day, so you'd usually get at least 2-3 plays of higher rotation items. Playlist changes would offer a brief respite for a few days until the 'new' song sank in and it would be back to praying for death. And this is something that members of the public were voluntarily switching on to listen to!
One day, while the boss was out, I called the station and asked to be put through to the DJ. After being told that the DJ was uncontactable until the end of their shift, I challenged the person on the other end to play any song at all that had not been played every day for the past 2 weeks straight. They were sympathetic to my situation, but also explained that their research showed that, for every 7 times a song is played on the station, most listeners only remember hearing it once. Without saying it directly, she also heavily implied that listeners were morons. In any case, they would not deviate from the playlist under any circumstances.
8 days to go out of business? That radio station is still spewing its bile 20 years later.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Monday March 04 2019, @08:47PM
I'm not sure the comment is troll-worthy, but it certainly expresses the view that workers should just suck it up and accept any conditions the boss forces on them, and I disagree with that view quite strongly.
Why should the staff at Starbucks have to endure endless repeats of awful show tunes just because some PHB at head office says they should?
I think they're well within their rights to turn it off.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Monday March 04 2019, @09:08PM (2 children)
OTOH, U.S. forces used this tactic [wikipedia.org] in Panama against Noriega so it literally IS an offensive military tactic.
(Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday March 04 2019, @10:15PM (1 child)
Except it's not.
The poster above was making a godwin analogy -- actual torture looks starkly different than a repetitive merely annoying playlist.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Tuesday March 05 2019, @08:57AM
Interestingly, some of the most diabolical tortures involve a merely annoying stimulus applied relentlessly. After all, a drop of water hitting your forehead is merely annoying. A few times can be funny.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @09:28PM
Speaking of hyperbole, tone down your own eh?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @06:53PM
You don't need to suffer from idiotism when you are trying to do your job. Listening to some crap music is not what the workers are being paid for.
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Tuesday March 05 2019, @12:52AM
“If you don’t put your other shoe back on I will have to ask you to leave.”
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 2) by urza9814 on Tuesday March 05 2019, @01:45PM
Eh, yes and no. I do think it's getting worse lately.
Problem number one is lyrics. Soft, instrumental Muzak is one thing; freakin' musicals are quite a bit worse. They went from stuff specifically designed to be unobtrusive to stuff designed to be catchy and get stuck in your head for days.
Problem number two is that they KEEP. GETTING. LOUDER. Went out for lunch with my girlfriend a few weeks ago and we couldn't even speak to each other because the music was so damn loud that you'd have to bend over the table and shout in each others' ears just to be heard! And it's not like it was a freakin' fast food place where they're trying to encourage you to use the drive through or get out of there quickly, it's the kind of place where they're gonna try to shove a $10 dessert on you and some overpriced cocktails to go with it. Not like it was late night at a bar either, it was freakin' LUNCH!
Problem number three is the decline of traditional radio. When I was a kid, most of the department stores in town would be playing an actual radio station. Now they thrown one CD on repeat for months at a time. That's a hell of a lot worse. Radio stations do repeat, but they change over time and their playlists tend to be more than one hour long.
I know a couple places that let the employees take turns picking the music...mostly the more hipster kind of shops, the kind of place Starbucks likes to pretend to be...although I can certainly understand why Corporate would be afraid of doing that. But if Starbucks is going to be controlling all of the music in all of their shops from one central source, they could at least put a bit of effort into doing a halfway decent job of it rather than just cramming in a half dozen of the latest memes and dialing the volume up to 11...