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posted by Fnord666 on Monday March 04 2019, @01:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the not-just-employees dept.

Submitted via IRC for Bytram

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."


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  • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @07:56PM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 04 2019, @07:56PM (#809947)

    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?

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  • (Score: 2) by hemocyanin on Monday March 04 2019, @10:07PM

    by hemocyanin (186) on Monday March 04 2019, @10:07PM (#810004) Journal

    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

    by Mykl (1112) on Tuesday March 05 2019, @04:01AM (#810130)

    but if KISM played the exact same playlist every day, they'd be out of business in eight of them.

    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.