My father paid for college working at a grocery _part time_ and is full of stories about how a good grocer could tell a little better the ripeness of a fruit to gift that perfectly ripe one to the right customer that day who was going to eat it that night or that weekend, how there used to be an art to bagging, how they used to have real breaks and social lives, how he could get some of his homework done during work hours or do something incredible for a customer with that same kind of time.

You get the skills you pay for. When a part-time job can pay for college, imagine what the full-time regulars can do. When people have the sorts of breaks and downtime to improve themselves, think of what they can do with that time to also improve their customer's experience in little and unique ways. It is easy to wonder what all we've lost in letting companies penny pinch labor so hard, focusing on productivity numbers over anything else, minimizing the number of employees and their wages to the barest minimums.

But also, as it easy as it seems to wonder about those sorts of things, it is still fascinating how many that lived through those changes don't see the squeeze that well. My father tells those stories just as often to complain about the experience in a modern day grocery store and how quality has slipped. It does take explicit reminders like "they paid you well enough you paid for college, you know what minimum wage is like today, yeah?" The long boiled frog sometimes doesn't remember the soup wasn't always so hot.