During the worst recession of the US at one point I was changing shit retail jobs at like 1 a week trivially for the hell of it. To do it now you practically only need a pulse. You don't need to lose income to change jobs, you just don't show up to one and show up to the next. Starbucks would be crushed if they had to close all their stores but the laborer can close up all their labor to a company and change jobs much easier than closing all the stores.
Swapping jobs still takes time. A single 5 minute phone call worth of your time is a larger percentage of your working year than Starbucks closing a single store is to them.
That is very time-and-place-and-worker-dependent, but yes, for a young person with no significant attachments, a cheap or free place to live, and a car, it's often still very easy. Many of those jobs don't come with Starbucks-level benefits, or pay, but some do.
Of course, if you have a kid, or rent is due, or other entanglements, things are more complicated.
Because he's full of it.
I was unemployed last year. It took me 6 weeks to land an in-demand tech job; mostly because of the layer of interviews. I think it was an average of 3 interviews for each job. I eventually had 6 or 7 similar offers and a couple bad ones. I also cut short several processes because I knew they were a month away from an offer.
Meanwhile, my wife tried to land a part time retail job. She got 3 offers, but all had slow an onerous background checks, so none started before I got the offers I was waiting on.
There's also the emotional impact of losing a job and the psychological toll of looking for work and possibly not finding it. Just interviewing by itself can be mentally and emotionally grueling.
Also, it does nothing to prevent bringing balance to the massive imbalance between employer and employee power in the US.
mind you, employers in the US are protected by a massive amount of governmental support, both legislative as well as financial. Workers have very little protection in comparison, and most of those got seriously reduced after the end of world war 2.
Have you considered your wife was either slow walking it, or didn't have recent wage labor experience( the starbucks employee has recent wage experience, but in your wife case say their only recent experience is stay-at-home mom or something)? I've literally stumbled into labor agencies homeless, unkempt, and hungover and started within hours (while I sit in the chair shotgunning hundreds of applications for other gigs too). You could find felons outside drinking 40s and fighting and they'd be on the job within a day too. But yeah I mean if I wanted to I could tell the wife 'sorry took me 6 weeks to start a shit job' if I wasn't super thrilled about doing starbucks tier shit work all day.
If you're talking about say a 6 figure federal contractor job then sure it's gonna take awhile, but that's not really an apt comparison.
I don’t think he’s full of it. Maybe some of it is time/place depending?
I was a teenager in 2005 looking for summer work. Over 3 years I worked at a couple different retail places and some fast food (not Starbucks but similar).
It really wasn’t that hard to find a job like that, even with my crappy under 18 understanding of the world
Consider that age discrimination is prevalent in the workplace. It's often a lot easier to find jobs line that when you're young and wet behind the ears because many employers see young people as easily exploitable and malleable, think you'll work longer and harder than older people, and because they have various biases and preconceptions about older folk.
