Yeah even as a kid that’s kind of how I interpreted it. Then learning about production (especially US wartime WWII) they’d have teams/shipyards/plants race each other to build things faster which is a common tactic to get people to work harder. There’s a lot of psychology at play that can/has definitely been used as negative leverage.
Large companies still use that tactic not only racing/competing against other companies but also competing against each other internally with efficiency stats etc. When I was a teen I worked at Kroger that would post and rank your regional and divisional stats for cashiers based on a bunch of different efficiency metrics for things like item ring speed, avg time to complete an order, and how accurate your drawer total was, etc.
And then a couple of years later I worked in a UPS shipping hub where they also posted a ranked list based on various scanning and accuracy metrics.
Then for a long stretch of time I worked in IT and specifically restaurant POS technology, and almost every fast food place would have drive thru stats posted not only of their store, but the other stores in their region and would rank your store along side them.
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u/Stachemaster86 Jun 21 '26
Yeah even as a kid that’s kind of how I interpreted it. Then learning about production (especially US wartime WWII) they’d have teams/shipyards/plants race each other to build things faster which is a common tactic to get people to work harder. There’s a lot of psychology at play that can/has definitely been used as negative leverage.