Rejected for a Job at the Container Store

&gt; <i>Because seriously, if an Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad cannot land a job as a greeter at The Container Store—or anywhere else for that matter, hard as I tried—we are all doomed.</i><p>If she actually put &quot;Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad&quot;, of course it was rejected. Such an application is overqualified, and it looks strange that someone who actually has those credentials would want to do something like that.<p>If she didn&#x27;t put that on the application, then it is not intellectually honest to say that an &quot;Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad&quot; was rejected. The person that was rejected was the character that is described in the job application, not the author who is hiding behind that character!<p>The people doing the hiring for this type of greet-the-public job are usually looking for &quot;fresh faces&quot; who project a certain image, which means, of course, that the jobs tend to go to attractive young people. Nobody cares about your bestselling writing, Harvard degree or Emmy award: unless perhaps the latter is in an &quot;Oustanding Lead&#x2F;Supporting Actor in ...&quot; category because then, doh, you&#x27;re actually famous, in the sense that random people in the public recognize your face!

Articles like this seem to be among the best ammo to support single-payer healthcare and a basic income for all adult citizens. In addition to shielding workers from harm due to business changes, this would also enable more entrepreneurship since the risk of failure would be much lower for people starting new businesses. Small businesses would also be more enticing to work for, since they wouldn&#x27;t need to directly provide health insurance and the specter of the business folding wouldn&#x27;t be as much of a concern.

This article brings up a very important point that I don&#x27;t think the author intended to make: do not sign up for COBRA. If the author had signed up for an individual plan under Obamacare within the 60 day period from when she lost her job, she would have at least had health insurance, and if she remained unemployed, she would qualify for increasingly large subsidies.<p>In the olden days (before 2013) you had to sign up for COBRA to stay insured unless you were healthy enough to qualify for individual insurance. But now you can&#x27;t be turned down, but you can only sign up during specific enrollment periods. Problem is, COBRA is still around, and companies are still required to offer it to you, even though for most people it&#x27;s going to be way more expensive than individual insurance (because it&#x27;s unsubsidized), and if something goes wrong or you become unable to afford the premiums, you can end up like the author, unable to sign up for an individual plan because you&#x27;re out of the enrollment period.<p>This is one of a few holes and pitfalls that were created by the Affordable Care Act.<p>I know a lot about this stuff because my startup helps companies save money and design health benefits programs that take advantage of recent changes in the health care law (benefitter.com). If you have any Obamacare questions, let me know.

I don&#x27;t understand how the Container Store fits in to this story, other than the fact that she was denied a job. Also, I disagree with this:<p><pre><code> Because seriously, if an Emmy-award winning, New York Times bestselling author and Harvard grad cannot land a job as a greeter at The Container Store—or anywhere else for that matter, hard as I tried—we are all doomed. </code></pre> Being an author does not qualify you to work in Loss Prevention. It may, as gdilla pointed out in another comment, even make you overqualified for the position.<p>I sympathize with the author, and I think there is a compelling story here about healthcare, but the title undermines it severely by making it about how she failed one attempt to get an entry-level job; and it almost feels like a form of blackmail: The Container Store now has to deal with this widely-shared article about how they didn&#x27;t give a poor, cancer-having mother a small little job.

If you think that having an Emmy, degree from Harvard, and a slot on the NYT best-seller list makes you any more qualified for a job at the Container Store than a 19 year old high school dropout with 2 years of McJob experience, you might be a classist.

This rung a bell - the Container Store pays its retail workers extremely well (at least if you believe their numbers): <a href="http://www.triplepundit.com/2014/10/three-equals-one-container-stores-50000-sales-staffer/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.triplepundit.com&#x2F;2014&#x2F;10&#x2F;three-equals-one-contain...</a><p>If they&#x27;re really investing a lot in their workers, then they want a perfect fit or ideal type of background. If they believed the writer was a risk to pack up and leave a year down the road, it makes sense that they wouldn&#x27;t take that risk...

&quot;For years we Americans have been fed the convenient lie: study hard, work hard in your chosen field, work hard at your marriage, save money, organize your flour, salt, and sugar into labeled bins, and you will be in control of your life and your destiny.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m officially starting to get sick of hearing this. Yes, it&#x27;s an interesting story, and yes, US Healthcare is in need of some serious fixing, whatever that may mean to you.<p>But nobody ever guaranteed that you&#x27;ll be in control of your life and your destiny. Freak things happen; life isn&#x27;t fair. All of these things (work hard, save, study, etc.) are good to teach kids, because it increases the odds of being in control of your own destiny. But that&#x27;s it--it tilts the odds slightly in your favor.<p>What else would you rather teach your kids? The author mentions her own child is paying his&#x2F;her way through college. Is that a bad thing? If higher education is a part of this &quot;convenient lie&quot;, perhaps you should tell your child: it doesn&#x27;t matter if you study hard or work hard--just sit back and wait for things to happen.<p>Perhaps sitting down and talking with her children about career paths. No one ever guaranteed that she&#x27;d be financially independent regardless of what she chose for work (that I know of, anyways). If she chose to go into a field that she LOVES, but that doesn&#x27;t pay much, she needs to be aware of that. Writing is a difficult field, I am sure. And yes, doing what you love is important, but so is being able to do the things outside of work that you love.<p>The article talks about &quot;massive nooses of debt&quot; that affect the economy. Nobody forced her child to go to a college where he&#x2F;she had to take out massive loans. State schools are excellent choices! Outside of the top 10-ish in the country, I&#x27;d be surprised if the higher-cost schools are &quot;worth&quot; their cost. Talk to your children about their college choices!<p>Yes, there are things that need to be addressed about our economy. Yes, our healthcare system is in a bad state. But I am sick &amp; tired of hearing people blaming the lie that &quot;some anonymous person&#x2F;society told me to work hard and study hard, but now I&#x27;m not where I want to be--it must be society&#x27;s fault&quot;. She had to downsize your apartment, she can&#x27;t pay for her child&#x27;s college. So what? Is that society&#x27;s fault?

I really don&#x27;t understand how this got to the front of HN, but okay, i&#x27;ll bite:<p>Articles like this make me ashamed to live in a country where we have so much, and yet feel the need to complain when things don&#x27;t go exactly our way. As if the world owes you a lack of breast cancer, or a stable marriage, or a steady, decent job.<p>Ask the migrant worker who&#x27;s here illegally, far from his family, who works a soul-crushing routine, saving pennies to send home, with no visible end in sight, with absolutely no form of health care, with virtually no rights as a non-citizen, about finding a job. Maybe he&#x27;s lucky that he doesn&#x27;t look for white-collar jobs. That he only has to stand outside a home depot in the rain and hope to get randomly selected, jump into the pick-up, and head off to whatever manual labor might make him a few bucks that day, so he can put a small portion away for his family and use the rest to buy something from the dollar menu.<p>Poor us, we starving, huddled, highly educated, successful, safe, free, white middle-classes.<p>Jobless? Cancer? Kids to support? Even with all of that, there&#x27;s still so many options and opportunities afforded to this person. Sometimes things won&#x27;t be perfect. Bumps in the road happen to everyone at some point or another. But that doesn&#x27;t mean you have to wallow in your misfortune. You can also take stock of how much good there still is, and how much worse off you could be. Be thankful for the bumps and keep on rolling.

Thanks to juanplusjuan for submitting!<p>I&#x27;m the lead engineer at Cafe, so if you spot any issues please do let me know.<p>(Also, if you want to help build top-tier tools for writers like Deb to publish online, we&#x27;re hiring: <a href="http://cafe.com/careers" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cafe.com&#x2F;careers</a>)

Honestly, it sounds like during the best of times she spent each and every paycheck in full, and then when hard times fell upon her, she had nothing to fall back on. This is a common symptom in our consumerist society. An author of her magnitude would have been making enough $ at one point to stow away at least a few years&#x27; expenses if she&#x27;d just sacrificed a little more during the fat period.

I have read a number of these stories. Mostly people gripping with the realities of life. A lot of struggle, and a lot of pain. One thing that helps me is my faith. Not that I think some deity is going to rescue me from hard times, but to let go the frustration and anger at things I cannot change to a higher power where I don&#x27;t have to worry about them.

&gt; most of us are just a single job loss, a single medical diagnosis, a single broken marriage removed from a swirling, chaotic, wholly uncontained abyss.<p>I completely understand that. I was transitioning from my old industry into tech and was hit with some surprise medical issues. If I didnt have the luxury of a large savings I would have been de-railed completely. I was also lucky that Lyft was an option in SF because I got rejected by several companies along the way. Now that I have a start in a new career I&#x27;m pretty keen on rebuilding to ward off the next random disaster.

&quot;For years we Americans have been fed the convenient lie: study hard, work hard in your chosen field ... and you will be in control of your life and your destiny.&quot;<p>Surely a nice idea, and maybe I&#x27;m a cynic, but what rational adult actually believes this? Some fields are inherently more stable and well-paying than others.<p>&quot;Now, in this new gilded age, where profit takes precedence over people, and commerce takes precedence over art&quot;<p>When in the history of the United States has this not been the case?

Great story; great writing. I feel like the Container Store would reject anyone who seemed overqualified. If only because they know they&#x27;d bolt if something better came up. Of course, that&#x27;s not a given, but you can understand where they&#x27;re coming from.

I&#x27;ve found it&#x27;s harder to get a job you are massively overqualified for than to get one you are barely qualified for.<p>If you need a job which you are massively overqualified for, dumb it down and do your best to appear no sort of threat. Bosses in entrenched organizations love people who are just smart enough to push the levers, but not smart enough to appear promotable, or to become bored or feel unfulfilled and cause some sort of trouble or to notice obvious abuses and have the mental capacity and wherewithal to seek remedies....<p>In these types of situations, appearing dumb and predictable is your best bet. And that&#x27;s a very hard act for some people.

Here&#x27;s something outrageous that a reader might have missed: An MRI doesn&#x27;t have to be $6000. The marginal cost of one more MRI is pretty low (they go for under $200 in Japan, and people get them way more frequently), but the price tag quoted to insurance companies is inflated, so that the insurance companies can bargain the hospitals back down. Only the uninsured end up paying a needlessly large sticker price for things like MRIs.

You can only consider you&#x27;ve tried to get a job if you put out 100+ cv&#x27;s. Sharpen the tool (ie. Make your CV perfect), then send out 100 resumes.<p>Good luck.

Seems to me like the author is seriously overqualified to be working at the Container Store. That&#x27;s probably why she was rejected.<p>Also, the whole article is a great example of why single-payer socialised health care is a good thing. Living in Canada, I don&#x27;t have to worry that a job loss means no health coverage.

When the Industrial Revolution came around, the amount of value a worker could produce increased a great deal. But society saw that increase as belonging to the business owner who purchased the machine. Wages fell and fell as worker productivity increased. Entire families, including children, had to work just to survive. After a great deal of fighting, and not a little bloodshed, we got the definition of a 40 hour workweek, and society came to see it as proper that a single person working 40 hours a week should be paid a wage high enough that they could comfortably support an entire family. Society expected employers to share the increased value workers were generating with the workers.<p>We&#x27;re facing a similar situation now. Computers and automation technology came into the workplace around 1980 or so. And society sees the increased value workers create thanks to these tools as belonging to the company, not to the worker. The idea that a worker should be paid enough that they can work 40 hours and provide for an entire family comfortably has vanished. Now the concern is only that no one be paid above the market rate for their position, and that the market rate be kept low. Society and the business world was entirely unprepared with the breakneck pace of productivity growth that computers brought about. The idea of having wages keep pace with the productivity gains simply seemed absurd, as it would require large and frequent raises. And now we&#x27;ve gotten so far behind, with wages stagnating for decades while companies have grown accustomed to ludicrous profit margins, that any reasonable correction seems ridiculous. Will we see society come around and consider it proper that a worker once more is entitled to a good portion of the value they create? Or will companies devalue jobs to the point where taking one costs more than they pay? Will we be able to avoid bloodshed this time?

This should be titled &quot;Life was good while I was rich&quot;.<p>US healtcare is so fucked up :&#x2F;

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The actual content aside, what a fantastic writing style the author has! It&#x27;s so... engaging.

Why do authors&#x2F;sites insist on doing this:<p><a href="https://i.imgur.com/aCAmbQ2.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;aCAmbQ2.png</a><p>It is super annoying and adds no additional content by design. There&#x27;s like four or five of these throughout the article.<p>As to the article most of the issues seem to revolve around a broken healthcare system (i.e. no public option, insurance through employers, unemployed pay more than employed, etc). Although the author does start to come across as a little entitled when she brought up her Harvard education and how people like her weren&#x27;t meant to be in positions like this...<p>I liked the first 2&#x2F;3 of the article, just the end is kind of irksome. Harvard, CEO pay, gender gap, etc none of this came across like the author likely intended. I bet she didn&#x27;t customise her resume for &quot;The Container Store&quot; job and just forwarded her normal&#x2F;writer one.