Ten's a Crowd

One of the two things that, even after nine months here, continues to amuse me -- the other is the bar girl-sex tourist symbiosis -- is the gross over-employment throughout Bangkok. Whatever establishment you happen to patronize -- 7-Eleven or McDonald’s; bar, department store, food stall, or bank -- you can bet your baht there will be no shortage of young, solicitous employees there to service you. Everyone knows Asia is a pretty populace place. But most of us don’t consider Thailand a prime offender, and when we think of overpopulation, we generally think of crowded streets, noisy traffic jams, and unemployment, not too many happily employed middle-classers. Yet that’s exactly what you’ll find in Bangkok.

In many bars, on my many weeknights, there are three or four waitresses for every customer. I once saw 20-30 luminously clad bar girls in one bar, most of them wandering aimlessly or chatting with each other because there was only room for three or four girls to surround each of the two men who were there drinking that night. Several months ago a branch of the gym California Wow opened in the office building where I work. (Incidentally, it’s “the #1 fitness club in the world!” according to the tagline, which surprised me because I’ve never even seen a California Wow in California.) To promote the opening, the company stationed a cadre of presumably part-time employees -- fit-looking young men and women in clean white uniforms -- in the lobby to accost anyone who entered the building with brochures, flyers, and sign-up sheets. There must have been 15-20 of them -- and not once did they approach me. I entered the building and passed them almost every day for six weeks, and I never saw them make contact with a single potential customer. All they seemed to do was hang out by their counter, natter constantly, and crack each other up. I’m not sure how their manager would have appraised their performance, but for their part they were having a blast doing -- or rather, not doing -- their jobs.

Indeed, the main thing you’d likely notice if you had the opportunity to witness these undertasked packs in action (besides the obvious fact that they don’t have enough to do) is that they really seem to enjoy their work, no matter how menial the job. Take Bangkok’s countless massage girls. (Only the certified ones can really be called masseuses.) Bunched closely together in large groups -- half a dozen will suffice for a parlor the size of a studio apartment -- they sit in front of their parlors the way you see old Jewish or Italian women on the steps of their Lower Manhattan walkups in the movies. The massage girls’ first task, before administering the actual massages, is to win customers by harassing passersby. For the most part, they do that. But there are only so many passersby on many of the small streets, and only so much patience one can muster in a nine-hour shift. And so instead the women spend most of their time gossiping (“We gossip you!”), giggling, and chasing each other around like 6th grade girls at a slumber party. Who can blame them? Would you rather joke around with five of your best friends or earn an extra 50 baht (about $1.00) by rubbing down an old fat German tourist?

But the most egregious culprit in Bangkok’s over-employment phenomenon is 7-Eleven. Hands down. No contest. Not only is each and every store grossly overstaffed, but the population of 7-Eleven stores themselves is growing at an uncontrollable rate. It’s astonishing, really: new franchises literally open across the street or one block down from existing ones. Americans make jokes about Starbucks, but Starbucks is a veritable mom-&-pop shop compared to 7-Eleven here. It’s as if the owners give no thought as to what locations would actually be most profitable; instead, their business strategy is to simply blanket the landscape with as many stores as possible until the only place to buy a Pepsi in the entire city is 7-Eleven. There must be 200 of them in Bangkok, with 20-30 going up as I type this. Anyway, that’s not why I brought 7-Eleven into this. I mention it because 7-Eleven is one of the funniest places to visit in Bangkok (and not just because of the “shrimp crisps” and other gnarly Asian snacks they stock the shelves with). Inside every store you’ll find five or six uniformed employees, five or six of whom are doing exactly nothing. One time I counted -- as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up -- ten (ten!) employees in a single store. One of them was manning the counter and -- again, I am not making this up -- nine of them were hanging out in various spots around the shop doing nothing. There was a line in front of one register. On the counter next to the other register was a “Please use next register” placard. Here’s a joke I heard here:

Q: How many 7-Eleven employees does it take to ring you up?
A: Eight. One to ring you up and seven to ignore you.

Here’s another one I thought up just now. Have you ever wondered why they call it 7-Eleven when it’s open 24 hours a day? Maybe it’s because it takes between seven and eleven employees in each shop to keep things running at a barely acceptable pace. (Thanks, folks. Thank you very much. I’ll be here all week...)

Both the cause and effect of Bangkok’s labor surplus are visible throughout the city, in the form of Bangkok’s noticeably high female-to-male ratio. I don’t have any figures to back myself up here (and as much as I’d love some, the closest the Thai census-takers ever come to official statistics are loose approximations), I wouldn’t be surprised if the ratio is as high as 60 – 40. Yes, it’s evident inside the shops and bars, but you can also see it on the streets and on the sky train, especially in the downtown areas: high heels, short skirts, and long hair abound. And it’s not just the sex tourism industry. Young women flock here from the outer provinces by the hundreds of thousands to make money any way they can. All but one member of the administrative staff at my office, for instance, are female (probably 14 out of 15) -- all of them young and from the provinces. They, like all the others in Bangkok, know that no matter what job they end up finding, it will pay more than they ever could have made in Isan or Surat Thani. Some of them send the “extra” cash back to their families; others stay until they’ve saved enough to return home financially secure. And of course some end up staying.

Why Bangkok? Well, imagine an America with only one major city -- say, New York. If there were no others from which to choose -- no L.A. or San Francisco or Chicago -- and you had to make more money than you could ever earn in Iowa, where would you go? You’d have to go to New York, whether you wanted to or not. And you’d have to live in a shitty rundown apartment an hour or two from your job in the City, just as many of the bar girls and girls in my office do.

Mostly, though, Bangkok’s over-employment appears to be a win-win situation, at least on the surface. The employed are given an opportunity to earn their way out of poverty, while the consumer enjoys one major benefit of the effect: bargain prices. For all the doomsayers who warn that the days of Thailand’s Third-World prices are numbered -- “It’s only a matter of time before the prices here catch up with the technology,” they say -- I should remind you that as long as there are eight employees manning the counter at 7-Eleven, the prices of the shrimp crisps on the racks nearby will remain irresistibly cheap to Westerners (even if the shrimp crisps themselves aren’t irresistible.) It’s basic economics. Basic supply-and-demand, to be exact. In this case, the supply is labor. Because there’s so much of it, the managers and owners of the establishments can pay their employees low wages, which in turn allows them to sell their goods and services at commensurately low prices. The result: “normal,” or appropriate, prices for the Thais; great deals for tourists and ex-pats. As for the social ramifications of the resultant deeply stratified socioeconomic class system and the moral implications of an economy based so heavily on the sex industry... well, that’s a lesson for another day. I’ll be here all week.