loading . . . Pluralistic: Understaffing as a form of enshittification (23 Mar 2026)
# Today's links
* Understaffing as a form of enshittification: A way to shift value from workers, patients and shoppers to investors.
* Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
* Object permanence: Marvel v "superhero"; What's a photocopier?; "Up Against It"; "Medusa's Web"; AI can't do your job; Coping with plenty; "The Shakedown"; Chickenized reverse-centaurs; France v iTunes; Copyfight discipline; Mystery lobbyists; "Where the Axe is Buried"; Free/open microprocessor; Folk models of computer security; Bug-eyed steampunk mask; Academics embracing Wikipedia.
* Upcoming appearances: Berkeley, Montreal, London, Berlin, Hay-on-Wye.
* Recent appearances: Where I've been.
* Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
* Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
* Colophon: All the rest.
* * *
# Understaffing as a form of enshittification (permalink)
At root, enshittification can only take place when companies can move value around. Digital tools make it easier than ever to do this, for example, by changing prices on a per-user, per-session basis, using commercial surveillance data to predict the highest price or lowest wage a user will accept:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/19/twiddler/
Digital "twiddling" represents a powerful system of pumps for moving value around, taking it away from users and giving it to business customers, then taking it from businesses and giving it to users, and then, ultimately, harvesting all the value for the company's shareholders and executives.
Twiddling is powerful because it's fine-grained, allowing businesses to extract more from their most vulnerable customers and workers, while reserving more equitable treatment for more empowered stakeholders who might otherwise take their business elsewhere.
But long before digitization made twiddling possible, businesses that found themselves in a position to make things worse for their customers and workers without facing consequences were accustomed to doing so. Think of the airport shop that sells water for $10/bottle: that's a ripoff whether you're in coach-minus or flying first class, and it's made possible by the TSA checkpoint that makes shopping elsewhere a time-consuming impossibility.
The airport shop is the only game in town – a "monopolist" in economics jargon. When a business has something you really want (or even better, something you _need_) and it's hard (or impossible) for you to get it elsewhere, they can take value away from you and harvest it for themselves.
The most obvious forms of monopoly extraction are high prices and low wages. Dollar stores are notorious for this, using their market power to procure extremely small packages of common goods in "cheater sizes" that have high per-unit costs (e.g. the cost per ounce for soap), while still having a low price tag (the cost per (small) bottle of soap). These stores are situated in food deserts, which they create by boxing in community grocers and heavily discounting their wares until the real grocers go out of business. They're also situated in _work_ deserts, because driving regular grocers out of business destroys the competition for labor, too. That means they can pay low wages and charge high prices and make a hell of a lot of money, which is why there are so many fucking dollar stores:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/27/walmarts-jackals/#cheater-sizes
That's the most obvious form of value harvesting, but it's not the only one. There are other costs that businesses can impose on their customers and workers. Think of CVS, the pharmacy monopolist that uses its vertical integration with bizarre, poorly understood middlemen like "pharmacy benefit managers" to drive independent pharmacies out of business:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/09/23/shield-of-boringness/#some-men-rob-you-with-a-fountain-pen
If you've been to a CVS store recently, you have doubtless experienced a powerful form of value-shifting: _understaffing_. CVS (and the other massive chains in the cartel, like Walgreens) have giant stores with just one or two employees on the floor, often just a cashier and a pharmacist.
This makes them easy pickings for shoplifters, so all their merchandise is locked up in cabinets and when you want to buy something, you have to find the lone employee and get them to unlock the case for you. This is CVS trading your time for their wage-bill.
Then, you're expected to check out your own purchases – shifting labor from workers on CVS's payroll to you – with badly maintained machines that often misfire and require you to wait again for that lone employee to come and override them.
Meanwhile, that employee is absorbing a gigantic amount of frustration and abuse from customers who are paying high prices and enduring long waits – another cost that CVS shifts from their shareholders to someone else (workers, in this case).
Finally, CVS demands that publicly funded police respond to the inevitable shoplifting and other security problems created by running a big-box store with a skeleton crew, shifting costs from the business to _everyone_ in the local tax-base.
In "Not Enough Workers For the Job," _The American Prospect's_ Robin Kaiser-Schatzlein looks at the systemic trend towards understaffing that has swept across every sector of the US economy over the past five years:
https://prospect.org/2026/03/19/understaff-workplace-business-covid-cvs-pharmacies-hotels-grocery-stores/
Kaiser-Schatzlein lays the blame for many of life's frustrations at the feet of this business trend: "long lines, messy grocery aisles, organized theft, high hotel costs, frequent flight cancellations, deadly medication errors at pharmacies, increased use of medical restraints in nursing homes, and, more generally, a palpable and rising dissatisfaction with work."
As you can see from that list, understaffing affects everyone, from people with the wherewithal to buy a plane ticket to vulnerable elderly people who are literally tied to their beds or drugged into stupors for the last years of their lives.
There's academic work to support the idea that understaffing is on the rise, like a 2024 Kennedy School survey of 14,000 workers where a majority said that their workplaces are "always" or "often" understaffed. A 2023 study in the _Journal of Public Health Management and Practice_ found that public health institutions need to hire _80%_ more workers to be adequately staffed. New York's Mt Sinai hospitals paid a $2m fine in 2024 for understaffing its ERs, as well as oncology and labor units. Another study blames understaffing for the rise of use of antipsychotic "chemical handcuffs" in nursing homes:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35926573/
The hits keep coming: the DoT Inspector General says that 77% of air traffic control is understaffed, with NYC ATC staffed at 54% of the correct level. In Texas, county jails have had to reduce their capacity due to understaffing (they have enough beds, but not enough turnkeys). Understaffing is behind much of the unprecedented union surge, with workers at Starbucks, railroads and elsewhere becoming labor militants due to understaffing. 83% of white-collar millennials say they're doing extra work to make up for vacant positions in their organizations. As Starbucks union organizers can attest, workers need unions if they want to have a hope of forcing their bosses to adequately staff their jobsites, so it's not surprising that understaffing has emerged at a time when union density is at rock bottom.
Kaiser-Schatzlein quotes the Kennedy School's Daniel Schneider, who identifies understaffing as a deliberate business strategy. Businesses don't hire enough workers because that makes them more profitable. It's not because "no one wants to work anymore" (though doubtless repeating that fairy tale helps shift the blame for long lines and poor service from real, greedy bosses to imaginary, greedy workers).
Private equity firms lead the charge here, "rolling up" multiple, competing businesses in a sector and then cutting staffing across all of them. Putting all the businesses in a given sector and region under common ownership means that when these businesses hack away at staffing levels, workers and customers have nowhere else to go. This is especially pernicious at nursing homes, where PE companies drastically reduce headcount, putting staff and patients alike at risk:
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/01/31/1139783599/new-york-nursing-home-owners-drained-cash?ft=nprml&f=853198417
Private equity has just about declared victory in its decades-long war on community pharmacies, consolidating pharmacy ownership nationwide into just a few chains that are the poster-children for understaffing. These ghost-ships aren't just frustrating places to shop – they're a danger to their communities. As Kaiser-Schatzlein reports, Ohio fined CVS in 2021 for boarding up the walk-up pharmacies in its stores and forcing customers to use the drive-through, because there was only a single pharmacist on duty.
Without help, the lone pharmacist was unable to process deliveries, so CVS pharmacies' floors were littered with unopened parcels. Patients had to wait _over a month_ to get their prescriptions filled. CVS refused to hire additional staff to process the backlog, and the on-duty staff worked under declining conditions, as the undermaintained air conditioning quit and indoor temperatures soared. Unsurprisingly, these stores had massive staff turnover, which also hampered their efficiency.
Understaffing in pharmacies leads to serious medication errors, which are proliferating across the US, killing hundreds of thousands of Americans every year. The errors are incredible, like the woman who died after getting chemotherapy drugs instead of antidepressants:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/31/health/pharmacists-medication-errors.html
Pharmacists at chain stores like CVS are at elevated risk for kidney stones because they don't have time for bathroom breaks, so they adopt a practice of not drinking water during their shifts. One CVS pharmacist told Texas regulators, "I am a danger to the public working for CVS."
As ever, covid provides the ideal excuse for shifting value from customers and workers to shareholders. Today's high prices never came down after the "greedflation" that bosses boasted about to shareholders, even as they told customers that it was because of "supply chain shocks":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/11/price-over-volume/#pepsi-pricing-power
Likewise, staffing levels never came back from the covid skeleton crews that we all learned to deal with in the days of widespread acute illness and social distancing. Kaiser-Schatzlein spoke to hotel workers like Jianci Liang, a housekeeper at Boston's Hilton Park Plaza, who described a post-pandemic jobsite with 20 fewer housekeepers: "I sleep with pain, I wake up with pain, I go to work with pain." The Bureau of Labor says that hotel staffing levels are down 16% nationwide.
Prices (and profits) are up, though. Hotels are posting record profits and paying record executive salaries, wrung from facilities where the pools are closed and room cleanings happen on alternate days.
Workers absorb the cost of understaffing in their bodies and their psyches. It's not just physical exhaustion, it's also the abuse that is directly correlated with lower staffing levels. Frustrated customers vent their anger at grocery workers, flight attendants and other front-line workers.
I can't help but see a connection here to the AI bubble, which is fueled by the fantasy of a world without people:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism
The billionaire solipsists who have directed hundreds of billions of dollars in AI investment like to rhapsodize about a future where a boss's ideas are turned into products and services without having to be funneled through workers:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/#bubble-exceptionalism
That's why AI has taken over customer service – the multi-hour waits for a customer service rep were always a way of shifting value from customers and workers to shareholders. Businesses _could_ increase staffing at their call centers. Businesses _could_ offer better products and services and reduce the number of people who need customer service. By refusing to do either, they make _you_ wait on the line until you are suffused with murderous rage, and then expect their workers to deal with your anger. Turning the whole thing over to AI makes perfect sense – your problems won't be solved, and they don't have to pay the chatbot at all when you get angry at it:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/06/unmerchantable-substitute-goods/#customer-disservice
"We did this with AI" has become a synonym for "We don't care if this is done well":
https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/11/modal-dialog-a-palooza/#autoplay-videos
"We don't care if this is done well" could well be the motto of the understaffing craze. The technical insights that sparked today's AI investment bubble could have happened at any time, but the ensuing investment tsunami is a product of a world dominated by large firms that are "too big to care" about the quality of their products – _or_ their jobs.
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# Hey look at this (permalink)
* Our algorithmic future – Utopia or Armageddon? https://b2fxxx.blogspot.com/2026/03/our-algorithmic-future-utopia-or.html
* The Market Definition Trap https://lpeproject.org/blog/the-market-definition-trap/
* On Spec 2026: New Canadian Literature of the Fantastic https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/edwardwillett/on-spec-2026-new-canadian-literature-of-the-fantastic
* Day 7: Ticketmaster's "Velvet Hammer" https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/day-7-ticketmasters-velvet-hammer
* From Race to the Bottom to Worker Power on the Road https://economicpopulist.substack.com/p/from-race-to-the-bottom-to-worker
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# Object permanence (permalink)
#20yrsago Marvel Comics: stealing our language https://memex.craphound.com/2006/03/18/marvel-comics-stealing-our-language/
#20yrsago MPAA/RIAA/BSA: No breaking DRM, even if it’s killing you (literally!) https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/03/08/riaa-says-future-drm-might-threaten-critical-infrastructure-and-potentially-endanger-liv/
#20yrsago Coping with plenty – stuff gets cheaper, space gets pricier https://www.theguardian.com/business/2006/feb/28/retail.shopping
#20yrsago France will let Microsoft play iTunes http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4828296.stm
#20yrsago A new discipline to describe the copyfight https://web.archive.org/web/20060422010702/https://www.nyu.edu/classes/siva/archives/002930.html
#20yrsago Right-wing think-tank hates DRM https://www.cato.org/policy-analysis/circumventing-competition-perverse-consequences-digital-millennium-copyright-act#
#20yrsago Reasons to take math in high school https://web.archive.org/web/20060610134055/http://www.acm.org/ubiquity/views/v7i11_math.html
#20yrsago Sun ships free and open microprocessor https://web.archive.org/web/20060221112756/http://opensparc.sunsource.net/nonav/index.html
#20yrsago Octavia Butler scholarship will send people of color to Clarion https://web.archive.org/web/20060406161412/https://carlbrandon.org/butlerscholarship/
#20yrsago Online sexual material is obscene if any community in US objects https://web.archive.org/web/20060505232346/http://www.justicemag.com/daily/item/2590.html
#15yrsago Folk models of home computer security: what we think our PCs are doing https://rickwash.com/papers/rwash-homesec-soups10-final.pdf
#15yrsago Fixers’ Collective: people learning to make broken stuff work again https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Arts/2011/0321/The-art-of-the-fix-it
#15yrsago Bug-eyed monster steampunk mask https://bob-basset.livejournal.com/158400.html
#15yrsago Scholars to stop pretending they don’t use Wikipedia; will work out best practices instead https://www.bbc.com/news/education-12809944
#15yrsago Electronic publishing Bingo card from John Scalzi https://whatever.scalzi.com/2011/03/20/the-electronic-publishing-bingo-card/
#15yrsago RIP, Mike Glicksohn, Hugo-winning science fiction fan https://file770.com/mike-glicksohn-1946-2011/
#15yrsago Anti-labor ads celebrate workers taking paycuts and CEOs getting millions https://www.cogdis.me/2011/03/is-this-what-they-really-want.html
#15yrsago Reluctant witness refuses to admit he knows what a photocopier is https://www.cleveland.com/metro/2011/03/identifying_photocopy_machine.html
#15yrsago Tim Wu in the Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2011/mar/17/the-master-switch-tim-wu-internet
#15yrsago Up Against It: smart, whiz-bang space opera pits astro-bureaucrats against rogue AIs https://memex.craphound.com/2011/03/18/up-against-it-smart-whiz-bang-space-opera-pits-astro-bureaucrats-against-rogue-ais/
#10yrsago Howto: start a fire with a lemon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bv2vT665bGI
#10yrsago First order of business for hard-right government: canceling Croatia’s answer to The Daily Show https://balkaninsight.com/2016/03/17/satiric-show-pulled-from-croatian-tv-for-intolerance-03-17-2016/bi/all-balkan-countries/
#10yrsago FBI issues car-hacking warning, tells drivers to keep their cars’ patch-levels current https://www.wired.com/2016/03/fbi-warns-car-hacking-real-risk/
#10yrsago BART’s twitter manager drops truth-bombs, world cheers https://gizmodo.com/i-would-like-to-buy-a-drink-for-the-poor-soul-who-ran-t-1765477706
#10yrsago Chelsea Manning gets the US Army to cough up its “insider threat” training docs https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/mar/18/government-persecuting-whistleblowers-insider-threat-chelsea-manning
#10yrsago Apple engineers quietly discuss refusing to create the FBI’s backdoor https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/18/technology/apple-encryption-engineers-if-ordered-to-unlock-iphone-might-resist.html
#10yrsago Russia moots ban on discussions about VPNs, reverse proxies, and other anti-censorship techniques https://torrentfreak.com/copyright-holders-want-site-block-circumvention-advice-banned-160319/
#10yrsago Medusa’s Web: Tim Powers is the Philip K Dick of our age https://memex.craphound.com/2016/03/18/medusas-web-tim-powers-is-the-philip-k-dick-of-our-age/
#10yrsago Meet the Commercial Energy Working Group, a lobby group that won’t say who it lobbies for https://web.archive.org/web/20160320150011/https://theintercept.com/2016/03/20/mysterious-powerful-lobbying-group-wont-even-say-who-its-lobbying-for/
#5yrsago Support Amazon workers today https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/20/against-amazon-union-busting/#what-rhymes-with-bezos
#5yrsago Department of Truth https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/20/against-amazon-union-busting/#dot
#5yrsago The political possibility of cities https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/21/ex-urbe/#arcology-politics
#5yrsago Aviation bailout cost $666k/job https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#aa
#5yrsago Impunity for NYPD cops who brutalized BLM protesters https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#nypd-black-and-blue
#5yrsago Help news, not news-barons https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/18/news-worthy/#big-news
#5yrsago Announcing "The Shakedown" https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#monopsony
#5yrsago Chickenized reverse-centaurs https://pluralistic.net/2021/03/19/the-shakedown/#weird-flex
#1yrago You can't save an institution by betraying its mission https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/19/selling-out/#destroy-the-village-to-save-it
#1yrago AI can't do your job https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/18/asbestos-in-the-walls/#government-by-spicy-autocomplete
#1yrago Ray Nayler's "Where the Axe Is Buried" https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/20/birchpunk/#cyberspace-is-everting
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# Upcoming appearances (permalink)
* Berkeley: Bioneers keynote, Mar 27
https://conference.bioneers.org/
* Montreal: Bronfman Lecture (McGill), Apr 10
https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/artificial-intelligence-the-ultimate-disrupter-tickets-1982706623885
* Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, Apr 10
https://mtl.drawnandquarterly.com/events/4863920260410
* London: Resisting Big Tech Empires (LSBU), Apr 25
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/globaljusticenow/2042691
* Berlin: Re:publica, May 18-20
https://re-publica.com/de/news/rp26-sprecher-cory-doctorow
* Berlin: Enshittification at Otherland Books, May 19
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/cory-doctorow.html
* Hay-on-Wye: HowTheLightGetsIn, May 22-25
https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/hay/big-ideas-2
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# Recent appearances (permalink)
* Do you feel screwed over by big tech? (Ontario Today)
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-45-ontario-today/clip/16203024-do-feel-screwed-big-tech
* Launch for Cindy's Cohn's "Privacy's Defender" (City Lights)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuVCm2PUalU
* Chicken Mating Harnesses (This Week in Tech)
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/1074
* The Virtual Jewel Box (U Utah)
https://tanner.utah.edu/podcast/enshittification-cory-doctorow-matthew-potolsky/
* Tanner Humanities Lecture (U Utah)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6Yf1nSyekI
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# Latest books (permalink)
* "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
* "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
* "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
* "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
* "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
* "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
* "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
* "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
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# Upcoming books (permalink)
* "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)
* "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
* "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to _Enshittification_ , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
* "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027
* "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
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# Colophon (permalink)
Today's top sources:
**Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1034 words today, 54661 total)**
* "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
* "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
* A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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