Punching In
Reviewed by Ellen Wernecke
December 20th, 2007
George Orwell did it because he was broke. Barbara Ehrenreich did it to find out why some people are always broke. And according to the New York Times, a 25-year-old named Sean Aiken is blogging about it at OneWeekJob.com to find his passion. Converting a string of jobs into literary non-fiction gold is easy to do if one can withstand the indignity of taking a menial job long enough to get the paragraphs out. Compared to those mentioned, the lot of business-tech writer and consultant Alex Frankel was relatively easy. To put together his new book Punching In, he worked at hip companies like Apple and Starbucks to find out how these places find, mold and create loyalty in their bottom-level employees. Surely Orwell would have preferred being an Apple Genius to washing the dishes of Paris aristocrats.
Frankel wasn't able to penetrate the personality tests of Whole Foods or stand out in a group interview at the Container Store, but he did stints at five companies for Punching In. Under an assumed identity as a grad student without much retail experience, Frankel scrunched jeans at Gap and struggled to answer Mac users' esoteric questions while observing his fellow employees and the way they felt about their jobs. In each case, Frankel provides a tantalizing glimpse into the corporate self-image of the companies as delivered in training and day-to-day operations to their employees, from the differences among UPS uniforms to how Enterprise Rent-a-Car uses customer satisfaction to decide its employees' eligibility for promotion.
Though his targets are unconventional, Punching In offers few surprises, unless tidbits like Gap's insistence that employees only wear Gap clothes or non-branded apparel to work come as a surprise. Whether Frankel wasn't able to work at his target companies long enough to experience the indoctrination he was seeking, or because he claims to be resistant to such branding attempts, he never fully answers the question: Why do people want to be a barista or a UPS guy, anyway? Perhaps he could have used a little more of Ehrenreich's perspective in recognizing his co-workers for whom these jobs are careers, as well as the way those companies might encourage or, alternately, undercut that goal. With his anecdotes that never form a complete picture, the case study he wanted to live is bland enough for CEOs to read on airplanes.