McRichelieu's

Greeting Fellow Citizens and Furry Creatures:

As you may well know, since the day I arrived in SL I have been fascinated with its virtual economy. After presenting at several road shows, I have been granted an endowment from the Center for Research Libraries to undertake several economic experiments in SL.

The first phase and experiment will be McRichelieu's. This enterprise will mimic a fast-food joint IRL. The skills required to perform jobs will be minimal and the tasks will be repetitive. While it is possible the output of McRichelieu's may turn a profit, the real purpose of this enterprise is to gain an understanding of the SL unskilled labor market.

The goal of the enterprise is to answer the following questions:
1. Is there a SL labor market?
2. Are there structural divisions in the SL labor market? (ie skilled, unskilled, tech, etc)
3. What does the supply and demand curve look like for unskilled labor?
4. Is there any upward mobility in SL?
5. What is the growth rate of the labor market? Contraction rate?

McRichelieu's will soon be hiring, so please IM me inworld or email me at [email]jacquelinerichelieu@hotmail.com[/email] if you are interested. Please note that pay will approximate a proportionate real world wage.

I look forward to launching this initiative and hope to receive your support and feedback.

Sincerely,
Jacqueline R.

Dumb idea. I don't want to work for McCrappers in real life, I sure as phuck dont want to spend my free time flippin primmy burgers. Sheesh.

I think you'll struggle to get workers for unskilled, menial positions. However I'd love to see the results

what's your product? i hope it's not virtual fast food like the name suggests cause my av hasn't been hungry in months poor thing. you can prolly find plenty of unskilled repetitive labor tho. just recruit from the people who dance in the same spot in the same club for 8 hours a day. they prolly loved making pizzas in TSO.

What an interesting idea. Please do keep us updated on the results

*ponders the idea of a BigMac that doesnt go straight to her hips*

I dunno what sort of results you may be expecting but you are essentually asking paying passengers on a cruise to work a Mcjob instead of playing shuffleboard. I can't imagine what sort of useful data you could get from that.

Instead you might look into the SL equivalent of a Mcjob that actually ties into the reality you find inworld. What comes immediatly to mind is the club dancer. No skills required, just look pretty for hours at a time and work for tips.

The good part of this venture is that it is not expected to actually make a profit. The endowment grant allows me to experiment with different compensation schemes without having to worry about the impact on the bottom line. This enables me to research the unskilled labor "going wage rate" and draw conclusions based upon the various compensation packages.

I hope you'll all stop by McRichelieu's to enjoy economic science at work.

I'm not "expecting" any specific results, merely trying to gain insight into the SL low to no skilled labor force. Its an academic research project.

And FYI, anyone interested in obtaining government funding for this type of research, should look into it. There are quite a few endowments out there for those seeking to broaden our understanding of virtual economies.

Oh, I've heard Prokofy Neva really misses his pizza factory and jam factory work.

....why?

Flippin' burgers won't work. I think the practical approach is to come up with an idea and then implement it as best as you can. The people you hire and the position you fill represent whatever labor market exists. You can't create substance where this is none.

As a burger joint, most, if not all, of the whole task can be automated. Pay a vendor, get a burger. What could be a better implementation than that? I don't think there's much room for unskilled labor. "Unkskilled" jobs happen at the social places such as clubs (dancer, host/hostest). As SL grows, we make see sales positions become available, if the population grows to such an extent that you have crowded enough malls that a sales staff becomes neccessary. But not until then.

There are -lots- of skilled jobs, I think. More than I think there are people to fill them. At the same time, I don't think most people are ready to pay what those services cost.

I thought the same thing - but then I started thinking... mainly on Chip Midnights money tree spinoff thread...

A better implimentation could involve me sitting and chucking over how long a person will stand at bench making virtual pizza for 1 L$ every 2 mintues

Like a lot of things I tend to do in SL - I can waive the practicality if it makes me laugh for a short time

Siggy.

The scientific method, as I understand it, involves first observing and describing a phenominon then develop a hypothisis based on the observations then develop pedictions as to what results you would expect if the hypothisis were true. You then create experiments to test the hypothisis and the results of the experiments must be independantly reproducaible.
(sorry, school was a long time ago )

My point being that from what you described and your subsequent response and "gaining insight" doesn't sound very scientific to me. By creating an artificial "Mcjob" with no real purpose other than to create a monotiounus, low paying job will not tell you a whole lot about the economy you are trying to "gain insight" or even the behavorial patterns of people who would actually have to make a low wage to survive in the real world using a virtual job.

This sounds like someone putting a pink tutu on a grizzly bear and making observations. This might tell you a little about the bear but all it will essentually tell you is how a grizzly reacts to having a bright pink tutu on. Since bears don't wear them in the wild, what good is this data going to be?

She's starting at the bottom of the SL workforce, comparing RL McDonald's employees to SL Club Dancers... this is pretty obvious, and yes there's a market. The interesting research will be the wages report versus te income of the "enterprise."

This is a neat idea: evaluating L$'s value against players' time (which is one of the two real currencies in SL).

Unfortunately you won't get a meaningful value unless you operate on a free market basis, which means: having a strong competition.

It seems you'll have to open multiple burger joints that will compete on hiring employees. This means the burger joints will have to be profitable on their own merits, each of them, and that means selling something that people will buy. Unless you can gather these conditions you will be operating outside of the real SL economy rules and thus will be measuring nothing significant...

... OR you can simulate profits and sales numbers for each joint, but that takes away some realism (does not measure quality of the work of your employees).

Sorry, your experiment is flawed in my opinion

I was gonna keep my fat yapper shut on this one but the more I think about it the more it pisses me off.
Somehow, Somewhere, in some way...
"We the people" foot the bill for such stupid assed endowments and grants.

Can I have fries with that?

There's a place where they are already doing this experiment: it's called The Sims Online.

If you open up an iceee machine, I am so there. I'd love to put my sim on during the day while I work in the other window.

Do you pay overtime?

These are great questions to try to answer, but I don't know if you're going to be able to answer them with the experiment you describe. (The answer to #1, btw, is 'yes'.) You're asking questions here about the entire SL labor market. It's going to be difficult to answer them without being able to identify and survey a statistically significant portion of the actors in that market.

Are there hard data points you'll be collecting from McRichelieu's, or that you're collecting in TSO, or will the material that comes out of the experiment be more anecdotal?

I think it's great that you've gotten a grant to study virtual economies, Jacqueline. I'd actually be interested to know more about how that happens.