Daiso (Paid Work and Research) JULY

Daiso | Paid Work July wage: ₩1,006,360 There is something strangely satisfying about seeing ₩1,006,360 deposited into your account and knowing exactly where almost every won came from. It came from hours behind the till, stocking shelves only to watch customers empty them again, memorising where increasingly obscure products were located, carrying boxes, answering questions, and discovering how exhausting it can be to remain polite to someone who has decided that a minor inconvenience is entirely your fault. Before Daiso, I understood labour mostly as an economic concept. Labour was a factor of production. Wages were the price of labour. Firms employed workers until the marginal revenue product of labour equalled the wage. All perfectly sensible on a graph. Then I actually became the labour. Suddenly, ₩1,006,360 represented mornings I could have slept in, hours spent standing, boxes carried, shelves filled, and thousands of tiny interactions nobody outside the shop would notice. I also realised how much invisible work goes into making an ordinary shopping experience feel ordinary. Stocking shelves became an endless game of tag: I filled; customers took. I reorganised; they moved things. The shop was never "finished." And then there were the customers. Most were lovely. Some were impatient. Some were, frankly, 진상. Customer service made me think about power and courtesy. Being polite to someone who can benefit you is easy. Being polite to someone whom you believe cannot challenge you says considerably more about you. It also made me notice cashiers, cleaners, servers, and delivery workers differently. There is a difference between not being rude and actually recognising someone's work. Once you have stood on the other side of the counter, "thank you" means more. Yet the money I remember most from Daiso isn't my wage. An elderly man in his eighties regularly collected waste paper outside the shop. His cart was unbelievably heavy, so I would help him wheel it out and sometimes stop cars so he could cross the road. I knew there would eventually be a day when I stopped seeing him. One day, he gave me ₩3,000. Economically, it made no sense. I was earning a wage; he was collecting cardboard. But perhaps the economic insignificance of the note was precisely what made its human value so enormous. ₩3,000 is almost nothing beside ₩1,006,360. Yet I know which I value more. The million won tells me how much I worked. The three thousand won reminds me why people matter. I also hesitate to romanticise the experience as "humbling." I could choose to spend my summer working and then return to school. For many people around me, work was not a temporary opportunity to gain perspective. It was rent, groceries, family, and livelihood. I had the privilege of knowing there was an end date. Economics necessarily turns workers into labour, shoppers into consumers, and wages into data. Daiso reminded me to zoom back in. Behind "labour" is someone whose feet hurt. Behind "wages" are hours of someone's life. And behind an insignificant ₩3,000 note can be an eighty-year-old man saying thank you. Sometimes, the smallest transaction on the balance sheet is the one worth remembering.