Team Production with Gift Exchange

The articles we were asked to read for this blog post all had a similar theme to some of the social aspects to economic transaction. At my current job, we have a form of team production with gift exchange in the way that we give up and pick up shifts. When I first got hired at the bar I started as a doorman, which meant I cleaned up the bar, and ensure nothing too crazy happened. Every week we fill out a Google sheet with the shifts we want and don’t want to work, and if you forget to fill them out you could end up working a shift you don’t want to or not work a shift at all.

When it comes to getting shifts covered there is a sense of altruism that is described from the third article. Whenever someone tries to get a shift covered due to a family emergency or something important that is related to school, another employee will usually step up right away to take the shift. While sometimes those motives aren’t always altruistic and could be attributed to a lack of shifts or money, when it comes to emergencies the shift always gets covered.

The altruistic nature of college students does reach an end and when it comes to anything outside of an emergency, getting a shift covered can be difficult. To help explain, first I must explain the way that working as doormen is organized at our bar. Our schedule also doubles as a list with doormen in numerical order, the higher you are on the list, the better you get tipped out and the less grunt work you have to do in comparison to your other doormen. The only way to move up the list is to put in the work, which entails picking up extra shifts and not messing up while working. This in itself works as a motivator to pick up shifts because of the possibility of promotion and better pay through movement on the shift, or at least it should be. This now ties into another point in one of the articles that say that people view transactions through a moral or economic lens. The economic lens, in my case, comes into play when another employee offers compensation for picking up their shift. This was a concept that I started seeing more of recently, which ruins the possibility for true gift exchange in this scenario. When I first began working, it was very common for two employees to switch shifts to enable them to study, go out, or rest on nights that they originally were scheduled for. Now I’ve seen employees throw anywhere from $20-100 to get their shift covered, which makes other employees reconsider how much their time is actually worth to them. What would be the incentive for an employee to switch shifts with someone when said employee could just wait until someone offers a ludicrous amount of money for their shift to be covered.


In a utopian scenario, the most efficient and prevalent exchange would be trading one shift for another, which helps both workers. This was shown by the example given in the first article of the two kids pulling the marble machine at the same time to receive marbles. In the example from the article, two kids must pull the levers at the same time for marbles to be received and one child received more marbles than the other but in most cases the children ended up with the same amount of marbles. When it comes to shift exchange at work, this effect can be seen when one employee trades a busy shift for a shift where we close early. While the busy shift will involve more work and effort, the tips received are much better, whereas the shift where we close early involves little work but results in a very small tip out. Even though it wasn’t exactly planned, the added work is offset with the extra money obtained and the exchange becomes more of an even trade. Unfortunately, this scenario isn’t as common as it should be and money usually ends up being the main motivator for a shift to change hands.

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