The 19 Jobs of Ordinary People: What Can Regular Folks Do?
Demographic: People in their 20s with vocational college or regular undergraduate degrees
Working as store clerks, bogged down by trivial chores that eat up your time. Even what looks like a relaxed bookstore job leaves you with no time to actually read books. Taking on loan brokerage or real estate sales seems decent at first glance, but you have to spend your own money buying customer contact lists (client leads)—averaging around 2,000 RMB a month on information packages, with prices varying by plan. Online course sales look pretty good too: you p.u.a. minors and their inexperienced parents or grandparents, and just work the back-to-school season for two months a year, raking in roughly 20,000 RMB per month. Working as a matchmaker in a婚介agency—just lie to people and you’ll make money. Or take a job as an outsourced operator for the government hotline 12345: you’re just relaying messages and can’t actually solve any problems. “Expedited” requests just mean sending an SMS to the person in charge at the relevant department, and whether they read it or act on it is anyone’s guess—there’s probably no penalty, since many work orders sit unresolved for over 300 days...
If you don’t go into factories, the only options open to everyone else are sales jobs paying around 2,000 RMB a month.