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On the fifth floor of South Korea’s sprawling National Library is a place far more fascinating than its name suggests: The North Korea Information Center.

Here you can read every edition of North Korea’s national newspaper, the Rodong Sinmun, dating to its first publication in the 1970s. Or peruse a collection of 100,000 North Korean books and videos — fiction, nonfiction and the complete teachings of the autocratic dynasty that runs the country.

In addition to political propaganda, there is also a North Korean children’s book section. And there are textbooks. (Calculus problems are exactly the same in North Korea, but the textbooks have much less color.)

“There are very few places worldwide where you can get most of this stuff that is surrounding us,” says Christopher Green, a North Korea scholar from University of Leiden, who spends a lot of his time here doing research.

Researchers know about this place, which opened in the late 1980s during a thaw in inter-Korean relations. But the library isn’t advertised. Most South Koreans have never heard of it, and they can face jail time for having these materials out in the wild.

In The Heart of Seoul, A Trove Of North Korean Propaganda

IMG_6981 by Tony Golding on Flickr 

There is literally no reason for cashiers to stand other than gross “aesthetic” reasons like not wanting their employees to look “lazy” and to specifically alienate fat and non able bodied employees. They can’t outright say you can’t work there so instead they find ways to make the job impossible for you.

Most retail cashier jobs are absolutely gross and treat their employees like shit simply for ableist/fatphobic reasons.

I worked at a Rite aid for 4 years and almost every one of our rules were like that. We couldn’t lean on counters or just stand “idly” because we couldn’t look “unproductive” to customers. If customers were in the store we were required to be “busy” at all times. So even if you were just standing behind the counter waiting for people to come up you had to look “engaged.”

So moral of the story as much as your issue with the fact that maybe we didn’t perfectly pack your groceries or maybe that we didn’t spend your entire order smiling from ear to ear, maybe it has to do with the poor work conditions cashiers and many people in the service industry are forced to deal with, such as make us uncomfortable, tired and unnecessarily sore due to the owners desire to make the customers feel as if we couldn’t be happier to be there.