An American got hired as a part-time barista in Germany. The job benefits blew her mind.

If you’ve never left your home country, it’s easy to assume certain things are “normal” when they’re actually abnormal elsewhere. As an American living in Germany points out, that normalization can sometimes blind us to how problematic some norms actually are. A woman named Lanna shared that she left the United States two-and-a-half years ago and is now living in Germany. She recently got a job as a part-time barista to make some extra cash. The experience, even before she has started the job, has “broken” her—but “in a good way.” Per her residence permit, Lanna cannot work more than 20 hours per week. Rather than a traditional interview, the employer had her come in for a “try-out day.” At the end of it, she was surprised when the boss asked how she felt about being hired. The business seemed more concerned with how she felt about the job than with how they felt about her. Then, when it came time to do onboarding paperwork, she was first asked about taking her vacation time. In the U.S., part-time work very rarely comes with paid time off at all. In Germany, Lanna will receive 36 days of paid vacation, even while working part-time. Not only that, she also found that inclusion in the German public health care system as a part-time employee was not just possible, but required. For 80 euros a month, she can see any doctor with availability for free or nearly free. It is also required to visit the dentist twice a year, with the visits covered by the public system. Lanna says she hasn’t been to the dentist in years. She checked with her German friends to make sure she was reading the paperwork correctly, since it was all so different from her experience back home. Not only did they confirm her understanding, but they were also surprised by her surprise. This was their normal. For Lanna, it was so abnormal that she didn’t even think to research it beforehand. Barista pulling coffee | Photo credit: Canva “We don’t even have a public healthcare system like this, and a 20-hour-a-week barista gig would never give you social safety nets from it,” Lanna said. “Why would I have expected that?” She added her perspective on how it feels to struggle in the U.S.: “People who are not American will never understand that America, systemically, is so harsh and unforgiving and just cruel, that…if you’re poor, if you’re not wealthy, then it socializes you into having just an overall pessimistic mindset or having expectations that everything will be so difficult and/or impossible, that you should set your standards super, super, super low, like in hell, so that you can be easier to exploit.” Lanna also talked about the nervous system dysregulation that comes with the fear of ending up on the street after a few bad months. She shared that she knows women in abusive relationships who feel they cannot leave their partners because they rely on them for health insurance. She also described people working two or three jobs and still worrying about making ends meet for their families. Part-time work in the U.S. rarely comes with benefits | Photo credit: Canva “I can’t believe how easy it was for me to obtain the essential care that every human being needs and deserves just by serving a little bit of coffee,” she said. “Of course, you can read and research about other countries as much as possible, but there’s some things that you don’t fully understand until you leave the United States.” Naturally, comparing two different countries with different histories, populations, demographics, economic systems, and geographic realities will never be an apples-to-apples comparison. But there are some essentials that people living in a wealthy nation should be able to count on. One is that if you are working, you should be able to take time off without worrying about your paycheck. Another is that affording basic health care should not be an overriding concern that inhibits your ability to live your life without fear of financial ruin. Whatever responsibility U.S. employers bear on these fronts, they are also working within a system that doesn’t make it easy to offer employees these kinds of “benefits.” Health insurance is expensive for employers as well as employees, and it is hard for small businesses to survive in a competitive system that prioritizes profits over people. There may not be a simple, overnight fix for these issues in the U.S., but it is good to see what’s possible when a system sees people as humans first. You can see more from Lanna on TikTok.