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Floc, pH plus, maxi tablets, and chlorine granules are words that I never expected to add to my vocabulary. But thanks to Miles, a 30-year-old TikToker from Bedfordshire, England, I’m now obsessed with the way he uses these chemicals to clean ugly basins covered in green algae. With more than 2.3 million followers on the platform, where he’s known as @thep00lguy, Miles has turned his daily job into captivating videos of him cleaning pools with all sorts of gadgets, powders, and products.
On May 21, he published a TikTok showing his routine as a pool technician, which went viral. “I did have a different account with just random videos, just to mess around. And then I did one pool TikTok on there, and it seemed to get more likes than any of my other videos. So I thought I’d just start a new account just doing pool stuff,” he told Teen Vogue in a phone interview.
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Miles is just one of the many young service workers who have gained large online followings for giving viewers a behind-the-scenes look at their day-to-day grind. It feels like an extremely 2020 phenomenon. There’s the fine line between millennials and Gen Z’ers turning their lives into content for fun, and because they feel obligated to — driven toward any opportunity that could possibly gain them exposure, and, ideally, new jobs or more money. And there is the fact that so many young people are working in service industries, navigating exhausting shifts while also trying to mitigate the health risks of working in customer-facing jobs during the COVID-19 pandemic. The videos can be hypnotic and enjoyable to watch, but doing so can come with a shot of guilt.
Morgan Eckroth, known as @morgandrinkscoffee, is one of TikTok’s favorite baristas. Her 4.6 million followers love to watch her joke around and create gorgeous, professional latte art videos at the coffee shop where she works in Corvallis, Oregon. “I haven’t seen a large increase [in people who recognize me] at my work, but that’s mostly due to our customers being slightly older than the main demographic that uses TikTok,” said the recent marketing graduate in an interview with coffee blogger Jenn Chen. “I get recognized a decent amount when I’m in areas with a lot of middle or high schoolers, and it’s always a lot of fun,” she added.
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Given the stress and chaos of the pandemic and 2020 elections, it’s not surprising that people want to zone out to soothing videos of Eckroth nailing a foam swan on a latte or watching Miles turn a murky pool crystal clean. Viewers are looking for visual content that offers distraction and satisfaction. “My content is unique on most social media because nobody thinks about showing you what goes on behind the scenes,” Miles said. “You go to a pool, you see clear water, and you think nothing of it, but my TikTok shows you the background and what goes on and how it stays like that.”
Another somewhat disconcerting side effect of this trend is that these young employees end up doing free advertising for the companies where they work. In Portland, Oregon, full-time student Justice Platiro, 20, also holds down jobs at a Cold Stone Creamery and the Columbia Sportswear Company. “I did not necessarily want to work in the food industry, but I just took the job because I needed one,” she said of the gig at Cold Stone. She says she downloaded TikTok just “for fun,” and on July 4, decided to record herself behind the counter at work, making a scoop of ice cream fly through the air before catching it in a tub. “It blew up,” she recalls.
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Platiro now has more than 500,000 followers on the platform, where she shares videos of herself at Cold Stone juggling, decorating cakes, opening and closing the store and dancing in uniform all over the place. She said company management found out about her videos and “are big fans of it. And they’re not opposed to it and sought me out to see if I would like to do additional marketing with them.”
“I’ve never thought of it as a way for me to get more money from Cold Stone,” Platiro said. “I noticed that it was free advertising for the company, which I was not too mad about. It is just nice to know that they aren’t mad at me for making these videos, and I’m able to do them and have my creative freedom as long as I don’t make them look bad. I keep up with good work ethic, and it is okay, which I appreciate because it allows me to have fun with it too.”
Teen Vogue reached out to Cold Stone for comment.
Sometimes these employees open up about the challenges of their daily gigs and packed schedules. Since publishing her first TikTok in June 2020, housekeeper Vanesa Amaro has gained 1.7 million followers. Her feed is filled with videos of her cleaning and organizing, along with tips and hacks, from how to get rid of hard water stains to how to clean a sofa covered with dog hair without a vacuum.
But she’s also frank about the downsides of the job. In one four-part story, she dished about her worst clients. And in another, she shares that her work, considered a source of entertainment for hundreds of thousands of viewers on TikTok, remains a tiring job. “Cleaning is not just organizing,” she writes, on a video of her vacuuming and scrubbing toilets. “It is hard work. We sweat and get wet and tired.”
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Platiro also shows her vulnerability, talking about the stresses of holding down two jobs, feeling lonely, and how it’s “actually really overwhelming” to have a large online following, which she never sought out.
“When I first started gaining a significant following, I began to push myself to create more content, to put out more without stopping, and I noticed I was starting to get super burned-out,” Platiro told Teen Vogue. She says she had to learn how to log off to protect her mental health.
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Some service employees say they’ve benefited from their online platforms, which have helped them find community, and have leveraged them into additional paid opportunities.
“Anyone who gets big on TikTok gets companies approaching you who want to do collaborations. And it’s up to you to decide whether you can fit that in your content and possibly get paid for it,” Miles said. “I’m not turning down every opportunity to make more money. I worked with [storage solutions business] BiGDUG. They found me through TikTok to see if I could get their product in my videos.”
For Eckroth, 2020 was the year of her graduation from undergrad and the end of her three and a half years as a part-time barista. After building a community with videos orbiting around her work, she says she still plans to create online content. “It was just my time. I graduated with my marketing degree, found a new job and got married. I knew it was inevitable when I got the position at the beginning of college. As far as we go, I’m not going anywhere. I’m Morgan, and I’ll still be drinking coffee even though I’m not on the floor as a barista anymore. Will my content look different? Perhaps, or perhaps not,” she says from her YouTube channel.
As for Platiro, she says she’s “reaching a point wherein the next year or two I will be leaving Cold Stone.” She’s thinking about the future of her TikTok platform too. As someone who has “always found it super fun to share stuff” and loved watching YouTube streamers, she says, “I don’t like to tie myself down to one specific type of content. I love doing dancing TikToks, art, comedy and satisfying videos. I try to incorporate other videos into my page so that people will follow me for multiple reasons. That way I’m not just the Cold Stone girl.”
Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Young Service Workers Are Going Through Hell
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