Also retail businesses in SEA tend to employ more workers than would be considered necessary in the west. e.g. hiring far more shop assistants than they need. If your labour costs are a small fraction of your overall costs then you have an incentive to hire many workers to provide better service in peak times even if most of the time they are doing nothing, or just to make your business look good.
Right. If people are relatively expensive , as with US retail, you use fancy retail scheduling software and you maybe share a maintenance or a bookkeeper with other businesses so they're not sitting around twiddling their thumbs most of the time. Ditto for household helpers. If, on the other hand, relatively unskilled people are cheap relative to your salary or a businesses profits, it's easier for you just to keep them around all the time even if it's not as efficient.
As someone else noted, there may also be value in specialization. Rather than have a full-time all-around handyman, it may make more sense to just call a plumber if that handyman isn't that cheap relative to the [plumber anyway.
