“The way I’ve been growing and growing,” she said, “I don’t want for that to stop.”<br />Las Vegas • The Hotel Cleaner<br />Most mornings, Wendy Almada — a guest-room attendant, or G. R.A., at the Aria Resort<br />and Casino on the Las Vegas Strip — puts on a pair of latex gloves and tackles the bathroom first.<br />“I have a very tame cat, and when they start to have sun-downing” — the late-afternoon confusion<br />that can be a symptom of dementia — “I have a wild tiger,” she said.<br />The average wage of a culinary-union worker is $23 an hour, compared with the $10 an hour made by a nonunionized Las Vegas hospitality worker or the $6 an hour Almada, who is 42<br />and who moved to the United States from the Mexico border town of Agua Prieta (she got her green card when she was 11, and became a citizen when she was 22), was paid at her last job in a coffee-cup-making factory in Tucson.<br />“It takes time and patience for you to be able to stand on your feet for hours<br />to braid somebody’s hair,” she said, “so you really have to love doing it.”<br />Ufot, 38, has known how to braid since she was 15; she picked up the skill in Warri, Nigeria, where she was born.<br />“It’s not what you look like, it’s what your clevis hangers look like,” Awan said, referring to the brackets used to support pipes.<br />As consumers increase their online shopping — total retail sales in the United States increased only 2.9 percent last year,<br />but online sales rose 15.1 percent — distribution networks have adapted by integrating more and more consumer destinations into their systems.
