At the Fantastic General Store, sometimes positions don’t get filled as employees leave or retire. While this is better than laying people off, it does come with its own set of problems. First of all, any employee who was interested in moving into that closed position is now disappointed, which lowers morale, and may even cause the employee to leave entirely. There is also the fact that some positions shouldn’t be left unfilled, but they are anyway. This means more work for the remaining employees, which leads to lower morale too. There is also the issue that, after a certain point, customers don’t get as good of service due to a lack of employees available to help them. Temporary cloning doesn’t go well either with retail workers. The clones tend to be more surely than their originals, and the worker is exhausted after reabsorbing the temporary clones. I think the side effects are because the cloning process is as cheap as the retailers can get. If the stores aren’t filling positions, they probably can’t afford good cloning either. Regardless, leaving positions unfilled to the point that the remaining employees are stretched thin, is a bad idea. It only creates more problems.