Ton, however, argues that workers are not merely a cost; they can be a source of profit — a major one. A better-paid, better-trained worker, she argues, will be more eager to help customers; they’ll also be more eager to help their store sell to them. The success of Costco, Trader Joe’s, QuikTrip and Mercadona, Spain’s biggest supermarket chain, indicate, she argues, that well-paid, knowledgeable workers are not an indulgence often found in luxury boutiques with their high markups. At each of the aforementioned companies, workers are paid more than at their competitors; they are also amply staffed per shift. More employees can ask customers questions about what they want to see more of and what they don’t like, and then they are empowered to change displays or order different stock to appeal to local tastes. (In big chains, these sorts of decisions are typically made in headquarters with little or no line-staff input.) Costco pays its workers about $21 an hour; Walmart is just about $13. Yet Costco’s stock performance has thoroughly walloped Walmart’s for a decade.

I was thinking about this as my wife and I re-entered Ikea. From the moment we walked into the store, we realized that something changed. A greeter at the entrance pointed out a shortcut to get to the closet department, which probably saved us half an hour. When we got there, a salesman guided us through the options. Suspicious that this was a fluke, I made a point of asking questions of every worker we passed, but every one was pleasant, knowledgeable and helpful. Even on a crowded Sunday, there seemed to be plenty of roving employees looking to answer, direct and expound upon the various differences between the Pax and the Stuva closet systems — of which, I can now tell you, there are many.

This wasn’t a fluke. A couple of days later, Rob Olson, the C.F.O. of Ikea U.S., told me that since my last visit, the company had invested in a new work-force-management system that reminded me of much of Ton’s thesis. The software helps the company to better distribute workers throughout the store, so that there are more of them in the areas where people have the most questions, like closets. The new system was designed by Kronos, a large work-force-management company (both The New York Times and my other employer, NPR, are customers). Charles DeWitt, Kronos’s head of business development, told me that he and his colleagues have been profoundly affected by Ton’s work and are building a new set of work-force-management products designed to help retail chains enact some of her ideas. Ikea’s system is only the beginning, he said. He has been traveling the country selling the concept to other retailers.

Ton may have started her research in retail, but she believes her core findings are relevant in nearly every industry. After re-evaluating the relationship between worker management and profit, she argues that many corporate leaders will realize that paying their workers more and treating them better will actually make everyone better off. And this, indeed, would foment a small revolution. For generations, technology has been a source of misery for many low-paid workers, rendering their jobs tedious or eliminating them altogether. Gallup recently reported that only 29 percent of North American workers feel engaged with their work. Yet Ton suggests that a more sophisticated use of those same technological tools could reverse those trends. It’s possible that the lousy commodity jobs that we think of as central to an industrialized economy — from Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern Times” to “Office Space” to the latest disaster in Bangladesh — may not be a sad but inevitable result of a bigger, more efficient economy; it may just be a math error. Ikea’s decision to improve conditions for its workers is a major step forward. Persuading Walmart, with its 1.3 million U.S. employees . . . well, that might be a revolution.