I mean, you’re paying them either way. Businesses money for salaries comes from customers. It’s still silly and indirect, but it’s not like you wouldn’t be paying the workers’ salary anyway.

That or a in depth description of your last bowel movement.

These people need to learn how to conversation then. Remember: it’s not an interrogation or exam, you don’t have to exactly answer the question as though you’ll be flunked out of a class for the wrong answer. So:

“Oh man, I don’t remember. But I really like x by y. What kind of music do you listen to?”

It’s not that hard.

This assumes you’re looking for a particular item of clothing. It’s true that the clothes cache is not optimized for that.

However, if you are instead looking for a shirt, a pair of pants, and/or so on, without regards to which specific shirt, and if the cache is randomly sorted and the distribution of all such items is roughly equal, then it becomes O(1) - regardless of the size of the cache, you’ll get what you want within 4 or 5 checks. Plus, you typically want one of each of the types of item, and you’ll get all of them within those same 4 or 5 checks.

Bonus: the checks can be parallelized by using a “wide” cache that enables multiple items to be checked at once. This is why I use a short and wide clean clothes basket and a tall and skinny dirty clothes basket.