
Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising? - JumpCrisscross
http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/business/economy/pastry-workers-restaurant-job-training.html?em_pos=small&emc=edit_dk_20161013&nl=dealbook&nl_art=1&nlid=65508833&ref=headline&te=1&referer=
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bootload
_" the salaries of pastry makers in the Chicago area do not appear to have
budged much, if at all. The key to this puzzle tells us a lot about why the
American economy isn’t necessarily behaving the way workers have traditionally
assumed. ... Employers, according to those in the industry, have increasingly
turned to less experienced workers to ensure the flow of sweets"_

The drive to employ cheaper, okay workers in action. Applies to software
development as well.

~~~
hughes
Does a more expensive pastry chef produce more expensive pastry? Or can a more
experienced chef produce higher volume also? If the cost of the pastry
increases with the cost of the chef, then it's entirely reasonable that there
is a lower demand for more expensive pastry and therefore a lower demand for
more expensive pastry chefs.

With software development it's a little different - it's entirely possible for
a more expensive software developer to produce lower-cost software if the cost
savings come from better planning, more fluency with the toolset, and fewer
(high-impact) bugs.

~~~
emodendroket
Do you really find it hard to believe that a more experienced pastry chef can
make better pastries? I think this is the same frustrating myopia that makes
people assume they all could easily write software the way you do except in
reverse.

~~~
carterehsmith
Let's be honest. Making pastry is not really hard.

You can spend 30 minutes learning on youtube, and you will be able to make
some basic pastry. It will not be glorious but it might be edible.

Otherplace in this thread somebody was quoting some pastry chef claiming that
"it takes months" to learn to do cupcakes or whatever.

That "months" is a definition of low-skill job.

Which is why pastry chefs have minimum-wage salaries basically. Btw, the
"chef" moniker here is kind of silly.

~~~
wfo
Let's be honest. Writing code is not really hard.

You can spend 30 minutes watching youtube videos and learn how to write basic
code. It won't be glorious but it will work.

The arrogance is bleeding out of the text itself, I'm not even sure how that's
possible but it's happening.

~~~
Chris2048
How many companies need "basic code"? Many need much more than that. Your
phrasing makes it seem like advancing beyond that point is just as easy, but
it's not.

What happens when you need to debug, and you don't understand anything because
you copy-pasted from a tutorial? How long would an employer be willing to wait
while you google for the right tutorial telling you how to fix the problem?

~~~
emodendroket
Have you ever looked into how many businesses do nothing but set up WordPress
sites for customers with light customization? Quite a lot of companies want
such services.

~~~
Chris2048
"Writing code is not really hard" isn't the same thing. Maybe you can bang
together such a site without really coding, as soon as you do, even simple PHP
or HTML it gets harder. I'd also take "writing code" to mean writing code, not
just a subsection of particularly easy code - you can't advertise as "software
developer" in general if all you can do is wordpress.

~~~
emodendroket
You can't advertise as a "pastry chef" if you just know how to bake cupcakes
either.

~~~
Chris2048
I'm not sure this is relevant to my point that coding isn't easy. I don't know
anything about pastry-cheffing.

------
ensignavenger
Maybe because they are only in demand at the current price point, but as soon
as the price goes up, people switch to 'substitute goods'?

~~~
sbuttgereit
Not only for the labor, but for the product as well.

I know few people that dislike pastries... ok maybe they like some kinds more
than others, but still...

But I know few people that like pastries at any price; at least not with any
frequency. Once that price goes up too much they do look for substitute goods.
Maybe mass-produces Hostess-style stuff: not great, but sufficient and cheap.

At some point, this too will resolve itself. I think you'll see some mix of
price rise and demand reduction in the independent sector (with some labor
rate rise, too, but only for the highly skilled) and an increase of demand in
the cheap, mass production baked goods area. This will take time to shake out,
but it will.

...And I could be wrong in how it will: you cannot plan economies. Not
everyone will agree with that, but I have yet to see it happen successfully.

~~~
eli_gottlieb
>But I know few people that like pastries at any price; at least not with any
frequency. Once that price goes up too much they do look for substitute goods.
Maybe mass-produces Hostess-style stuff: not great, but sufficient and cheap.

Eehhh. I think there's a huge range of quality that's underserved between the
fancy cookies, over-sweetened brownies, and pretentious scones at most cafes
and the fancy croissants and cakes at "real bakeries". In fact, you can tell
there's an underserved market because most of the "high-quality", expensive
offerings are actually pretty bad, but dressed-up nicely.

You know what? I think my comments in this thread might be a hint that
someday, when the economy grows again for non-tech people, I should go ahead,
learn to wake up really fucking early, and try starting a bakery.

------
woopwoop
Part of the reason could be the tipping system. It is impossible to raise the
price of the food in your restaurant without giving a raise to your waitstaff,
since almost everyone tips a fixed percentage. So if you want to give a raise
to your chef, you want to fund it with a price increase, but you can't do that
without giving a raise to your waiters.

~~~
harryh
There is definitely some evidence for this hypothesis. If you read about the
restaurant industry you'll see a lot of comments from restauranteurs that seem
to indicate that they think the salary ratios between FOH and BOH staff are
off.

We've had a couple of restaurants in NYC go tip free, instead building the
cost of service into the base cost of menu items. Unfortunately it appears
that this can be a challenge because consumers aren't used to the higher cost
menu items. Even though a $30 entre with no tip is roughly the same cost as a
$25 entre where a tip is expected apparently consumer behavior changed
significantly. Quite a few places have abandoned their gratuity free plans
after a couple of months of testing.

There might be a bit of a prisoners dilemma problem here. If every restaurant
eliminated tipping consumers would soon get used to new prices, but when only
a few do they stick out as feeling more expensive (even if they really
aren't).

We might currently live in a stable but non-optimal equilibria.

~~~
ufo
Are tips required by law to go to the FOH staff or could a restaurant split
the tips between the FOH and BOH staff (assuming the staff agrees to it)?

~~~
et-al
Nope. It's called tip out, and in my experience it's been 3-4% of my total
sales going to the other staff (sometimes 4% of only the liquor sales to the
bar). Othertimes, it has been a percentage of my tips themselves (~30%: 10
bar, 10 runner, 10 bussers, I think.. been years).

~~~
harryh
All of the tip outs you describe are to FOH staff.

~~~
et-al
Pretty sure the first gig with the 4% of sales went to the kitchen, but okay.

------
lamontcg
The problem here is the Restaurant industry. Overall, its not growing like
high tech is growing. While even the article notes:

“Restaurants are being built much faster than I can produce professionals.”

That sounds like it'd be good for "professionals", but when you think about
the industry that sounds bad for "restaurants".

That means higher competition between restaurants for the consumer's food
dollar. The wages to pay the professionals come from those food dollars.

Without people willing to pay substantially more for food there isn't the cash
going into the industry to be able to give raises to the professionals (anyone
here willing to shell out $25 every day for the best latte in the world, or
will you stick with $4 starbucks or brew your own?).

~~~
Klover
Good points. On top of that you might also argue that restaurants are very
consumption oriented.

Fast food can save you time by letting you focus on other things than cooking.
A pastry chef will take more time to make something special. During that time
you might be entertaining potential clients or business partners, though on
the global scale of restaurants, most people are probably going out to dinner
to enjoy dinner.

There is of course nothing inherently bad about this. People like going out to
have food, and restaurants oblige them. But they can only really do this when
their guests are in their restaurants. They cannot create more value than they
do now. All they compete on is status, atmosphere, service, food quality,
price. I personally see limited innovation potential here, therefore a
somewhat limited market. Therefore, sort of like you said, lots of competition
in many aspects besides pastry chefs, all for the limited food dollar.

Now compare that to your average software developer. There is new software I
come across on a near daily basis that attempts to improve work flow one way
or the other; trying to make me more productive. There is more value in a
rather basic tool MS Word alone than there is in lots of dinners. If Excel
didn't exist, I'm not sure if I would have the time to go to restaurants.

But software development also differs greatly to restaurants, on the
developer's side. They can produce a game once, and people can purchase it and
play it without the developers having to directly entertain at most a few
number of people.

But what I am most surprised about is that you make it sound as if a daily $4
latte is that normal. It isn't, is it?

(Sorry for the mess, the screen kept scrolling oddly, so I could only see the
last few words I typed.)

~~~
Chris2048
> you make it sound as if a daily $4 latte is that normal

I buy maybe 2 lattes a day at 3.50 EUR each.

I also spend about 350 EUR a year on coffee beans/grounds and this year 1-2k
on coffee machines (a one off admittedly, I expect a yearly average of 200-300
EUR on equipment going forward).

Maybe I'm unusual, but I expect people who buy fewer home materials will drink
at cafes more?

------
internaut
There are a number of reasons why wages might not rise that have nothing to do
with free market supply and demand.

The most obvious is you could control wages by being the owner of inelastic
goods your workers require to live, such as housing. I think this is how the
feudal system worked originally, workers produced cereals but the Land and the
worker's cottages were both owned by the Landlord. If the price of bread
decreased the Landlord could simply increase rents. So it was only when the
factories came along that most workers managed to have any savings.

Another example is where a worker in debt, and must work at an existing job to
pay for the debt. Obviously a worker without debt is a worker than could
request a higher pay rate because they are able to be more competitive by
obtaining a new employer.

Another example is the existence of non-compete agreements.

It should not surprise us that in London there exists widespread use of non-
competes and their workers are typically indebted by student loans or
mortgages, that the wages are so low. Look at any London software engineer
thread if you'd like to be depressed, 300-400 a day and sometimes much less,
for people with 10+ years of experience.

Another example is that I suspect that there is a conspiracy to hold down
wages that involves both the government and companies price fixing. I further
suspect this is a deliberate policy by at least the US and UK governments
using a list of occupations they depend on to function. Scientists, engineers,
programmers.

This shouldn't come as a surprise because even in Silicon Valley where the
wages are the highest in the world for computer programmers, it was found that
multiple well known corporations were involved in a wage fixing cartel. That
however I suspect is merely amateur hour in comparison to the government and
its partners.

~~~
dcre
...what? If I could upvote the top half and downvote the second I would.

~~~
internaut
Why do you find the idea of a wage fixing cartel so bizarre? It's a phenomenon
as old as labour markets themselves. The employer does not want a market for
labour, they want a steady supply of workers for the lowest price. Since there
are fewer employers than workers, it is easier to coordinate a plot against
them.

Also when the economy becomes more centralized and bigger companies swallow up
smaller ones, you should _expect_ more cartels. That is just logical.

I didn't say I had evidence but I know the number of competitors for positions
in the UK has been going down, not up. The price for labour however has not
shifted.

This is indicative of fixed prices, in this case wages.

Does you think the prices for turnips can be fixed but not that of plumbers?
It's all the same thing.

~~~
clock_tower
Think about how people won't buy turnips (or consumer goods in general) if the
price is higher than they expect -- even if that's the break-even price. I
think something similar's happening with employers: they won't pay more than
$80-$100,000 for a programmer, the market-clearing price for programmers is
somewhere around $130,000, and thus you get a STEM shortage. And this applies
pretty much everywhere; it's astonishing how few employers are willing to
admit that they can't fill positions, they aren't offering enough money.

~~~
marchenko
good point. Price stickiness can apply to wages as well - it's often used to
explain why it's supposedly difficult to decrease wages to keep positions
filled during a recession, but I suspect in the current market the opposite is
more often true: companies have a certain price point for labor in mind and
are unwilling revise their payscale upward. It's a sinister version of your
grandmother complaining about the price of milk, since large companies have a
lot of leverage to distort the labor market.

------
maxlamb
Very simple, the supply of people who want to be pastry chefs is increasing
just as fast, thanks to the recent crazes (cup cakes, etc) and the explosion
of reality tv cooking shows in the last decade that is making that career
option a much more popular choice. I know someone who just quit their high-
paying consulting job to fulfill her dream of becoming a pastry chef, and
willing to take a considerable pay cut for it.

------
pcurve
Chefs and cooks generally don't command high wage because there is plenty of
competition, including those who don't cook for living.

There is a limit as to how much people will pay to have other people prepare
meals for them. After all, people can cook meals for themselves if all else
fails.

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cylinder
There's a cap to how much people will pay for dessert. They will just skip it
if it's too expensive. As such restaurants will source cheaper pastries from
larger suppliers if they reach this point, rather than employ in house chefs.

------
WillPostForFood
_Tony Galzin, a former pastry chef at the Chicago restaurant MK, cited ice
cream making. It can take months to learn how to achieve the correct
proportions of fat, sugar, protein, water and stabilizers, all of which are
thrown off by the use of different ingredients._

This is an example of pastry chefs overvaluing their own skills, so not
surprising there is labor substitution happening.

~~~
dmamills
This is hysterically ironic on a forum like hacker news.

~~~
WillPostForFood
The article directly makes the parallel case of programmers and code
academies. I'd say the same thing about programmer wages and claims you need a
4 year degree to put up a wordpress blog or whatever you think the programming
equivalent of making ice cream is. Bottom line is if your wages are low, then
your skills aren't as valuable as you think, whether you are a coder, or
creamer.

~~~
code_sardaukar
I think the endgame for programmers is very different to pastry chefs. Yes
there are bootcamps, but part of their success is being selective in who they
accept. No one has yet shown how to take an average person and get them a well
paying programming job. Egalitarian dogma states that programmers don't have
special abilities or interests but the market has been very stubborn so far.

------
heisenbit
In these matters it pays to look closely at wants and needs. A lot of
restaurants want great pastry chefs but in how many restaurants will an
excellent pastry chef really make a difference? The whole experience of a
night out depends a lot more on the desert. Sure an excellent desert can make
the difference between a good meal and a totally over the top experience worth
twice as much. But how many restaurants are on that level? Most suffer from
significant weaknesses in the basics. A dollar can be spent only once and
spending salary on pastry chef competes with cleaning the bathrooms more
often.

------
qwrusz
The headline when I click the link now reads _" Creating a Pastry Chef From
Scratch"_

This also seems more accurate.

Pastry chefs may be in demand, but it does not appear that experienced and
trained pastry chefs are in some high demand. Sounds like humans willing to
work as pastry chefs are in demand. Personally I have not noticed a pastry
explosion. Couple more cupcake spots maybe.

If humans are easy to find and train to do this "from scratch" while on the
job...Supply meets demand here. One reason why wages aren't rising.

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eva1984
> For the profession, the downside is that it can be hard to scratch out a
> middle-class living.

Middle-class living meaning? If it consists owning a property, then...you
might need to adjust your definition of middle-class then.

~~~
Shebanator
FYI: In Santa Clara Country there is a related proposal to require large
employers to offer full-time employment to existing employees rather than just
hiring more part-time employees with no benefits:
[http://opportunitytowork.org/](http://opportunitytowork.org/)

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veritas213
Seems like a sector that would be ripe for automation ie grunt work of
prepping.

Surprised it hasnt taken off yet but maybe because wages are still reasonable.

Pretty sure that would change instantly if wages started rising.

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timwaagh
another way this can happen even if there is demand is collusion. if
businesses decide together to pay a certain amount for a certain job, then
wages won't rise. if they decide to not pay more than their neighbour, they
also won't rise. eg software development here has not seen the big salaries
like in the US. Even if demand is very high.

