The restaurant industry has known the solution for a long time but everyone wants to pretend it would be too difficult.
Stop the tipping guilt trip placed on the public, raise your prices 20%, and pay your employees a livable wage. The public will still show up to eat in your restaurant.
That may be the case for some....but that is not the case for all. For one ancedote, my father in-law runs a restaurant with my aunt in-law (his sister). They are the only workers, and split the profits evenly. They are in the midwest (low taxes), and own the restaurant's property/building. They were able to completely shut down during COVID and restart back up, and have survived several economic downturns.
They are still worried about the long term health of the business because of enternal cost increases (food, supplies, etc.), and are honestly thinking of just shutting down their restaurant and retiring rather than raising prices. They honestly think that if they raise their prices to get the same profit (NOT increase, just to keep it the same!) they have been getting, no one will come anymore because the cost is too much.
They by comparision to a lot of other business are lucky! They don't have to worry about rent at all, and they only have themselves to pay. Both also have other external sources of income (their spouses works), and have absolutely zero debt.
I can't imagine how it is for business that have rent (and possibly rent backpay) and employees they need to pay. I went to Northern VA (Reston) before and after COVID....so see almost all of the local restaurants and a great local grocery store wiped out because the property management were so unforgiving for rent.
I'm sure things are more complicated than you describe, but it seems like they fear increasing prices will lead to closing, and to avoid this they're... just going to close?
There is a certain amount of investment needed to keep going. If you are going to close the restaurant next year you can keep the current tables, otherwise replace them before they get too worn out. Or maybe it is the fry machine at the end of life, replace it for $50,000. If the restaurant continues for a few more years it is worth it, to fix/replace things, but if the restaurant is doomed it is better to cut your loses.
Even in the best of times restaurants are the hardest business to run successfully. These are not the best of times, and (as always) it isn't clear what the future will hold.
McDonald's fryers are generally just standard commercial fryers with preset temperatures and timers. The only custom part is the (separate and standalone) machine that measures out standardized portions of fries into baskets, and while I'm sure they'd call it a trade secret it's really just a big plastic hopper and some sort of weight sensor arrangement.
Perhaps with the entire hood/exhaust and fire suppression system. But not a simple two basket fryer. When I bought mine (new) in 1995, they were roughly $3K. And this had a built-in filtering system.
Actually, to spend $50K on a fryer system is pretty hard:
We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines. Please don't create accounts to do that with—that's against the site guidelines in its own right.
Sorry, should have been more specific! More correctly, they are debating if it's just time to retire now and be grandparents full time rather than risk losing a lot money in the restaurant due to increased prices, then being forced to retire.
I assume "closing down the restaurant and retiring" means they will sell the restaurant (or at least the property), but I am not sure to be honest?
Would raising prices 5 or 10% be so catastrophic to revenue that they couldnt even give it a few weeks? Or are they looking at a 50%+ price increase?
If they want to retire anyways, then good for them. But a lot of businesses have had to raise prices this year, including grocers, which are arguably restaurants only competition. I think folks would understand.
If raising the prices drives away customers, you have now lost a notable value if you try to sell. Brand perception is (almost) everything. Unless you offer something truly unique or exceptional, you're replaceable in just about every market.
There was a local beer taproom/bottle shop that I frequented a lot for years. Even as craft beer became more prominent and there were more local options, I liked it enough to keep going, but fundamentally there came a point where they raised their prices enough that I started going elsewhere, and once I broke that habit there was never a big reason to go back unless I was meeting someone else there once in a while.
In this case, "enough" was in the 20% range, but given what's happened to food prices lately I don't think 5-10% is a realistic number for a restaraunt either.
> If raising the prices drives away customers, you have now lost a notable value if you try to sell. Brand perception is (almost) everything. Unless you offer something truly unique or exceptional, you're replaceable in just about every market.
Agreed in general terms, but who is going to buy a business that cant even cover its costs? It sounds like this business has a negative expected value without raising prices.
Is this inflation creeping up in all the expected places? The value of goods is the same but the value of the USD is lower and thus we must increase costs. I don’t see it impacting brand perception if all prices go up.
>They honestly think that if they raise their prices to get the same profit (NOT increase, just to keep it the same!) they have been getting, no one will come anymore because the cost is too much.
That may be true, but you mentioned they're in the midwest. So am I. I'm in the heavy hitter, Chicago, but I'm from Smalltown, Midwest. I can say that NOTHING is free. Everything is a trade off. All those years of low taxes? Yeah, no one has any money in the midwest. Raising prices may well run people off. They already got the reduced-risk benefit of the midwest for decades, ability to own the building, lower taxes. Having a poorer local clientele was the price for those securities. That was part of the trade off.
You aren't just flat out "getting a better deal" as they probably felt, doing business in the midwest vs coasts. It is absolutely not outright just a "better place to do business". Other than perhaps our environmental stability (the greenhouse effect matters less, no fires, abundant fresh water, no fault lines outside of the St. Louis locale, etc.), those things are starting to matter in a big way, but are of limited benefit to a restaurant.
They already took the benefits from this area. All comes out in the end, but generally the midwest grants you more stability/security, while you end up poorer at retirement than someone that earned more dollars on the coasts. Same end result for them, just like the rest of us.
Sounds like its time for them to raise prices past what they deem to be a reasonable rise. Other restaurants in the area will likely do the same, and not pricing yourself to match can cause a drop in business as people seem to think the more they pay the better the quality (especially when your service or offering is priced on the low end of the market).
You might look at this and say charging $4 for X item is already at the edge of reasonable, but when your neighboring restaurants are already at $6 to $8 there is little reason to offer screaming deals. Its just a sign that its time to reprice to $7 to $8 for your own offerings, providing more profit to interest the dual owners moving forward. Reducing hours would also be a good idea for a owner operated business like this!
timing the market is everything. Consider this the 'first mover disadvantage'. If you price yourself at the higher end of the market before the rest of the market moves, the lower price competitors will absorb your clientele.
In addition, type of food matters a lot. A place that sells 'cheap slop on a plate' has lot less price flexibility than a boutique that sells fancy sushi.
I could get a "burek" (pastry with cheese) for 2eur, it's cheap, it fills you up, and you continue with your day.
Or I could order a pizza delivery... pizza used to be in the 6-8eur range if you lived near the restaurant, so for 12, 13 eur I could get two pizzas delivered to my home.
Then "the plague" came, the local pizzeria was closed, delivery was taken over by "app companies" (wolt here), they charge percentages of the food price + delivery cost, so the price of the pizza has gone up to 9-10eur (to cover the wolt fee), and with the delivery fee, we're talking 20-22eur for two pizzas. After the reopenings, the prices in the restaurant are the same as on wolt + with drinks, we're talking close to 30eur for two pizzas and drink.
If bureks cost 2.5eur or even 3eur (50% higher), they're still "cheap", and people will buy them. With pizza going from 12, 14eur to 20-25eur, I can make a huge amount of very good food at home, and saving 15eur to eat healthier makes it worth it.
TLDR: at some price point (that I currently feel we're at now, with some foods atleast here), it isn't worth it anymore to eat out. Everybody might rise their prices, but less people will eat outside, lowering the overall profits of everyone.
Yes, slovenia, but in other countries it's probably the same, just with different prices, and at some price point, it becomes expensive enough to eat out, that you'd rather choose to cook
I added a small cafe in Aug last year to my existing brewery's taproom because food was required by the state to reopen. I had no prior experience in running a small cafe (we do mostly paninis and similar). My thoughts roughly a year later is that food is one terrible business. We are close to braking even over that time, minus buildout. We have a wonderful staff and have been blessed with no issues in that department. But other problems are always popping up. Such as pork prices have doubled in the last 3 months. Bread went up about 15% and lots of other things change a lot order to order. We can't change our menu every week, so some weeks a sandwich is perfectly priced, while the next its food cost is 40%. Basically there are just so many moving parts, that change so frequently, so much inventory that expires in just a few days (vegs). So little max potential profit. It's usually a goal of 25-30% food cost, 30% labor cost, 40% to overhead and hopefully of that 10-15% profit (Assuming you didn't piss away 20-30% to a delivery service). I have found that being such a small operation we have yet to really hit the 30/30(60%) its more like a 65-80% in ingredients and labor. Which vary wildly from week to week as customer traffic varies. If sales were to triple overnight we could more easily get it lower and into range of the 30/30 or possibly even 25/25. Just because there would be less wasted food, less wasted staff potential, and more room for improvements. Which brings me to the point of this long paragraph. It seems (from my limited experience) like a restaurant that can't get enough sales for its appropriate overhead size, struggles. I am fortunate enough that we make enough coin to live on the rest of the business and don't need the income from the cafe, but it sure is a lot of work for very little reward that I would never want to mindfully walk into.
> They honestly think that if they raise their prices to get the same profit (NOT increase, just to keep it the same!) they have been getting, no one will come anymore because the cost is too much.
This is why hard-enforced industry standards are a good. The situation you describe only exists when the price increase happens for 1 single restaurant and the others stay the same.
However many exist in the region, as long as there's no mandatory system, they're just gonna wait it out, see who gives up first, people stop going there and go other places instead, thus increasing traffic and income without having to raise prices.
This race to the bottom will be won by those who are already the richest and can weather the financial storm the best.
It's a system by which those at the top of the rungs actively prevent anyone from passing them through hard work.
In my experience, raising prices might have a small short-term effect, but if the product is good, sometimes you'll think it was overdue !!!
It has happened to my own fees, and I still should raise them (so I totally understand the fear behind it).
Plus, the United States has significant inflation now, which you aren't used to, but in other countries it's TOTALLY NORMAL to raise prices every year.
Business owners can raise their prices slowly. You know, boil the frog. Surely that prevents the harsh reactions that customers have to suddenly having the price raised?
$9 or $9.50 for a beer is the most you can charge in some places. You'll suddenly put people off if the beer is $10.
What you can do is charge $9 for a 14 oz beer (previously 16 oz), which is roughly like charging $10.28. Can only do that trick once, though. Or you can increase the size to 24 oz and charge $14.
Yeah but $9 for a beer is already insane in most locales. Most bars charge $5-$7, going down to $3ish (or even a dollar) for a cheap beer in a lower-income area. Unless these restaurant owners are already capped out they have a lot of wiggle room
Honestly, as necessary as that is, it’s not a magic solution. People are quitting the restaurant industry in France too, despite having none of the tip silliness.
It’s just that people are realizing that there are easier minimum wage jobs than working in a kitchen
Sure but this goes beyond restaurants in my opinion. Look at these states that had mass migration of people during the pandemic. You will find the (big) sky-rocketing cost of living where those who are moving in on a whim are also not seeking jobs in the state. However all these businesses need employees to handle the new increase in customers. The employers aren’t raising their wages either, which is also not attracting people to work. When the lower classes are forced to move elsewhere (Outside the cities) then this problem will get worse.
Return to office might have some reverse effect but online remote employees can be one of the biggest generators of this problem.
This is exactly it. This is a second order effect of the pandemic flight, not a "restaurant" thing at all. People facing long term unemployment/underemployment over the past year had huge incentives to "move back home" (or wherever) to places with lower cost of living.
And who feels that pressure the most? Service workers, who had jobs in the cities, sure, but didn't reap any of the economic benefits of all that urban wealth concentration. They're overrepresented in the population who fled, which means their jobs are now underserved.
Long term, this will probably just be viewed as a correction to a few overpopulated urban cores. We'll find equilibrium again, though not at the same state as before.
But regardless, the fix here is the same: pay more for the jobs and you'll find people willing to do them.
They are. It takes time but they are. I work in a business that is having a hard time hiring entry level healthcare workers because Walmart and Amazon warehoueses is now paying $15-20/hr when it was only $12 pre-covid. Walmart and Amazon would only raise wages if they truly had a labor supply issue, which they do, we all do.
I do see a bit of improvement. CVS starts out at $15/hr. I have a feeling that is only in certain zip codes?
Kroger decided to close a store because it didn't want to pay a covid front line temporary increase of $4/hr.
I don't see a big increase in wages, and I work a lot of lousy jobs.
If job conditions were a bit better, a lot of employees will stay at a low paying job because they actually like their fellow employees, and sometimes the job.
I don't know why being nice/respectful is so out of fashion in corporate america?
I grocery shop at Safeway, and The Nugget markets. Safeway employees hate their job. They even have a hard time retaining new immigrants. When I shop at Safeway, I sometimes need to move to another line if I feel the checker is having a bad day. (I overheard an employee state a manager wanted him at a store 70 miles away at 5 am the next day, and he told that manager he didn't have transportation other than the bus. I wanted to grab the phone and lay into that "Manager".)
As opposed to The Nugget, which is notated as one of the best 100 places to work. It's like going back to the fifties. The employees are nice. It might be they hire people whom will have better jobs one day?
Anyways, it's not just about wage. I have had lousy low paid jobs I liked, and well paid union jobs I despise.
> Kroger decided to close a store because it didn't want to pay a covid front line temporary increase of $4/hr.
If you're talking about Seattle, Kroger closed that store because it was underperforming for years, not because of a temporary wage increase that affected every grocery store in the city. Weeks later, they started advertising open positions with wage increases for nearby stores they didn't close...
When it comes to political decisions, firms lie all the time about their motivations. I don't understand how anyone can take what they say at face value, without any means to verify their claims.
The reality is that nobody closes their grocery business because labour costs went up for them and their competitors. Customers still need groceries to live, and you and your competitors just pass the costs directly to them, without any change to profit margins or market share. Closing your grocery over this is as nonsensical as closing your grocery because the spot price of milk went up to $15/gallon.
Kroger also elected to close three locations in Los Angeles rather than hike their employees' pay $5/hr in accordance with a new (temporary) hazard pay during covid.
It gets argued again and again that the profit incentive is necessary for cutting inefficiencies, and looking at it from Kroger's perspective, this appears to be another such example. Yet this is only the case for Kroger - when considered in its full context, as a supplier of necessities for working class folks, it's the total opposite. It's the composition fallacy at work: just because companies with a profit motive evolve to cut inefficiencies wherever possible (such as by externalizing costs) does not mean that society as a whole reaps the same benefits.
> When it comes to political decisions, firms lie all the time about their motivations
Of course they're not going to say "we're closing because we don't want to pay our employees a decent wage", that would be bad optics. You can be pretty sure that if you ask employees at the store, they'll say that whatever the stated reason, the intended message from the parent company is "we ain't gonna pay you more".
I'm curious where in the US are healthcare workers getting less than $15/hr and what kind of work it is. Even the sort of jobs that require no certification, no degree, and no experience seem to pay quite a bit more than that.
We pay CNA's $12/hr in some markets. Their job is like daycare but geriatrics instead of toddlers. It's a lot of hands on service on both ends of the gastrointestinal tract. There are RN's around in fewer numbers that earn more and do the actual clinical parts.
> Based on the May 2017 salary information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), orderlies make a median wage of $13.07 an hour or $27,180 a year. Half of orderlies receive more, and half make less. The lowest-paid 10 percent make less than $9.73 an hour or $20,240 a year, while the highest-earning 10 percent get over $19.52 an hour or $40,610 a year. Orderlies employed in psychiatric and substance abuse hospitals are paid the highest average wage of $17.21 an hour or $35,800 a year. Nursing care facilities pay one of the lowest average wages of $12.00 an hour or $24,950 a year.
> Wages often start out low for entry-level orderlies and grow with experience. Some orderlies complete additional training and state requirements to advance to higher paid nursing assistant or registered nursing roles. In July 2018, PayScale.com showed this hourly pay progression by experience for nurse aides, orderlies and attendants:
Often for $15/hr or less (many places will pay EMTs literally minimum wage, and tell their employees, "you can have as much OT as you want").
Part of it is supply and demand. Private EMS is often an in-road or holding pattern to a more "cushy" unionized fire department EMS position (where firefighter paramedics can make into the six digits). So private EMS has little motivation to be competitive - "there's a line of 21 year olds who will happily take your job".
Possibly home-care workers, people who look after invalids with the type of arrangement where they drive to several different houses and provide a couple of hours of care at each. It doesn't require any particular qualification, but it's difficult and draining work that is not usually well-paid.
Walmart and Amazon raising wages allows them to exercise their huge scale to further crush their competitors.
With their huge efficiencies of scale and deep cash reserves, they are better able to offer higher wages than competitors. During the pandemic, both Walmart and Amazon have seen huge growth. They can continue this growth post-pandemic by squeezing their competitors on wages, and eventually emerging with less competitors.
Amazon/Walmart are capable of raising wages to add more/retain employees. Other smaller business aren't able to adjust as quickly, thus the big box stores take on way more workers. If everyone raised wages at the same time (a la minimum wage increase or otherwise), then Amazon nor Walmart would look like that much of a better place to work, eliminating the "boo they're using their huge scale to further crush their competitors."
It isn't hard to start a new business. There are a ton off niches that Walmart and Amazon don't server well. Find one and serve it, then use profits to expand into the much larger (though lower margin!) areas that Walmart or Amazon serve. Good luck - it is not easy to run a business.
lol it’s not hard to start in tech with no regulation no capital or overhead. Real businesses are hard to start and live and die by the cost of financing
If Amazon or Walmart is part of your plan you need a better plan. Try selling oil well drilling supplies in oil country (I have family doing this, and they have cornered thus niche, so don't try that exactly, but it is the type of thing. They make it because they have in stock the special parts needes for that niche and Walmart won't)
everything about that analysis of the situation is backwards.
the problem is the restaurants are seeing fewer customers due to the pandemic so they can't raise wages, while the upper 1/4 or so of the population hasn't been financially impacted by the pandemic and housing and rents have continued to climb. restaurants can't raise prices in this situation and they can't raise wage, which squeezes the workers who are now not putting up with it any more.
return to work means continued increase in housing prices and if restaurants fully open they're going to have to pay more and that means that those wage and rent increases for the businesses will have to get passed on as rising prices.
if there's a switch to remote work then that will make cities more livable again at current wage costs and menu pricing. you lose some disposable income from the seriously high wage earners that have left the city, but they'll mostly take the distortion of the housing market with them while the bulk of the population that makes less than $150k will have more left out of salaries to eat out at the restaurants.
short term the effect of popping housing bubbles would be recessionary, of course, but it'd act more like Volker's popping of the 70s stagflation bubble, give it 5 years and the "new normal" of consistent housing prices would take over.
With the SV housing prices what they are, seems like a hourly worker can't possibly afford a reasonable place to raise a family. Maybe they will end up paying restaurant workers a "hazard" wage and treat it like working on an oil rig. Do a tour of duty for a month at a time, go back to family in a not-insane location.
This was already happening with gig workers. I've met several drivers who were sharing a hotel room with a bunch of friends in SF for a week or two to try to earn as much as possible before returning home.
In france being a waiters is way harder than most others jobs. At most jobs you get to work 35 hours on regular days, with a lot of hollidays and a fixed schedule.
Restaurants have a lot of legal exceptions because you need people to work on sunday, vacations, weird schedules, etc.
So compared to other situations in the same country, it's not a good deal.
>> Restaurants have a lot of legal exceptions because you need people to work on sunday, vacations, weird schedules, etc.
Actually a lot of industries have this problem.
I was a smartphone tech. I repaired phones. You know when a majority of our business was done? On weekends and holidays. Whenever my GF had a national holiday, I had to work because it meant the people who put off fixing their phones will take that day and come it for a repair because it was way more convenient than during or after their working hours.
I also had to work until 7pm every night for the same reason. My owner was banking on people coming home from work and stopping, so we stayed open an extra two hours. Some days I had five people in my office. Other days? Maybe one or two. But those two hours generated a lot more revenue than you probably think over the course of a month.
I agree. It seems that most people's "solutions" to this "problem" are various ways to make people's live more miserable and keep them desperate enough to work shit jobs for low pay. I guess a lot of people are just fine with having a slave class as long as it means they don't have to be inconvenienced in any way.
If this industry literally cannot afford to pay people a living wage, if no one wants to work for them and they can't remain profitable by making working conditions better, then they just shouldn't even exist.
Most eye opening part of the pandemic was the fact that in the US the majority of people dubbed as essential and forced to work were also the people paid the least. Grocery workers standing there with 2 masks on making minimum wage while the rest of us waltz in take what we need and return to the relative safety of our remote work. Then making fast food workers essential instead of paying them unemployment was just taking things to another level of pettiness.
It used to be. When ordering food in a restaurant was a special thing for special occasions. It was expensive to eat out and the workers were compensated for it. Then we got to a place where food was supposed fast, cheap and accessible to everyone at any time. And suddenly you couldn't charge a lot for your food and worker wages stagnated. Sure more people work in the restaurant industry than they ever did before, but that's what happens. Quantity over quality in almost any service industry always means abundance of the service at the expense of the workers. Take a look at the rideshare business.
I mean...to what extent does this correlate with the nationwide stagnation of real wages?
If your average American working a full-time job can't afford to eat out at high enough prices to keep restaurants afloat while paying decent wages, that sounds like a systemic problem—and we already know that one of those exists here.
Once you learn to cook you won't eat at anything less than the most expensive. It is really hard to enjoy a meal when you are thinking "I could have done this better myself at less cost". Chains and fast food just don't provide the quality I demand for the most part, and even the independents are hit and miss.
> Once you learn to cook you won't eat at anything less than the most expensive.
This isn't really true. Restaurants exist to fill a bunch of different needs; experience, novelty, convenience etc. And expense isn't a particularly good predictor of quality.
I do agree that once you can cook well you're much less likely to be happy at an overpriced generic version of something... which is right where fast casual and big chain casual is aimed. But sometimes you go for the company and not the food, etc.
There's a bunch of foods that are a pain to make, or will make your kitchen smell ...
Plus having different plates for everyone is also super convenient
> There's a bunch of foods that are a pain to make
This cuts both ways, some types of pain are easier to take on at home. During service, time and focus are at a premium - which is way almost every place cuts corners on e.g., risotto.
Once you can cook well you learn that cheap is typically bad food. Expensive food can be good or bad, the good is worth it for those other reasons you state.
> Once you can cook well you learn that cheap is typically bad food.
Not really. I had a great tacos the other day from a food truck, and great Ethiopian dinner on the weekend. Both cheap and not something I could reproduce easily or at all.
On the other hand, what you say usually applies to the ragu at a fast-casual.
In this case you're trading out your effort for the cash. I'm happy to trade my money, which I earn much more efficiently at my job than I can save by cooking, for the food so I don't have to put in effort and can enjoy my evening out with friends. I'm also more than happy to pay a couple of dollar premium to eat fast food than try to recreate it on my own while I'm running to work.
I can guarantee you that unless you're an experienced professional chef yourself, restaurants make way better food than you can make at home. They make the same dishes night after night after night for as long as they're working for that restaurant. They have measurements of ingredients, cook time, how to cut everything just right, etc. baked into their muscle memory. They know every little trick and hack to bring out every little bit of flavor, which they've built through years of both experience and being taught on the job by more experienced cooks and chefs.
Time is money, and cooking is a lot of work. We cook a lot, have a kitchen that's better than what the average restaurant has, and have eaten at some of the most prestigious restaurants in the world.
Yet sometimes I crave a fried chicken sandwich and to hell if we're going to spend the time doing that ourselves. Life's too short and that's way too much work.
It’s not fiscally viable closed system. Restaurants operate on tiny margins and come and go as frequently as software startups.
We keep trying to hitch biological necessity to ridiculous memes of social capital accumulation, inventing more abstract and Byzantine math as if literal reality will implode if the rich can’t earn a profit.
Like healthcare, the routine is eating is obviously necessary. Is the industrialization?
If you are a KFC/Burger King/McDonalds franchisee then it seems to work but I have lost count the number of establishments that open/closes in that one spot of our local mall.
Pub/Indian/Pizza/Chinese/Fish & Chips/ - they come and go.
I would draw a further distinction. Some franchise operations (thinking Subway and Little Caesars) don’t really care if you make it: They get their money up front and you have to pay to get out.
McD is more strategic: They want a good business plan, location, etc. and are very picky at the cost of some false negatives.
McDonald's and similar jobs used to be an entry level job for teens and college students. When I was 16 I was happy to work there for minimum wage ($3.35/hr at the time). Nobody other than the mangers did it to support a family. It was never understood to be that kind of job. I don't know how we got to the point where a no-skills-required job that anyone with a pulse can learn to do in a few hours suddenly became required to support a family of four.
> I don't know how we got to the point where a no-skills-required job that anyone with a pulse can learn to do in a few hours suddenly became required to support a family of four.
That's an odd way of looking at it. Surely what happened first isn't that the expectations of fast food jobs changed out of the blue. Could it instead be that other jobs which adults worked to support their families went away?
> Nobody other than the mangers did it to support a family. It was never understood to be that kind of job
Wrong.
"From the beginning, the minimum wage was meant to be a living wage—meaning families could live off of the pay comfortably, rather than struggling paycheck-to-paycheck" https://www.lendio.com/blog/minimum-wage-livable/
You're correct, McDonald's (and plenty of other large employers) probably never thought or cared whether or not their minimum wage jobs were for teenagers or parents with families. To them, it was just the least they were legally allowed to pay, and therefore just a cost to be minimized as much as possible.
1) The idea that McDonald’s used to be primarily staffed with students doesn’t carry water. How would the store run during school hours? Students can’t run a store when they need to be in class, someone else has to do that.
2) Have you actually looked back and compared that salary to the cost of living back then? I think you might be surprised how many people could, and were, supporting a family on a job that “anyone with a pulse” could do.
Spouses who needed to get out of the house while their other half was at work. They loved going to work with the same friends every day, chatting while cleaning up after the lunch shift... There was enough work to not be bored.
There are a lot of people who like having a job, but don't really need the money. Those that need the money move up to management if they can.
> There are a lot of people who like having a job, but don't really need the money.
These people exist, I do not believe that any of them work at fast food restaurants. That’s an incredible amount of stress to put yourself through to “get out of the house” and meet new people.
> Those that need the money move up to management if they can.
I think you’re overestimating the size of management by quite a bit.
Did you read the article? It directly countermands everything you’re saying. I personally can’t figure out why you’d make a claim that’s such transparent nonsense.
> Most people decide fast food management isn't for them, and move elsewhere.
I have personally been in fast food, and I worked my way up to management. If what I say contradicts the article, then my personal experience contradicts the article.
Management is more stressful. That is a different from the line worker who has been working the same position for the last 5 years, with no interest in advancing. I saw several people refuse advancements because they didn't want the stress: they knew how to do their job and it wasn't stressful at all anymore. (they learned to shut off the customer who yells at them while the cook is behind on orders - this coping is an important skill)
> If what I say contradicts the article, then my personal experience contradicts the article.
Then your experience is atypical.
> Management is more stressful.
But you said it wasn't stressful. Which is it?
> they learned to shut off the customer who yells at them while the cook is behind on orders - this coping is an important skill
Uhhh, this is not a good thing. You're describing someone shutting down in the face of excessive stress.
I'd also point out that claiming that it's "not stressful" and being shouted at by customers are mutually exclusive. Being shouted at is a stressful experience, definitionally.
Exactly. There are all kinds of better social outlets if you don’t need money; book clubs, knitting groups, and game nights exist precisely to fill that need. The idea that you’d go work at McDonald’s for funsies rather than out of economic necessity just doesn’t pass the sniff test.
I don't know how we got to the point where a no-skills-required job that anyone with a pulse can learn to do in a few hours suddenly became required to support a family of four.
Deskilling, derisking, outsourcing. Companies used to run their own email, which required a competent mailadmin, nowadays you outsource it to Google or Microsoft.
I don't know where you grew up, but it still looks that way in fairly affluent suburbs. In the city, the fast food workforce is 75% immigrant single mothers.
The minimum wage was set to $3.35/hr in 1981, a time when 22.2% of Americans were employed in manufacturing vs. 10% today. There were many alternatives to working at McDonalds that stopped existing in the US over the last 40 years. The ultimate answer to what Americans would do instead of manufacturing turned out to be restaurant and retail work.
Also, consider the relative increase in housing, education, and medical care over that period of time. The inflation adjusted median home was about $178,000 in 1981, It’s $314,000 now.
The modern service job isn't meant to be sustainable in the first place. It's entirely based around the idea of having surplus labor using it inefficiently.
Any sane economist that has to solve for the constraint "everyone has to provide for themselves" aka the mythical republican "responsibility" would first start by creating enough jobs to reach full employment. When you leave everything up to responsibility you also have the duty to provide everyone with the ability to live up to their responsibility.
Society as a whole doesn't benefit from exploitation or unsustainable businesses.
I think some of this might be down to a lot of pensions being invested in property. It feels a little bit like the dam is bursting in several places at once; I'm not hopeful.
>> people are realizing that there are easier minimum wage jobs than working in a kitchen
A lot of jurisdictions showed them this when they paid almost the the same as their FT take-home pay during Covid. I don't think they've left for something better; I think they're mostly not doing anything.
>It’s just that people are realizing that there are easier minimum wage jobs than working in a kitchen
Exactly, so restaurant owners should raise wages to compensate. There's not a shortage of workers, there's a shortage of owners willing to pay the current market wage.
What we are observing is the Demand Curve shifting left (people less interested in eating out) and the Supply Curve shifting down (the people willing to work in restaurants for any given wage is going down). Remember that supply and demand curves cover all wages/prices and quantities, they are not specific to a certain price/wage or quantity.
This is observed as a shortage - more customers willing to buy a restaurant meal than the restaurants are willing/able to supply at current prices. This must equalize to a new equilibrium with higher prices and fewer restaurants. .
I've over-simplified a lot, but it's pretty much right out of an Econ 101 textbook.
Some of this might be transient - for example the demand curve may shift right again after some time and with COVID well in the past.
The supply curve might shift back up if, for example, government wage supports are reduced.
This isn't entirely correct. Your example refers to two demand-supply pairs, but your analysis equates them. Consumers demanding restaurant meals, and the supply of those meals constitute one pair. Restaurants themselves demanding workers, and workers being reluctant to work for current prices constitute a second demand-supply pair.
For the first pair, since the change in the supply (a shift of the curve itself, not a walk along the curve) of restaurant meals is negligible except in the case of restaurants closing in aggregate, a left and downward shift of the demand curve (as you note) has the net effect of downward pressure on both prices paid and quantities supplied of meals.
The second pair's supply curve itself shifts left and upward (not downward), which results in a net effect of increasing the prices (wages) of restaurant labor, and decreasing the quantity supplied (number of workers).
A similar analysis could be performed from the new state of each pair: the first pair might actually see its supply curve shift left and upward due to these dynamics (restaurants may close in aggregate), causing the quantity of meals supplied to decrease further and prices of meals to rise, possibly though not necessarily up to the level they were before. For the second pair, demand for workers might increase in aggregate, resulting in a right and upward shift in the demand curve, which would further ratchet wages upward (barring another supply curve shift) and would help increase the number of workers to a level closer to what it was before any of these shifts took place.
I don’t think so. Hilton Head Island, SC is a great example of the trend that COVID accelerated.
Hilton Head is a popular vacation destination, but as development started radiating inland towards I95, all of the workers are priced out. The housekeeper at the hotel I stayed at in 2019 commuted 2.5 hours daily, and restaurants started reducing hours due to labor shortages. COVID made it worse, but the problem existed because you can’t work in most places without covering the cost of operating a car.
My understanding this year is that popular restaurants require reservations 60+ days in advance.
There may be some demand shifts at the low end from sit down to fast casual, but those are the places where tipped workers are paid the least. A waiter at a good steakhouse is making a good living, an IHOP waiter makes $10/hr or less.
At the low end, I think those workers have shifted to curbside retail. I’d guess the average Target has 12-30 more staff to handle curbside orders alone.
I'm not sure a waiter at a good steakhouse is making a good living. It's been a while since I worked food service, so I might be making some poor assumptions, but:
1. Most waiters don't get health benefits
2. Most waiters don't get retirement plans
3. Most waiters are at the whim of the restaurant managers
4. There's only so many tables you can turn in a shift, and tips average under 20%.
5. Most waiters don't get any PTO
Say you have a four-top that has meal service of $120 (booze tips usually go to cocktail waitresses, wine goes to waiter). An average section for a "good" steakhouse will have no more than 5 tables per waiter; otherwise service sucks.
So each table earns the waiter $24 in tips. With 5 tables, that's $120 per turn. High end steakhouses don't turn fast; again, the appeal is having a long, hearty meal. So maybe 2.5 turns on a good night. That would be $300 in tips. But then you have to tip out. Busboy gets $25 (helps you turn faster, helps with some service), dishwasher gets $10 (should get $100), hostess gets $20 (so your section gets sat promptly), and at least $50 for the line cooks who are the real stars. Now you're done to $195. That needs to be reported as income, so it gets held back by mgmt for tax.
You get 3 good shifts a week, and 2 crap shifts. After a week you've made $195x3 plus $125x2 for a grand total (pretax) of $835/week. So your gross is $44K. I'm ignoring the base hourly wage because it's usually nothing.
$44k isn't bad money. It's above the nationwide median, but considering all the downsides, it's not "a good living." If you get sick, tough shit you lose out. If the chef jacks up the menu, you lose out. And it's a young person's gig. People want their waiters to be young and attractive, not balding and showing grey hairs.
Your numbered points stand - no healthcare, no retirement, or other benefits a FAANG employee would have, but your numbers are low for a high end restaurant. A good steakhouse for 4 might cost closer to $500, $800 for just food at the highest end, with booze being another couple hundred on top of that. And then there's the cash aspect of it. Each night's tips are required to be declared to the IRS, and not reporting it would be tax fraud, but the reality is I'm sure not everything gets reported, boosting take home amounts, making the numbers incomparable without further analysis.
I've heard of bartenders making more than $100k/yr, (but still with no benefits).
A "good steakhouse" doesn't charge $200 per customer unless it's selling Kobe/Wagyu. And the percentage of customers buying Wagyu over the $50 ribeye is very small.
Even with the $50 ribeye, that four-top is still generating $200 on food per turn, more than the grandparent's original $120 estimate.
Maybe my view is skewed from seeing prices in expensive cities, but I think the beef alone at a good steakhouse is gonna run you more like $75-$100 per person, and that's not even for the high-end wagyu (which will probably run $150-$250 for most cuts). Then add another $10-$30 per person for appetizers and side dishes, and maybe dessert on top of that.
I feel like it's pretty hard to walk away from a good steakhouse spending less than $80 or so, even if you have nothing to drink. And the more common case is probably quite a bit more than that...
> It's above the nationwide median, but considering all the downsides, it's not "a good living."
I think well educated professionals sometime miss what reality is for millions of people. $44k for a few shifts is better and more reliable income than a retail gig. The similar premium gig for a low skill person is probably a janitor.
For a few shifts? That's five shifts, and usually a good eight hours each. And the income is sporadic; during the offseason (in tourist areas) your income might be halved.
Even with your understated numbers, with everything being as worse as possible, you ended up with a pretty decent wage for 5 evenings of work.
In reality, half of the US population lives in a state with a regular minimum wage for waiters (California, New York, Washington, and a bunch of other states), and the other half averages $5/hr which is $7800/yr if you work 30 hours a week. Also there's cash tips that aren't reported on taxes. And like others have said, you're estimating $30/person at a steakhouse which is TGI Fridays prices.
Put that together, and you're looking at the equivalent of six figures pre-tax for 5 nights of work, with no email at night or on-call. Sounds pretty good to me.
Not reporting tips on taxes only hurts the waitstaff even more. It blocks you from being able to get loans/credit. Reporting them and keeping track of them then paying your taxes at the end of the year is the only way...but of course that assumes the bank doesn't deem your income as "not steady/stable" because of course...it isn't a salary.
In my area some waitstaff also make $3.50/hr because the company assumes they make tips. Some also hold all your credit card tips and give them to you on the paycheck...so it isn't all roses.
"restaurants started reducing hours..."
>> This is EXACTLY what I mean by "supply curve shifting down." Restaurants are not willing to supply the same number of meals/hours to the market at the given price.
"My understanding this year is that popular restaurants require reservations 60+ days in advance."
>> This is what a shortage looks like. Long lines and empty shelves. People who are willing to pay the advertised price, but can't because there isn't anything to buy.
"started reducing hours due to labor shortages."
>> Meaning that there is more demand for labor than supply at the current price (wage). The supply curve for labor moved down, causing a shortage of labor at the current price. That's a 'shortage' as perceived by businesses that don't want to pay the actual market clearing price/wage.
In your example, a labor shortage is leading to a restaurant shortage. In both cases caused by changes in the supply and/or demand curves (down and/or right, respectively).
You could also go farther upstream to the housing market and say that because the supply curve of housing moved down, house prices went up, and that caused labor's supply curve to move down accordingly.
All of these things ultimately mean fewer things and less stuff, at higher prices.
So, I’m from Hilton Head and that is a fairly accurate telling of the issue (though the 2.5 hours commute is a bit uncommon.) They’ve attempted to alleviate it with shuttles from Bluffton and even Northern Beaufort County to little avail.
We have similar issues up in Charleston, with my girlfriend ‘s restaurant in an HCoL (Mt. Pleasant) really struggling to find staff beyond the 16-26 “living with mom & dad” crowd where HCoL is little of a factor.
I would add I have at least a half-dozen friends in BoH that intentionally (an)used our state pay benefits for a free vacation to smoke weed and play X-Box though sadly citing it as their first vacation in a forever. There’s definitely a problem a multi-faceted problem here.
Is it really a shortage? If the preferences of potential restaurant customers simply changes such that they're no longer willing to pay enough for a restaurant meal for the restaurant to stay financially solvent, that's not a shortage. It's only a shortage if something is preventing the market price from changing (in this case, the price of a restaurant meal increasing) or preventing restaurants and customers who are willing to transact from being able to do so. Is that the case here?
"A shortage, in economic terms, is a condition where the quantity demanded is greater than the quantity supplied at the market price." https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/shortage.asp sounds like it fits the situation to me.
Indeed, investopedia's definition seems to include any time supply is insufficient with no regard for the reason that the market price is not increasing.
This is because the reason is irrelevant to whether there is a shortage or not. A shortage is when at the given price a higher quantity will be demanded than will be supplied.
The normal market solution to a shortage is to raise prices until there is no longer an excess of supply at that higher price
Investopedia’s definition treats the condition where price has not yet aligned to a new equilibrium as equivalent to one where there is a constraint preventing price adjusting to equilibrium. Leaving aside the fairly arbitrary question of whether it is correct to call both conditions “shortages”, it is important to note that they are fundamentally different situations, especially from the perspective of “is a policy change needed to address it and what policy change would that be.”
does it matter if it's a technical shortage or just and observed one?
The only thing preventing restaurants from changing their prices is the 'penguin on an iceberg' issue. You may be correct in raising your prices, but if other restaurants are willing to lose money longer before they raise their prices your business may suffer/fail because of it before the rest of the market changes their prices/wages.
Kinda, but not really. Remember that a shortage is an excess of demand at a given price. Meaning implicitly that, at the margin, prices could go up some small amount and there will still be a queue/line/excess of people willing to pay that marginally higher price.
So as a restaurant, very roughly speaking, you basically can raise prices until the line starts to go away. Unfortunately customers can be very stubborn and would rather wait in a 1hr line somewhere else, or not go out at all, for quite a while before eventually coming around to the new normal and accepting your new, higher price.
And you will still probably end up with fewer restaurants along the way, as those least-profitable and with the shortest lines outside, go away.
Are customers that aware of price increases? Unless you're eating out at the same joint every day, a 10% increase isn't very noticeable. Say you have an item priced at $9.99, bumping it up 10% makes it $10.99.
Restaurant sales are rarely made up of price conscious buyers. Sure there's a limit, but short of the blue light special crowd, most customers are eating out for either variety, social reasons, or being tired of cooking.
Yes. This is exactly the question answered by the concept of supply and demand curves. Of course you can argue about the shape of those curves but their existence is not in doubt.
Supply and demand curves don't address the customer's awareness and perceptions at all price increases. Sure if the price doubles, they'll notice. But a 5-10% increase in something infrequently purchased would not be noticeable to the average consumer. Now if it's something they purchase everyday? They'd notice a penny increase.
> does it matter if it's a technical shortage or just and observed one?
Yes. A so-called “observed shortage” is not a shortage, its just buyers wanting a good without wanting to pay the price it costs to buy in the present market conditions.
A real shortage involves either a constraint which prevents price adjustment to an equilibrium of supply/demand or demand and supply curves shaped in such a way that no equilibrium point exists (which, I guess, is just a very special equilibrium-preventing constraint.)
The solution to an observed shortage of labor is “employers pay more and quit whining”.
The solution (if it is solvable at all) to a real shortage depends on what constraint prevents equilibrium from being reached.
There is a slight distinction here though. I would tend to only describe the situation as a "shortage" if there is insufficient supply to meet demand at the actual price sellers are offering. If restaurants double their prices and thus a lot of people are no longer willing to pay (and are upset), that's not what I would consider a "shortage" (although it might certainly be described as such in headlines or in conversation). In my view that's no more a shortage than the ongoing lack of supply for private jets at the price of $10,000. I'd pay $10,000 for a private jet!
But there can also be a fuzzy area here. There may be situations where most sellers have not raised their prices to respond to decreased supply (for a variety of reasons), and therefore other mechanisms (like who gets in line the earliest) determine who gets to buy. At the same time there may be a small number of sellers who do raise prices (think of the toilet paper hoarders who resell on Craigslist at huge markups). If you consider that higher reseller price to be the "market price" then that wouldn't wouldn't strictly be a shortage, but if you consider the unchanged price to be the market price then that would indeed be a shortage. (In fact, this is why for every natural disaster there are articles with headlines like "Price gouging is actually a good thing; it's the solution to shortages.")
"The solution to an observed shortage of labor is “employers pay more and quit whining”." - Keep in mind that going along with higher prices (wages), there will be a lower quantity (jobs). At least according to your Econ 101 book.
> "The solution to an observed shortage of labor is “employers pay more and quit whining”." - Keep in mind that going along with higher prices (wages), there will be a lower quantity (jobs).
No, that would only be true if there was not an observed shortage; that is, if the current market price was clearing the market with no unmet demand at the market clearing price.
An observed shortage that is not a real shortage means that the market price can rise to the point of market equilibrium without reducing quantity traded. In fact with a normal supply curve shape, the minimum price increase to achieve equilibrium will increase the quantity traded compared to the status quo, as quantity supplied will increase with price. Quantity demanded will be lower than in the status quo, but since the “observed shortage” is quantity demanded being above quantity supplied and, therefore, traded at the current price, that reduction is literally just reducing the “observed shortage” to zero, not reducing quantity traded.
I'm no expert in how economists use the term, but I suppose it could certainly be called a shortage if there is some systemic reason why restaurants can't (or at least think they can't) raise prices in the short term. Personally I don't find that likely, at least based in my region where restaurants have indeed raised prices and many seem to be thriving (although many others failed in 2020).
In a normal economy, most restaurants fail for two simple reasons; poor location and undercapitalization. If you sell a good meal, in a good location, people are very tolerant of price. Getting to that point is where 99% of restaurants fail.
That seems to assume that the products are completely interchangeable. Even between restaurant chains I don't think that's true. And independent restaurants are very individual, even unique. Some people like one type of food or dining experience, some another, and they may forego dining out altogether rather than substitute.
It is a shortage until prices rise, quantity demanded goes down, quantity supplied goes up and a new equilibrium is attained. This might take a few minutes, or even milliseconds, or it might take many months, or it might never happen.
I think the market is going to split soon. The lowend local resturant will die because they wont have access to the ecconomyies of scall that will allow them to raise wages and the market wont pay more just for being "local". so small burger joints cafes and such will suffer. the mid to hig end will raise wages and most will survive.
Then those the are unwilling to raise server wages will either die due to lackmof labour or become ghost kitchen fire the serving staff and do take out and delivery exclusively.
I think delivery and take out is going to stick around in a big way. there is less expectation to tip the restaurant when not eating on premises. and it think wage regulation of gig work is coming for the likes of ubereats doordash and grubhub
on the cheap end you will have take home food with no tips and on the high end a living wage will become standard with less pressure to tip
+1, I would have to see evidence that the demand curve has permanently shifted or is generally shifting left. Because it doesn't match with my experience at all, that people love restaurants and have been eagerly waiting out the pandemic so they can go to restaurants again. Restaurants in some areas of the US now are so busy that they stopped takeout service because they have so much inhouse service.
> The supply curve might shift back up if, for example, government wage supports are reduced.
This is the key... the problem isn't really the market... it's the market interference.
First COVID and the "lockdowns" (effective or not)... and then the resulting "free" money that makes it more lucrative to be on unemployment than working a job.
Restaurant work sucks, it's not tipping's fault. I don't work nearly as hard as a software developer compared to when I was a waiter or cook. Software development is lower stress most of the time too.
I knew someone who was mad at their partner because their partner was a software engineer and "didn't work as hard as they do" at a lower skill job, and yet made a lot more money.
I'm not sure where this idea comes from that hard work is as valuable/more valuable than skilled work. But it seems to be a pervasive idea.
Skilled work is not the antonym of hard work. You can work hard doing skilled work.
Knowledge work does look different from physical work, but you can work hard at both; you need to work hard at either to be successful.
As for why hard physical work is so valued - only a century or two past, it was the only practical method to prevent the starvation for yourself and your family. Knowledge work being a viable means of survival (for non-nobles) is pretty new, all things considered.
Even my own parents never really understood how knowledge work could be as valuable as getting out and working with your hands; and they were born in the early/mid 1900's.
> Knowledge work does look different from physical work, but you can work hard at both; you need to work hard at either to be successful.
Classist wage disparity is a real problem in America today. Often knowledge workers who don't work hard earn more than physical workers who do work hard.
> knowledge workers who don't work hard earn more than physical workers who do work hard.
earnings are measured with productivity, and knowledge work has more scaling to their productivity output. You can dig holes really hard, but a hole dug is a hole dug. A line of code written is not just a line of code, as power of compounding output stacks on top of each other.
True, hard work and skilled work are not opposites, but you can work less hard doing skilled work (it's almost the definition of skilled work), and still have a bigger impact than someone working very hard at unskilled work.
I probably should have used the phrase "unskilled work" in my original post, but I was trying to convey the person's frustrations about "hard work." From an outsiders perspective, a skilled knowledge worker doesn't look like they're working very hard, but we know that's not true.
Some "skilled work" intersects with "hard work". There's a ton of work in the construction industry that requires a very high level of specialized knowledge that sometimes takes years of college and practice in their industry to learn, just for example. Even more reason that it's strange that some people find one type of work somehow inherently superior to the other in generalized terms. I tend to think that the skill and care that one puts behind their craft is maybe what should be more important.
I'm not sure I even agree with that "impact" rhetoric. What do most of us do, deliver ads? Host funny pictures? Move electronic money around? Running shops so people on minimum wage can buy products they don't need, packed and delivered by other people on minimum wage?
Those people are only serving us the food we need to live.
There are different hards. I've worked construction: you come home at night tired, but your brain is awake and ready to think (which is why so many veg on the couch - it keeps the brain busy and body resting). In software the hard jobs leave your brain tired, but your body is ready to go - this is a hard place to be in as your brain can't figure out how to get the needed exercise your body wants.
Programming can be copy/paste, but the hard days when you have to figure out how to eliminate some mutex across some threads so the whole performs without a race condition - that will always be hard.
You're equivocating on the meaning of the word "difficulty." It's impossibly difficult for anybody but me to be exactly me, but that doesn't mean it's hard work for me to be me.
I've worked in a factory as a machine operator, and in a company as a programmer, and they're not comparable in either difficulty or compensation.
Anyone can work in a kitchen. It's physically demanding, but the tasks are not that hard and easily picked up without any real education. Sorry that's just the truth. And why we don't have as many programmers as service workers.
I suspect it comes from the “truism” that hard work pays off. It’s understandably frustrating for people when they inevitably realize it’s not as true as we were led to believe. A person can work like a dog their entire life and still be poor.
Skilled work means you're less replaceable.
I've met a lot of assholes in IT who would have been fired if it wasn't for their contribution to the company.
Except the measurement of "skill" that accounts for the income disparity is not so much "lower skill" vs "higher skill" but more "expensive skill" vs "cheap skill". I could spend the same amount of time and effort training in culinary arts and not approach the income I make writing software. That difference isn't "amount of work" or "amount of skill" but just the market price of said skills.
> I knew someone who was mad at their partner because their partner was a software engineer and "didn't work as hard as they do" at a lower skill job, and yet made a lot more money.
Wait until they learn about passive income and proper usage of leverage!
I don't think "hard work" and "skilled work" are useful buckets, there's a lot of overlap.
It really boils down to how much money a business can make from your outputs. A line cook makes the business less money than someone building an AWS service. This is not a law of nature, just the status quo.
I think the difference in leverage between a software eng and a line cook does have a law-of-nature quality to it. Line cook serves dozens a day, software serves minimum 0 and maximum the whole planet a day, and that service could stick around for years without degradation
Skilled, in late antiquity/mediaval times, meant the engineer doing trebuchet, or building ships, or building high quality steel, etc.. et.c.. it was actually hard work.
None of them were things that the ruling class/aristocracy did. They just paid for it (with the levies/taxes they took from their land).
Eventually another higher skilled level arised, as thinkers/scientists became hired by the court of a monarch, or baron.... and being a patron (paying for someone to do poetry, science, etc) was a sign of status.
The skilled workers have always been the middle class. It took the industrial revolution, where they could become rich themselves, and monarchy started becoming irrelevant.
You aren't refuting the class distinction the parent commenter was actually pointing out (serf/peasant class vs merchant/"middle" class). That there exists another distinction between the ruling class and "middle class" in feudal society does not negate the hierarchical relationship between said middle class and the laborer class.
I have spent thousands of hours honing my software craft outside of work/school hours. I guarantee you most folks working those minimum wage jobs are not doing the same in their field. If they were passionate about it (whether front of house or in the kitchen) they would also hone their craft and work their way out of minimum wage.
The problem is that the turnover rate in restaurants is ALREADY very high. Most employees see it as a “stepping stone” while they get their careers on track.
Hi there. I went to a 2 year college, spent hours outside of work reading and working on my craft and was still the highest paid line cook at a multi-million dollar restaurant at a WHOPPING 15 dollars an hour in 2016 in New Jersey.
The industry is terrible. If you didn't work in it, your solutions sound a whole hell of a lot like "bootstraps". I think "there should not be such thing as poverty wages" or "if you can't afford to pay people you can't afford to run your business" are better
> Low wages are the most common reason people cite for leaving food service work. But in one recent survey, more than half of hospitality workers who've quit said no amount of pay would get them to return.
> That's because for many, leaving food service had a lot to do also with its high-stress culture: exhausting work, unreliable hours, no benefits and so many rude customers.
Some folks would say the same thing about software development sucking.
I think it probably depends on which restaurant you work at and on your skill set and ability to thrive in that fast paced environment.
The difference is that software is easier money if you have the knack for that type of work.
But it’s like anything: you have folks who are passionate about cooking but not business savvy. They might be excellent cooks but the potential customers just eat greasy shit and don’t appreciate nuance of vegetables and spices—and so the chefs are at the mercy of substance-less customer demands. How can one be excited about that?
Anyway, I don’t think the folks quitting their jobs fit this category because talented chefs can make a lot more than minimum wage. But it’s still relevant as one must be excited to go to work in the morning.
> I think it probably depends on which restaurant you work at and on your skill set and ability to thrive in that fast paced environment.
Equally true of software development, systems/network administration, etc. It can totally suck, or it can be a source of joy, growth, and profit, all depending on where you're workin' and who for. Some of the best jobs I've had in both industries have been almost like "gettin' paid to play" because the whole crew was doin' stuff they already enjoyed doin' and doin' it for a boss that knew how to motivate in positive ways and how to join in and be part of the fun of it all. That plus a paycheck and benefits? Why would anyone ever want to go back to a shit job after knowing good jobs exist out there.
In the end restaurant work is completely unfulfilling, largely because tons of customers treat you like shit. I've never experienced that as a software engineer. It's not even about the pay.
For me, job stress has little to do with being extremely busy in the moment and a lot to do with thinking about far-flung high-leverage consequences of mistakes (will this system crash in the middle of the night 2 weeks from now, costing tons of money and causing someone to call me in a panic?). With something like being a cook, failure feedback is usually pretty immediate, which IMO is nice for stress levels.
I wouldn't be a good cook, but I get what you're saying. I miss the jobs I had when I was young that were just repetitive tasks, once muscle memory was established, you could work a shift and have a fresh mind with no stress as soon as the shift ended. I suppose it would be nice if I had my current income with that type of job but alas it was also very unsatisfying to do for a long period of time and I think I'd feel a bit unaccomplished for doing that job for a career.
Have you ever worked in a kitchen or are you just assuming?
I personally haven't worked in a restaurant, but I see how the staff and chefs are always running around, doing 20 things at once. Stimulants use like cocaine and amphetamine is endemic in the industry as well, probably for that reason.
As a restaurant worker, the pay is usually terrible as well. So while some super rich corporation won't lose millions off of your mistakes, you can lose your job and be forced to live off of your inexistent savings. That sounds very stressful to me.
Your assessment for what constitutes stress seems to be, at best, highly subjective.
I worked in very busy bars for a number of years. It’s hard sometimes back breaking work but it was certainly much more “fun”. Up until the point where you end up working for penny pinching gradgrinds who see your “fun” as an externality to be eliminated. At least as a software developer I’ve a good bit more leverage around matters of occupational convenience.
I cooked in professional kitchens for years before becoming a software engineer.
For me, the cumulative stress of the software industry is a lot higher. I can never quite "turn off" and in the long-run it's a lot harder for me to control my psychological stress, than when I was working in a kitchen.
(And of course these are highly subjective, I'd expect nothing less from a psychological phenomenon. Anecdotes will likely be all over the place.)
Ex-deli/pizza shop worker here, you can leave it all at the store when you leave. Your slicer will not send you a message at 2am that everything is burning.
For some people, server jobs are a between what they're doing. Especially for artists/filmmakers it's money between the gigs that don't pay. I met tons of people as a barista doing exactly that.
Worked through college, and yes conditions need to be better overall. A concern would be if it's now a FT 40h something or other, it squeezes out people who take 6 months making coffee to get to their next acting gig. Also, barista jobs are a dime a dozen once you make some friends. Very easy to get rehired, people talk.
> Stop the tipping guilt trip placed on the public, raise your prices 20%, and pay your employees a livable wage.
FYI, one of the reasons restaurants don't do this is the tax impacts. When someone tips 20%, there is no sales tax assessed on the tip — the full 20% goes to the worker. If you increase prices by 20%, that is subject to a sales tax (roughly 10% where I live), which amounts to a 1%-2% increase in the total price.
On top of that, moving tips to wages results in more income and payroll taxes being taken out (most workers do not fully report all of their tips, which saves them both income and payroll taxes).
It might not seem like a lot — just a couple percent here and there — but restaurants have pretty thin margins.
> most workers do not fully report all of their tips, which saves them both income and payroll taxes
I wonder what percentage of tips are still cash tips, which is the only case where you can get away with that. I imagine the percentage of tips that are on a credit card (or even app like Doordash/Seamless) vs. cash has been increasing over time, but I can't find solid numbers.
Most credit and debit card tips are paid out to servers with cash from the register at the end of the day. The amount of the tips is recorded, but the recipients are not, and taxes are not assessed against the tips. Technically, servers are supposed to declare the cash they receive as income, but it is accepted practice not to do so.
I'm not sure about that. It's been thirty years since I waited tables, but our restaurant required us to turn in tips (they were pooled and distributed to everyone who worked that shift). The withheld taxes on them, and if we skimmed tips and didn't turn them into the pool at the end of our shift, we'd get ratted out by coworkers and fired.
This has been tried many times, you are ignoring the reasons it did not work. The employees hate it because they make less money, forcing the restaurant to go back to tipping. It was effectively a pay cut for employees. It is not wage/revenue neutral because it changes customer behavior.
Generally speaking, Americans are more generous when the money goes to directly to a service person than to a faceless business that sets itself up as a middleman in that relationship.
As a tipped employee, I can tell you this is not exactly the real reason. There are at least two more important:
- Historically (less so now), tips are a tax dodge - they often aren't reported, or greatly under-reported.
- Tips are less egalitarian than wages would be. Nominally, front of house and back of house have similar wages, but front of house gets far more tips. Even in the normal shared-tip-pool model this is true.
Changing this would mean making explicit and obvious things that were previously implicit and looked past: Front-of-house would need/want/demand a far higher hourly wage than what the back-of-house workers would/cloud, and everybody would have to report ALL their income for taxes.
There is also the problem that unprofessional service staff might not try as hard to please the customers, though maybe those get filtered out over time.
I can't articulate the details, down to the last detail, but the worst thing to happen to tipping is the change the IRS made, some years back. If I understand correctly, the IRS always used to estimate tip for a server based on a table's bill. (The custom is 15-20 percent, and I think the IRS used to average lower than that.) But the IRS always used to collect its cut on tips from the server.
The change is that the IRS now holds the restaurant owner accountable for the taxes due on the tip. The result is that instead of the money going to the server directly, it first has to pass through the hands of the business owner. I don't know if this still goes on, but some years back I recall hearing that some restaurant owners would then "distribute" those tips to other members of the staff — the busboys, kitchen help, etc.
Traditionally, waiters always "tipped out" the busboys and bartenders they worked with, on any given shift, and better service (theoretically) promoted more generosity from the waiter. But now that the business owner has his hand in it, the business owner will operate according to his own interests. The waiter is cut out. The waiter has less control, and less direct incentive. The waiter has less of a payoff.
Rumor has it (or, if you will, common sense has it) that some owners abuse their role as middleman.
This isn't an IRS change. It was a public behavior change.
The owners always had to withhold taxes from their wait staff, just as your taxes are withheld by your employer.
The difference is that since almost all tips are now on credit cards, the business owner doesn't need to assume the % sales to withhold, and withholds based on virtually all of their employees tips.
The end result is that the wait staff can't commit tax fraud by not reporting tips. The business owner didn't have to report cash tips, only withhold based on a % of sales. They still withhold on % of sales if actual tips are less than the % of sales.
That is a change. I used to deliver pizza, it was cash or check, I pocketed any tips before I got back to the store, the management never had a clue how much tips I got or did not get. Even with the checks, they just went into a box and were totaled at the end of the day. No way to trace them back to an order.
I don't know if there's been case law behind it, and I certainly wouldn't want to be the one to try it, but I feel like there's a strong argument to be made that tips are gifts from the consumer to the wait staff.
That said, gifts totaling under $15,000 are non-taxable.
> This has been tried many times, you are ignoring the reasons it did not work. The employees hate it because they make less money, forcing the restaurant to go back to tipping.
Yup. A couple of restaurants in the Seattle area tried this. "20% price increase, no more tipping".
Over time, their employees left, saying they were being paid less.
Remember this the next time you hear the "if you tip 15% or less I'm literally paying to serve you!" (which is also BS. The IRS, if you don't disclose tipped income, assesses a standard rate. If you're truly earning less than that in tips, you can document it and pay less. But almost no-one wants to do that because the IRS is behind the times, and almost all servers make more in tips than that standard rate).
That's not a problem with a tipless system, that's a management decision to lower wages. If management simply paid employees what they were netting before, or better, there would be no pay cut and no departures.
I have several good friends that work in this business in Seattle, where several restauranteurs tried the "no tipping" model. Anecdotally, in a popular quintessentially Seattle restaurant, a good front-of-house person may net around $40/hr after tips, some more and some less. I don't have a lot of sample data for the "no tipping" restaurants, but my general impression is that it was on the order of a 10% reduction in pay.
One reason several of them have mentioned is that many customers are happy to regularly tip much more than 20%, and this is often correlated with the highest spending customers. Making it a non-discretionary 20% puts an artificially low cap on how much they earn from the customers that pay the most. At one time some customers would leave extra cash on the table after paying the "no tipping" bill, but no one carries cash anymore.
Places that net $40/hr have enormous difficulty hiring right now. These are not poorly paying jobs but the broader lifestyle is pretty terrible even at good restaurants, made even more terrible because of the employee shortage.
One overlooked issue is that many restaurant workers in the big cities are originally from "flyover country". When the restaurants closed during COVID, a large number went back home. I was talking to a waitress in the middle-of-nowhere Iowa a few months ago and she had just moved back after several years working in New York City restaurants.
One would think a sign out front that said "Now hiring: Wait staff, starting pay @ $40/hr (or even $30/hr)" would have no trouble finding and retaining talent, even in big cities like Seattle.
I don't think I've ever seen a sign advertising anything near that for restaurants.
These are skilled restaurant jobs, they don't advertise with signs. Same reason there isn't a "help wanted" sign for my job. It is a social market. There were shortages already before COVID in Seattle, but now the shortages are extreme. Restaurants are reducing opening hours and days.
I have friends working these jobs. The consistent pattern is that they are only working the minimum number of shifts required to pay their bills, and they live pretty cheaply. You can't staff the restaurants when all of your employees only want to work 1-2 days a week. They could easily work more hours, and did before COVID, but are choosing not to now. And because restaurant work is extremely flexible and available on-demand, it makes their life flexible.
Many people have adapted their lifestyles to having less money and not working, especially with the generous unemployment benefits. Restaurant workers I know fall into that camp. My SO was receiving $75k/year on unemployment during COVID and turned down jobs paying $125k+ because they discovered the unemployment benefit was sufficient for a lifestyle of doing nothing that they were happy with. Not likely to take a job anytime soon either.
As a tangential observation, while I know many people in this position, none of them is doing much with their newfound free time. Just kind of coasting.
> This has been tried many times, you are ignoring the reasons it did not work. The employees hate it because they make less money, forcing the restaurant to go back to tipping.
Isn't the solution obvious? Adjust wages/prices to such a degree that it does fully compensate for the missing tips.
Whilst that might be true for Americans, as a European I find your culture of tipping(as part of a waiter's salary) a negative for everyone but the faceless business. I still tip waiters who do a great job, but don't have to be guilted into thinking they will go hungry if I don't.
Those workers never had a choice. If it "works perfectly" then why do workers that do have a choice consistently choose to work in establishments where tipping is the norm? That's not a very convincing argument.
The bottom line is that it is the workers making the choice you disagree with, in pursuit of their own self-interest. It would be one thing if choosing one policy over the other was revenue-neutral to the restaurants and workers, but empirically that is not the case.
or automate 99% of the business and free these poor souls from a mundane existence. Also, I think we should support them w/ safety net (see basically andrew yang's platform).
I don't see anyone screaming about ditch digging jobs or dishwashers saying we should "save those jobs!" . Backhoes and automatic dishwashers have freed people from meaningless work. We should do the same for everything we can. There's a stereotype of struggling artists working at fast food/coffee shops, imagine how much better human life could be if we freed them to do their real work (the arts).
> or automate 99% of the business and free these poor souls from a mundane existence.
I agree on one hand, but there's a lot of hand waving and hopeful/wishful thinking built into that answer.
It's very easy to say, "Do something else," but if it were that easy, it wouldn't be an issue in the first place. And if 20 million food service workers all get CS degrees, guess which will be the next industry with plummeting wages and few job opportunities?
We have more people on earth than ever before, but we also have more automation and less need for those people than ever before. It seems like at some point society is going to have some hard questions to answer about employment, pay, etc.
> guess which will be the next industry with plummeting wages and few job opportunities?
'cept with 20 million CS degrees, the software industry would boom - more code, more customized, bespoke software for every firm, presumably increasing productivity and output and thus, increases wealth.
Not to mention these people may also "stumble" upon something great by being entrepreneurial.
So it'd be strictly better to have 20 million CS degrees holders, vs 20 million hospitality workers.
It’s not socially efficient to spend all our effort trying to automate things. This happens naturally as wages required to hire people for a given task increase and automation gets cheaper. The natural progression of the situation in the article is that wages go up, increasing the viability of automation, so you’ll get your wish (in this context) soon enough.
If we “freed” people from work with welfare, 99.9% of recipients would smoke weed and watch cartoons, not create art. It might still be preferable to having people work low-engagement jobs, but let’s not be too idealistic.
I think that the leverage of automation is so high that we can afford it. Look at how much money the top founders of companies have...
FTR I also think the social safety net should be bare minimum existence, for a single person something like a bunk bed, 3 minimum nutrition meals (simple food like beans, rice etc not steaks...), clothes from a thrift store etc. -- It's more complex when kids are involved because you have to consider that you're essentially growing the future generation so have to consider the repercussions of underinvesting in formation.
This bare minimum would still leave lots to be desired and thusly incentivized (such as money for weed and a tv/netflix) ... But they'd have the time and basic support to do something contributing that only humans can do (at the moment at least) .
If society actively encouraged the creation of more positive ways to contribute positive things, I bet we'd see an "organic" growth in numbers of people choosing to do so.
Example; There've been some pretty positive things happening around community gardens in some places (when they're not being attacked by self-appointed neighborhood Nannies that don't like to see people gathering together around something beneficial).
Example 2; I remember "maker" clubs and similar community groups doin' lots of really fun activities that benefited more than just the group itself (free community virus cleanups, operating system install parties, community LAN parties - everyone's welcome).
I'm sure that if enough positive activities were presented to society as a whole, you'd just naturally find a growing percentage of humanity doin' good things for each other that used to be considered "work" at some point in the past before whatever "safety net" made it unnecessary to do for survival's sake anymore. People might even still do some of those things at a higher level of quality than others and net themselves some personal gain out of it.
Problem is that humans aren't willing to cooperate with one another enough to even approach any sort of Utopian ideal, and they're often too ready to jump at all the reasons such a thing is "impossible" without being willing to even consider any ideas that might lead to it bein' a reality.
You could introduce a negative income tax (to implement UBI) and then increase your tax credits by joining community groups or going to college. Competitive groups could then receive more tax credits based on their ranking.
Instead of career tracks you will be offered volunteer tracks.
However, this is a complex solution to the problem and it is prone to being gutted because it will be seen as socialist and once there is full employment politicians will demand everyone to quit their clubs the same way they demand welfare recipients to quit today.
Yeah, that just took the wind outta my sails. I literally give up trying to restore my hopes for humanity or any sort of better future for myself or anyone else. We're all fucked. I need to just accept that.
When I traveled to Geneva 4 years ago I marveled at the efficiency of every service and labor job I saw. The prevailing wage for a grocery store clerk is ~35 USD per hour in Geneva.
The Restaurant workers had portable credit card stations to ensure they didn't have to run back and forth to a central register. The garbage trucks had automated arms for picking up trash bins. A busy restaurant had ~1/3rd the staff of a similar restaurant in the US. This compares to my condo association which recently hired snow shovelers who don't have a snow blower because they were cheaper than the ones with a snow blower!
There is no employment crises in Switzerland, and by simple inspection I'd believe that the American service/labor sector could absorb the 3-6x improvement in productivity present internationally without an existential crises.
There is already an enormous oversupply of art. The struggling artists' real product is something rarer: authenticity. If they did not struggle then they would not be able to produce it.
This is an interesting take, but most of my favorite artists grew up comfortably middle class, because it gave them the time and space to develop their art, compared to people who had to get jobs as teens or watch their little siblings.
You've got the causality backwards. Authenticity means steering clear of the siren call of mass market appeal. An overwhelming focus on creating things, despite their lack of commercial expedience, is what causes the struggling.
The analog in software is working for a surveillance company versus architecting your software to cut out needless middlemen.
> Which raises the question of why anyone would work, if doing whatever you want and still living a comfortable life was an option.
People with literally billions of dollars of wealth still devote time and energy to earning more. I don't think its a stretch to think that people who merely have enough for tolerable food, clothing, shelter will continue to do so.
But there are very few people with that kind of wealth, because very few people have the innate drive to do what it takes to attain it. Most people don't have that drive. Most people just want a paycheck and a low-risk life.
> Most people don't have that drive. Most people just want a paycheck and a low-risk life.
If I look at the size of the median house, the price of the median car, that doesn't seem true. If most people would be satisfied with a basic income scheme and nothing more, why aren't most middle class people trying to save half their paycheck and retire before 50?
Use free market logic instead of making things up. If a billionaire has enough money to do nothing then why would he do something? It's because the tradeoff is worth it. Business owners have a large stake in their business. They can get billions out of a company.
For a minimum wage worker it is absolutely trivial to see that the tradeoff isn't worth it and subsequently they behave predictably like a lazy person. People acting according to free market logic deserve the stick. Do you see the problem?
> Which raises the question of why anyone would work, if doing whatever you want and still living a comfortable life was an option.
You work to be able to afford nicer clothes, more vidya games, fine whisky, more-comfortable retirement when you do stop working, vacations, better school for your kids, a nicer house with a view, and so on.
The carrot remains the same, the stick is just somewhat smaller.
The pay generally isn’t the issue; especially, tipped positions. It’s the work conditions, treatment by management and customers, the inconsistency in hours, and no benefits. We’re seeing here in Portland that people still don’t want return to restaurants at $15/hr. Restaurants suck to work at.
I think restaurants pull that crap in the US too, by not scheduling enough on the clock hours for cleanup after the store closes. It's why you'll see places lock the doors even 30 min or more before the listed closing time.
When I was young I worked at Dunkin’ Donuts. You’re right that we had 30 mins of cleaning after the store closed. We were paid for it and were never asked to clock out and work for free.
But, sometimes on Friday nights we’d lock the doors 30 minutes early and clean just so we could get to enjoy our weekends 30 minutes sooner.
That was pretty rare unless a manager happened to be there that evening and also wanted to go enjoy their weekend.
I honestly can’t think of anyone I worked with there that would’ve clocked out and worked for free. I think people would’ve quit quickly. There were like 5 other Dunkin franchisees in the county and they’d all hire you on the spot if you’d done the job before.
I worked a few fast food and restaurant jobs 10+ years ago and we were auto clocked out at closing, but were still required to clean up. I never did and I got let go 2 times for not working for free.
Probably depends on how competitive the market is for workers. When I was trying to get a minimum wage job, it took a while to get. Now it's probably relatively easily. In today's market, they wouldn't try that because those people would go to a place that wouldn't do that and implicitly pays more as a result.
A lot of this article is about fast food workers, who don’t get tips.
The answer is automation, logistics and supply chain improvements so you can service more customers with fewer, but more specialized
employees who can be paid a living wage.
The fact that you enjoy that intersection is not an excuse for the terrible pay we give people to do it. If you want premium customer service maybe you should be charged a premium price.
That has not worked out so well in other industries. Immigrant labor is badly abused, perhaps you said this in jest, but I do not think it is something to be taken so lightly. This article from the New Yorker may change your thinking: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/08/exploitation-a...
That's a false dichotomy, because those people can go and do something else.
Even if we make an assumption that it IS a zero sum game (and that there are no other jobs), then we're into a wildly different conversation around how we deal with allocating finite resources in a culture that supports property rights, and no one is going to solve that in a hacker news comment chain.
> That's a false dichotomy, because those people can go and do something else.
That is not automatically guaranteed.
Part of the problem with the Western economies is that the mills/mines/etc. used to employ a LOT of people.
A good example is the Natrona Heights steel plant. It used to employ something like 10,000 people at its height. After automation, it will now employ a couple hundred.
This is why we need to get past the idea that everyone needs to work to earn a living. Why does anyone need to earn the right to live? Our society has enough empty homes to house the homeless, and throws away enough food to feed the hungry. Why are people still homeless and hungry then?
Take your example of the steel plant. Presumably when the 9500 people were laid off, productivity remained the same (or increased) and costs went down. Where did the extra profit go? Was it dispersed among the remaining 500 workers? Was it used to help the displaced workers who devoted years building the steel mill and keeping it running? The very people who designed, forged, and brought on-line the machines which replaced them? No, the upside went to the owners, because they have a slip of paper that says they own the mill.
Our problem is not that we're automating away jobs, it's that the displaced workers don't get to share in the benefits of that automation. Eliminating a job is seen as a disaster, rather than a victory. We should want to eliminate terrible jobs, not keep them around just so someone can stay busy. And I guarantee you, people who don't have to work will find something to do. There's always work to be done, just not all of it is profitable (e.g. raising children, taking care of the elderly, volunteering, open source coding, etc.)
There wasn't extra profit because all the mills automated and they are all competing with each other. If expenses were lower, one would cut prices to gain a market advantage, others would follow until the price reached its floor.
There were plenty of profits to be had. I've lived in steel towns almost my entire adult life, and you can see exactly how that manifested in region. Drive around these towns and you'll see the names of wealthy steel tycoons on roads, parks, schools, and even whole towns. You'll also see stark divides between streets with lavish mansions where management lived, and dilapidated row homes where workers lived. The divide was so deep that workers literally fought and died for better conditions at a time when steel prices and profits were actually increasing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_strike).
Ever heard of Carnegie Tech (CMU), the Wharton School, or Swarthmore college? They exist precisely because of the existence of massive profits from steel.
Well, if we have a morality of "work is virtue" then obviously it's best to spread that virtue to the most. If we want to spread wealth to the most to avoid social upheaval in the context of that morality, then more people employed would be better over fewer with a living wage.
Of course UBI or other safety net would be a good way to avoid social upheaval as well.
> UBI or other safety net would be a good way to avoid social upheaval as well.
I know it's not an apples to apples comparison with any proposed UBI implementation, but looking at the social upheaval caused by the COVID-19 quarantine and stimulus programs, I'd say cutting a check to people and leaving a void in their life where work used to be is a fertile breeding ground for aimless people who will be easily radicalized. It's not something I ever considered pre-2020 as a big proponent of UBI, but now I feel it's something that has to give us concern.
Automation doesn't cause unemployment or low wages. You can always give all people a living wage. Always and I mean it.
I don't know how to express this but it frustrates me a great deal.
Money is akin to a video game. It's not real. It's just a token that allocates work. It doesn't decide how much work there is. People decide. You can spend the same dollar an infinite amount of time and thereby create an infinite demand for work.
Therefore work becomes a philosophical or an existential problem. We work for our own benefit to satisfy our needs and desires. To do so we have to do "productive" work, meaning work that helps someone else satisfy their needs and desires by proxy. What if you have already done enough to meet the basic needs of everyone? Yes, we are reaching the edge of humanity. The realm of philosophers. Why do we live? To work? We already worked enough to live. Beyond this point all activity including work is meaningless. When you accept that life itself is meaningless then so is the work that you do to sustain yourself.
How have humans dealt with this in the past? They did wholly pointless work. The pyramids weren't built because they were needed, it's because rulers decided to build them. Another way is to simply start a war. Once there is urgency, politicians are ready to spend whatever it takes, no matter how pointless the war. The Chinese just build infrastructure and housing even before there is a need or purpose.
Here, I'll do it. I'll prove that there is no lack of work and it is purely a political problem: Climate change prevention requires the creation of a huge amount of jobs. Yes this one sentence is a bomb. How does more work, research and technological progress make us poorer? It doesn't. The whole climate change denial/skepticism thing can't be explained by economics because we will end up better off by preventing climate change and I am not even talking about the benefit of preventing climate change. Just the benefit of creating more work. The powerful combination of economics and climate should make any capitalist immediately support the effort.
The only people who actually benefit from denying climate change are those directly working in the fossil fuel industry. Germany once gutted 100k jobs in the renewable industry to keep 20k coal jobs alive. It's 100% not about economics.
There are a few exceptions who report it all I'm sure. However a good waiter/waitress can make as much as a good software engineer working less hours. Good is key though, most don't have the personality to rake in the tips. It is a pleasure getting good service where the 25% tip is deserved, it is painful having to give a 10% tip for bad service.
I think another is the response by the service industry to the requirements of the ACA. Everyone I know that works in a restaurant had their hours capped just below the line at which they'd have to be provided health insurance. Now they have multiple jobs. Juggling more than one job is a PITA, but even more so when your schedules are constantly shifting. These folks need full-time work with a predictable schedule, so they can do things like go to the dentist or take their kid to the zoo.
This is happening in more than just the United States... so your theory doesn't hold up. Also, at least near me, people living on tips make REALLY good money. Some make 6 figures. I've talked to some bar workers specifically that are totally against the idea of getting rid of tipping and the wage structure. They make really good.
The pandemic has had me appreciating home cooking more. I still eat out occasionally, but for health reasons, I prefer the home cooked meal. Pandemic lasted long enough to shift my preferences long-term.
Blackstar Co-Op in Austin (https://blackstar.coop/) is a great example imo. The service is great and the missing begging bowl is a great relief. Hopefully there are more examples.
This would have to be put in place at the government level, otherwise it won’t work. A restaurant by me tried it and struggled to keep waitstaff because they can make so much elsewhere..in untaxed cash. If they doubled their prices no one would come
I think realistically it would come down to an increase of 30%. Most of the time, only a small amount of tips show up in taxes and now that it's part of the pay, the employer will also have to pay taxes on the increase.
Seems like an oversimplification to me. If the owners could simply raise prices by 20% and suffer no economic consequences, I have little doubt they would. Thus, I can only surmise that it is not as simple as that.
I know it sounds crazy because we've had them for so long, but maybe it's not sustainable to have so many of them?
In any case, this seems like a great area to let the market figure it out. If restaurants go out of business the owners and employees will find something else to do.
> In any case, this seems like a great area to let the market figure it out. If restaurants go out of business the owners and employees will find something else to do.
I'm not sure more corporate concentration would be a better situation.
Your tone is quasi-facetious, but you do not realize that Taco Bell was the only restaurant to survive the Franchise Wars, so...now all restaurants are Taco Bell.
I don't think my comment implies more corporate concentration.
And even if it does, why should restaurants be held to a higher standard than other sectors? It's fine for Google and Facebook to buy up everything, but restaurants can't consolidate?
I do think that if it's persistently difficult to find workers for non-distortionary reasons, prices will likely increase gradually with whatever attendant effects there are from that.
> If the owners could simply raise prices by 20% and suffer no economic consequences, I have little doubt they would.
If all the restaurants did at the same time, they could. But if only some do, then the restaurants that underpay their workers will have lower prices and outcompete them out of business.
You can look at this an yet another example of the core problem where consumers don't have visibility into the externalities of the purchasing choices. When picking a restaurant, you see the food prices, but you don't see that one restaurant is more expensive because it treats its workers better. That's an encapsulated abstraction. So we choose based on price, which inadvertently incentivizes restaurants to treat employees like crap.
The article says about 5% of workers quit each month. If you raise pay by 20% - then maybe this goes down to 3%? I'm not sure - it obviously doesn't eliminate the problem entirely and either creates the problem of having to raise prices or get by with less staff.
I think people on HN may be forgetting the restaurant industry does not have the same margins as tech ... and close to no one working these jobs (on the employee side) is ever hoping to stay there for decades.
Owners most likely can raise prices 20% right now, but there's no guarantee that restaurant demand will continue to be so high. When demand falls, people will still remember the inflated prices and may choose to not eat there even if prices fall back down again.
I worked in hospitality for 10 years before formally getting into software engineering.
The customers can suck, yes, but more often than not your boss has the same sociopathic qualities of that mythical asshole geninus founder except you're not working at a startup, you have no equity, you're being paid bare bones, and the boss is not a fucking genius.
Thats more a solution for the customer. That comes up a lot, and times and again its pointed out that the employees hate the idea (likely because of survivor bias, where those who are making it in the current system would be worse off in a different one).
Long term it likely would help, but short term it would make it harder, not easier, to get employees.
In no small part because so much of the tip wages are under the table.
Ending tipping needs a top-down enforcement of norms akin to pandemic response measures. The restaurants that try to go it alone confuse and sticker-shock their customers, unfortunately.
I don't see why we need to end tipping. Keep it, and raise wages. I get that it's the flavor of the week for people to rally around, but I don't see a problem. Let's let the market solve the problem. The last thing we need is even more bureaucracy and laws to police something that doesn't need policed.
Guilt trip? I have never felt this ever. I pay a tip proportional to the service. 10% bad, 15% average, 20-25% for very good.
As an American living in Australia, I really do miss tipping. I think that on average the restaurant service here is a lot lower. At most restaurants at the medium level (e.g. $25 hamburgers) you pay in advance, and then a waiter will bring the food to you when its ready. Do you need more water? Get it yourself... Ketchup, you have to ask but it won't be offered. The waiters don't care because they are making good money anyway. The only place you get American style service is at the very high end places.
As an Australian living in America, the expectation that there will be a person to refill your water cup is pretty uncomfortable. The need to tip is a ridiculous abdication of the responsibility for labour laws to ensure staff a living wage. If you don't like the service at a restaurant, don't go! There are other restaurants that will compete for your custom. If no restaurant is sufficiently servile for your tastes, then your expectations are likely out of step with local culture and how it treats people.
Individual service persons should not be held hostage to your interpretation of their service for their wage. If they're routinely underperforming they'll be sacked.
Adding to this what tipping also does is pit the server against the kitchen and sometimes the house itself in establishments that don’t share tips with the kitchen.
Tipping can still take place. It just doesn’t need to be obligatory. It’s the difference between a culture of servitude vs a culture of service.
The waiters "don't care" about what?! Things you expect from another country's customs? That is a strange way of thinking. And complaining about a country because you have to ask for sauce if you want it sounds so.. entitled.
Although I'd never pay $25 for a burger. (Sydney here)
If the biggest downsides to paying workers a living wage you can think of are asking for ketchup and fetching yourself a glass of water at a midrange restaurant... I think that's a fine tradeoff.
I've always found service in restaurants in the US makes me rather uncomfortable - I don't want people acting so servile.
I remember being particularly unhappy about being served breakfast in Houston while I was there for a conference and being referred to as "sir" - I almost asked the waitress to stop but I realised that would probably cause even more problems so I stayed quiet.
So I would reject the idea that the service in US restaurants is somehow fundamentally "better" than elsewhere - it's just different and some of us actually regard that style of service as a negative.
Genuine Q: is $25 a lot for a burger in a restaurant (including tax, like in Australia)? I ask because I see burgers in mid range restaurants for $14-$20 here in NYC, and then there's the 8.825% tax. 25 AUD is ~ $18 USD, which seems about right.
Grilld is a popular mid-range burger chain and their burgers range from AUD $9 to $16.90 (USD $6.60 to $12.40). All advertised retail prices in Australia include 10% GST (good and services tax).
At a more formal restaurant you will likely find a AUD $25 burger but that's about the top end for burger prices.
I was thinking more along the lines of a non-chain establishment like a restaurant, since that's the impression I got from the ancestor comment - they're referring to table service. A burger chain like Shakeshack has burgers in the range of $6-11, pre-tax.
Grilld does do a limited table service. You order at a counter (or on your phone) but orders will be bought to your table. The wait staff will check up on you but if you don't want that there's a stick on each table that you flip over.
How expensive are they over there then? I feel restaurants aren't best for everyday meals, but rather once a week/month social events with friends/SO. That makes price definitely less important for me.
Also, I consequently completely avoid chain restaurants. I haven't entered McDonald's since 2008 or so.
People become servers because of the tips not in spite of them 9/10 times. Of the servers I've known every single one chose serving because it beat the hell out of the other available low-requirement options they had. Complaining about tipping is easily one of the most counter productive forms of woke culture I encounter on a regular basis.
Suppose I don't care about the workers and I just want the actual price I'm going to pay printed on the menu, with no additional charges and fees at the end? Does that make me "woke"?
Very few people do that. Tip amount barely changes based on how good the service is. Most people that tip well are basically always going to tip well, which does not reward good service.
I think some businesses are going out of businesses because they stubbornly refuse to raise their wages.
In the vacation community where I live, there are two grocery/delis about a mile apart from each other. One is at a marina, the other is at a beach. They have almost the same business offering. Traditionally, both are fully mobbed during the sunny seasons.
Two weeks ago, I visited the one I usually go to -- at the marina. They had a sign at the front door, "Due to the labor shortage..." and they weren't operating their deli counter. No sandwiches. When I sent inside, it was empty. No customers. The one employee at the register was on their phone. Nothing going on. A couple of people pulled up in their cars, read the sign, pulled out and left immediately.
Drove up the road a mile to the other one. No sign -- it was busy like it usually was. Full house, busy counters and registers.
My son asked me why the other place wouldn't just raise their wages.. I couldn't answer, but I guessed it was more on a matter of principle than calculated reality. There's no way they were surviving or thriving. I joked that maybe the owner was an old cahoot who remembered when a soda was $0.05 and there was no way they were going to raise their hourly wages to $15 or more.
It's not just wages - like alot of what we can do is making shitty jobs less miserable, ensuring everyone gets some amount of vacation and sick time, insuring everyone has cheap or free healthcare access, ensuring everyone has relatively fixed schedule - eliminate punitive workplace policies, on stuff like attendance and other shit that makes being there miserable. Like, you can do a hell of alot to reduce peoples day to day misery.
There used to be some sort of a tradeoff, there used to be a ton of jobs that didnt pay well, but they were not miserable places to work at, that was kinda the tradeoff, you know - you like, didnt get a ton of money, but the workplace wasnt awful. Those jobs still exist but they're rarer.
All of those reasons are valid, but not unique to hospitality industry.
I think we might be backgrounding one particular reason too much: customers are a headache. One of the subheadings of the article is "They're just yelling the entire time".
I find it interesting that this hasn't been discussed as much, maybe because we are culpable? Maybe at one point of time we were that high maintenance customer? Maybe there is a general culture problem we all have regarding how we treat strangers, especially those who are bound to serve us to an extent. And looking at that need for transformation might be hard on our ego than the transformation of structural non-industry-specific inequities.
Management culture shifted sometime ago, I've often said unions are a problem you earn. We are contributing here to the problem as a society, but management is often just outright hostile now in service sector jobs. Employees are treated as disposable fungible objects, with no inherent value.
Like, There was a cultural shift some decades ago, and as corny as it sounds, the shift in culture began when we went from having a "Personnel Department" to "Human Resources" - resources are something you often extract and use up, to the point we have a special way to call out resources that are renewable.
As much as I hate the "words matter" phrase, I think here they clearly do, as they've clearly subtly altered peoples thinking about people who work for them, and their disposability.
Changing Personnel to Human Resources was definitely the start of that process.
It was an attempt to "professionalize" the work that Personnel departments did and make it sound more important.
It meant that you could have "Vice President of Human Resources" which sounds as "impressive" as "Vice President for Manufacturing".
It also leads towards today's stupidities where these same people are called things like "Leader for People and Culture" or some other BS touchy-feely title.
Employers do what they can to commoditize and standardize their use of workers. Anything to make them more fungible makes them more replaceable and therefore easier to a) lower costs (ie wages) and b) automate.
At eery restaurant job I worked and every restaurant job anyone in my family worked, the management was poor. Their worst sin was writing the schedule last minute every damn week and wielding it like a weapon. Get on the wrong side of the boss and you get the worst shifts posted at the last possible notice.
I must say, as much as I agree with the contents of your argument, and I am not saying this was intentional, I resent the fact that you've co-opted the reply-space to plug back in managerial or organizational culture issues, which was already being discussed in the rest of the thread extensively.
I wish you would have stayed on topic with the idea of customer culture issues, or lack thereof.
Is that a cultural thing? I'm always surprised when I see American service workers complain about abusive customers, because in my region in South India I've very very rarely seen anyone abuse their servers. A few complaints, maybe, but no yelling or pressure. IME the class divide in India is wider, so it makes me even more confused.
I was shocked in the US to see an American colleague get really angry with a waitress over the quality of a steak. It's ok to complain but to think you can dump anger on someone who is on minimum wage and who had nothing to do with the problem is beyond me. I lost any respect I had for him.
Several of my single-and-dating women friends have told me they pay close attention to how their date treats the server when they first go out. If he acts like a jerk to the server, they assume he'll eventually act like a jerk to them too and thus there won't be a second date.
I believe so. When I was working in customer service, I had an English coworker. He said that the way customers treated us regularly would probably never have happened in England. Not once. Things haven’t gotten better since then.
I can only compare the USA and The UK but my experience is that the customer/server relationship in the USA often takes on a “master/subservient” tone whereas in the UK that kind of behaviour would be considered “posh” and somewhere between laughable and despicable by the majority.
This is my experience too comparing UK and USA. I worked as a cleaner for some summer schools at university and only the American students (c.f. UK and Japanese students who were also there) treated me like I was complete trash. It was very eye opening.
Could be cultural, but a data point from France is that while I, personally, don't often see abusive clients, I have friends who work in this industry, and they do complain about this.
Some of them are Americans, and they tend to find working here more of a drag than in the States. They mostly complain about people being generally rude, followed by big parties each having extremely specific requests and later quarreling about the check (as in who has to pay for what).
They also mention that they usually make less money here, because although the wages are higher, they don't usually get any tips. Also, cost of living is higher (Paris, as opposed to US cities other than NY / LA / SF).
I've worked retail before (Apple Retail, Genius Bar specifically, so probably one of the more decent and better paid retail jobs in the grand scheme of things), and dealing with customers was one of the primary reasons I changed careers.
You only need so many people looking down on you because of nothing other than your job, to make you want to do something else.
I've worked in various retail jobs. Most customers range from kind to inoffensive. The negative experiences from the exceptions stand out and occupy more headspace.
If you (general - not you) think you could improve how you treat people, please work on improving, but most people here are probably fine and have nothing to feel guilty about.
A purely introspective approach is fundamentally limited to addressing the cases where the problem is within ourselves. It cannot address cases where the problem is within other customers or within business practices.
Healthcare, retirement, everything required for living should be socialized. Old people today have Medicare and Social Security, but we need to finish the progression to Star Trek and just make sure there's enough to go around and that it does go around.
The other part is that misery, fire bad customers and bad managers. It really isn't that difficult to be polite.
Socializing those things would also make basic entrepreneurship much more practical and make failures of entrepreneurship much less harmful (such as the many restaurants that fail in their first year), hugely benefiting the economy as whole.
I'd like to see data from other parts of the world, but at least for France, this argument may hold some water.
A crude comparison of business formation between France (with socialized healthcare / retirement) and the US (without those), shows that the numbers are fairly close. Data is for 2020, which saw a 4% rise for France, whereas in the US numbers were stable. France also doesn't have as much of an "entrepreneurial" culture as the US, meaning people are much more likely to "look for a job" rather than found their own business.
Interesting statistic. The one year may be a bit of an outlier for the relationship. If you look at the 2010-2020 period in the data linked above, the US had a significantly higher growth rate in business formation (75% vs. 36%). This is not explained by growth in population which were identical over the period (7.2%, wikipedia).
> Healthcare, retirement, everything required for living should be socialized.
Indeed. Many small businesses can't even afford sponsoring a sick leave directly AFAIK. At my location (in Europe) you pay a part of your monthly wage to the social security fund and once you get sick it covers your salary in the amount like if you kept working (and also pays you basic pension once you get too old).
In France, the "social security" (run by the state) doesn't cover the full salary, not even close. It only covers up to 50% [0], and only after three days (if you have 10 single sick days, you lose 10 days' pay).
You have to have your own insurance ("mutuelle", usually chosen by your employer — which you cannot refuse, but can augment) to have a better deal.
---
[0] It covers 50% of the salary, but the maximum salary taken into account is 1.8 times the minimum wage, which is 2 798,24 € before tax.
You write that 50% of nearly 3k Euros is bad. I can see where it would be bad. But in the US, you would have to fight tooth and nail for YEARS to get disability coverage that "good." US Disability payments average around $1500 or so a month, and you often get rejected your first application or for several rounds of appeals.
Thanks for saying this. I feel that a lot of the time people forget about post scarcity. People can focus on the dystopia but I feel that it's important to remember there are other options. A lot of us are already living post scarcity and helping others. We are so close to limitless energy generation it is a matter of when not if it happens. Thanks
Is Medicare fraud really a meaningful amount compared to how much it pays out? Europeans have had the same issue for decades, you can’t give things away without some grifting. But that’s part of the cost. Usually not a very large one either.
Just a quick looks suggests it is a big issue. Hard to get firm estimates (presumably because we only know about the people who get caught) but one estimate has it at 7% of total expenditures of $700 billion which puts it at around $49 billion / year.
In Germany it's reverse. In the typical case the waiter verbally abuses the paying customer. Like when are not friendly enough to the waiter. Or you only can pay with credit card
I think I get 15 paid sick days a year, 15 vacation days with an extra day added each year, and 12 lieu days that I get off but no pay. This was the first year having it. What a difference it makes to my mental well being. I spread my days off out so I get lots of 3 day weekends and I feel a lot less burnt out. The sick days are a big one. If my kid is sick or I hurt myself or I have a bad tooth or just feeling down or something just call in at least half hour before my shift and it’s all good.
From a European perspective, it boggles my mind that sick days can be limited. What happens when you run out? You get fired for not coming into work, I imagine?
The Family and Medical Leave Act protects most (IANAL) employees for up to 12 weeks of unpaid time off per year at the federal level. At some point Americans with Disabilities Act protections kick in and after a few months of a serious illness temporary or permanent disability insurance comes into play.
It's not the dystopia its made out to be but even in the best states the inconsistencies between the layers of protection and myriad of rules cause a lot of people to fall through the cracks.
While this is true technically, in practice many companies will make an excuse to fire employees who take "too many" sick days. Like if there are layoffs, the sickly employee will be in the round of layoffs.
Also, if you work a service job and miss too many shifts due to illness, they'll just fire you for being unreliable.
* The limitation is the other way around, they don't want to give a single pool of 30 paid days off, you're limited to 15 vacation days
* If you have a good relationship with your manager, it's a soft limit and they'll allow you to go over as long as it's not abused
* If you're part-time/hourly, trading days/hours with a co-worker
Our HR department combined vacation days and sick days into one pool several years ago when they realized most of us were faking sick days to get more vacation time.
In Europe typically there are unlimited sick days, but the company has insurance to cover your salary after a certain number of days per year. You typically need a doctor's note after 3 consecutive days, and if you are abusing the system the insurance company (who is a pro at this) will quickly investigate and terminate / claw back their coverage.
That's a good deal. I'm in the UK and I've never had anything like that. I currently have ten paid sick days per year and after that it is Statutory Sick Pay (SSP, £96.35 pe week) for an additional 26 weeks. SSP is better than nothing but it's not great.
Looking back, all of me previous jobs have offered 10 days sick pay and I've always assumed it is a de-facto standard over here.
From European perspective, yes the sick days absolutely can be limited - see Poland or Czechia. When you run out you better have acquaintances among doctors and at the appropriate public offices. Otherwise you're sick, fired, no income.
Well if I ran out of sick days I can use some vacation days and if that ran out I could get a doctors note and go off on medical leave. It is like unemployment in a sense and I would be eligible for I believe 55% my wage while off. If I just needed a few extra days and not really wanted to deal with the hassle of medical leave paperwork I am in good standing with my employer and would simply need to ask and could have some unpaid sick days for sure. So essentially the 15 days is just what you can take off and be paid my the company. Also not all companies offer these benefits I work in health care.
> There used to be some sort of a trade-off, there used to be a ton of jobs that didn't pay well, but they were not miserable places to work at,
I think protecting this enviroment is also important for middle class if only for selfish reasons. As if you have the fall-back of 'stuff it I'll go flip burgers for a while' then middle class jobs are more protected as employees know some people will walk out for the lower paid but stress free job as its an option, which in turn flows up the chain at each level.
The problem I have with that is getting the actual number. Employers aren’t sharing that and I don’t know how much I actually cost my employer per year. I can guess by summing my salary, PTO, healthcare, taxes, etc. but that’s probably grossly inaccurate. Is also Very hard to comparison shop companies benefits packages when many are very reticent to hand out the official rate and coverage documents including their contributions.
All of that costs money. Are we as customers willing to pay for it? While a lot of us on HN can afford the price increases, not everyone else can.
I have a feeling that wage increases will come, but there will be less employees and the remaining better paid employees will be augmented with technology in order to serve more customers ie more automation
When a deli closes up shop because they can't afford to hire people - it isn't for lack of customers interested in food. Food is a basic necessity that people will consume in as many varied forms as budget and tastes allow.
The notion that a deli would simply close up shop because they couldn't hire people at a wage they deemed reasonable means they either couldn't be bothered to try higher prices/quality - or for some reason they are unable to (e.g. high debt service costs). The building sitting empty and idle costs the business money, so it's surprising they don't at least try something.
Around here, 16” cheese pizzas have gone from “around $10” just 8 months ago to “around $15”.
Pizza places that would be jammed from 6 to 8 PM with a line for pickup are now ghost towns. The one I was in last night at 8:15, workers outnumbered customers (dine-in plus pickup).
The roast beef place that I’d frequent on a particular errand went from $6.50 for a large roast beef to $9.50. What used to be a 15-deep line at lunch is now “walk straight to the register and order”.
Customers are only willing to pay so much for food. That well isn’t infinitely deep. (Maybe some of the gap is COVID, but people are out doing plenty of other things, other restaurants seem to be doing well, and these places were jammed during the pickup-only phases of COVID, so I think pricing is a significant driver of reduced volume.)
Anecdotally this is me. I work from home 3 days a week, 2 days in office. Pre-pandemic I ate breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner in the road...2.5 hour commute. Food prices have increased 10-40% at each one of those stops. Now I eat one lunch per week out to socialize. The other 5 meals that I used to eat out are groceries I buy at the store and carry in.
The reason I was at this second-choice (also virtually abandoned) pizza place last night was that our normal/preferred pizza place had jacked up their prices so much. This one had done the same, which ensured that parking was plentiful right in front of the joint, but also meant that the owner was forlornly leaning on the empty parking meter rather than being needed inside selling pizzas.
I suspect I'll now mostly eat out when the company is keeping me on the road (and paying for it), but will overall eat a lot more at home now.
Probably healthier anyway, but this can't be good for restaurant owners and workers.
> Food is a basic necessity that people will consume in as many varied forms as budget and tastes allow.
Food has supply and demand like anything else. People have to eat, but they don't have to eat at the delhi.
For example, if they charged $50 a sandwich it would probably not work. Maybe the business owner is just being stupid, but its also not impossible that they ran the numbers and they just didn't add up. That happens sometimes in business. I havent seen their books, i dont know what the numbers on their business look like.
The most import parts don't cost money. Fixed schedules, non-punitive work rules, flexibility, treating your employees like they have value. The shift in culture began when we went from having a "personnel department" to "Human Resources" - resources are something you often extract and use up, to the point we have a special way to call out resources that are renewable.
In terms of registrations, sure, but what about surface area? I can only think of very small pockets of places where the heavy majority of establishments are part of some megacorp
"Since 2014, the latest year for which there is census data, this is no longer the case. At this point, 39.2 percent were employed at either a large or very large company, while 26.5 percent worked at mid-sized companies and 34.3 percent worked at small companies."
Atkinson & Lind ("Big is Beautiful") didn't agree with you in 2019 either, specifically taking on what they call the "myth of small business as the engine of job creation"
A business is a business if it has customers. It only stops being a business if it loses those customers or it's no longer profitable. Whole Foods was one of the 1st grocery retailers to treat their workers better, yet at the same time many people nicknamed the store as "Whole Paycheck". What customers are willing to pay for or more importantly what they are able to pay for is also an important part of the conversation.
Even letting cashiers & staff sit down would be something, but apparently business owners want modern day humans with the mentality of Victorian era maids and butlers cleaning the silverware for minimum wage and working unpaid overtime as if they expect that is what the customer wants for some reason.
As a customer, I want to see that the people who provide me the goods and services I need and want to function in society are as well treated as I would treat myself and nothing less.
If they're sitting down but upbeat and attentive, I'm satisfied.
>I think some businesses are going out of businesses because they stubbornly refuse to raise their wages
I'm skeptical that a business would choose to go out of business rather that give raises. Have you considered that margins are tighter than you think? I know small businesses like that.
>I'm skeptical that a business would choose to go out of business rather that give raises. Have you considered that margins are tighter than you think? I know small businesses like that.
I run a small business. I know other small business owners. An MBA-like focus on hyperefficiency is rare. Usually people have their views about how the world should work and act in accordance with that.
Some people will come around, but plenty of others will fail to adapt, go out of business and blame "the economy".
>It doesn't take a MBA-like focus to think "Gee..only if we had more margin, we'd pay more".
It does take razor-sharp focus and constant innovation to work out how you can increase margin, though. You can't just arbitrarily raise prices without offering any additional value and expect your business to stay alive.
And yet that's precisely what lots of businesses do: raise the prices, cut the wages, drop the product quality. Oh no, the customers start losing the brand loyalty and go to the competitors, why on Earth, those ungrateful pigs!
It seems to be especially popular in the street food business and food industry in general over here: someone thinks that surely one can produce decent <insert whatever here> at reasonable cost and earn some good profit from it, and indeed they can, the customers are happy, the business is growing a-a-and then something happens and the market self-corrects: the price grows to the level of the competitors', and the quality drops to the competitors' level too, now the "playing field" is level again (all products are more or less equally mediocre and equally expensive), wait about a year for another entrepreneur to rinse and repeat this cycle.
There must be some objective reason why that happens though I am really not sure what it is. But whatever that reason is, it seems to have been working pretty much without exceptions for the past ten years at least.
Small businesses already have a razor sharp focus otherwise they'd disappear. Literally their margins are their bread. I find your take slighly condescending but I want to give you a benefit of the doubt - what makes you think small businesses aren't focused on optmizing their margins? Just like you, I am a small business partner and know many small business owners. If you put an MBA-educated person in charge, the opposite would happen. Reading HBR doesn't make you a qualified for optimizing a restaurant business. Neither does having an MBA degree.
>Reading HBR doesn't make you a qualified for optimizing a restaurant business. Neither does having an MBA degree.
I think I understand the miscommunication now. Sorry for that!
I didn't mean to suggest that you need an MBA to run a small business, just that you need to be constantly optimising, innovating and focusing on raw numbers. I don't have an MBA, but from what I understand this is how MBAs are taught to think.
>I find your take slighly condescending but I want to give you a benefit of the doubt - what makes you think small businesses aren't focused on optmizing their margins?
Maybe it's the people we talk to? I definitely do know guys that are creative and sharp, but for every one of them there are 3 or 4 people who stubbornly refuse to adapt to changes in the market, fail to capture even low hanging fruit in terms of margin (big one is eCommerce businesses that make no effort to minimise postage costs), spend huge amounts of time on activities that bring in minimal value to the business and make no effort to expand into new product categories/markets or make use of new technology. It's just not how many people think.
Is it possible there's multiple types of small business owners, and you're talking past each other? Because I'm sure some owners know where every dime goes, like you say. But the small business I work at currently doesn't work like that.
The small business I worked at previously was closer, but the owner worked longer hours, possibly for less pay, and absolutely had more responsibilities, than I ever did working there. And I assume that led to a divided focus, and in turn, not being able to focus solely on optimizing every dollar.
To be clear, you’re arguing that companies pay more when they increase their margin? The rest of this thread is out of touch for thinking otherwise? I don’t know, that definitely sounds like MBA-brain to me.
What's exceedingly common is an focus on what they think is efficiency (or really, what they see as "waste") which they think makes them a shrewd, smart, savvy business owner.
Distrust in their employees coupled with excessive monitoring on consumables and the like, I think is the most common.
I've patronized, worked at, or know people who worked at places where the employees are doing everything they can to keep a business running despite the owner....often doing what they can to keep said owner from getting their hands too deep into daily operations or in contact with customers.
>Have you considered that margins are tighter than you think?
If they can't give a decent wage [1] then they were not a viable business to begin with, regardless whether they can find some poor souls to work for them. If it takes a mandatory minimum wage to reveal that and bring their demise, so be it - let them stop putting a band-aid on part of the economy and have better businesses take their place.
[1] Which is not the same as: a wage someone will capitulate and agree to work for - there are always e.g. unregistered immigrants, single mothers working 2 jobs, people in emergecy desperately needing anything they can get, kids who just see it as a temp gig to get some pocket money but otherwise live with their parents, and so on, that are desparate for near substinence - or even below substinence...
"If they can't give a decent wage [1] then they were not a viable business to begin with"
Yep. 1000%. If your workers need to be on any form of government assistance, you're being subsidized.
Mr. Factory Owner does all sorts of bullshit like paying unlivable wages, not having any employees working over the number of hours at which they'd have to pay benefits, and so on.
But guess who's always got enough money to donate to republican and libertarian campaigns, and has very strong opinions about 'pulling yourself up by your bootstraps' and how wasteful government assistance is?
Restraunts are high turnover businesses, as in most new owners don't make it more than 2 years. Many small businesses are owned by people without much knowledge or experience outside of that business. Very little classical education/degrees. The only businesses that thrive become survivor bias, they believe what worked before is what will work now, not realizing that markets do change.
I can perfectly see a dysfunctional small company draining their business away by just not changing. Happens all the time on Kitchen Nightmares.
In fact, restaurants are pretty much the pathological case of small businesses: they're a lot of work and a high percentage of them lose money. If your deli was already losing money, I can imagine a lot of owners deciding not to throw good money after bad.
You would be surprised. I've lost count of the number of small businesses I've seen where employees go unpaid or are underpaid to 'save the business' while the boss makes no such sacrifices.
Had to help a number of people applying to the local equivalent of a labour small claims court.
One could argue the move to continue unemployment payments / covid payments is a strategy to "raise minimum wage" without actually having to pass any policy to do so. Politically it's brilliant, you gain the support of your voter base in 2yrs with the assumption that "cheap employers" will simply go out of business because nobody will work for them. And your more conservative base will champion you for "resisting to raise minimum wage".
I for one support raising minimum wage, but the automation / negative outcomes of menial labor being too expensive to hire for will happen whether or not the official minimum wage is increased. UBI is another debate entirely, however I'd also argue that UBI in time harms poor people more than it really helps them and just enriches huge companies and land-lords.
>...but the automation / negative outcomes of menial labor being too expensive to hire for will happen whether or not the official minimum wage is increased.
This is true, but obviously the rate at which this happens will matter.
In 1900, 41 percent of the US workforce was employed in agriculture. Due to increasing use of technology, 70 years later only 4 percent of the labor force worked in agriculture. If that loss of jobs had happened in say 20 years instead of 70 years, it obviously would have been a much more painful transition.
Perhaps depressed wages are partly to blame for the lack of automation in the current economy. If there is labor scarcity it may unlock new innovations by forcing market participants to find more productive uses of labor.
Labor force participation has been falling for a long time as labor sellers (employees) fail to find an adequate price for their labor from employers (the buyer). Many economists assumed this was the fault of the labor seller for not having skills attractive to buyers. It's also possible that in certain segments employers were using labor in-efficiently, or simply miss-pricing the value of a worker.
Which is a long winded way of saying that a higher minimum wage may bring more labor into the market, while simultaneously forcing businesses to leverage automation to improve the productivity of said labor.
"Many economists assumed this was the fault of the labor seller for not having skills attractive to buyers"
Given the massive redistribution of wealth in the US for the last half a century it's pretty clear that's not true, and that what's really been going on is businesses have been squeezing "labor sellers" to death.
Absolutely this. Wages have been depressed for a long time which has severely hampered innovation. Historically the black death labor shortage led to the renaissance.
The problem with both unemployment payments and UBI is, that someone has to pay them, and (in case of the first) they stop at some time.
If you get X money per month of unemployment and X+20% to work, then yeah, if it's not a fulfilling work (and let's be honest, what work at that price is fulfilling), you'll rather stay at home. Once the "free money" dries up, people will be forced to take the shitty jobs too, but due to many failed businesses, there will be even less jobs available, and this skews the jobs-vs-workers ratio, making wages even lower.
Making it easier (and cheaper) to start a business would create more jobs, raising the price of work, and replace the shitty jobs with better one (in terms of pay and conditions).
Yep, and in states with lots of illegal immigration the actual price of "labor" is heavily depressed since they're willing to work for basically anything.
If it's depressed it's because business owners who hire undocumented immigrants (often knowingly, even assisting with GC/visa fraud to pass I9 verification) are never, ever fined or punished.
I bartended at a Mexican restaurant in USA around the Great Recession. The owners absolutely knowingly employed illegal immigrants.
Interestingly, the illegal immigrants generally got paid way more per hour (~30% higher) and also generally paid taxes via ITIN number. Eventually our restaurant got “raided” and the owners called around to find them new jobs at other places around town.
One guy lived with me for awhile. He eventually went back to Mexico because he saved a bunch of money and wanted to spend it on a real degree/career. The universities in our area told him they’d take his money and let him audit classes but wouldn’t be able to give him any proper documentation like a transcript or degree.
Enforcement isn't a farce, its just focused on workers because employers are powerful and workers aren't.
The reason republicans are so hardline on immigration is because "illegal" workers are really easy to coerce and exploit.
They don't call the health department when you make them shit in a hole in the field. They don't call OSHA when you deny them access to water out in the field. They don't call the attorney general when you pay them by what they pick, or only start counting their hours after they've walked half an hour to the field they're picking, and stop paying them the second they stop picking instead of when they get back to their vehicle...because you're too cheap to provide a truck or bus and they'll walk for free. They don't call the police when one of the supervisors smacks them around for accidentally damaging some equipment. Etc.
> Enforcement isn't a farce, its just focused on workers because employers are powerful and workers aren't.
I don't think many companies are powerful against ICE, especially small restaurants... there are probably political reasons why they choose to target employees and not employers.
Completely agree, this is why where I grew up in TX many of the business owners who are stout conservatives are basically complete hypocrites since they hire illegals! Tbh I strongly advocate to grant citizenship or work visas to people from other countries who want to work, however the democrats still benefit year after year by kicking the dreamers down the road and never actually changing the immigration system.
If we replaced every millenial deadbeat who complains about how hard it is to be a barista with a hard working immigrant our country would be better off!
Disagree, many progressives totally also expected prices to rise.
The alternative of forcing people to go to work while covid-19 sick, or being laid off and facing total abject poverty, and such... well not very attractive.
Prices & wages going up was going to be inevitable with inflation, which was on the plate, even if unemployment was never expanded and we forced the working poor to work, or eat our of dumpsters.
Yep, but at the end of the day anyone who's trying to build wealth or have anything left for retirement gets fucked by inflation. People who are spendthrift and receiving UBI or unemployment payments (long term) were never trying to do that anyways and their payments in theory would increase with inflation.
I'm a supporter of the idea of UBI but I just can't see the incentives panning out realistically.
But price inflation is the policy goal regardless of minimum wage or UBI. In fact, government spending makes for better inflation in that it is spread around the economy, rather than lending based inflation that only shows up in CPI after it sends assets through the roof.
Could you go into more detail here? My head is still slow to digest economics concepts like this, but this is something I certainly haven't read about before.
The Federal Reserve's mandate is to make sure there is a steady level of gradual price inflation. The main way they accomplish this is to lower interest rates, so that more money gets lent out into circulation. But this new money only affects the Consumer Price Index via housing assets and other big ticket items that get financed - it doesn't directly bid up the demand for consumer goods.
Whereas if the federal government creates more money (via debt) and gives it out direct aid to the people, it goes right into the consumer market. Prices rise across the board, getting the CPI to the target level without the Federal Reserve having to lower rates.
There will always be inflation as long as the monetary policy is to create inflation. But government spending at least chooses somewhere explicit for it to end up, rather than the default option of just inflating financial assets (which we've had quite enough of).
Am I the only person who thinks restaurant prices are pretty low? I'm sure they could go up quite a bit. Lunch out costs me maybe £15. Surely that could be £20 or so?
Surely it depends on the income level? There are people for which a $20 USD lunch everyday or close, is nothing to write home about.
In fact their time can be far more valuable (into what money they can command by doing some extra work), so that the opportunity cost between cooking and buying lunch to make it not worth to cook.
I'm just pointing out that the demand for eating out is highly elastic. If the restaurant industry as a whole raises prices relative to background inflation, then overall sales will fall and some will go out of business.
The probability of the food from a restaurant being sufficiently tasty/nutritious is way too low compared to the effort required to make it at home for it to be worth spending 20GBP eating out all the time.
I also simply choose to eat out a maximum of 1 or 2 times a month. I can afford 20GBP, I just have better options.
Like with everything, all that matters is whales. The kind of person who eats lunch out every day doesn't care if it's 20 GBP or whatever, so they'll keep paying whatever it costs to eat whatever they want. What'll happen is places without enough whales, like low foot traffic, will poop out or become ghost kitchens.
No, you're not.
But I guess it depends on what you call "restaurant" and "lunch out".
Some people will basically eat every working day in a restaurant. So more than £/$/€10 will be seen as expensive.
Some people, like me, will go to[1] a restaurant once or twice a month. In this case, £/$/€50 will be totally acceptable. And giving what is sold in places where you eat for £/$/€10, they will avoid going to those places in the first place.
So I guess restaurants that sells food are having a hard time, but restaurants that sells a service have a different story to tell.
[1] See how in the first case it's "to eat in a restaurant" and in the second it's "to go to a restaurant". To me that's the big difference : when you are here to fulfill a natural need (eating), you don't want to pay a lot for it, while you are here to have a nice time out, you will gladly pay more.
It doesn't take much to open a small business. There's a reason many small businesses fail, and often times it is the result of rather foolish decisions and ideals.
Because if everyone raises their prices, the wage increase then effectively makes no difference.
If everyone raises wages, they have to raise prices. For the restaurant, this means they have to charge more for the same service, and they have to pay more for their supply chain (because they also increased their prices).
For the worker, that means they will pay more for things and services they need/want, because every other business will suffer from the same issues and be forced to raise their prices.
All this to say, the worker's purchasing power decreases if everyone raises wages, and that is the definition of inflation.
Citation needed. I can find plenty of studies that show it doesn’t. [0] Raising wages at the bottom doesn’t increase prices across the board, and so this benefits folks at the lower end more than it hurts.
> Higher prices for goods and services—stemming from the higher wages of workers paid at or near the minimum wage, such as those providing long-term health care—would contribute to increases in federal spending.
>Because if everyone raises their prices, the wage increase then effectively makes no difference.
Not really. The relative elasticity of various goods and services (including labour) will determine which parties ultimately shoulder the cost. The additional costs could cut through margins or they could be passed on.
> Because if everyone raises their prices, the wage increase then effectively makes no difference.
That’s only if everyone makes about the same, which is less and less true due to rising wealth inequality. As it stands now, there are people making $200k/year and people making $30k/year, raising prepared food prices isn’t going to chip off everyone’s income the same way.
A rise in interest rates would have much more effect on upper income buying power than a $5 increase in the cost of lunch.
> Because if everyone raises their prices, the wage increase then effectively makes no difference.
Depends heavily on specifics. Like, which goods and services? How much of someone's purchases do they represent? Are they substitutable? Restaurants deal in the substitutable and minority part.
The relationship between per-unit price and labor cost per unit also matters quite a bit. If labor costs per unit are small, it may not take a big per-unit price bump in order to give labor a substantial raise.
It's interesting that nearly everything that might benefit the lower and lower-middle classes seems to lead, inexorably, to inflation: UBI, a living wage, decent benefits, the list goes on. One might almost conclude that inflation has become a lazy boogie man, to be trotted out for propagandist purposes whenever change is suggested.
I mean this is HN where the solution to the problem is obvious to a software developer but invisible to someone with decades of experience in the restaurant industry.
Well, all businesses run operations dif and have dif margins, so let's not forget that. I run a recruiting company. From our data a few things have popped up. First, people want higher wages in the lower wage industries. They are asking for $15-20 per hour. Second, lot of these people don't want to go back to the same labor jobs they had - they want to do something different. the problem with this is that they want to get paid more than they were making before for jobs in which they have no exp. For those that think the worker knows they can get more money, it's not the majority. They only know if someone told them. A lot of low wage workers who risked it and stuck it out during the pandemic are upset they really didn't get wage increases. Their employers sure didn't offer it to them. And now they want to quit and get their benefits like the rest. There is a lot going on here. One group though that does want to work are the teenagers. Issue is that they want $20 per hour...this fiasco is probably going to continue for a while.
Your comment is informative, but, come on. This "fiasco" is supply in demand in action. When it (occasionally) favours the workers, it doesn't deserve to be described so negatively.
Well, sure. Just keep in mind how supply chains are working right now. Fiasco / failure - well, most workers didn't even get raises yearly to keep up with annual inflation. I'd say that's negative, although the market "working". Where is the equilibrium then? The balance will be found but at what detriment to society on numerous levels? How many people don't have healthcare? How many people work three jobs? All this is catching up and to me, it's a fiasco...will we see social unrest because of it, or better yet, have we in some ways? What about people finding purpose in life and taking pride in their careers at these lower levels of labor. Compared to 100 years ago maybe we are better off, but I think there could be at least an 80% improvement in the system.
Oh yea, and although we have made "progress", we must all hail the great economy structures we currently have that leaves out environmental externalities. This wonderful society and world where almost all living systems are in decline. To stay on topic with restaurant workers. Remember how hard those people in the kitchen work, many of them who don't speak english and make a set hourly rate, while all the people in the front of the house make massive tips that they don't have to share. just sayin...
Why shouldn't a teenager make 20 an hour? At 16 your looking down the road at 2 very expensive options.
1) Go to college and earn a degree for 120-240k dollars
2) Start paying rent, owning your own car, healthcare, food, and leisure activities.
Both of these are expensive directions to take. It used to be that someone could pay for school with a summer job, why shouldn't it be now? It doesn't appear the education changed at all.
The inability to pay for college is more an artifact of the insane increase in college prices than it is the pay. Inflation hasn't been kind on minimum wage, but the effect is less drastic than the increase in college prices.
Also, as others have pointed out, teenagers tend to be less reliable employees. One part of that is that they don't need the job, at least in an "I might starve and be homeless if I get fired" sense. Another part is that if they're only working for the summer, they're unlikely to have time to become exemplary employees.
As a society, I agree it makes sense for teenagers to be able to pay for their own education with reasonable work. As a business, I don't think I would see that as my problem to solve directly, and probably not one I could even afford to fix even if I wanted to.
The average in-state tuition in the US (so sticking to the cheaper side) is $10,440/year. There's roughly 10 weeks of summer break, so 400 hours of work assuming a 40 hour work week. You need to make $26/hr after taxes and save every penny of your paycheck to afford that tuition bill. Average out of state tuition is $26,820/year; you'd need to make $67/hr after taxes to pay for that over summer break.
Again, those are after-tax numbers, so you'd have to make north of $30/hour pre-tax to be able to pay for in-state tuition. I just don't see that happening.
It's not that he "shouldn't". Rather, many businesses cannot afford to both pay teenage employees $20/h, and also to not raise the prices. Some businesses can raise prices just fine, but others are not able to, as the customers will stop buying at higher price point. For example, if all groceries doubled their food prices, I'd still buy food (though maybe less than before), and likely spend more on it than I used to. However, if all restaurants doubled their prices, I'd pretty much stop eating out altogether, except special occasions.
However if all groceries doubled their prices then all workers would demand higher wages to compensate. Other businesses would need to become more efficient with their labor or reduce margins. In the short-term this means CEOs get paid less, and investors see higher ROI in labor efficient business models.
It's obvious that teenagers can't make 1k/hr without breaking the economy - but I don't see any reason why $20/hr would be outside of historic norms. In 1981 the minimum wage was ~$3.25/hr, translating to ~9.71/hr today. Given the advances in technology that have driven a more than 2x increase in real economic productivity over that period why shouldn't the starting wage be $20/hr for teenagers?
All workers demand higher wages at all times. Workers demanding higher wages stronger and harder won't raise aggregate wages by much, as there is only so much that is actually being produced, and aggregate wages can pretty much only be increased through increase in aggregate supply: the margins are already pretty thin, especially in retail and food service business, and the CEO pay is pretty small component in grand scheme of things (CEOs also don't actually consume much of their earnings, they invest most of it, so you can't actually transfer much of consumption from them to workers).
> Given the advances in technology that have driven a more than 2x increase in real economic productivity over that period why shouldn't the starting wage be $20/hr for teenagers?
The growth in economic productivity hasn't been uniformly distributed across industries, and it's been pretty low exactly in the industries depending on cheap, low skill labor. What are the advances in technology between now and 1981 that made restaurants 2x more productive?
Workers do not demand appropriate wages commensurate with their value at all times. I recall making $7.25/hr and having colleagues "doing well" by making $7.50/hr. At the time it was not uncommon for "good" employers in the service sector to promise something along the lines of a $.25/hr raise every 6 months to a year.
Now the problem with this is that the effect is to lower expectations for wages by taking advantage of financial literacy. Someone working for them for 4 years receiving a raise every 6 months earns $2/hr more. The employer/seasoned employees point to this and say that a starting wage $2/hr higher is unreasonable. Unfortunately the fixed rate wage increases diminish over time, and if you think that moving into management/higher level positions would entitle you to more money... then I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.
When employers mirror this strategy or take other similar approaches, then you end up with wages that are depressed relative to the value of the labor being provided ( or the opportunity value if that labor was applied to other activities, or used more efficiently ).
> I don’t think credit cards make a restaurant more productive.
They certainly reduce the potential for theft/shrinkage! It used to be that you needed a trusted business manager/employee to manage the register, now anyone can do it and it's much harder for someone to siphon funds. All transactions are now viewable to management to more easily see what's selling and what's not.
If all restaurants doubled their prices, but, at the same time, paid their employees a proper wage (and made that public) and removed tipping, they could effectively raise their prices 20% (the expected tip) without any impact on the customers.
McDonalds manages to make profits in EU/AU/NZ/CA etc while (mnostly) complying with local minimum wages and conditions. The Big Mac index shows that their actual prices are within a narrow band compared to the US.
They (and other megacorps like Walmart) exploit both their workers and their customers, who end up paying the workers via the inefficient means of tax credits and poverty relief instead of the corporations/businesses being required to pay proper wages and contribute to their local communities via taxation.
> If all restaurants doubled their prices, but, at the same time, paid their employees a proper wage (and made that public) and removed tipping, they could effectively raise their prices 20% (the expected tip) without any impact on the customers.
If they doubled they prices, they could increase them by 20%? Huh?
You picked a total outlier, a very prestigious public school in one of the most expensive states. University of Utah, for example, is a relatively good school and costs about $8k / year for in state tuition.
University of Utah costs 23k per year in-state with a total cost of 27k per year including indirect costs. Out of state is 43k/yr excluding indirect costs.
If you looked at this 5-10 years ago your numbers were probably right. But interest rates are low and borrowers can borrow far too much money.
Have you ever employed a teenager? They lack life exp. They lack confidence. They really don't know much at all about anything on a professional level. Sometimes you get good ones, but the majority are not sticking around for long or are doing a poor job. Your customers wont return with bad experiences and low quality. College is a scam for most. Put these young kids in debt for most of their life to earn a degree for which they are not even into. Better off going to trade school. And by the way, the lack of labor in skilled trades is astounding right now. Making $20/hr is better than $12/hr, but it's not really going to make a big dent in your college debt.
edit: talk to any large employer and ask them about employing the younger generation. All of them will say they have no work ethic and sit on their phones the whole time. You know what else, they think they should be paid $100k/hr and be millionaires...so try managing a bunch of people with that attitude and try not to go crazy. These companies are now reaching out to the older crowd for which they used to discriminate against because the young people suck.
> talk to any large employer and ask them about employing the younger generation. All of them will say they have no work ethic and sit on their phones the whole time.
“The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.” - Socrates
One would expect in that case lots of laborers with wages at the minimum, and many more looking for work. What we're seeing in the description is not that.
I reckon the jobs are not on offer because the restaurants only want to pay a small amount (they have razor thin margins and an employee costs more than just salary [workers comp, insurance, equipment, liability etc]).
Previously people accepted the small amount, but now they aren't because they're (currently still) being paid to stay home in most cases.
I do agree with you that a minimum wage potentially has unintended negative consequences for those looking to work but do not have valuable skills to offer. An employer may make do without rather than hire a day laborer for instance at an expensive rate. We might disagree on whether negative consequences are inevitable.
By your assessment, though, it seems the seller's market is not caused by the minimum wage, but by COVID relief packages?
Also, I'm sorry you're getting downvoted. I only downvote if someone goes against community guidelines, and not if I simply disagree with them
I think it is important to distinguish a couple of things.
If there are businesses out there, like maybe McDonalds or Walmart, who are easily able to pay $20 per hour instead of $7.50, and are choosing not to do so because of a desire for even larger profits, then yes, this is evidence of a mild seller's market for labor and also a lack of market savvy on behalf of McDonalds/Walmart.
If those corps are already offering $20 an hour and benefits and still people are not showing up to work, then it is a roaring seller's market for labor, and must in theory be caused by some other external source that is causing laborers to feel $20 is too low. Where are they going, what are they doing? Are they taking the opportunity to pursue a degree? Are they staying at home playing video games? Have they all found a job making $42 an hour talking on the phone at home? We would need the data to answer these questions.
But in the exact case of restaurants, I genuinely think most of them do not have the money. I haven't ever in my life met a restaurant owner who has a stable financial situation with a paid off mortgage, nice car, and 3 kids put through college already having become cardiologists or something like that. But I've met a lot of other people who have done all that. And I've met a lot of restaurant owners too.
I think that all they can afford is $7.50-$12.50 an hour in most cases, with no benefits. And now that city centers have seen a good portion of their residents with lots of disposable income move away, I suspect that most restaurants have lost the financial base that used to support them.
I saw a video of a restaurant owner during the pandemic in NYC who cut his staff from 45 to 3 and was just barely able to pull it together and survive. Was he paying his people more than $15 an hour? Don't know.
So the owner who has operated a cut throat, extremely demanding, razor thin margin for years folds because they don’t understand basic labor supply and demand?
Keep in mind this person has mostly likely done in depth analysis on how to make their most popular item at the same quality but for 2% less of some expensive ingredient.
I know one phenomenal restaurant owner who spent an entire year to get the cost of their paper products from 2% of COGS to 1%. Bonuses to managers, trash audits, the whole thing.
You really think people like that couldn’t figure out raise salaries and prices?
Do you know whats going to happen here? Panera, Qdoba, and 5 Guys. Just a monoculture of terrible bland food. Only the big players with economies of scale can charge less and pay the same as smaller restaurants.
The answer is yes. In a functioning modern capitalist economy, workers must be able to choose if and where they work.
A good way to think about this is to frame the question on yourself: should I be forced to work for less than a living wage? Should the state subsidise my employer in order for her to underpay me?
What do you think will happen when the chains beat out the smaller restaurants due to economies of scale?
They will raise prices because there are no competitors and lower wages because there are no alternatives. They will collude. They will extract the maximum economic value out of every community that they are in. Enjoy your nothing
> I would rather have nothing but chain restaurants owned by megacorps than have people working for less than a living wage.
Those megacorps do everything they can to pay as little taxes as possible and get as much money out of the country as they can in the form of off-shore corporations that hold the trademarks for said corp, the US subsidiary of which pays it massive 'licensing' fees.
They're also the worst at keeping money within a local economy. They use other large corporations as much as possible for 'efficiency', but it has the side effect of meaning that said business doesn't spend money for services anywhere in the local economy. Joe Drain Buster doesn't get business from Five Guys having a grease clog; some nation-wide plumbing services company does. Maybe they contract out Joe Drain Buster, but not before taking their cut.
It gets worse. The larger the employer the easier it is for that employer to grift the local, county, state, and federal government for freebies, tax breaks, eminent domain gimmes, friendly legislation and regulations, etc.
Witness: Amazon and Walmart. Companies that generated a handful of people with unimaginable wealth who fight tooth and nail to treat their employees like shit.
Jeff Bezos has a net worth of $200BN as of a month ago. The average network for a resident of Mississippi is slightly over $17,000. That means it would take roughly 11.5M Mississippi residents to equal his net worth.
I think your anecdote isn't necessarily reflective of all restaurant owners:
(1) not everyone leases, some family businesses own the land and has significantly better margins at the trade-off of opportunity cost on the real estate,
(2) some businesses are explicitly there to fulfil visa or immigration obligations, so profitability isn't a priority,
(3) in less dense areas, the general laws of competition don't apply as much pressure as SF or NYC.
Don't forget lifestyle businesses. I actually know multiple high-income people (lawyers, doctors) who just let their partners run businesses for the sake of doing something during the day; they lose money every year which offsets the joint income, and is better than having their partner sit around at home and spending money on something else.
> Panera, Qdoba, and 5 Guys. Just a monoculture of terrible bland food.
Compare with the food in the US say, 40 years ago. Whatever you feel about Panera & Qdoba, they are not bland by comparison with food the way it was within my lifetime.
I don't like 5 Guys much, because I'm not much of a burger eater, but they too are generally of significantly higher quantity than most burger outlets from 40 years ago.
Any other advanced economy (eg EU, AU, NZ etc) proves that
"Do you know whats going to happen here? Panera, Qdoba, and 5 Guys. Just a monoculture of terrible bland food. Only the big players with economies of scale can charge less and pay the same as smaller restaurants."
>I think some businesses are going out of businesses because they stubbornly refuse to raise their wages.
That would mean the people running those businesses were in need of psychological help, it is pretty much crazy to close your business because you refuse to raise wages.
I propose a counter explanation - your business has a very tight margin - if you raise wages you cannot afford to continue in business unless you raise prices. If there is a competing business nearby and you raise prices you lose customers to competitor and you will have to go out of business - unless of course competitor also raises prices.
You and competitor(s) sit around waiting to see who will raise prices first, probably one of you closes up because they don't have enough workers.
The one who remains open gets customers, because of extra income from customers they might be able to raise wages. At any rate they can probably raise wages because competitor that closed can't just reopen without any down time.
By not raising wages, keeping your employees and staying open you will definitely go under. Maybe you cannot outcompete the other business but by not even trying to go open you have already lost.
There is always convenience customers, loyal customers and opportunity customers who do not care about the 2-3% difference in price.
I'm not saying you are wrong, it could definitely be this case, just that there might be more factors to consider.
>by not even trying to go open you have already lost.
sorry, I thought the store was open until it closed down and posted its reasons?
The problem with following the don't raise wages strategy and wait for your competitor to do it is if they outlast you - you reach the have to close position first.
>By not raising wages, keeping your employees and staying open you will definitely go under.
unless something changes that will make it profitable to raise wages.
>There is always convenience customers, loyal customers and opportunity customers who do not care about the 2-3% difference in price.
In a small margins business this might not be enough to keep you afloat.
exactly, but unfortunately the way to get out of a prisoner's dilemma situation is to communicate with the other prisoners and to trust each other - communication about prices is illegal and who trusts their competitor anyway?
Maybe some a-b testing could be fun. If you want service to operate on starvation wages you stand in line A or sit at the right side, if you want fast service without anyone spitting on your onion rings take line B or sit on the left.
>I joked that maybe the owner was an old cahoot who remembered when a soda was $0.05 and there was no way they were going to raise their hourly wages to $15 or more.
But otherwise had no issue jacking their prices up to the heavens...
I think that for a lot of businesses, it's a question of what will happen when extended unemployment ends in September.
If employees are going to flood the market and you can keep paying the wages you were paying pre-pandemic, then it makes sense to hold out, since if you raise wages now, you can't really reduce them later. You lose out on sales now because you're short staffed, but you keep your costs low in perpetuity.
On the other hand, if that's not going to happen, then clearly you should raise wages and prices now, so you don't miss out on those sales.
At this point, though, I think the folks who raise wages/prices because they think the latter case is true are going to cause a significant enough rise in the effective minimum wage (not the legal one, but the least you can practically pay and actually get employees) that everyone's going to have to raise wages anyway.
It's an interesting game theory problem - if everyone's going to hold out on pay raises, then you should too. If a critical mass of people are going to raise wages in the next few months, though, then you should raise wages ASAP to get the best employees and not miss out on a summer of sales. Luckily this appears to be one of the rare game theory problems that'll actually work out well for the little guy.
This argument works only if the labor and jobs don't have fungible alternatives. But while in-store retail and dine-in restaurants have been suffering, online-order retail and food delivery have been taking off. Plenty of workers are turning to the gig economy. At least there the apps aren't constantly degrading you, even if they are depreciating your car.
> The States that ended the extend benefits have lower unemployment rates.
Your “example” is of a state that had a lower unemployment than the national average before ending extended unemployment benefits seeing not significantly different than the national rate of decline in unemployment in the brief period since cutting extended benefits, not an example of more rapid drop after cutting benefits.
Of course you have lower rates of people collecting unemployment when you end unemployment extensions. You can lower it to 0% by killing the program altogether.
Unemployment rates refer to the share of workers who are out of work, not the share who are receiving benefits - i.e. it’s the rate at which people are unemployed, not the rate at which they are “on unemployment”
Not sure how it is in the US but where I live restaurant owners are wealthy entrepreneurs driving around expensive SUVs.
Every sunny day the restaurants and bars are packed from morning until midnight.
If they need more staff they have the money to pay better wages. That's how every other industry deals with labour shortages.
In the US restaurants are very cutthroat and what you describe only applies only to the most popular restaurants. It’s trivial to start a restaurant in the US so many people do an fail terribly after a year.
Restaurants are the worst fucking industry to invest in.
It's not that businesses stubbornly refuse to raise wages - it's that they can't afford to. A lot of local small businesses were barely staying afloat even before March 2020.
In high school, I worked at a fast food joint to make a little extra money. There were no expectations to pay rent or other essentials. But you'll say that it's not kids working these jobs, so we need to provide a livable wage. What about getting these people skills for better jobs? I'd rather attack that problem than make Wendy's sandwich maker a viable career.
You realize wages based on supply and demand are very accurate at measuring exactly how much value to “society” a job brings? You may disagree but economic equilibrium in the price of a common good such as an agile coach is telling you exactly how much value society believes that job brings.
>You realize wages based on supply and demand are very accurate at measuring exactly how much value to “society” a job brings?
If that were true, then DMV employees would have to pay for the privilege of working there.
In all seriousness, though, there are huge swathes of people working in bullshit jobs, and many of them are well-compensated. There are power dynamics, misinformation and far too much complexity at play to simply say "society places more value on the work performed by people in higher paying jobs".
That's a nice abstraction, but actual wages are determined individuals convincing other individuals they should be paid a specific wage. That's about their power to extract value.
Value creation can be used to increase that power, but there are many organizations (picture the NCAA or your favorite employer of H-1B1s maybe?) that have put in the hard work to make sure the work of value creation doesn't give individuals too much power to extract value.
Yet we have recently had the interesting experience of many low paid workers suddenly being deemed “essential workers”. I don’t think any agile coaches were essential workers.
There are many jobs that are low paid because they are low skilled and have low barriers to entry, but otherwise very useful to society e.g. refuse collectors.
This is not a great hill to die on, but I’ll bite a bit.
If I fundamentally disagree with fast food as objects of consumption than I might think every job in this field should not be viable. There are costs to society (“externalities”) that places like Wendy’s are not held responsible for (obesity epidemic).
All said, Sandwich Maker is a viable career, to me, if its in a boutique/gourmet shop where the food is prepared from scratch and with precision care. The prices will be higher, extra skill is involved, and then the Maker can command a higher wage.
The meme of whether or not fast food is a viable/respectful career is just a manifestation of more fundamental problems with growth optimized capitalism.
>There are costs to society (“externalities”) that places like Wendy’s are not held responsible for (obesity epidemic).
This is a valid point. Western society should be making an effort to ensure that there are cheap, convenient, healthier fast food options like what you see in Asia.
My comment was more in response to the parent, who was drawing a distinction between "real jobs" and "entry level jobs". I believe we should treat people in low-skill jobs with more respect, as they actually produce things we need and want as a society. Many people in "real jobs", on the other hand, produce (or facilitate the production of) nothing.
“There is an art to the business of making sandwiches which it is given to few ever to find the time to explore in depth. It is a simple task, but the opportunities for satisfaction are many and profound: choosing the right bread for instance. The Sandwich Maker had spent many months in daily consultation and experiment with Grarp the baker and eventually they had between them created a loaf of exactly the consistency that was dense enough to slice thinly and neatly, while still being light, moist and having that fine nutty flavour which best enhanced the savour of roast Perfectly Normal Beast flesh.
There was also the geometry of the slice to be refined: the precise relationships between the width and height of the slice and also its thickness which would give the proper sense of bulk and weight to the finished sandwich: here again, lightness was a virtue, but so too were firmness, generosity and that promise of succulence and savour that is the hallmark of a truly intense sandwich experience.
The proper tools, of course, were crucial, and many were the days that the Sandwich Maker, when not engaged with the Baker at his oven, would spend with Strinder the Tool Maker, weighing and balancing knives, taking them to the forge and back again. Suppleness, strength, keenness of edge, length and balance were all enthusiastically debated, theories put forward, tested, refined, and many was the evening when the Sandwich Maker and the Tool Maker could be seen silhouetted against the light of the setting sun and the Tool Maker’s forge making slow sweeping movements through the air trying one knife after another, comparing the weight of this one with the balance of another, the suppleness of a third and the handle binding of a fourth.
Three knives altogether were required. First there was the knife for the slicing of the bread: a firm, authoritative blade which imposed a clear and defining will on a loaf. Then there was the butter-spreading knife, which was a whippy little number but still with a firm backbone to it. Early versions had been a little too whippy, but now the combination of flexibility with a core of strength was exactly right to achieve the maximum smoothness and grace of spread.
The chief amongst the knives, of course, was the carving knife. This was the knife that would not merely impose its will on the medium through which it moved, as did the bread knife; it must work with it, be guided by the grain of the meat, to achieve slices of the most exquisite consistency and translucency, that would slide away in filmy folds from the main hunk of meat. The Sandwich Maker would then flip each sheet with a smooth flick of the wrist on to the beautifully proportioned lower bread slice, trim it with four deft strokes and then at last perform the magic that the children of the village so longed to gather round and watch with rapt attention and wonder. With just four more dexterous flips of the knife he would assemble the trimmings into a perfectly fitting jigsaw of pieces on top of the primary slice. For every sandwich the size and shape of the trimmings were different, but the Sandwich Maker would always effortlessly and without hesitation assemble them into a pattern which fitted perfectly. A second layer of meat and a second layer of trimmings, and the main act of creation would be accomplished.”
― Douglas Adams, Mostly Harmless
To be fair, both "sandwich" and "Wendy's" mean completely different things in Australian English!
Sandwiches typically contain fresh ingredients (we'd call a gresy heart attack patty between two buns a burger), and Wendy's is a completely different chain that sells dairy products and hot dogs.
General multitasking, team coordination, cash handling, basic restaurant dishwashing, stock management, industrial cleaning, pacifying unhappy customers, dealing with druggies and harassers, and a whole bunch of other things I've probably forgotten from when I worked fast food as a teenager.
The simplicity of each individual job means that nobody ever has just one job at a fast food place. Stick around for any amount of time and you'll get rotated through every available position.
Any of those skills can be picked up at basically any job, further they require no foundational skills to learn.
That's why the pay is low, because the skill set is widely accessible. I'm not sure why people insist that these kind of jobs are teaching valuable skills.
All that is happening is the basic process of working. They could learn it in any context, at any point in their lives. There is no justification to pay people starvation wages.
For someone that didnt go to college, seeing a 2yr stint on a resume as a fast food worker tells me more about that persons work ethic, reliability, and general sense of getting stuff done vs your avg grad.
Its not only skills but its the information being conveyed
I agree (I think), we need either free college or a livable minimum wage or both to solve this problem. Disagree that we need to have any low-paying jobs at all, but I suppose your high school could run a fast food joint for the students, if we really need that sort of thing?
The current labor shortage is purely because of the unemployment and covid benefits and being paid out to people. Why work when you get to stay home and get money doing nothing?
Well, in that industry, companies don't have obscene amounts of money from investors that they can keep the company running for years after years with 0 profits and pay people higher than average salaries and provide free drinks and gym memberships.
Yep, and when those stores and restaurants actually close down (just watch louis rossmanns videos about NYC), this means even more workers and even less workplaces, driving wages down.
My state gave restaurant owners a billion dollars during the pandemic. A billion dollars.
During the pandemic, restaurants lobbied hard as hell against restrictions and cheated at every opportunity what restrictions they were obliged to follow. Our governor ordered bars to be shut down around 9pm during a surge last year and everyone joked that was great because it meant apparently the 'rona only came out to infect people after 10pm.
I really wanted to meet a prospective date and we wanted to be as safe as possible. We scoured websites, google, and and social media for information about outdoor seating accommodations. Whatever information was available was exceedingly vague, despite it being a year into the pandemic when you'd think any savvy business owner would have information like that readily available. When restaurants had outdoor seating listed as available, most of them had seating fees and some insane minimum order requirements.
Policy has crept business in this direction by stretching wages low while maintaining the benefits of revenue of a developed society, and while there are some successful restaurants, a large amount of them aren't exactly swimming in money because the benefits of this policy are captured by the large corporations. Nobody starts a restaurant to get rich. If there is a hard snap back like what covid did with state benefits, it isn't a stretch to say that many businesses would be scrambling to find a new equilibrium.
Restaurants in general are relatively premissionless in that anyone can start one, which is why so many fail. They can run the gamut from low margin to high margin, poorly managed to managed very well, so its no surprise that some will do better than others. In fact, I would think that the large corporate franchises will have the resources to adapt compared to the small business, family run restaurants because they have the logistical acumen to subsidize the costs.
Given that we are outside observers, is it possible that they know something we don't? What might be some charitable explanations for why they don't raise prices?
Restaurants that are not franchises have a 50% failure rate. Margins are intensely tight and the largest cost is labor, not food, spoilage, advertising, interior design, or whatever else.
The central government and state government take limited to no responsibility for healthcare, child care, retirement, sick leave, pto etc.
The central justice system has agreed that corporations have a duty to their stakeholders above their business and so growth is paramount.
As a result, restaurants, esp independent ones, struggle to find ways to make ends meet and corporations (aka McDonalds) see no incentive to raise wages. The easiest and most obvious example of this playing out is imo that McDonalds pays labor more elsewhere than in the US.
Exactly! Thanks for sharing this. Currently the demand for higher wages is suddenly slightly more weighted towards the employee and yet McDonalds can pull out a three year timeline to get to $15 an hour, by which time inflation will make the increase insufficient
This “labor shortage” line makes more sense when you think of it as a capital strike, not an objective statement of reality that should be treated literally.
That's a consequence of rent control laws, which limit the percent that you can raise rent by per year. Ever lowering rent in a place with such a law is penny-wise but pound-foolish.
Most small shops are struggling, being 1 bad financial decision away from bankruptcy; doing business with no type of insurance whatsoever, and here and there stiffing some suppliers to make ends meet.
So, there's no way they can afford to increase any expense, if they were to do that, they'd be out of business right away, so they continue floating away.
These business owners are unfit to do business; so what is happening is economic darwinism. RIP.
The reason they're not raising their wages is because restaurants make slim to nothing profits. Additionally the people quitting is from the government continuing to provide the stimulus checks that are in excess of the minimum wage. They need to stop providing those checks when the economy needs to be recovered.
Wages/insurance/tips are an ongoing concern of food service work, but I want to set that aside and talk about the other half of the article. Customer entitlement is out of control and anybody who works with the general public will tell you it’s gotten even worse since the pandemic—and it wasn’t trending in the right direction before. Flight attendants, park rangers, government clerks, the anecdotes are everywhere, in whispers and on social media.
A good friend of mine is a doctor and he has a hair-raising story for me nearly every day, often indistinguishable from fast food customers’ behavior. I’m trying to get him to retire before he gets shot by somebody who was told they’d have to wait 3 days for an appointment.
What’s going on? I have my own theories but I want HN’s take.
I think there has been a general rise in selfish behavior now that pandemic restrictions are being lifted. You have people who never took the pandemic seriously and now that things are back open, but are not the same, they are lashing out. That's one part of this.
I also think you have another camp, which I'll admit to being a member of. I did everything I was supposed to do. I stayed at home, used masks everywhere, took no trips, and had very few social engagements for more than a year - and it sucked. Now that things are open all I want to do is go out. Even though I know that I should lower my expectations, I can't help emotionally but feel entitled to having a good time now.
The thought rolling around my head is:
I did everything that was asked of me for a year and a half, I deserve to have fun now.
As I write that I know intellectually how self-centered, selfish, and delusion it is but I feel it intensely.
I can't remember the other term, but there is a related concept where we do things like separate our recycling, then fly private. Someone with a job helping other people becomes an abusive disaster at home. Or the classic relationship anti-pattern of partner who "does things for you, and now you owe them," (covert contract?) It's related to indulgences and self-licensing, and there is a calculation where we decide our past or even current good behaviour justifies poor behaviour now because we have an imaginary idea that we are somehow bargaining with the universe and it owes us something. (It doesn't care.) It's not the universe, it's your mother, and people are rude because they are caught in a psychological feedback loop of expectation, shame, and rage.
For years I thought it was economically broken that even restaurant and café jobs required a college degree, but now I don't understand how anyone without a psychology degree could be equipped to work with the public. We are hell.
I suggested the bold idea of going to the movies this Friday, in theatres
And my friend replied “I don’t think theaters are a problem after the orgies”
From my experience over the last several months hosting parties in reopened areas, people are open to anything. Even people that would be considered squares are taking the opportunity to live it up alongside the wild vagabonds
I don't know why, but I've seen people becoming more anti-social lately in the past 5 years or so. I've always thought of myself as anti-social, but I wouldn't anymore. As I make an effort these days to be friendly to people I haven't met yet, they don't always reciprocate in kind. So these days, I feel less anti-social, but only because the bar seems to have lowered.
I'm not certain why, but when I was younger, I feel like the tenor of stuff on our screens, message boards, TV, etc. was more positive than it is now. People celebrated stuff they liked more. That definitely still exists today, but more and more people are excited to celebrate a shared hate in something: sports stars (I can't watch shows like First Take on ESPN), reality tv (which seems to mostly revolve around petty conflict), politicians, I even used to use Facebook to find people to go to shows with, but I've since deactivated my account because it's not very social anymore, etc. When the people we look up are famous for being argumentative or being jerks, it makes us think that is what leads to success, or something along those lines.
After realizing this, I've definitely tried to base my relationships on stuff that I like (OK, I allow myself some bashing of the Dallas Cowboys :D ).
A good friend of mine is a doctor ... I’m trying to get him to retire before he gets shot by somebody who was told they’d have to wait 3 days for an appointment.
I'll be honest, the receptionists at my PCP have very poor, whatever the equivalent of bedside manner is for them. When I try to make an appointment, or get a referral, I get thrown around a lot of technical terms that I don't quite understand and they don't seem to have the patience to explain to me what such and such a number is, and who I have to give it to and when. Healthcare in the US is very confusing, and when you're sick or your kid is sick, it's not always easy to deal with all that red tape. I mean, I wish I only had to wait 3 days for an appointment, but it's like, I need to make an appointment weeks in advance, give someone a number, but not too far ahead of my appointment's date, then no one can tell what any of this is going to cost, etc. It is very stressful.
One thing to consider is perhaps a bias: could there be some phenomenon that makes these "entitlement" events _appear_ to be more common than they previously have been? Or are they actually more common lately?
To that end, I saw an interesting statistic thrown around: "The Federal Aviation Administration said it had fielded 1,300 complaints of unruly passengers since February, the same number of enforcement actions it took against passengers in the past decade." (Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/10/travel/faa-unruly-airline...)
That lends statistical credence to what you're saying: customers/people have gotten more entitled and, I'll interject my own phrasing, crazy. A 10x increase in "unruly passengers" is ... just hard to wrap my head around.
Of course, that 10x spike could be primarily attributed to masks and not necessarily an increase in broader entitlement or "freakouts". That's really what we're concerned with, because the mask rules will go away eventually. So what we're all really worried about is, are people getting "crazier" in general? Or is just the mask rules rubbing a lot of the population the wrong way?
That's harder to say. But I thought it important to at least address the bias question. I know myself I figured things couldn't be getting as bad as the internet makes them seem. I thought it may have been the "video camera in everyone's pocket" bias or something. But the stats point towards this possibly being a real shift.
As for why people might be getting out of hand? Well I don't have specific sources for this, but I've seen a few articles and quotes that suggest that isolation can cause permanent psychological damage. I know many people expected lock downs to have negative effects on our psychologies, but I think few are aware of just how damaging it's been. And it likely had a disproportionate effect on people with existing mental illness or mental "fault lines" as I like to call them. Combined with many society's lack of support structures for mental health and, well, it's perhaps no wonder that we're seeing a lot of public "freakouts". And as you've said, customer service workers bare the brunt of that.
More anecdata: my wife is a veterinarian and deals with endless angry customers who think she’s trying to rip them off or waste their time or is just plain wrong. I don’t know if there are more, but there are a lot.
But, she has an out fast food workers don’t. She tells the worst offenders, “If you’re not happy with the care you’re receiving, we’d be happy to give you Fido’s records so you can take him somewhere else.”
They shut up when you remind them you don’t have to fix their sick dog.
I wish more businesses would allow their employees to do this. One of my first jobs was at a call center, and as soon as the customer stopped being professional, I would give them a single warning, and then say "since you can't remain professional, I'm going to end the call" and hang up. It was amazing! Why should your employees have to take verbal or other types of abuse from your customers?
When people feel up against the wall, all social protocol and laws go out the window.
In the US, a faction of politicians are pushing apocalyptic thinking so hard, that everyone is getting the fear: not just the doomsayers and their followers.
But it actually is getting worse. We're in a new pandemic due to to ignorance, half of the US is on fire, cost of living there is through the roof, there are armed militia rising with a political bent, and their supporting politicians are encouraging violence.... Basically, the Karens of the US are being told it is their patriotic duty to be entitled. This all comes out as panic and "me first" behavior in everyone, not just Karens, but the people that have to deal with them, it accumulates.
Even driving now is more difficult. I live in San Diego and it seems now people have more cars and are driving more then pre-pandemic. Half the time I can't change lanes because no one lets me in. I can't get off on some freeway off-ramps because some are backed up many hundreds of feet (so I go to the next off-ramp as I have been nearly hit by people trying to slow down to get into the off-ramp line). Strange things... I really expected to just to return more to normal but there are some changes for the worse.
Driving in New York and New England is ridiculous now. What used to be occasional antisocial dangerous behavior is now commonplace: tailgating, speeding, aggressive lane changes, boxing people out from changing lanes. It's like everyone lost their marbles.
I find it very strange too, but I find it even stranger that management mostly continues to tolerate it. A business has the right to refuse service. If someone is abusing your staff, why not kick them out and ban them immediately? Public shame is the best cure for bad behavior, and staff will be loyal a manager who has their back. Instead of that, assholes mostly seem to be allowed to keep on being assholes until they get to the point of physical violence.
It depends on the country but "zero support" is absolutely not the case in the U.S. My stepmother was receiving more money in unemployment than she ever earned as a receptionist. My mother received hero pay and bonus checks as a grocery store clerk.
My theory is that erosion of community leads to people increasingly not caring about how they are perceived by others. Previously, social pressure made people feel ashamed of their bad behavior. Now, there are no consequences for bad behavior, and it takes some modicum of effort to be nice to people you don't care about, and so the bad behavior continues.
This and other dysfunction like it are just ordinary run-of-the-mill, well-documented societal effects of the rise of the kind of socio-political order proliferating lately.
It hides - and so persists - deep beneath people's therefore ever-increasing unwillingness to face the reality of the consequences of what they've consented to.
Such self-absorbed puffery is the hallmark of any similar regime, and those "toeing the line", which at the moment - is a large number - are of course puffed-up along with the "upper brass" they've aligned themselves with and dutifully follow, and so reap the benefits reserved for and bestowed upon only those who conform, do what they're told, and further dispense those orders to others they themselves see as subordinate.
It's pathetic to watch, will come crashing down eventually, and as the dust settles, those who were ostracised and persecuted for questioning it, will lead us back. As always.
Your comment is so drenched with florid contempt and disdain that it's actually really hard to understand what you're talking about.
I'm trying to be charitable in my interpretation, but even leaving aside the style, it's extremely vague. What I've taken from your comment is:
- this bad thing is like other well-known bad socio-political things (which ones?)
- people are just going along with it without openly acknowledging it
- there are a lot of those people, and there's a hierarchy of them
- it's sad and bad, but will end eventually, and as usual, some outsiders who questioned it will come back in and form the new hierarchy
Now to be less than charitable for a moment, I think "It was a dark and stormy night" now has competition with:
> It hides - and so persists - deep beneath people's therefore ever-increasing unwillingness to face the reality of the consequences of what they've consented to.
I sympathise, and appreciate your summary. I was intentionally vague about exactly what I was referring to, for the very reasons that form the subject matter.
Specifically, stating it directly leads to wild denials, ostracisation, persecution and generally overwrought and unjustifiable discombobulation from many - as they puff about unwilling to accept it.
From a less-reticent perspective:
"On 12 July the British Government announced that it will be strongly encouraging vaccine passports for venues and events to exclude the unvaccinated from public life. Although they say this is a voluntary act of discrimination, they have explicitly stated that they retain the option to make this mandatory in the future, as they also retain the option to resume police state measures as and when they please. The French government co-incidentally announced the same measure on the same day, only going much further, barring the unvaccinated from cafes, metro etc, and mandating vaccination of health workers – which is to say, putting the unvaccinated out of work. They follow the Irish and Greek governments which have brought in similar measures, along with other countries and states worldwide.
The long-term effects of these measures will be disastrous. It will normalise the discrimination, exclusion and persecution of a section of the population.
[...]
Never underestimate how powerful the motive to retain one’s self image is. The longer this goes on and the more brutal the measures enforced the more powerful this motivation becomes. The difficulty of admitting you have been fooled is directly proportional to how much and for how long you have been fooled. Perhaps my labelling of the new regime as fascist will make it even more difficult for people to break from it, as the immediate instinct is self defence – ‘I’m not a fascist. This guy’s a lunatic, he’s calling me a fascist!’"
Thank for you at least giving slightly more concrete examples.
There are a lot of semantic gymnastics going on in that blog post, specifically around identity groups:
- how lockdown/virus/vaccine skeptics _are_ an identity group,
- how lockdown rules and vaccine requirements are repression against those identity groups,
- how fascism is repression of identity groups,
- therefore a lot of people and governments are fascist now.
I think we'd both agree that it's wildly unjust that actual human beings have far fewer freedoms (a major one being freedom of movement) compared to corporations or their capital, so I can sympathize with the notion that more restrictions on biological beings is unfortunate, to say the least. But like in chess, we must play the board as it is, not as we wish it to be, and we're responsible for the predictable (especially policy) consequences of our actions.
The author is also a lockdown skeptic:
> Leading up to a (ritualised) date that announces a review of restrictions, the government generates terror on a mass scale – through its new gargantuan propaganda machine.
> The evidence mainly consisted of Sweden, Florida and other places that actually exist in the real world, and also the fact that the lockdowns haven’t worked
AND a virus skeptic:
> Imaginary variants, case numbers, double mutants (the possibilities are endless)"
And hence presumably a vaccine skeptic. These are further critical failures of analysis to add to that of "what constitutes an identity group and fascism".
Honestly, the _blog post_ itself almost reads like a psyop, but probably it's just the kind of nonsense that people like George Galloway and Aimee Terese are known for. Maybe if these failures weren't so central and didn't compound on each other, there'd be something else useful to say having read it.
Along similar lines there's been a significant increase in auto fatalities despite the fact that miles driven went significantly down. Most of this can be attributed to people driving more aggressively and recklessly. Then there's the 30% rise in violent crime.
The truth of the matter is that America has become a much angrier society since the pandemic started.
I won't bother speculating on the origins or nature of this socioeconomic situation, but I think we can focus on the first order things we have more control over.
For instance, be willing to fire your fucking customers. If someone is being a jackass in your establishment, make them leave. If they persist, involve LEO and trespass them.
There is no reason this cannot extend to the software realm. Make sure your customer contracts have some sort of language regarding circumstances for termination. Apple, Google, et. al., have certainly applied this thinking to their customers via EULAs and the like.
There is no customer so valuable that you should endure abuse for their patronage.
It's not just customer entitlement. It's been a steadily rising thing throughout society for my whole life.
People are less and less willing to accept responsibility for their choices, and more and more it's always someone else's fault.
For example, a person who chose to go $300,000 into debt to go to Columbia film school, where the starting salary upon graduating is $30,000, claims to be a victim of the school.
But in that example, Columbia made students big promises that it simply couldn’t deliver. It’s more like a deeply dishonest salesman than a hapless waiter who gets your order wrong. From James Stoteraux:
> Many of the students in my class who didn’t turn their degrees into industry success were insanely talented, but Columbia traded on its reputation to sell them big dreams that it could never deliver.
> During my 2nd year I suspected that the school wasn’t providing a launching pad to a career — most of the instructors were struggling to establish a career themselves & many weren’t even much more experienced than their students. A 4th yr student taught our cinematography class.
> The brass ring the program dangled was that your film could be chosen for the annual festival where, in theory, big-time agents would see it and maybe sign you. But it was cutthroat to even be selected for the festival. And tuition didn’t cover the cost to make those films.
…
> I slowly begin to realize this IS the deal. He made it pretty clear if I wanted my degree, I needed to help him sell his tv pilot. Yep, the Chair of Columbia’s prestigious graduate film program tried to shake me down in order to jump-start his own stalled out career.
Students definitely deserve some blame for signing onto these expensive programs without doing any meaningful research. But university admins can be corrupt, too, and it’s likely that they used their reputation as “Columbia” to sell students something they knew was fake.
Anyway, in response to the original point — I don’t think that’s a good example of entitlement since “scam” is a more appropriate word. I think they had stuff like “people being mean to waiters and flight attendants” in mind, which is a different sort of entitlement.
Allowing any random 18 year old to sign for a $300,000 unsecured loan is insane. At that age, most people simply can’t calculate the risk they’re taking. At that age, you are programmed to think you’re invincible and take unreasonable risks. It’s why we send 18 year olds to war. No one else would take those odds.
They don't get loaned $300,000 in the first year. It gets doled out over 6 years (a Master's program). That's $50,000 per year. At any point they can quit (and only be liable for the debt up to that point), transfer to another school, or change majors.
At what point do you consider the person a functional adult and assign some responsibility?
> It’s why we send 18 year olds to war.
18 year olds are most likely to survive the rigors of combat. Survival rates drop steadily from 18 on.
> No one else would take those odds.
Plenty do. The US, for example, has had an all-volunteer army since the 1970's. The Navy and Air Force have always been all-volunteer. My dad volunteered at 23. A lot of volunteers were rejected for being too old.
It doesn't apply for film school, but there are plenty of scam law schools that sell students on the prospect of massive future earnings my juking the stats. For example, it's common to say that some high percentage of past students are employed after graduation, but it's often an outright lie or the numbers are padded by the university giving low-wage sham jobs to most graduates.
Of course, you _can_ find information and protect yourself from even these scams _most_ of the time, but I don't think the "just do your due diligence" argument holds enough of the time to dismiss the general argument being made, even if it applies to specific cases.
So everybody should drop out after they first start to hear second hand info about it? And it’s their fault if they don’t or if they do but they’re on the tail end of the grapevine so it takes a few years? And that’s the system working justly?
If you imagine the uncertainty and justifiable inertia involved in a realistic scenario, I don’t see how you can dismiss arguments that it’s not necessarily just the fault of kids for not doing due diligence.
> So everybody should drop out after they first start to hear second hand info about it?
Choices are:
1. continue, rack up $300,000 debt with no way to pay it off
2. change majors to something that pays
Which do you think is the sensible decision?
> just the fault of kids
You're infantilizing them. They are adults. They can vote. They can drive cars. They can sign contracts. They can join the military and command others. They go to the big boy prison if they commit crimes. They can consult with their parents or anyone they respect. They can marry. They can have gender reassignment surgery.
They can use google. Just like you and I can.
They're not victims.
Do you really believe they spent 6 years studying a major and had no clue what the career prospects were? I don't.
You expect a 15-17 year old to have the life experience to deal with this? They've been told exactly what to do their whole lives. Then they have been told how amazing and great and awesome they are, surely they won't be the ones coming out at that bottom wage.
Masters' degree students are 22-25. They don't go to college until 18, either, and even then they have FOUR years to figure out how to google starting salaries for their major. And if it doesn't look good, they have time to change majors, or at least stop digging deeper.
This seems like a wild take to be honest. Humanity over the generations remains much the same beast, it's just that as you get old you forget the lessons your generation had to learn by experience (rose tinted glasses so to speak). You also fail to see that the context of the humans being raised today is different from yours, and their experiences / opportunities different as well. Heck, even those in your generation likely had wildly different experiences / opportunities compared to you.
It's also weird to present such a wild off the wall example at the end. I don't think such people are common.
Common or not, I regularly see stories about this in the newspaper. The students change, the stories are the same "but nobody told me I couldn't get a decent job in this major, look at all the debt I have now."
Always consider why you should trust them or what their ulterior motive is (selling papers, stoking outrage, etc.).
Talk with some folks from the new generation and build a connection beyond what someone else wants you to feel / think about them, you might be surprised what you have in common.
In the past you didn't end up with a $100,000 of debt. That's what's changed. If you failed you could try again. Now you get your one chance with an education and that's it.
I agree customer entitlement is growing but I disagree with your example.
We created a society where we tell people they should chase their dreams and anything is possible in America. Then, when they chase their dreams and fail we tell them how stupid they are that they did that and they should have done something more practical. I don’t think teenagers should be blamed for doing exactly what they were told to do and they’re right to be angry at the system.
Students often need to decide during undergrad to apply to grad school and at that point many are 19 or 20 years old. Not teenagers is a little pedantic.
Applying to grad school is not making a commitment. One still has two more years. At any time while in grad school, one can google starting salaries, and stop digging in deeper if the math doesn't work.
I wouldn’t underestimate the feeling of the sunken cost (especially after studying and taking the GRE, writing essays, getting recommendations from professors). For someone relatively young who isn’t aware of alternatives nor has prepared for alternatives, it’s not surprising they would keep going down the path feeling they have no better choice at that point, only a choice to imagine their future selves will work even harder to “make it”.
> especially after studying and taking the GRE, writing essays, getting recommendations from professors
Sorry, I have to laugh at the idea that taking the GRE, writing an essay, and getting recommendations is so onerous one feels compelled to take on $300,000 in debt due to the sunk cost fallacy.
It's still their choice, and therefore their responsibility. It's not society's responsibility to make up for their sunk cost fallacy.
Besides, one can always change majors or transfer to another school with better prospects. Lots of students do that.
P.S. Studying for the GREs is what one did the previous 4 years getting a Bachelor's. Nobody I knew studied for the GRE. You should know that stuff by then. The GREs I took didn't go past sophomore material.
That doesn't change the fact that we push people to go to college. We tell people anything is possible in America. We say this is the land of opportunity and you can do whatever we want and to follow your dreams. Then, we charge people a hundred thousand dollars to follow their dream and tell them that dreams are stupid and they should have been practical and googled salaries and career expectations.
America is still designed for when a college degree was payable with a minimum wage job. We either need to fix our schools or acknowledge the American dream is dead and we tricked a generation into giving us money for something they could never have.
The assumption that there's any kind of tidy line from a major to a career is a problem, and is hard to shake. I had good enough advice to know to look out for it, and I still got bitten by a situation where solid grades in a viable major were worth little without an in-field internship.
I've changed my mind on this a few times, but I think schools or creditors should have some duty to not give out loans of this magnitude to 17-year olds with little to no financial literacy. The same way that a bank would not give you a huge loan with bad credit. Schools should also be extremely upfront about this type of financial information.
These were Masters degree students, not 17 year olds. They had SIX years to type this into google:
Starting salary for film degree
I would think an educated student would know how to use google? But I bet they actually did know this, and went ahead anyway, and now just want to blame others.
It's taking longer than I would have thought for this meme to soak in for the general public. I knew this back in college, but that was a bit ago...
There isn't a lot of room at the top in film (at least until the creator economy table flips Hollywood). Likewise, there aren't many paid positions for historians, philosophy professors, etc.
Kids need to understand that their top priority should be to understand the shape of the economy and how to make themselves a valuable, indispensable part of it. Doing this early affords much greater freedom and leisure later in life.
Basically, kids need to understand supply and demand for careers. If they don't, it greatly impacts their future stability and happiness.
That person clearly is not a victim of the school, rather that person is the victim of a predatory loan.
Just think about it. A degree doesn't have to cost $300000 but the bank financed it anyway, with the clear intention of working that person down to their bones. Why would a bank let someone take a debt that takes 10 years of work to repay? Because they want to force that person to work for 10 years. If the law were sane the debtor would default as soon as possible.
I'm not sure what's going on, but on the flip side I've noticed a general lack of care from service workers at restaurants lately. Anecdotal evidence, obviously, but my meals have often had wrong ingredients, incorrect items, missing items, low quality items... the list goes on. This really doesn't inspire confidence or give credence to the argument that they deserve more money if they can't get basic details correct.
It’s crazy out there. I checked in to the emergency room during peak COVID for a non-COVID emergency. After going through a metal detector there were six beefy security guards packed tight in a small vestibule that definitely wasn’t socially distanced. I can only imagine what kind of terrible patients the staff have to deal with if they have that level of security.
General entitlement is out of control. There are also plenty of restaurant workers who just don’t get jobs right now because of “free” money from the government. Their problems will compound with that Great Inflation, where everything consumer will cost more.
Also, service generally blows. Even at your doctor friend’s place. I bet he has an 8 page HIPAA form that’s only fillable on paper and has duplicate entry requirements. How does this reduce frustration?
Companies, regardless of size, have started assuming consumers will keep paying for shitty service. Want my cash? Provide something I want. Going to be a rude prick? Quit and go on the dole, then. Save us all the trouble. I’ll happily take my business elsewhere. It’s not like there aren’t other options available for services.
> rude customers, whose abuses restaurant staff are often forced to tolerate
Service workers in general, I'd love it if more managers and companies would support front line workers in refusing service. The customer is not always right. People should not have to put up with literal abuse.
The Alamo Drafthouse theater is famously known for kicking someone out who was using their cell phone and other customers appreciate it.
I worked in one of the largest grocery store chains in the US for about 8 years before going full time into a PhD program. Almost very problem we had to deal with was caused by one of three things: not enough work hours scheduled, supply chain issues, or not being able to say no to a customer. I actually really liked my job - I got a lot of joy out of making nice displays (I worked in produce), cleaning, organizing, etc. But being forced to be a servant to every customer, no matter how rude, abusive or unreasonable they were, and never being able to confront them without first talking to management was the most dehumanizing part of any job I’ve ever had.
"Customer is king" mentality should die. Far too often it leads to disgruntled frontline workers and customers walking around as if they are doing a business favour just by being their customer. Even something seemingly as simple as "smiling" is tiring if done all day.
In a business transaction all parties are equal. No one is doing anyone else a favour.
I quite liked it when I saw signboards in Singapore that said abusing a store keeper is a punishable offence.
Totally agree. My first computer store boss had a general rule that he repeated often to us: "The customer is always right until they're wrong; That's when you hand them over to me." When the day finally came that had to be tested, we watched him actually "86" (perma-ban) a customer from the store. That customer then tried to spread false rumors about the store that literally no other customer was willing to believe, because they all already knew our boss was a fair guy and wouldn't have banned someone without a mighty good reason. Still to this day wish that type of boss was more common rather than a total rarity.
I saw someone try to return 5 subs and get them replaced with 5 wraps.
The store worker "If we made the mistake, we'd fix them, but your wife watched us make these and didn't say anything" words were exchanged and the customer left, leaving sandwiches behind without a refund.
Not knowing they're were dealing with one of the brothers that owned that sandwich shops led that customer to think they could bully the employee.
Employee owned shops are the way to go. They really care but don't have to put up with crap.
I'm pretty torn. I've found a lot of small shops to be...well, dicks. Often acting like they were doing me a favor and I was a nuisance. I still remember one guy saying 'I have plenty of money and business, call me back or don't I don't care.' I wasn't complaining, just asking about pricing on an initial call. Obviously, I never called him back.
On the flip side, I've done enough work and seen enough to know what customer facing people put up with.
I'd really like a hybrid model that does treat the customer as valuable, then tells them to get bent as soon as they start acting unreasonable.
While this is absolutely true, it would also make the job very stressful (and potentially dangerous) if front-line staff, or any staff really, has to eject people on a regular basis. I definitely wouldn’t want to do it, the people who you’d be refusing service to would be the worst of the worst and likely not take it well.
Maybe if enough businesses did this it would drive a societal shift. I've had the pleasure of firing a small handful of customers from my very small SaaS business when they were outrightly rude or vulgar. I feel terrible whenever I see an employee at any business having to be sanguine with an abusive customer, it shouldn't be tolerated.
It shouldn’t be, but just be aware that you’re asking people to put themselves in harms way. I’d rather grin and bear a jerk customer than get shot by one waiting outside after my shift because I personally had to kick them out.
I totally agree abusive customers are a huge problem though.
If other customers object to rude customers behavior and demand they are kicked out, it destroys "customer is always right" rationale - they have to choose one customer to disappoint and will probably choose the one being abusive to their workers.
I worked a long, long time in the food service industry and it was the tipping that drove me away. I just could not smile and bear it anymore. I never got angry at a customer, never lost my cool in front of them, and did my best to be polite and humble, but it just wore me out. I felt like every day I was begging, hoping for them to like me so I could pay rent. If I didn't have to worry about that I could do the job professionally and know my pay was not tied to if the customer liked me or not.
I've literally never tipped anyone less than 20%. Tipping might be a terrible practice, but to me it's an unwritten contract that since I'm accepting service from you, I'm going to tip at least the standard amount. I'm in a pretty privileged position now but this was the case when I was living on poverty wages as well. I just can't imagine telling someone "you don't deserve to be paid for the service you offered me today." I can't believe anyone is comfortable with that notion, but I suppose it's probably more out of apathy than spite.
I used to work at high ticket fine dining restaurants and tipping at those sort of places was great for me, it was one of the few non-professional jobs I had that I could actually support myself on.
I go to a breakfast shop a lot, they lost around 1/2 of their staff permanently due to COVID, It majorly jostled the restaurant sector around here. I asked the owner, "Well, why'd they leave?". He claims "They're getting more on unemployment than if they worked."
Well, why is that the case? Don't you provide them with enough to live on? If they're getting $500 a week from unemployment, that would mean you're paying people less than $24k to work for you, without healthcare or retirement benefits, might I add.
He later stated if minimum wage was $15 an hour, he'd have to raise his prices and lose some staff who aren't efficiently employed time-wise. He stated this like it was a huge negative, but to me, he should pay great employees a great wage to work hard, not have extra employees all of whom are paid poorly to stand around a bit on the downtimes. And anyway, as a customer, I'd happily pay $10 instead of $5 for breakfast, if I had the option to support the employees properly.
$5 vs $10 for us in technology? Many of us make $30 hour, or FAR more, so these $5 differences are much smaller to us than to restaurant workers.
ok, sure. but then once again it's on the managers, who have apparently failed so badly to remedy their dangerous work environment that the state considers the employees to have been forced out.
It is more that when the pandemic hit, most restaurants let go of their working staff, given they couldn't furlough or keep them on payroll when the restaurants were closed.
Since they were fired, they got unemployment. Now, restaurants are open again, but folks don't want to go back for the meager pay (and likely the extra freedom in their time is welcome as well).
that's not the situation of "employees quit to collect unemployment", which is commonly claimed and is what i was calling a lie. the article at the root of this discussion documents that employees are indeed actually quitting, which disqualifies unemployment.
but anyway, for those who do collect unemployment, job search requirements are in effect now. unemployment offices are requiring workers to apply to jobs and document their search. they cross-reference with employers and will actually revoke unemployment if job offers are declined. if restaurants still can't hire staff under these forced conditions, it's because they are simply worse than other jobs available, and perhaps even worse than no income.
just remember that _you_, presumably a tech worker making great money, would easily pay $10 instead of $5. Many others are extremely price-elastic and will literally give up years of patronage for Denny's or something with a move like this.
One could argue that they could market to a higher-earning clientele, but that might not exist where you are, and they'd still have to pay to (maybe) earn that market.
it's a huge catch 22.
i feel like i should add that I usually tip 50-100% (since COVID started) regardless of service and want to see restaurant workers paid much better across the board. tips are not commissions.
Indeed - and if people are quitting at record rates, that potentially exposes the image of willfully unemployed restaurant workers lazing about on piles of unemployment cash as a myth.
Folks raise that spectre when a living wage is mentioned. "So many service jobs lost!" I shake my head at that - folks who imagine themselves Free Market advocates, and here they are agreeing with Karl Marx that a capitalist system can't survive without a slave-wage class to prop it up.
Paying everybody a living wage should be the minimum bar for any economy. If ours can't do it, we need a different one.
Issue is that the only reason this slave wage class exists in food services is because of a coordinated lobbying campaign to influence politicians to keep it like that. Most people in this thread would be pretty upset if all tech companies got together tomorrow and decided to artificially cap salaries and bought politicians to enforce it.
>Most people in this thread would be pretty upset if all tech companies got together tomorrow and decided to artificially cap salaries and bought politicians to enforce it.
Are you claiming that wages in the restaurant industry are kept artificially low because of companies artificially capping salaries, and that politicians are enforcing it? If so, is there a source for this? AFAIK the pay is bad purely because of market reasons (ie. there are more people willing to do it than there are positions).
I don't think it's as common any more, but for many years a lot of states had "tip credit" laws (which were strongly supported/lobbied for by the restaurant industry) that allowed companies to pay tipped employees less than minimum wage with the assumption that they made up the difference in tips.
The "facts" in this comment are similar, but not the same as the claims made in your original comment. Specifically, it only presents evidence of businesses removing government restrictions on the minimum price of labor. It does not present evidence of businesses keeping wages "artificially low" (ie. below the natural market clearing price). If anything, removing the restrictions stops restaurant wages from being artificially high.
The closer analogy here would be if for whatever reason there was a law saying that "engineers" had to be paid $200k minimum, and tech companies lobbied for software engineers to be exempt. That's already very different than software companies suppressing wages (eg. by colluding with each other not to compete on wages). Another wrinkle to this is that tipped employees receive tips. If software engineers were receiving royalties in addition to their normal salaries, I would think it's fair for them to be paid lower minimum wage than other engineers that don't receive royalties.
No specific employer is obligated to employ a specific employee, but we as a society have an obligation not to allow a slave-wage class to exist. We can do this, but we choose not to.
Be aware that you can't entirely trust his perception of the situation. He has a vested interest in under-paying his workforce.
He is going to doom and gloom any situation that results in him potentially losing money. And him losing out on profit to pay his staff probably doesn't enter his mind. If he made $X of profit last year, he wants to make $X+ this year. So he figures if he has to pay people Y more, he will have to charge Y more so he can still profit what he wants to.
To your opinion on what he should do regarding "extra" employees, I'm going to refer you to the book, Slack. While those employees are technically standing around being extra, they're needed to accommodate the bursts of activity that happens in a restaurant. Restaurants aren't busy all day long, they're busy in spurts. When you need people, you need them now.
And I think that may a major issue. The tipped minimum wage makes things feel like they're running efficiently, when it's really just shifting the money around in a way that is not optimal for the customer and causes them to overpay.
Not quite. You're trying to shift what I'm talking about to ignore the issue.
The owner is under paying for the labor and the customer, in turn, is over paying for the labor.
This is due to information asymmetry.
The employer is only paying the legal minimum, in the case of tipped wages in the U.S., $2.13. The employee is expected to make up the rest of the federal/state minimum wage in tips. But that's what they're incentivized to do. If you've got a short sighted view of finances, you may think that if you manage to cut costs, that always translates to extra profit. And if you're paying a dime more than minimum wage, you can cut that cost. (Also, this is why a lot of restaurants fail, most people who run them shouldn't be running a business)
The customer is obligated by social pressure and what not to tip for the service provided. However, people in the service industry are cagey about how much they pull in, actual effort required, etc. in order to get people to tip more and more. Originally, tipping was around 10% and now we see people trying to promote the idea that a baseline tip is closer to 25%.
So the customer has no clue as to how to price the labor that's been provided to them and it is in the servers' best interest to exaggerate as much as possible to get the most tip possible. That's what they're incentivized to do.
And inbetween it all, you have the servers. Who don't want to let go of the tipping model because they can manage to get paid better than what the actual service would be worth in a fairer market.
If you’re interested in the topic, I recommend the MIT living wage research [1]. They’ve got probably the most useful calculator, letting you compare multiple scenarios.
Hmm just ran this for my area (Essex County, MA) and it spat out that NO job pays enough on average to have 3 kids (required 130k, max job average 121k for “management”). This seems a bit pessimistic, as I know plenty of people with 3 kids and pretty typical jobs…
> This seems a bit pessimistic, as I know plenty of people with 3 kids and pretty typical jobs…
"Living wage" may include having enough margin to save such that one may retire at something resembling a typical retirement age. If so, it's very easy to under-cut it and still be apparently doing fine, until age 70 when you have to keep working, through illness and pain, as a Wal-Mart greeter.
This also means responsible savers have to compete with borrowing-against-their-future types with no retirement savings, for things like housing or (relatedly) various scarce benefits for their kids. IMO it's a pretty strong argument against "freer" personal retirement account systems being the main mechanism of retirement savings, and for mandatory, strong public pension schemes.
>"Living wage" may include having enough margin to save such that one may retire .
Doesn't seem to be.
>[The living wage model] does not provide a financial means for planning for the future through savings and investment or for the purchase of capital assets (e.g., provisions for retirement or home purchases).
Must be childcare costs & housing making it so high, then. I gather childcare costs vary quite a bit from city to city, and in my cheaper location those are easily the two biggest expenses, with childcare eclipsing housing by a fair margin, for 1-parent and 2-parents-both-working categories on the calculator, with 3 kids.
FWIW only the "management" category's average income is (barely) above the "living wage" for a single-adult household, for three kids, here. Since that's pre-tax income, yeah, I'd say that's about right. Kids are crazy-expensive.
Yeah they probably have two income that get pretty close to 130k, or they get government subsidies and credits to make up the difference. Raising kids is extremely expensive but also subsidized heavily, and those are probably not accounted for in the "required salary" from this tool.
> it spat out that NO job pays enough on average to have 3 kids
No single job that earns enough, I think is what you found; this doesn't preclude that dual-income families can afford to have three kids, with average or above-average income jobs.
I can imagine it would be very difficult to make ends meet in this situation as a single parent with 3 or more kids. (I suppose you would either need an exceptionally high paying job, or another major source of income besides that job.)
This is a great resource. I'd nitpick that the childcare expense is IMO a terrible evolution of society. People used to take care of eachother's kids while they were at work (eg, work less hours or compressed days and trade day care days with a friend. ). It's far better for children to have stable adult support (ie same small set of people stably over time) than a revolving door of new employees, whomever is working that shift etc. So we're being less resourceful _and_ giving a worse setup to the next generation.
children used to just go to the workplace with adults and/or spending time nearby playing with other kids. it's the separation of children from adults that creates a problem, not the accounting of it (e.g., childcare cost figures), an extension of a victorian sterility to public life, trying to cast perfect images of idyllic lives for others to admire rather than living carefree.
Most of the historical community building was done at faith communities, and by stay-at home parents in the past. As a society we fell hook line and sinker for "The two income trap," and are unwilling to contemplate the horrible idea of allowing families to collect the childcare subsidy to pay the parent providing childcare is upsetting to enough different groups to be a non-starter.
Right wingers are upset because "it's socialism" and folks on the left who I've discussed the idea with have repeatedly expressed fear that it will undermine feminism.
Customers have lost their minds. The notion that "the customer is always right" has combined with what can only be described as a mass-psychosis among a population of patrons. The level of behavior among these customers is borderline criminal in terms of attacking staff and restaurant property. Why deal with that for minimum wage?
Last week we went to a great local restaurant. At least it used to be in the pre-covid times. Now most of the stuff had a "temporary worker" or an "apprentice" sticker on their chest. You could see their hands shaking while serving heavy glasses of beer, improper way of serving food. They forgot about us at one point. We kindly asked to get served. The new hires were not even able to take our orders without being apologetic. After that a young waitress passed me a boiling hot soup over a head of our 3yo son!
Just a year ago, this was one of the most professionally stuffed family friendly restaurants in Prague. Now they have to train a new crew and build their reputation from scratch again.
Was working as a waitress here in the Czech Rep. / EU really that bad that the ones who managed to find a different job during the pandemic do not want to go back?
You're supposed to dream big and have career goals, so I would be surprised if any young wait staffers dreamed of staying wait staff for the rest of their life. Covid was just an opportunity to get out for a lot of people who otherwise couldn't be without the paycheck.
Here's my story from the industry I was a part of for a better part of a decade: One time while I was a line cook, I was cleaning a meat slicer and sliced 3/4ths of the way through the tip of my thumb (just the meaty part at the end, not bone or anything). I realized I had 2 options: Leave work, go to the ER, miss my shift/pay, and incur a bunch of medical debt I could barely afford OR; leave work, go to the CVS around the corner, buy a bottle of superglue, and patch myself back up. My boss even told me if I just needed to run to CVS, I wouldn't need to clock out, what a great guy! This was at an upscale Italian place on the Asbury Park boardwalk that was doing millions of dollars in sales every year.
When I left the industry to go into tech, I never looked back. I will always have a love/hate relationship with the industry. I love the creativity, the people, the experience of dining. I hate everything about the exploitative labor practices. I wish everyone leaving the industry good luck on their new, hopefully better paths. I wish every manager crying poor and bemoaning that nobody wants their poverty wages in a physically crushing industry a very fuck you.
Workers comp insurance would have/should have paid for your ER bill, worst case you hire a personal injury attorney who would love the chance to sue a multi-million dollar business for a claim like that.
> Employers should be responsible for workplace safety and pay for it.
In the US, employers are responsible for workplace safety and there are serious repercussions for violations like this. Some small businesses rely on employees being too fearful to report incidents, but that’s not unique to the US.
Worker’s compensation would have covered the injury mentioned above, and any employer interfering with that would face serious consequences up to and including loss of business license and closure of the restaurant.
Of course they do! I was like 24 and just out of culinary school. The courses of action I talked about were the ones I was told I had by my boss (who probably didn't want a claim.) 10+ years late I'm much more aware of labor laws/practices but at the time I had no clue.
It's interesting that when labor costs shoot up (and let's be honest, that's what this is, you can get people to take those jobs if you pay enough) it's a 'shortage,' but we don't really call skyrocketing medical costs a 'medicine shortage' or skyrocketing rents and home prices a 'housing shortage.'
> Low wages are the most common reason people cite for leaving food service work. But in one recent survey, more than half of hospitality workers who've quit said no amount of pay would get them to return.
Note that over half of survey respondents directly refute your claim of "Just pay more". Paying more will get some people in, but having your restaurant half or three-quarters staffed is still an unenviable position.
Not trying to sound unsympathetic to those with struggling businesses, but: I don't get why there were so many restaurants in the first place.
Everywhere I've been, it seems like there's literally 10+ restaurants per square mile. In cities it's 100+, not exaggerating. And it's not even unique restaurants either: in my local town there are multiple Mexican restaurants, Italian restaurants, Chinese restaurants, American restaurants, with a lot of overlap in the menus.
Why? My parents hate to cook and get takeout almost every night. And even they don't get every restaurant, in fact they like to get the same few. Meanwhile, I cook for myself and almost never get takeout because it's healthier, cheaper, easier, and even IMO it usually ends up tasting better anyways. It's mostly common knowledge that the restaurant business sucks to get into anyways. So why are there so many restaurants?
Where I live, there is a high density of restaurants -- no corporate chains either -- and they are all packed full of people most days. I'd say it is a simple matter of supply and demand. There are so many restaurants because there are so many customers.
But you are correct that the restaurant business is terrible from an investment perspective. For some people, the restaurant business is their calling and what they know well, can't fault them for that even if the margins are poor.
It is like being a startup founder. Mostly a bad idea on a purely economic basis but many people feel compelled to do it.
I think brand awareness plays a role here. A low quality restaurant can stay in business forever because many people don’t do a lot of research (foot traffic, ordering online, etc). I live in a city and it takes a long time to learn what restaurants are good and bad. Probably plays a role in why there are so many - you can do a bad job and still stick around, at least for now.
Does your area have a lot of immigrants? A lot of immigrants start a restaurant because they struggle to find meaningful employment elsewhere (e.g. was a doctor in home country being forced to do minimum wage home healthcare in the country they immigrated to because of licensing issues).
It's actually worse for physicians. Incomes not only declining due to increases in expenses, but reimbursements in Medicare dropping too, in nominal non inflation adjusted dollars. Yet the corporate side of organized healthcare is seeing healthy pay raises. Bottom Line: anyone who actually does the work gets shafted. Those who delegate win.
Avoid this kind of mostly seasonal work, it's a chain of pressure all the way down.
High rent pushes the restaurants to increase prices and reduce the good content of the menúes.
The food in the vast majority of restaurants these days is more unhealthy than a mc Donald's menu, they use a lot of oil, the meat is minimal, you get the fatty parts instead of the lean parts and they add the most economical sides like fries to fill the gaps.
It contributes a great deal to obesity, people's lazyness, I simply do not support any of this.
And all the jobs are unthankful, be it in the kitchen, waiter or door staff.
If the quality of the food would be amazing, i would change my opinion.
By amazing quality, my standard is the evening buffet , all you can eat events in a Hilton, and in most places it's a good price. You can include Marriott as well, but the vast majority of random restaurants serve worse food than mc Donald's(which at least is fairly priced, fast, clean premises and tasty enough).
Tip or no tip is not the issue, it's a dead end job with zero perspective and requires shift work or worse , seasonal availability.
You learn nothing that could advance your career in a meaningful way. Treat the job as such.
This is an atypical time. Of course right now there is huge churn, due to covid, the pandemic unemployment benefits, and the fact that restaurants have had to quickly hire anyone with a pulse to keep up. This all leads to obvious churn.
The real question is whether things will be meaningfully different in 10-30 years. I suspect the answer will be yes, because automation will be more capable, combined with legislative pressure to eliminate low paying jobs.
The kinds of people still eating in person at restaurants were often not paragons of conscientiousness in the first place. And I could see a lot of people cutting back on tipping when just patroning a place could feel like an act of charity in itself.
Actually, IIUC people were more generous tippers “during” the pandemic [1]. Some of the reopening discussion included a note that average tipping went down.
> Actually, IIUC people were more generous tippers “during” the pandemic [1]. Some of the reopening discussion included a note that average tipping went down.
Yeah, previously I wouldn't tip if I had to order my food from a counter, but I changed that during the pandemic (especially if it was a smaller mom an pop restaurant).
I am not shocked that employees of businesses with 70-80% profit margins based on knowledge barroning are ignorant to the economics of businesses with sub 5% profit margins.
In two years we're going to see a lot fewer eat-in restaurants, a lot more kitchen-only joints, and those kids who used to be wait staff will be on the dole, or marching in the streets. Much like movie theatres, cheap quality dining is going away.
I don't see why you compare to movie theaters. The decline in movie theaters was, afaict, driven by a drop in demand, which in turn was driven by affordable home theater setups, increased availability of movies to watch at home, ...
In contrast, your argument for why eat-in restaurants are about to disappear in large numbers is entirely based on a decrease in supply of cheap labor. You don't argue at all for why there would be a decline in demand. Perhaps customers changed their habits after the COVID lockdowns, but at least on the short term, I feel like I'm noticing the opposite effect: people really want to do stuff outside of their house.
I understand that some of the more struggling restaurants would be driven over the edge by higher wages, but it seems spurious to assume that this will cause a large shift in the market all by itself.
And it's even more spurious to just assume that this will drive large swathes of former wait staff into unemployment. Similar arguments are made carelessly in the minimum wage debate, where people mistakenly believe that there is consensus among economists that it drives up unemployment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Surveys_of_econom...).
No, my prediction has nothing to do with a false labour shortage, and everything in common with movie theatres. They were precarious businesses, and there's been a huge shock to both industries from which I don't think most of the individual businesses will recover.
Theatres might have made it, if hollywood wasn't also at an all-time low in customer esteem and (IMO) quality of output.
I would be thrilled if kitchen-only joints replaced sit-down restaurants. I have about 20 sit-downs within walking distance, only about 5 are easy for takeout, none which serve higher-end food. If there were a few higher-end food options ($20 lunch instead of $10 lunch, $30 dinner instead of $15 dinners), especially without having to deal with tipping, I would carry out and eat at home a lot more. I have my own silverware, wine bottles, and napkins.
Go to a country with high cost of labour (eg. Switzerland) and you'll see that restaurants work just fine. However, they are a lot more efficient and hire less staff. Waiters carry their own card machines, menus are ready for customers as they walk in, service times are a little bit slower.
I live in one of those high wage (for waiters) countries, tho less bork-bork more crikey, and restaurants are closing left and right, and those still going strong are getting more and more of their revenue from uber-eats & co. More owners are going to realise they can save a fortune on staff and rent if they switch to a kitchen-and-front-desk only business.
Isn't that basically what online restaurant pickup ordering is?
If I order from Chipotle via the app, I don't have to interact with a human at all unless there's an issue with the food. There's a bag on the rack for me to grab.
You don't even necessarily have to interact with a human if there _is_ an issue. The Chipotle app which I use to order has a support chat (which I'm pretty sure is automated). If I'm missing an item or have pretty much any issue, they issue a refund for that item, no questions asked. Pretty crazy. (Also very convenient, and shockingly pro-consumer).
I'd say there's a slight difference. The food is prepared without your interaction in an automat. You would just walk into the store and open the door for the food you want. Everything is pre-made but replenished only when someone takes it.
1. Restaurant workers quit
2. Restaurants raise wages
3. Restaurants get workers back
Minimum wage seems to be out of this equation. Natural market dynamics will self-correct and the wages will naturally rise as literally any other price rises when inflation occurs. To be honest, I'm not sure what minimum wage is other than an artificial constraint. Workers obviously are willing to quit jobs with low pay, so why does the lower bound of pay need to be enforced? It seems contrived. If anyone can explain how minimum wage affects the above scenario, I would be grateful.
Unsound business models can only exist for so long -- are all restaurants closing, or just those with extremely small operating margins? If a restaurant is operating on such small margins that they can't raise wages to keep their business open, then it makes sense for that space to be used by a restaurant owner who can run the business more effectively.
I fail to see how this isn't just capitalism and competition working as expected. The majority of restaurants react to this by raising all prices -- including wages. The food costs twice as much now, and they are paying their staff twice as much. If people don't want to pay the price, maybe it's best that a better restaurant takes its place or the restaurant improves their offering?
you forgot the part where the socialist government is printing unlimited welfare and handing it by the truck load. it’s hard to compete with free money
I don't love the membership fee - it seems a wrong to me to exclude the people who see $55/year as a barrier, but I LOVE the no-BS aura of Costco's employees. At Costco, more than any other store I've been to, I get the impression that you must be respectful to the staff if you'd like to continue shopping there. Maybe the membership model helps enable this, as the store could revoke your membership if you cause problems.
you know thats really not a bad idea, although you'd have to get around people not wanting to visit the same place every day. I think it could work for a market-style place (think nice food court) for variety, but you'd still have to solve for having a place that people will want to go to at least twice a week to justify the membership cost.
I was thinking a coffee shop. Find a spot with 5 coffee shops all in one spot. Open a sixth and target the regulars by offering cheaper better coffee by subsidizing it with a monthly fee. Imagine during off peak hours $1 lattes.
Or do salads and compete in a similar manner - like a gym membership, prepay to incentivize healthy behavior.
The core problem is retail is a bad industry with high competition and there is a huge desire for variety.
The title cites a record rate, but I can’t find where they say what the previous record rate was. It makes sense for a time like now to be when a record number of people are changing jobs. Is this a massive increase though, or a slight one?
I think in the coming year, we're going to find out that the "return to normal" isn't going to be very normal.
I spot a longer term "convenience" trend in consumers that has been further propelled by the pandemic, creating permanent shifts in demand.
There's many examples of it regardless of the pandemic...
Visiting a theater to see a movie is on the decline, as people use Netflix on increasingly large and capable screens.
ecommerce has marginalized physical stores.
And so on. We were already on this trend, and the end game for pretty much anything is smartphone-level convenience. If I want something, it should in most cases not require more effort than the push of a button. Even to change the light in the house, of which the switch is 3 feet away from me.
The pandemic has "delivered" new services, or existing ones that we now got used to.
There's going to be far less business travel, as now every rank in every company has been forced to make remote work operate somewhat efficiently. This will permanently change office real estate and business locations.
Not to mention the car industry, as a lot of usage is based on commutes.
Gyms may also see structurally less demand, as people found alternatives, and got used to them.
In my country (Netherlands), ecommerce was already normalized yet now even the less tech savvy got accustomed to it, further accelerating the decline of physical stores.
Luckily, people still did grocery shopping at the store itself. Not anymore. Now many people have tried home delivery of groceries and are unlikely to give back the time won.
Finally, restaurants. Before the pandemic, all you could get delivered here was junk food. Now you can get a high quality meal. Further, home cooking is back, the convenience type where they ship fresh high quality stuff with clear instructions.
Surely, visiting a restaurant is still a rich and social experience, but I would not be surprised if demand is significantly reduced if the home option is pretty good.
As for the convenience trend, a cynical view is that people are lazy. A more optimistic view is that people optimize their time, which is scarce. Speed and convenience wins, and will take over everything.
I've gone to multiple restaurants of late that have had to close early (even very early, like 3pm) because they are so short staffed. Other restaurants have people waiting but have empty tables because there is no one to work them.
It's difficult for one restaurant paying living wage to compete with those relying on people working poverty wages. The businesses paying good wages will not be able to compete on costs and that benefit might not be passed to the customer. Certain businesses, for whatever reason, are more effective at hiring and retaining workers at low wages. Instead of forcing businesses to do the right thing and try and compete with lower prices due to horrible wages, we need to mandate living wage so all the competition has to move together.
That would just benefit big businesses that can absorb the cost. Small businesses wouldn't be able to compete as their margins get crushed. I don't think people realize how cut throat the restaurant business is. It is possibly the most probable business model to go under with. I am not sure I want to live in a world where it's all mega corporations that I can eat at without spending a lot of money. Also as many have pointed out, this doesn't really address the problem since this is on a global scale including in places with much higher wages and no tipping.
Maybe this will lead to adoption of automation in kitchen and front of house? There are a number of startups and concepts in this space and this might be the catalyst for meaningful adoption. Not sure I find it appealing as a guest.
Anecdotally I've seen "counter service" restaurants and fast-casual eats popping up more and it definitely helps without sacrificing all of the human element. I'm sure it helps drive down personnel costs allowing you to have a single front of house and just runners for the food
I feel like a company like Sodexo could create some vertically integrated restaurant or delivery service that radically changes the margins and process.
While the result would feel a bit dystopian I suspect I'd still go along as a consumer.
Money isn't a barrier to automation, technology is. The whole "if we raise minimum wage the workers will be replaced by robots" argument is bogus. The workers are being replaced regardless of what their wage is, as and when the technology is ready.
I can't wait to see how this will workout considering that a typically restaurant business runs on tiny margins. My prediction is quality is going to tank at most of our favorite places to eat (it actually already has). We'll have experienced pre-COVID service workers chasing better pay and benefits while restaurant businesses continue to hire and train those with no prior experience and continue paying same wages. In about a year or two we'll forget about all of this.
Restaurant owners refuse to pay higher wages because that would remove a huge profit source for them - variable pricing.
As long as part of the wage is in tips the owner effectively is capable of charging customers different prices. Rich people pay more but poor poeple also visit. If you raise the price to pay a good wage without tips and abolish tipping you lose the poor customers.
You seem to be under the impression that rich people tip more. From what I have seen, and from many friends in the service industry, this is simply false. You’re far more likely to get no tip from someone driving a Mercedes than someone driving a junker, at least around where I am.
This would apply to all industries and yet every one else seems to be able to figure it out. Also I have never been to a Restaurant where I got a different menu based on my W2.
>Also I have never been to a Restaurant where I got a different menu based on my W2
That's OPs point? Tipping allows for a degree of price discrimination since people that can't afford the full cost (menu price + tip) are allowed to pay less.
I'd quibble about the degree of that effect, but it makes sense directionally.
Eh, how is variable pricing a source of profit for the restaurateur? Their profit is calculated on a fixed price. Also from what I’ve observed in the US, everyone is morally obligated to pay a tip… Rich people may go above and beyond the average (citation needed) but having tips arguably does not raise demand from more modest people, since they are still expected to pay base price + tip. There is no real price segmentation at play as far as I can tell…
Modest people also eat out in Europe or in Japan, where morally mandatory tipping does not exist, so there is that.
I gave a precise argument to why I think tips do not increase demand for the service - most people in the US, regardless of wealth, pay at least the minimum tip.
GP's argument that there is a substantial price segmentation would only hold if poorer people did not pay the tip.
I live in france, and I recently went to some presentation by some "restauration job industry" school director, who tried to encourage us to apply. I was open to other jobs and I discovered that it was mostly about working in a restaurant after arriving at the presentation.
It's summer, france is a destination for tourism and there is a big shortage of workers. Post covid, people want to go out and have a good time.
I've talked several times with skilled and competent cooks in the industry I met, and apparently it's hell on earth. That industry has the most drug users: you work at times when others are having a good time. Competition is very high in france, restauration is a big big industry here, the culture of food is amazing and I'm pretty sure we're one of the best of the world.
In my view, preparing food for others is a form of slavery. It's one the most obvious form of social inequality. Of course people love to eat good food, sitting nicely in a cozy place in a nice terrace. Of course people are going to spend their money for this.
Except it's hard work, and there will always be a culture of "I pay, I decide, you work".
Honestly the more I eat at restaurants, the more I realize I'd be ready to eat slightly expensive frozen MRE and some picnic just to not make those poor people work like that. Plus there are many people out there who cook nice meals for their friends.
I love that part of the french culture, but honestly, clients will quickly realize eating at a restaurant is expensive for good reasons.
Our cafeteria at work is union. There is something about getting a decent wage which seems to inspire them. The food is really good (the best cafeteria of the 4 I've had at work) and they're quite pleasant.
How many people are we talking about here? How many restaurant workers literally have no other job or other option available to them whatsoever? Have you ever actually looked into that, or are you just hypothesizing based purely on feeling-inducing narratives? Or is it just a trolley-problem style hypothetical, not meant to represent real world conditions?
It promises to suck every shred of energy from you in exchange for a poverty wage, and you get treated like utter shit by society if you don't go along with it. I think there are some parallels here actually.
> In my view, preparing food for others is a form of slavery. It's one the most obvious form of social inequality.
This is an odd sentiment, the byproduct of living in economically segregated places. Where I live, an hour east of DC, there isn’t a restaurant in town where someone who worked there couldn’t afford to go there at least on special occasions. I was getting a hair cut the other day, and it turns out that my barber likes the cocktails at the nice restaurant (right on the water) where I like to take out of town visitors. The people who clean our house live a few blocks away. (Although the Fed money printing machine is causing our real estate prices to go up, and causing DC’s inequality wasteland halo to keep expanding outward.)
There is, of course, nothing intrinsically coercive about someone cooking food for the person who cuts their hair. An economy is people doing stuff for each other for money. It’s only in a handful of metropolitan areas where you have outrageous inequality and economic segregation that creates the situation you’re talking about.
> apparently it's hell on earth. That industry has the most drug users
I spent 3 years as a waitress, prep cook and dishwasher at a mid-range chain. Our regional manager would literally hand out speed pills to the staff if we were working a double or otherwise tired. Oh, having a rough shift? Here, have some trucker Yellowjackets I picked up just for this scenario at the sketchy truck stop just over the border.
Also, employees would steal literally everything that wasn't racheted down. Steaks, frozen fish, margarita glasses, people stocked their houses with the dishware and cutlery.
It is a tough industry to survive in. Forget thrive.
There is bunch of restaurants/joints offering me to buy a burger or buy some food with them. Yes it is more expensive than cooking myself. But no one is making them to offer those. I am not going around making people to bring me food.
Making food for one or two people is not that hard work as I mostly do it for myself or my GF or she is cooking.
Making food for hundreds of people is hard work and it has load of regulations to meet safety - that is why it is expensive. Almost everyone can make food, almost everyone can be a waiter that is why pay is not that great, if someone wants to make more money he can do something that is more complex, like making super good food like celebrity chefs.
If I would like to be nasty (as I am not and I agree it is hard work) I would go with explanation that there is bunch of lazy people who are not willing to learn anything more complex than making food and want to charge extra for that.
What I meant was essentially that restaurants are the most prime example of economic servitude, cooking a meal for somebody else who has enough money to pay for it.
You keep describing a job as 'economic servitude'.
Do you think the waiter is then exploiting the farmer when the waiter uses that money they got waiting tables to buy food for themselves? The farmer is 'growing food for someone else who has enough money to pay for it'
If you find this economic servitude, then you basically are saying that anyone who participates in the economy is being exploited.
I guess in a sense we are all servants to our need for food and shelter, and the fact that we need to do things that we might not want to do in order to cloth and shelter ourselves. Not sure why obtaining food and shelter by trading your labor for goods is somehow a worse situation that having to grow and make all your own food and build and maintain your own house.
Restaurants by and large are not high revenue businesses. Most small grocers generate more revenue in 1 to 2 months than a restaurant will generate in a year.
It seems like restaurant owners in the US turn over often, varying from every few months to 3 years on the outside. Seems like a really stressful industry that can have good margins, but maintaining profitability is hard and consumers are quite fickle.
Also look at how many chain restaurants are structured in their financing and it is not great. Usually some portion (40% or more) of the net goes to the parent corp. Then out of that you pay the lease on the building, any required decorations, and buy from locked in vendors. Both all owned by the parent corp or some sister corp. Then out of what is left you pay your employees, taxes (on the net), and yourself. You are looking at maybe 10-15% of the net to do that with too.
People can say 'oh just make the wages better'. But that may literally be the difference between there being a restaurant and nothing at all.
Many gas stations run the with the same model. The twist is the gas companies own the land, and the pumps, and set the price. You just run the business.
Basically most of these places someone 'bought a job'.
Think I heard somewhere that places like McDonalds is one of the largest land owners in the world. Yet most of their stores are not 'corporate'.
This is not a justification for paying low wages and treating employees like garbage (eg: no notice when the business permanently closes, reshuffling schedules with no notice, poor treatment when on and off shift, etc).
The current restaurant industry is a failing business model that usually harms those involved. The employees, vendors and business owners often end up destitute and with damaged bodies, hence why this industry burnt through people even pre-pandemic.
It's not really slavery, but it's true that too many people rely on restaurants to reassure them about their place in society, which means the waiters have to make a show of being, um, in a different place in our society.
It got really obvious when people objected to having to put on a mask for the safety of the waiter serving them, and I can't blame anyone for noping out of that noise.
In English we have a saying: He who pays the piper calls the tune. People who pay for a service expect, within reason, to decide how that service is to be rendered.
The opposite is what was depicted in the show Seinfeld as the "Soup Nazi": a person who renders the service only a particular way (and may even throw you out of their shop if you object). But even on Seinfeld the Soup Nazi only got away with how he acted because his soup was particularly good and it was worth conforming to his idiosyncratic etiquette on how to order, etc. So having such autonomy is uncommon and reserved only for the greatest -- even, say, in software: John Carmack can expect to have working conditions as he desires. You or I will have to settle for open plan offices and constant meetings.
That said, food service is indeed grueling and physically taxing work. My sister and her boyfriend both work in the industry. The boyfriend is a chef and smokes a lot of dope -- conforming to your observation about drug use. So I do what I can to make life easier at the restaurants I patronize, mainly being polite to the staff and, as America is a tipping culture, tipping them generously.
It’s trivial to cook something that’s better tasting and healthier than fast food, most cafes. With all the practice in the last year, it’s not hard to come close to my favorite upscale restaurants for 1/4 of the price.
I don’t need to find a recipe, I can “just cook” now.
Eating out seems like an antiquated division of labor given how streamlined procurement (grocery delivery from anywhere), and no commute have made my life.
Agreed. Restaurant food is generally speaking unhealthy and overpriced. Low quality ingredients are doused in fat and salt to make them palatable and I'm expected to pay an exorbitant fee for someone to remember what I asked for and carry it across the room. It's cheaper and easier to eat real, whole foods at home. There are too many restaurants and we've come to rely on them for our daily sustenance. A healthy relationship to restaurants would make it a once or twice a month kind of proposition, yet it's not uncommon for people to use restaurants as their primary source of nutrition (don't even get me started on F-ing delivery).
The more of them that shut down after COVID and don't come back, the better.
Yes agreed. I hate cooking but I decided to bite the bullet during covid and learnt to make simple meals. The whole chore of cutting, cooking, cleaning up, dishes and utensils still seems like a burden to me but I enjoy eating home cooked meals and have improved overtime to modify internet recipes to my liking. Eating out now seems expensive and unhealthy in most cases and I often doubt the quality of ingredients too.
Agree. My consumption of restaurant food basically stopped in March 2020. I have eaten out or gotten take out maybe once a month since then. Pre-covid I was eating at least one meal from a restaurant almost daily.
Disagree. Any time I eat out it’s because acquiring the ingredients would be incredibly difficult or expensive, or I lack the skill/tools to do it.
Sushi, most ethnic food, high quality locally sourced ingredients, pizza oven, etc. Heck even a sandwich from jimmy John’s - I eat meat once a week or so so a making my own salami sandwich would mean wasting a ton of food.
Agreed. Especially when a big part of the value proposition of a restaurant, the time savings, are negated when I can do my cooking while simultaneously in a meeting. Plus I can be in my underwear the whole time!
Every time there's an SF Bay area thread, you get libertarians pointing out how the lack of enforcement against shoplifting has destroyed the ability to run stores in the area. From afar in Canada, I have no idea if this is true or not.
But you can see the reflection of that in this mess - the lack of enforcement of cultural norms about being a nasty piece-of-work to waitstaff and other front-of-house jobs has raised the labour expectations to the point that it's no longer a worthwhile employment option for many people. There are similar jobs with similar pay but less emotional labor.
This is the price of ignoring the emotionally laborious. And yes, "laborious" has a two different meanings when applied to people.
as i've observed it is true in some kinds of stores like CVS/walgreens (like a shoppers drug mart in Canada). But I've never observed such behavior in, say, a Trader joes or a FF restaurant.
Yeah, CVS/etc are a special kind of case. They have a lot of the same products as a big box store, even alcohol, (but a limited variety). Because they're so much smaller, they can't justify dedicated resources for loss prevention.
Often times when I visit one of these stores, they have 1 or 2 employees working in the entire store, maybe 3 or 4 during a shift change or busy time. Never more than 2 people on a register.
I think these companies could alleviate the theft problems with more employees, but they don't want to pay the labor costs.
No kidding. $9/hr with no benefits is literal slavery. If I can pay someone a days wages for the cost of my lunch, something is seriously wrong with our society.
Let us keep remembering that there is no evidence that raising minimum wages increases unemployment (The Big Lie the economists use to defend their hypothetical model of how this works).
Gosh. Thanks this actually forced me to review the literature and actually yes you’re right and I was wrong. Turns out some pop econ articles I read recently where deceitful. The thing I did read about and seemed to hold up was rent control and construction - the effect there was small or minimal.
Does the BLS data account for under-reporting of cash-based tips? If I really was making $100k a year because of tips, I would be really tempted to not give 30% (marginal rate) to uncle sam.
Not sure, but something like 80+% of restaurant transactions are electronic these days, and undoubtably even higher in expensive restaurants where the unbanked can't afford to eat. People pay cash in diners and fast food. Fancy restaurants are full of people paying with company credit cards or collecting points on their chase sapphire or whatnot.
Even if everyone at 4-dollar-sign restaurants was making 6 digits, that's still a small minority of restaurants.
I don't agree that "great servers" are making 100K because of tips, but instead it is because of the generalized percentage gratuity. Just because the food was $150 doesn't mean the service was great, and just because the tip was large, doesn't mean the service was good.
In my experience only half of the population tips based on percentage, and it's generally those who eat at high end places, or seem to be more affluent. The rest tip based on "service" and that could be 5% on a $150 bill, or 20% on a $15 tab. I've seen both, and I think your example only applies to a very small percentage of wait staff.
I know for me personally, I tend to tip a percentage, regardless of the cost of the meal. If I go to a fancy steakhouse and the service is crap, chances are the server is still gonna get $20 out of me.
I came from a food service background though and realize people have bad days, but it does put me in a bit of a conundrum on how to handle truly terrible service. Fortunately for my wallet, I don't frequent those upscale establishments so it's not a problem I think about often.
Are you in the US? If not, let me explain, as a former US Chef, how comp works in the US for FoH employees:
The vast majority (let's call it 99%) of all dining establishments pay whatever their local tipped minimum wage is (for the purpose of this we'll use the Fed min, which is currently 2.13 with a "made whole" rate of 7.25). This means all the owner is on the hook for, is: 7.25 - 2.13 - Declared tip total.
What does this mean? It means sometimes waitstaff will actually have $0 paychecks, because the amount they earned actually outstrips the pay coming from their employer due to their tax burden on declared tips.
Well we can't have that! So what's an enterprising waiter to to? Often, declare as little as possible of their tips. Now you can't get away with ignoring credit card totals (there's a paper trail!) but you damn well better believe that every server (EVERY SERVER) everywhere in the country is doing their best to hide that cash from the tax man. Often times the managers help them with his (because they were usually servers too at some point).
TL;dr- Restaurants aren't paying servers who are making 20/hr. What's going on is that those places charge so much for their dining experience that it drives of tips (in the US, people typically tip as a percentage of their bill, e.g. 20 dollars on a 100 dollar meal is considered standard). It actually makes more sense for a restaurant to raise their prices if they want to their servers to make more money, and it STILL doesn't cost them more.
High end places don't need to pay you more themselves to attract the best talent. There are only so many places in a given area where you can pull in 200-500 dollar nights. If you suck, they will fire you comb through the stack of resumes they have at any given time to find someone who seems likely to not suck.
> That's because for many, leaving food service had a lot to do also with its high-stress culture: exhausting work, unreliable hours, no benefits and so many rude customers.
I didn't realize that rude customers was that widespread.
Have you ever worked restaurant or food service? I worked at McDonalds a few years after high school and it was the most demoralizing, depressing, and abusive job I've worked. Bussing tables wasn't much better in comparison either. But at least when bussing tables people didn't talk to you like you were human waste.
I had people actually tell me that I was stupid, I had someone throw an ice cream at me because they were mad I was parking them to wait for their order, I got screamed at far more regularly than you would think. That's just the tip of the iceberg, and management was usually worse.
No exaggeration: I would be homeless before working at McDonalds again. Not because of pride, but because it put me into a really bad depression.
The terrible customers are rare. Maybe 1% of the public. However when you service 200 people you will have an ~80% chance to run into at least one terrible customer. If you don't feel protected or supported this can be soul crushing. Even worse if you come home to poverty.
1) Lack of general(outside work) support for what essentially is an empathy job (care about the customer experience)
2) Lack of social enforcement of dont be a piece of shit. People used to call out people more for behavioral standards (swearing, presumption of positive intent, codes of dress, on and on the list goes...)
Next time you see someone being treated poorly speak up. Everyone is too busy recording for youtube rather than interacting in the environment. We've become passive observers rather than active partakers in life.
Part of it is a numbers game. One asshole per unit of time is stressful regardless of how many non-assholes you serve in that same unit of time. Now consider that a waiter working a 30 hour week can serve hundreds of individuals at even a modest restaurant.
Less objectively, I feel like assholes are much more likely to express their negativity in a service scenario. You may run into these people all the time and not see their behavior until you're the one serving them.
The ways some people not-uncommonly behave can be absolutely gobsmacking. It's hard to relate to what is going on in these people's emotional thoughts. Spontaneous stress reactions like road rage are at least relatable, but the purposeful way some people treat others when being served by them can be, frankly, totally alien.
It doesn’t take a lot of rude customers to really ruin your day. Even a 5% rate of toxic customers will weigh on your emotions heavily, given the outsized impact they can have. And the rate might be much higher than 5%.
In my experience out in more remote areas rude customers are a daily occurrence. People like to feel power over others, and have very little in terms of self control. Companies won't boot them because there's plenty of people whom are intentionally dishonest and will then label the company as being "sensitive liberals" or otherwise. Which then gethers people around it whom are just looking to take a bat to the "other team". It's a scapegoat for bad behavior I've seen multiple times.
"Food service jobs have been 'plagued with low wages for an extraordinary long period of time'"
Plagued? Isn't that just how supply and demand work, ms "economist"?
The only reason workers are quitting at record rates is because a new business opened up in town with unlimited resources handing out free dollar bills.
Of course people only put up with it because they had no better option.
The question is, should we force people to take the option of "low pay, no benefits, rude customers"? If those jobs are really the only alternative to the gov't paying workers, then do we as a society think the correct option is "low pay, no benefits, rude customers"?
To me, it seems like the options should be "restaurants provide a reasonable employment" or "we don't have restaurants". One way to do this would be to make laws that force restaurants to do certain things (min wage, benefits, etc). Another option (and a much more "free market" option) is to provide competitive benefits from the gov't and let restaurants compete with that.
Either way, if we as a society aren't willing to pay enough to eat at a restaurant such that the restaurants can provide reasonable employment terms then we should maybe rethink how restaurants fit into our society.
If a survival stipend competes successfully against a low-paying, high-stress, and absolutely miserable job conditions then the problem isn't the stipend, is it?
A zero sum concept of blame isn't really helpful IMO. It's better to just try to figure out the policy consequences without the moralizing.
The simplest model of utility (linear in money) basically says "people will take these jobs if they pay $X more than unemployment." With unemployment in the US paying $300/week more than it used to, jobs now need to pay about that much more than before to stay competitive -- about $7.50 an hour. So for a $15/hr job, the employer needs to pay $22.50 now.
A perhaps more realistic utility model has diminishing returns to money. The classic example is log($). Put simply, "people will work a job if it pays X times what unemployment does."
In that model, the $15/hr job at 40 hours/week pays $600 before tax. Say unemployment used to pay $300/week, so the job paid 2x unemployment, and now with the extra $300 of supplemental employment benefits it pays $600, so the job has to bump its pay up to $1200/wk or $30/hr to stay competitive.
That's a modeled kinda space of policy consequences -- wages go up 50% or 100% or there will be employment shortfalls even before thinking about childcare shortages, reduced immigration etc. That situation can be spun as "benefits too high" or "pay too low" to score political points or drive policy, but these effects are clearly explanatory either way.
Regardless of one's opinion on the wisdom of the policy, it's still a glaring oversight in a news article about the dynamics of the labor market.
I've been a UBI supporter my entire adult life, but that doesn't mean that what's effectively a lie of omission is good for the discourse. Then again, it's hard to expect otherwise from a rag like NPR.
>conditions then the problem isn't the stipend, is it?
It's laughable to make that comparison when the "survival stipend" is money for doing nothing. I'm not sure how any private enterprise can compete with that.
Except they're not doing nothing, are they? They're raising their kids, fixing their car, cooking healthy food, going to the doctor, visiting their mom, and any number of other things that a person working minimum wage can't make time for. The survival stipend gives them not only money, but time. When you see that, you start to realize how much those crappy jobs COST people.
Based on my discussions with barber-shops and other lower wage earners... at least in my area... people are still afraid of COVID19 and don't want to work in a public-facing role during a pandemic.
I'm not sure how money would change that. Even if you doubled wages all of a sudden, if people are literally fearing for their lives, you can't actually get them to come in.
-------
In resort areas (beaches, etc. etc.), a lot of these workers were also seasonal. I visited the beach and instead of being greeted by poorly speaking German folk (No offense, but its often obvious when you're interacting with a seasonal worker...) in my favorite restaraunt... I was greeted by Americans (far far fewer of them, because they couldn't find enough workers).
German seasonal part-time workers won't come over because of COVID19. Asking them to risk an airplane flight for some money just isn't worth it.
Well, you don't usually interact with cooks, so that's a bit harder for me to gather information about :-)
You can actually gain a hell of a lot of information with a brief 30-second talk with a cashier, someone stocking the shelves at a store, waiter, or barber. Keep it brief: they're still on the clock and you don't want to waste their time.
Its also their job to respond to you (ex: talk about checkout, to point you in the direction of where items are in a store... or to serve you a meal or cut your hair). So its not very hard to translate a natural interaction into a brief 30-seconds or so question about their perspective in life right now.
Sometimes, you don't even need to talk with them. Like the German seasonal workers at my local beach area: I know it without even talking to anyone. The Germans are gone this year: I didn't see any of them. I normally see lots of them (often shy workers who respond "I don't speak English" when you try to talk with them), but I saw literally none of them this past week when I went to the beach.
I also studied a basic level of Spanish and German. I'm not conversational, but I can recognize when people speak those languages. So hearing random German discussions between seasonal workers in the background is common under normal times, and that's just missing this year.
> (IDK about you, but 3 seconds of googling is easier for me than conducting my own personal polling of people I see out and about)
Information gathered from the Internet doesn't always match my personal spot-checked polls. I was able to call the BTC peak when I noticed that randoms I'd poll were talking about BTC for example, while the internet was damn sure that BTC would keep going up.
When my Bank-teller is able to talk about her Bitcoin "investments", I know we've reached the peak. Besides, people are excited to talk about their viewpoints and its always fascinating to me. (I do visit the banks on occasion still: gotta collects $5 bills and coins and ATMs don't always dispense those)
Its not a lot of effort and yet gets me tons of information. I don't really see any downsides in just doing it on occasion. I'm not like a newspaper reporter or anything (so this isn't my job), but having a quickie pulse on what other people are actually thinking is really helpful in making my own decisions about the world.
This is just the simple "what's the talk around town" sorta thing. Its not hard to start conversations and enjoy another person's point of view.
--------
Besides, when we start talking about innately political subjects (ex: is the current shortage due to unemployment checks vs the current shortage due to a lack of immigrants??), it helps to do some on-the-grounds fact-checking. Asking random strangers a quickie question every now and then results in far higher quality. Sure, the strangers remain biased according to their own viewpoints, but... there's still huge amounts of information from their perspectives.
And its not always politics. Asking about "hey, what's that food you're eating? Is it good?" is a good way to find new restaurants. Or "When is your next shipment of X coming in?" is a great one to ask in stores, so you know when some hot commodity is shipping (ex: GPUs at Microcenter or PS5 at Target). Its not like the internet knows when the specific Target at my street-corner is getting the next shipment of PS5s.
--------
What do you think of "X new product" (useful in determining my next stock purchase: is there on-the-ground buzz about the Ford Maverick? Should I buy the stock F??). Etc. etc. There's just always good information to be gained from helpful strangers. And more often than not, I think people are happy to have a bit of smalltalk in the day (as long as you keep it short).
Well, I guess I haven't really asked around how many cooks have died. Long story short. That's just not a statistic I've personally gathered (and such a statistic would be socially awkward to discuss).
A lot of what I was talking about in the top comments were just the anecdotes that I could personally verify with these spot-checks.
Waiters / Barbers / etc. etc. _ARE_ afraid of dying. Not necessarily the ones serving you, but their former coworkers aren't coming back because of the fear. Maybe dead-cooks have something to do with it. But I can say for sure that front-line workers are willing to talk about their fears (or their viewpoint on the fears of their former coworkers).
I personally know 3 people who left the restaurant industry (1 RNA certification, 1 barbering, and one realtor) last year. I know of one person who spent their time during shutdown working on IT certifications who is currently planning an exit. I don't blame these people for not working in food service. I did my time there, it's miserable on all fronts.
I think the bigger problem is shutting down the industry and starting it back up. People who had to go elsewhere to make ends meet aren't going to go back. It's going to take a long time for these restaurants to recover lost talent. They are going to have to offer a lot more than the old status quo if they want to woo workers back.
I don't know about that. I do think it's way way better than helicopter money and PPP loans, but I don't think it'd help this particular issue. Flushing people out of a local maximum (in terms of effort to compensation) will just have them searching for a new local maximum. A lot might find that their old local maximum was one of the least optimal. Furloughing people gives them time to better optimize. Which in my opinion is good for the workers, but I think you'd still see some people hunting around- they just wouldn't have a fire lit under them.
Those measures are expiring, or already have expired in many places. It'll be interesting to see how many people come back.
There are also high numbers of people retiring and lots of alternative low-skill job options these days. Many people are changing careers upwards as well. Lots of well-paying employers are also short on labor. COVID was a catalyst for many to reevaluate their job situation.
It does hint at how generous the rushed stimuli were:
"Cornett, off work for a few weeks, realized he received enough money through unemployment benefits to start saving — for the first time. He wondered if the work he loves would ever entail a job that came with health insurance or paid leave."
If you want to go that far, you might as well mention how the "American Dream" has been dying since 2008 and took a major shock in 2020. Why work hard and bust your butt in a country and real economy that is falling apart and currently has no long-term prospects?
In what sense did the "American Dream" take a shock in 2020? Iirc, by far the greatest %-age net worth growth in 2020 was among the bottom 50%: greater than the growth in the top 10% or top 1%.
> was mostly ephemeral (look at inflation in car/house prices).
It was driven largely by real estate appreciation. How do you figure that this is ephemeral?
Your second paragraph contradicts your first. America's policy in 2020 was decisively _not_ neoliberal, and was in fact one of the most generous in the world[1]. This is in part due to necessity borne of a smaller safety net than other OECD countries, but it's a huge mistake to interpret this as simply canceling out the scope of the fiscal action; at the very least, describing a government capable of specific spending bills at this scale and reach as committed to neoliberal orthodoxy is ridiculous.
Similarly, "neoliberalism" is an absurd description of an administration whose agenda is based on the increasing acceptance of steady-state gargantuan deficit spending (as we begin to cautiously accept that inflation is not appearing to nearly the degree we've feared for the last decade).
There's a large contingent out there engaging in a combination of wishful thinking and blind extrapolation of an outdated impression of USGov fiscal habits. It's a good fit for a post-truth world (I've lost count of the number of dumb friends who think that the extent of covid fiscal relief was a flat $600/1200 payment). But HN hasn't quite reached that level of disconnection with reality, so let's not steer it that way..
Come on! Real estate appreciation only matters for people that own multiple properties and can therefore afford to sell without compromising the roof over their heads, i.e. landlords.
My sole property doubling in value, along with every other house in comparable neighborhoods, is 100% ephemeral, because there is no way to realize that value without liquidating my family's quality of life--a counterproductive maneuver.
**
Trump Admin was paradoxically nationalist at home and neoliberal abroad (probably because he's a professional clown with no understanding of governance); US foreign policy has not meaningfully changed since 1991/2001. It's all about securing the conditions for global neoliberalism, i.e. American military and financial imperialism, which ensures I can buy a jar of premium African tree nuts from Costco for a fraction of an hours labor, even though it required many hours of labor to produce.
Anyway, that pyramid scheme called neoliberalism is collapsing, and it's only going to get worse domestically in America as a sad but necessary result.
Plus, the idea that your level of living expenses is completely immutable is idiotic. Obviously people don't turn over housing at the drop of a hat, but sitting on extra tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars isn't worthless: homeowners do move, and large increases in a leveraged asset mean even minor downsizing in one's home can allow large increases in other expenses.
> Outside the West, 2020 represented the decisive death of neoliberalism. No one is looking to America for the future anymore.
Interestingly, even America had its only explicitly-anti-neoliberal (in rhetoric, at the very least) President in the last 3+ decades in office at the time. Think what you will of him—I certainly have some thoughts—he was notable for that highly unusual, for a national-level US politician with the backing of a major party, policy stance.
That aspect of that particular phenomenon hasn't received a ton of attention (to be fair, there was a lot of stuff to focus on) so I'm not sure whether it represents any kind of trend, but neoliberal policies are actually fairly unpopular among voters across the board, though very popular among leadership in the two major US political parties for quite some time.
He got elected on a reactionary populist platform, and if he (or Bannon, rather) had any desire to shift American policy, he inevitably got discouraged from doing so by Washington's unelected bureaucracy. So he ended up using his largely ceremonial 4 years of power to enrich his family and friends.
>Cornett, off work for a few weeks, realized he received enough money through unemployment benefits to start saving — for the first time. He wondered if the work he loves would ever entail a job that came with health insurance or paid leave. "I was working what I decided was going to be my last kitchen job," Cornett said.
They're referring to unemployment benefits. I was surprised to find out that a friend's kid has been collecting them for a year - this person has a STEM degree and lost their job due to a fire at work, not COVID. Doesn't matter, the state gave blanket extension to unemployment benefits. In the past you could collect for only a few (maybe 6) months - not sure of that particular state's laws.
That makes sense though, because a blanket unemployment benefit extension is probably cheaper to implement than a bureaucratic mechanism to determine which jobs were lost as a result of COVID.
Exactly. This is not about tips, it's about waiter salary being too close to free money to stay at home. We are seeing this problem with waiters at other countries too, where employees are paid "full salary" and tipping is not even a thing.
The answer to any labor shortage is to pay more. Either take the profits currently captured by the owner and use them for salaries or raise prices and do the same. No consumer should ever be responsible for an entrepreneur’s failing business model.
>Its hilarious that you don't read the article to realize the comment is wrong
Sure, if you take the article at face value. The key argument seems to be "more than half of hospitality workers who've quit said no amount of pay would get them to return". On the surface that might suggest that people are getting out for non-monetary reasons (ie. not related to pandemic relief), I'm skeptical whether that's actually the case. It's easy to tell yourself and the pollster that "no amount of pay" would make you go back when the government has been paying you unemployment for the last 16 months. When unemployment ends and the bills pile up, I suspect a good chunk of them would eventually go back.
It’s neither rational nor fact based. The government isn’t “paying people to sit at home” it’s providing the bare semblance of a social safety net (kind of, not really) in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic. Hopefully these changes become permanent because automation continues to decrease the need for workers and wealth inequality continues to pressure the working class at historically high levels.
>It’s neither rational nor fact based. The government isn’t “paying people to sit at home” it’s providing the bare semblance of a social safety net (kind of, not really) in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic.
That might be the intent, but that's irrelevant to the actual distortionary effects that it causes on the job market that gp is talking about.
If it was fact based they would have provided those facts. They didn’t. It’s also highly irrational to suggest the government is paying people to sit at home, since they are not.
The comment was correctly flagged dead for being flamebait.
>If it was fact based they would have provided those facts.
What facts do we need here? That the program exists? I doubt that's in dispute.
>It’s also highly irrational to suggest the government is paying people to sit at home, since they are not.
1. I think the "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." guideline[1] applies here. The weaker interpretation you seem to be using is "the government's unemployment policy was deliberately designed to get people to stay at home" (as opposed to providing safety net), but the stronger interpretation would be "the government is effectively paying people to stay at home by enacting a policy that gives people money, but will withdraw it should they find work".
2. An argument could be made that the government literally wants people to stay home, as a matter of policy. After all, there would be much less people complying with stay-at-home orders if they ran out of cash, couldn't buy food, and had to find a job.
>for being flamebait.
I fail to see how that's the case. If the commenter called the people on unemployment "lazy" or whatever, you may have a point, but they didn't.
It's entirely rational and fact based, but it does threaten the worldview of the people who parrot everything they hear in mainstream media. Americans will never let "the new normal" be permanent, and only the grossly uninformed hope otherwise.
Stop the tipping guilt trip placed on the public, raise your prices 20%, and pay your employees a livable wage. The public will still show up to eat in your restaurant.