> 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.
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%.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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
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."
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
>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.
>> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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 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
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.
> 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!
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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?
> 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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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:
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.
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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
>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.
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
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
> 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.
"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.
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.")
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.
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.
"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.”
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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.
+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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
> 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.
> 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.)
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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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%.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
>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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
These types of jobs should be done by 14-21 year old as they are unskilled and help develop social skills. Always found it weird that we have so many career restaurant workers.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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.
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?
Sure, except restauration is one of the most obvious form of exploitation, where one works directly for the pleasure and luxury of one other person's desire.
Most people know how to prepare food for themselves.
I'm not against it, I'm just saying it's an expensive luxury which requires hard work.
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.
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.
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'.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 415 ms ] threadI didn't realize that rude customers was that widespread.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s just that people are realizing that there are easier minimum wage jobs than working in a kitchen
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.
In a pandemic with vast spending deficits, the government is giving out mortgage holidays, 95% mortgage scheme, stamp duty holiday etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So it depends.
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.
A couple of decent summaries:
* https://www.thedailymeal.com/eat/why-home-cooked-food-never-...
* https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1f1vr6/e...
People always need to eat.
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.
McD is more strategic: They want a good business plan, location, etc. and are very picky at the cost of some false negatives.
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/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carriesheffield/2014/04/29/on-t...
And who worked the day shift?
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.
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.
Most people decide fast food management isn't for them, and move elsewhere. The ones who remain dropped out and need the free training.
> Most people decide fast food management isn't for them, and move elsewhere.
Perhaps it was too stressful? Just a thought.
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)
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.
Deskilling, derisking, outsourcing. Companies used to run their own email, which required a competent mailadmin, nowadays you outsource it to Google or Microsoft.
Most companies didn't hire a competent mail admin, their IT guy would run Exchange on the company fileserver as a part of his other duties.
Most of the large companies that used to hire a competent mail admin to run their mail servers still run their own mail servers.
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?
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.
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.
listening to Changelog while riding my bike at night after getting out of the factory
Return to office might have some reverse effect but online remote employees can be one of the biggest generators of this problem.
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.
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.
No soup for you.
Sounds like they're in a no win situation.
If they don't raise wages: "boo they're paying their workers slave wages!"
If they do raise wages: "boo they're using their huge scale to further crush their competitors!"
Nothing, good point.
> That is what they are doing now, right?
I haven't seen that near where I live (in the US) though I wouldn't doubt there are a number of locations experiencing that.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> Salary and Years of Experience
> 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:
> 0 to 5 years: $8.19 - $15.24
> 5 to 10 years: $8.28 - $15.83
> 10 to 20 years: $8.84 - $17.16
> 20 or more years: $8.73 - $20.00
Often working 24, 36 or even 48 hour shifts.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course 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.
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 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.
Where do 9,500 people switch employment to?
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.)
Ever heard of Carnegie Tech (CMU), the Wharton School, or Swarthmore college? They exist precisely because of the existence of massive profits from steel.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Those people are only serving us the food we need to live.
After a certain point, programming becomes less hard. It becomes a set of very familiar syntax snippets to copy/paste around.
Rushing around a kitchen in the heat, and often toxic, juvenile environment all week never changes… versus programming in your house?
Give me a break. You’re not coming close to putting the same real pressure on your body.
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.
- 20 years of work
- x years of study
- being born with the right nature/nurture mix for computer work
…to get to this point. That’s a very significant initial hump in difficulty that restaurant work doesn’t have.
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.
people with engineering degree struggle to find job as SE.
let alone that you need to put hundreds/thousands of hours into it in your free time
and then still learn a lot as dev in order to move up
i'm not saying that it makes SE harder, just different.
Go work 20 years of Friday and Saturday nights in a popular restaurant. Does not have to be the same one, as the expectation is the same.
The level of effort I need to put into coding dropped off exponentially.
As one ages the level of effort out into restaurant work goes up.
Let’s rely on science and not bias. Programming is still not sweatshop work on the regular. I work 4 solid hours a day.
Why isn’t there a flood of ex-restaurant workers becoming software engineers? Because getting over that hump is really hard, statistically speaking.
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.
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.
Historically, the people doing "hard work" were peasants, serfs, and other lower-class people.
The people doing "skilled work" were the educated sons of nobility, and later of wealthy merchants.
An awful lot of the unhealthy and destructive dynamic in our modern work can be traced to feudalism.
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.
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.
Wait until they learn about passive income and proper usage of leverage!
It comes from well-paid workers also liking to pretend that they are hard workers. It's required for the moral superiority.
Because the labor theory of value seems intuitively true,
Unfortunately it does not reflect the reality of how humans exchange labor.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
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.
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.
Software development is done from a laptop, in whatever air-conditioned room or office you'd like.
Restaurant work is, by definition, hot, loud, and surrounded by people who treat you like a servant.
You could take two people who have the exact same "knack" for each profession, and one of them would still be much more miserable.
It just sucks more to be in a restaurant than it does to write code. I think that's kind of tough to argue.
Profit sharing, on the other hand...
I wonder what McDonalds would do if you tried it.
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).
The analog in software is working for a surveillance company versus architecting your software to cut out needless middlemen.
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.
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) .
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.
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.
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.
Which raises the question of why anyone would work, if doing whatever you want and still living a comfortable life was an option.
It sounds like a lovely future, but I don't the automation exists yet to replace all the jobs.
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.
Let's say you got $20k/yr[0] for free. Do you think you could live comfortably on that? Would you be willing to work to improve your comfort level?
[0] full time US minimum wage with no time off is about $15k/yr
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.
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?
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?
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.
'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.
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.
Doubling their rate to $20/hr would be a pay cut.
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.
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.
I'm not sure more corporate concentration would be a better situation.
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?
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.
Also, I consequently completely avoid chain restaurants. I haven't entered McDonald's since 2008 or so.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Actually, to spend $50K on a fryer system is pretty hard:
https://www.webstaurantstore.com/63853/deep-fryer-with-oil-f...
Fried food's on the menu, boys! Quadruple bypass, here I come.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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!
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.
Sounds good.
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.
Not in Minnesota, obviously.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_income_tax#/media/File:T...
$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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Although I'd never pay $25 for a burger. (Sydney here)
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.
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.
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.
I don't think I've ever seen a sign advertising anything near that for restaurants.
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.
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.
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.
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 said, gifts totaling under $15,000 are non-taxable.
https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc761
https://www.palisadeshudson.com/2013/09/if-gifts-are-not-inc...
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).
It works perfectly for many tens of millions of restaurant workers in two dozen developed countries around the world.
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.
Isn't the solution obvious? Adjust wages/prices to such a degree that it does fully compensate for the missing tips.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.")
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.
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.
The normal market solution to a shortage is to raise prices until there is no longer an excess of supply at that higher price
In economics, outcomes are all that matter.
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.
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.
$665/40=$16.63
The financial incentive to not work is strong. Add in 40 extra hours of free time...
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.
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.
I've heard of bartenders making more than $100k/yr, (but still with no benefits).
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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
Anecdotally I've stopped eating at restaurants/food carts that I absolutely loved when they've raised prices about that much
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You aren't gonna get all restaurants onboard with this at once unless you outlaw tipping, and I don't see that happening.
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.
[1] https://livingwage.mit.edu/
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.
yeah if you check the hourly earning chart, the hourly wage required for a dual earner household with 2 adults and 3 kids is only $32.29/hr.
"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.
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).
https://livingwage.mit.edu/resources/Living-Wage-Users-Guide...
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.
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.)
They're using state level minimum wages, but that's just as inaccurate as using the federal minimum wage.
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.
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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.
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.
https://www.advisory.com/en/daily-briefing/2021/02/10/covid-...
(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.
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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.
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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).
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).
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.
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..
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/business-52450...
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.
not really. you can reverse mortgage it when you retire.
That’s not true at all. By far most gains were captured by the wealthy:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/23/how-much-wealth-top-1percent...
The problem with that analysis is that it implies a 1%/1% growth (for rich/poor respectively) is preferable to a 2%/6% growth.
What they said was technically/precisely true, despite not being particularly meaningful.
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/07/net-worth-gains-in-2...
https://ielts.com.au/articles/grammar-101-who-vs-whom/
> if you can replace it with “him” or “her,” use whom
Source: parent
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.
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.
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.
By paying more, of course.
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.
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.
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.
"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."
>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.
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.
The comment was correctly flagged dead for being flamebait.
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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.
Or did I miss the post where you were complaining about aid to other tax brackets and businesses?
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 totally agree abusive customers are a huge problem though.
Also tends to deflate the rude customer.
"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.
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.
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.
Starbucks is a recent example of a company that had to do major damage control after asking some non-customers to leave their store.
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.
Modest people also eat out in Europe or in Japan, where morally mandatory tipping does not exist, so there is that.
More people dining means more profit probably.
> (citation needed)
Yes, that may indeed be a problem.
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.
Edit: I missed the point, my fault.
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.
https://www.eater.com/a/case-against-tipping
There's no good argument in favor of tipping. It's a bad practice that we should stop immediately.
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.
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.
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 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.
/s
The person in the article though is in the back of the house. Those workers almost uniformly make minimum wage across the country.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/Legendary-Zuni-Cafe...
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.
The 90th percentile wage for waiters (excluding fast-food!) is $20.46/hr. The 75th percentile is $14.73
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes353031.htm
The vast majority of waiters would love to make a $20 wage.
Even if everyone at 4-dollar-sign restaurants was making 6 digits, that's still a small minority of restaurants.
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 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.
Almost as if there was some kind of flaw in the initial premise...
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’ve never seen anything like it
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/red-deer-clinic-doct...
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.
> 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.
The full thread is here: https://twitter.com/jstoteraux/status/1413326562821246978?s=....
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.
There is a legal concept called "due diligence" where a party to a contract is expected to take reasonable steps to know what they're doing.
Googling "starting salaries for [my major]" is a very, very low bar for due diligence.
The posts in this thread absolving the student from making any effort whatsoever at due diligence is illustrative of the point I was making.
Then the onus would be on the banks to only lend to people who they thought could repay.
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.
Besides, it seems weird that the senior class would never notice that the class that graduated just ahead of them is working at the car wash?
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.
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.
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.
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.
This was long before Google.
The starting salaries for each major were common knowledge, too.
I don't buy that film students did not know this until after graduation.
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.
> teenagers
Masters degree students are not teenagers.
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.
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.
It's also weird to present such a wild off the wall example at the end. I don't think such people are common.
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.
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.
This is what I am talking about with the entitlement society - zero responsibility assigned to the person for their poor decisions.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What are we going to do about it? End the program? How about in september?
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.
The truth of the matter is that America has become a much angrier society since the pandemic started.
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.
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.
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!’"
https://leftlockdownsceptics.com/2021/07/collaboration-or-re...
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/Data-show-the-pand...
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).
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.
Paying everybody a living wage should be the minimum bar for any economy. If ours can't do it, we need a different one.
The employers aren't obligated to employ anyone. What do you think happens to the "slave-wage class" when the job disappears entirely?
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).
Federal minimum wage is $7.25 for tipped employees its $2.13
Lobbying groups contribute to keeping wages low: https://www.politicalresearch.org/2015/04/14/chain-restauran...
Herman Cain former presidential candidate and CEO of godfather's pizza specifically built his lobbying career on this.
Not claiming it, its a fact.
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.
And we're not obligated to provide them with people desperate enough to work their shit jobs either.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some say people pay for the experience, for being served when going to a restaurant.
It would be interesting to see if that's true, or if highly automated restaurants with the right experience and price will become a hit.
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.
The more of them that shut down after COVID and don't come back, the better.
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.
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?
While the result would feel a bit dystopian I suspect I'd still go along as a consumer.
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.
Treating people well starts with paying them well, but has to continue with respecting them.
Isn’t that every job, though? In return for money, you do something you wouldn’t do if you weren’t paid?
Most people know how to prepare food for themselves.
I'm not against it, I'm just saying it's an expensive luxury which requires hard work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 really isn't. France has lots of delicious recipes but the food that gets actually produced in the average restaurant in France is terrible.