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Tahoe's hiring crisis is unraveling small businesses during its busiest season

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Re: Tahoe's hiring crisis is unraveling small businesses during its busiest season

#141

Post by zepto »

ActorNightly wrote: post #127
aazaa wrote: post #96

> “You put an ad out and nobody even interviews,” Wilderotter said, echoing Barrios. That's because you're not offering enough money. Raise it by 20%, 50%, 200%. Keep raising it until you get qualified applicants. You will eventually find a price that attracts the people your business needs. And if that price is too high to turn a profit and there's no other way, shut down. Article after article with business owners…

The issue is that a lot of places are ran on thin profit margins. You would have to raise the price of goods, which then means you have to raise the quality of goods as well to outcompete highly optimized chain restaurants.

> outcompete highly optimized chain restaurants.

This makes no sense in context.

Highly optimized chain restaurants are not known for paying waitstaff high wages.

Re: Tahoe's hiring crisis is unraveling small businesses during its busiest season

#142

Post by andrew_ »

BrianOnHN wrote: post #48
andrew_ wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please be more nuanced in your replies when painting with a wide brush. Florida is absolutely exploding right now, and there's so much housing construction here that one can expect to wait for months for contractor availability. I've been in three of the five major FL cities in the past few months and while there are a lot of "help wanted" signs, businesses are open and busier than ever. What's hurting this region is…

Florida resident here, and I don't ever remember seeing $500 signing bonuses for gas station employees before now. Yes, restaurants are busy here, but the service and food quality is obviously suffering. Look up housing prices in the Tampa bay area. The new construction is all "Luxury" (just a word, still crappy) so they can sell $1,500 one bedrooms to foreigners. Not that anyone's surprised, but look to Florida for…

> Yes, restaurants are busy here, but the service and food quality is obviously suffering

Not in my experience.

> Look up housing prices in the Tampa bay area. The new construction is all "Luxury" (just a word, still crappy) so they can sell $1,500 one bedrooms to foreigners.

This just reads as incredibly bigoted. We're getting a decent amount of immigration influx but the majority of population rise is from out of state. Affordable housing is being developed and has been the last few years . New funding initiatives for affordable housing are in the works across the bay [1] [2], and there's a massive mixed income complex in planning for a major site across the river from downtown Tampa.

Demand is outpacing supply here. Plain and simple.

1. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.tampabay.com/news/st-peters... 2. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.tampabay.com/news/hillsboro...

Re: Tahoe's hiring crisis is unraveling small businesses during its busiest season

#143

Post by skt5 »

Red_Leaves_Flyy wrote: post #134
skt5 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In cases where rent exceeds the mortgage, I think the reasons would be to cover the cost of capital, risk, and operational expenses. In this case, the long term expected value of the property might be flat or growing at a lower than average rate so future expected gains can't be used to offset short term losses. If this wasn't the case, in theory renters would just become buyers themselves.

Renters can’t become owners when multi billion investment firms are buying or own large percentages of the market. The market is incredibly distorted and inherently dysfunctional in its current state. Families should be living in housing they own our mortgage not paying someone else’s mortgage or profit to the investment class.

I think we agree that when rent exceeds the cost of a mortgage one of the possible root causes is the cost of capital is high for the renter. Whether the cost of capital should be the same across different populations (in this example - the renter and investment firms) is another question.

Re: Tahoe's hiring crisis is unraveling small businesses during its busiest season

#144

Post by skt5 »

anonuser123456 wrote: post #43
djbebs wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is to not interfere in the market.

I agree with allowing the market to function, but I also believe it needs to be coupled with a land value tax to incentivise efficient use of the land. A land value tax incentives people to build up and build in a space efficient manner.

Aren't property taxes a form of a land value tax? You could argue that property taxes aren't high enough - or priced below market value - to incentivize efficient resource allocation.

Re: Tahoe's hiring crisis is unraveling small businesses during its busiest season

#145

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

sandworm101 wrote: post #119
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This randomly selected but high-google-ranked page disagrees with you: https://www.caminofinancial.com/restaurant-costs/ So does this one: https://www.7shifts.com/blog/restaurant-costs/ and this one: https://www.touchbistro.com/blog/restaurant-operating-costs/

And how much of the labor costs in fact goes to the rent paid by those workers? My point is that rents, payments to landlords, take little pieces out of everything.

But then your observation isn't really about restaurants at all, and is instead a general complaint that mixes various amounts of:

1) "the rent's too damn high"

2) too much renting going on, not enough

I'm not sure I disagree with either, but it doesn't seem that can explain the situation in restaurants, since it affects huge chunks of the population and the economy.

Re: Tahoe's hiring crisis is unraveling small businesses during its busiest season

#146

Post by spaetzleesser »

over_bridge wrote: post #136
listless wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand the “pay people more” sentiment. It _seems_ like the correct and obvious solution, but it seems like it just moves the goal line. Margins are razor thin in restaurants specifically. If you pay people more, you’ll need to raise your prices and that will offset the pay raise if it happens across the board. What am I missing?

I suppose for a restaurant specifically, the people who work there and who eat there are very different. If higher wages leads to higher unit price, its not the worker paying that difference, its the wealthier customers. Of course in the general case, the places the workers do shop at, probably supermarkets, will notice that people have more money to spend and will likely try to capture that extra money for themselve…

"its not the worker paying that difference, its the wealthier customers."

Exactly.

Re: Tahoe's hiring crisis is unraveling small businesses during its busiest season

#147

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

sandworm101 wrote: post #118
Choco31415 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If landlords are charging significantly more then the mortgage costs, then what if the rent model was switched to an auction with a minimum set at the landlord mortgage costs plus some percentage on top? That way the landlord gets what they need and the pricing is not arbitrary, but at least fixed to some realistic measure. Note: I’m not very familiar with the situation, just ideating.

Why should rent be higher than mortgage costs? Why should renters pay down principal, effectively purchasing the property for the landlord? In the past, landlords owned property and rented it out. If there was a mortgage, rent covered the interest payments rather than principal (interest rates were once far higher than today) and rents were generally lower than mortgage costs. If rent is higher than mortgage costs, t…

> In the past, landlords owned property and rented it out. If there was a mortgage, rent covered the interest payments rather than principal (interest rates were once far higher than today) and rents were generally lower than mortgage costs.

Got a citation for this claim?

During my 32 years living in the USA, and the 25 before that in the UK and elsewhere, I was never aware of rent working this way.

The difference between renting and owning was not so much the monthly payments, but:

* tenant has no financial or labor responsibility for repairs or capital improvements; landlord fully responsible.

* landlord collects all (if any) capital gains

* landlord pays insurance on building; tenant pays insurance on contents

* owner combines all above roles.

Re: Tahoe's hiring crisis is unraveling small businesses during its busiest season

#148

Post by EMM_386 »

bsagdiyev wrote: post #126
B2B_human wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like a big city person (i used to be one - 5 years ago before moving here). I live in Truckee. town of 16,000 people. > If the local residents are wealthy enough to live in the area, perhaps businesses have to bite the bullet, raise prices locally, and pay more for essential services like bartenders, wait staff, retail, etc I love your definition of "essential services" are bartenders and wait staff. You so…

You sound exactly like the people who moved up to Lake Arrowhead and ruined it, I ended up leaving when I got told by a flatlander to leave “their” mountain, where they’d lived for a lot shorter time than I had. I realized then it was losing its appeal and wouldn’t be a place I’d continue to enjoy with those sorts increasingly moving up there. For a resort area the people who work the service jobs are essential. Thos…

> For a resort area the people who work the service jobs are essential.

I am the OP the commenter was referring to. I wasn't going to bother responding to a nitpick on my use of the word "essential" but you summed up my meaning perfectly.

If all the bars, restaurants, cafes, dry cleaners, etc. go unstaffed (as they are right now), headlines start being made. We don't need to lump people into brush-fire fighters and bartenders in terms of who is essential.

To top it off I'm not a city person and I used to live in Truckee, CA, where this poster is living.

Re: Tahoe's hiring crisis is unraveling small businesses during its busiest season

#149

Post by listless »

spaetzleesser wrote: post #146
over_bridge wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose for a restaurant specifically, the people who work there and who eat there are very different. If higher wages leads to higher unit price, its not the worker paying that difference, its the wealthier customers. Of course in the general case, the places the workers do shop at, probably supermarkets, will notice that people have more money to spend and will likely try to capture that extra money for themselve…

"its not the worker paying that difference, its the wealthier customers." Exactly.

What if it becomes widespread? And every restaurant raises wages to attract workers while also raising prices? In other words, we need some people to be paid very little to produce the cheap food for these hire paid food service workers. Where is the bottom?

Re: Tahoe's hiring crisis is unraveling small businesses during its busiest season

#150

Post by astura »

analyst74 wrote: post #94
astura wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of the businesses interview in this article claim they start their employees at $20/he but that's not enough to pay rent and too much to qualify for government assistance.

To me that sounds like labour cost were subsidized by welfare in the past, and now needs to adjust for market realities. This causes shock to the market, but should eventually find an equilibrium.

Oh yes, I don't disagree at all, food stamps, section 8/public housing, medicaid (mostly medicaid expansion), WIC, etc can often take the form of corporate welfare.

Someone working full time should be able to pay life expenses without government assistance.

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