151–160 of 961 posts
Why not bring back the Automat to take the increasingly-rude public out of the equation?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 yo…
OP was pointing this out: 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.
--------
Besides, when we start talking about innately political subjects (ex: is the current shortage due to unemployment checks vs the current shortage due to a lack of immigrants??), it helps to do some on-the-grounds fact-checking. Asking random strangers a quickie question every now and then results in far higher quality. Sure, the strangers remain biased according to their own viewpoints, but... there's still huge amounts of information from their perspectives.
And its not always politics. Asking about "hey, what's that food you're eating? Is it good?" is a good way to find new restaurants. Or "When is your next shipment of X coming in?" is a great one to ask in stores, so you know when some hot commodity is shipping (ex: GPUs at Microcenter or PS5 at Target). Its not like the internet knows when the specific Target at my street-corner is getting the next shipment of PS5s.
--------
What do you think of "X new product" (useful in determining my next stock purchase: is there on-the-ground buzz about the Ford Maverick? Should I buy the stock F??). Etc. etc. There's just always good information to be gained from helpful strangers. And more often than not, I think people are happy to have a bit of smalltalk in the day (as long as you keep it short).
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…
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/red-deer-clinic-doct...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 attrac…
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 no…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 attrac…
> The employers aren’t raising their wages either 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.
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
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.
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.
Great servers at high end restaurants are making 100K a year because of tips. Why would they want to make $20 an hour?
Why would they only get $20 an hour? If they really are the best at what they do, high end places can and will pay more.
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 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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
It comes from classism. 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.