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Restaurant workers quit at record rate

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Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#281

Post by distances »

rubyist5eva wrote: post #198
yepthatsreality wrote: post #4

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.

Food is expensive enough as it is, if restaurant prices went up 20% overnight I would never go to one again. Tipping is irrelevant for fast food.

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#282

Post by almost_usual »

posguy wrote: post #274
jokoon wrote: post #263

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.…

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.

Sounds like restaurants are obsolete if they can’t afford living wages.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#283

Post by cratermoon »

vkou wrote: post #228
hellbannedguy wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 employ…

> 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…

> 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".

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#284

Post by posguy »

kop316 wrote: post #235
yepthatsreality wrote: post #4

The restaurant industry has known the solution for a long time but everyone wants to pretend it would be too difficult. Stop the tipping guilt trip placed on the public, raise your prices 20%, and pay your employees a livable wage. The public will still show up to eat in your restaurant.

That may be the case for some....but that is not the case for all. For one ancedote, my father in-law runs a restaurant with my aunt in-law (his sister). They are the only workers, and split the profits evenly. They are in the midwest (low taxes), and own the restaurant's property/building. They were able to completely shut down during COVID and restart back up, and have survived several economic downturns. They are…

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!

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#285

Post by rayiner »

jokoon wrote: post #263

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.…

> 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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#286

Post by erdos4d »

Gortal278 wrote: post #268
jokoon wrote: post #263

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.…

It's not slavery, that's a ridiculously naive and dumb statement. It's a shitty job, but it's not slavery.

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#287

Post by jokoon »

cortesoft wrote: post #272
jokoon wrote: post #263

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.…

> Except it's hard work, and there will always be a culture of "I pay, I decide, you work". Isn’t that every job, though? In return for money, you do something you wouldn’t do if you weren’t paid?

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#288

Post by coredog64 »

tibbydudeza wrote: post #200
lrdswrk00 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is as a behavioral habit. 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…

>> Restaurants operate on tiny margins 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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#289

Post by cratermoon »

throwawayboise wrote: post #253
lashloch wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something amusing to me about the idea of an industry that "used to be" sustainable. Guess it wasn't sustainable after all.

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 req…

> 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/

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#290

Post by pizza234 »

jbluepolarbear wrote: post #276
yepthatsreality wrote: post #4

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.

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.

At least in Europe, paying the salary off the book in large part, is very common.
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