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Restaurant workers quit at record rate

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Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#371

Post by FredPret »

minikites wrote: post #156
namdnay wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>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.

I agree. It’s a simple matter of supply and demand. Want more supply? Raise the price!

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#372

Post by mdavis6890 »

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.

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#373

Post by WalterBright »

zipiridu wrote: post #233
WalterBright wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Customer entitlement is out of control 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,…

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#374

Post by yesenadam »

jclulow wrote: post #328
stevejb wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wate…

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,…

Thank you, that's wonderful writing.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#375

Post by imtringued »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #64
tarr11 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So is it better to give 10 people some wage, but not a living wage, or 5 people a living wage and have 5 people with no wage?

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#376

Post by unstatusthequo »

ericbarrett wrote: post #73

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…

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#377

Post by archduck »

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…

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#378

Post by megameter »

okprod wrote: post #77
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.

I think the Shake Shack founder tried the no tipping-- increase prices route at his fancy restaurant and ended up reversing the decision.

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#380

Post by pessimizer »

ac29 wrote: post #326
conductr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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.

https://work.chron.com/much-hospital-orderlies-make-per-hour...

> 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

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