Restaurant workers quit at record rate • Hacker News Board

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#381

Post by mdavis6890 » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 9:00 PM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #356

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.

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 tha…

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#382

Post by HarryHirsch » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 9:01 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#383

Post by mariodiana » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 9:02 PM UTC

jandrewrogers wrote: post #356

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.

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 tha…

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#384

Post by ruined » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 9:03 PM UTC

usaar333 wrote: post #215

ruined wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you do not get unemployment if you quit your job voluntarily. when managers say employees leave in order to collect unemployment, it's a lie.

The covid rule changes to UI were more flexible. You could leave/not take a new job due to covid concerns: https://www.sfchronicle.com/business/networth/article/Califo...

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#385

Post by tshaddox » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 9:04 PM UTC

mdavis6890 wrote: post #372

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…

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?

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#386

Post by imtringued » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

blooalien wrote: post #144

wyager wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 reci…

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 beneficia…

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#387

Post by FredPret » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 9:05 PM UTC

lrdswrk00 wrote: post #190

falcolas wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I worked in a restaurant through high school and have been coding professionally for 20 years. 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…

It took you…

- 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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#388

Post by pessimizer » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 9:06 PM UTC

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…

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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#389

Post by BuckRogers » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 9:06 PM UTC

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…

>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.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#390

Post by ngngngng » Tue, Jul 20, 2021, 9:07 PM UTC

apozem wrote: post #370

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…

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…

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?