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Restaurant workers quit at record rate

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Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#461

Post by jandrewrogers »

tolbish wrote: post #364
jandrewrogers wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How much money did they make with raised wages and no tips? Was the wage still not comparable to other jobs?

I have several good friends that work in this business in Seattle, where several restauranteurs tried the "no tipping" model. Anecdotally, in a popular quintessentially Seattle restaurant, a good front-of-house person may net around $40/hr after tips, some more and some less. I don't have a lot of sample data for the "no tipping" restaurants, but my general impression is that it was on the order of a 10% reduction in pay.

One reason several of them have mentioned is that many customers are happy to regularly tip much more than 20%, and this is often correlated with the highest spending customers. Making it a non-discretionary 20% puts an artificially low cap on how much they earn from the customers that pay the most. At one time some customers would leave extra cash on the table after paying the "no tipping" bill, but no one carries cash anymore.

Places that net $40/hr have enormous difficulty hiring right now. These are not poorly paying jobs but the broader lifestyle is pretty terrible even at good restaurants, made even more terrible because of the employee shortage.

One overlooked issue is that many restaurant workers in the big cities are originally from "flyover country". When the restaurants closed during COVID, a large number went back home. I was talking to a waitress in the middle-of-nowhere Iowa a few months ago and she had just moved back after several years working in New York City restaurants.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#462

Post by moritonal »

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…

Whilst that might be true for Americans, as a European I find your culture of tipping(as part of a waiter's salary) a negative for everyone but the faceless business. I still tip waiters who do a great job, but don't have to be guilted into thinking they will go hungry if I don't.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#463

Post by dimgl »

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…

I'm not sure what's going on, but on the flip side I've noticed a general lack of care from service workers at restaurants lately. Anecdotal evidence, obviously, but my meals have often had wrong ingredients, incorrect items, missing items, low quality items... the list goes on. This really doesn't inspire confidence or give credence to the argument that they deserve more money if they can't get basic details correct.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#464

Post by fleddr »

I think in the coming year, we're going to find out that the "return to normal" isn't going to be very normal.

I spot a longer term "convenience" trend in consumers that has been further propelled by the pandemic, creating permanent shifts in demand.

There's many examples of it regardless of the pandemic...

Visiting a theater to see a movie is on the decline, as people use Netflix on increasingly large and capable screens.

ecommerce has marginalized physical stores.

And so on. We were already on this trend, and the end game for pretty much anything is smartphone-level convenience. If I want something, it should in most cases not require more effort than the push of a button. Even to change the light in the house, of which the switch is 3 feet away from me.

The pandemic has "delivered" new services, or existing ones that we now got used to.

There's going to be far less business travel, as now every rank in every company has been forced to make remote work operate somewhat efficiently. This will permanently change office real estate and business locations.

Not to mention the car industry, as a lot of usage is based on commutes.

Gyms may also see structurally less demand, as people found alternatives, and got used to them.

In my country (Netherlands), ecommerce was already normalized yet now even the less tech savvy got accustomed to it, further accelerating the decline of physical stores.

Luckily, people still did grocery shopping at the store itself. Not anymore. Now many people have tried home delivery of groceries and are unlikely to give back the time won.

Finally, restaurants. Before the pandemic, all you could get delivered here was junk food. Now you can get a high quality meal. Further, home cooking is back, the convenience type where they ship fresh high quality stuff with clear instructions.

Surely, visiting a restaurant is still a rich and social experience, but I would not be surprised if demand is significantly reduced if the home option is pretty good.

As for the convenience trend, a cynical view is that people are lazy. A more optimistic view is that people optimize their time, which is scarce. Speed and convenience wins, and will take over everything.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#465

Post by bsder »

Raidion wrote: post #96
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That's a false dichotomy, because those people can go and do something else. Even if we make an assumption that it IS a zero sum game (and that there are no other jobs), then we're into a wildly different conversation around how we deal with allocating finite resources in a culture that supports property rights, and no one is going to solve that in a hacker news comment chain.

> That's a false dichotomy, because those people can go and do something else.

That is not automatically guaranteed.

Part of the problem with the Western economies is that the mills/mines/etc. used to employ a LOT of people.

A good example is the Natrona Heights steel plant. It used to employ something like 10,000 people at its height. After automation, it will now employ a couple hundred.

Where do 9,500 people switch employment to?

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#466

Post by dragonwriter »

mdavis6890 wrote: post #455
dragonwriter wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> does it matter if it's a technical shortage or just and observed one? Yes. A so-called “observed shortage” is not a shortage, its just buyers wanting a good without wanting to pay the price it costs to buy in the present market conditions. A real shortage involves either a constraint which prevents price adjustment to an equilibrium of supply/demand or demand and supply curves shaped in such a way that no equilibri…

"The solution to an observed shortage of labor is “employers pay more and quit whining”." - Keep in mind that going along with higher prices (wages), there will be a lower quantity (jobs). At least according to your Econ 101 book.

> "The solution to an observed shortage of labor is “employers pay more and quit whining”." - Keep in mind that going along with higher prices (wages), there will be a lower quantity (jobs).

No, that would only be true if there was not an observed shortage; that is, if the current market price was clearing the market with no unmet demand at the market clearing price.

An observed shortage that is not a real shortage means that the market price can rise to the point of market equilibrium without reducing quantity traded. In fact with a normal supply curve shape, the minimum price increase to achieve equilibrium will increase the quantity traded compared to the status quo, as quantity supplied will increase with price. Quantity demanded will be lower than in the status quo, but since the “observed shortage” is quantity demanded being above quantity supplied and, therefore, traded at the current price, that reduction is literally just reducing the “observed shortage” to zero, not reducing quantity traded.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#467

Post by at-fates-hands »

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 are in the midwest (low taxes)

Not in Minnesota, obviously.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#468

Post by nightfly »

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 just doesn't always work, if you lose more than 20% of your customer base when you raise your prices 20% you aren't doing yourself a favor.

Anecdotally I've stopped eating at restaurants/food carts that I absolutely loved when they've raised prices about that much

---

You aren't gonna get all restaurants onboard with this at once unless you outlaw tipping, and I don't see that happening.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#469

Post by at-fates-hands »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #255
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

In france being a waiters is way harder than most others jobs. At most jobs you get to work 35 hours on regular days, with a lot of hollidays and a fixed schedule. Restaurants have a lot of legal exceptions because you need people to work on sunday, vacations, weird schedules, etc. So compared to other situations in the same country, it's not a good deal.

>> Restaurants have a lot of legal exceptions because you need people to work on sunday, vacations, weird schedules, etc.

Actually a lot of industries have this problem.

I was a smartphone tech. I repaired phones. You know when a majority of our business was done? On weekends and holidays. Whenever my GF had a national holiday, I had to work because it meant the people who put off fixing their phones will take that day and come it for a repair because it was way more convenient than during or after their working hours.

I also had to work until 7pm every night for the same reason. My owner was banking on people coming home from work and stopping, so we stayed open an extra two hours. Some days I had five people in my office. Other days? Maybe one or two. But those two hours generated a lot more revenue than you probably think over the course of a month.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#470

Post by InitialLastName »

jimmaswell wrote: post #342
ipaddr wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25 dollar hamburgers? That sounds so strange.

Could be AUD but that's still $18. Australia has a high COL.

Plus if more of the tip is baked into the price, that's a standard-NYC-fare $15 hamburger with a 20% tip.
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