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Restaurant workers quit at record rate

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Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#561

Post by remram »

daenz wrote: post #136
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…

True, hard work and skilled work are not opposites, but you can work less hard doing skilled work (it's almost the definition of skilled work), and still have a bigger impact than someone working very hard at unskilled work. I probably should have used the phrase "unskilled work" in my original post, but I was trying to convey the person's frustrations about "hard work." From an outsiders perspective, a skilled knowl…

I'm not sure I even agree with that "impact" rhetoric. What do most of us do, deliver ads? Host funny pictures? Move electronic money around? Running shops so people on minimum wage can buy products they don't need, packed and delivered by other people on minimum wage?

Those people are only serving us the food we need to live.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#562

Post by dundarious »

argvargc wrote: post #542
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…

This and other dysfunction like it are just ordinary run-of-the-mill, well-documented societal effects of the rise of the kind of socio-political order proliferating lately. It hides - and so persists - deep beneath people's therefore ever-increasing unwillingness to face the reality of the consequences of what they've consented to. Such self-absorbed puffery is the hallmark of any similar regime, and those "toeing t…

Your comment is so drenched with florid contempt and disdain that it's actually really hard to understand what you're talking about.

I'm trying to be charitable in my interpretation, but even leaving aside the style, it's extremely vague. What I've taken from your comment is:

- this bad thing is like other well-known bad socio-political things (which ones?)

- people are just going along with it without openly acknowledging it

- there are a lot of those people, and there's a hierarchy of them

- it's sad and bad, but will end eventually, and as usual, some outsiders who questioned it will come back in and form the new hierarchy

Now to be less than charitable for a moment, I think "It was a dark and stormy night" now has competition with:

> It hides - and so persists - deep beneath people's therefore ever-increasing unwillingness to face the reality of the consequences of what they've consented to.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#563

Post by impute »

WalterBright wrote: post #529
imtringued wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That person clearly is not a victim of the school, rather that person is the victim of a predatory loan. Just think about it. A degree doesn't have to cost $300000 but the bank financed it anyway, with the clear intention of working that person down to their bones. Why would a bank let someone take a debt that takes 10 years of work to repay? Because they want to force that person to work for 10 years. If the law wer…

> victim This is what I am talking about with the entitlement society - zero responsibility assigned to the person for their poor decisions.

It's the other way around. It's lender who has zero responsibility since student loans cannot be discharged during bankruptcy.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#564

Post by nerdponx »

paxys wrote: post #517
mdavis6890 wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There is no change in people's interest in eating out. They couldn't because of covid, but demand is rapidly shooting back up.

+1, I would have to see evidence that the demand curve has permanently shifted or is generally shifting left. Because it doesn't match with my experience at all, that people love restaurants and have been eagerly waiting out the pandemic so they can go to restaurants again. Restaurants in some areas of the US now are so busy that they stopped takeout service because they have so much inhouse service.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#565

Post by jimmyjazz14 »

minikites wrote: post #291
Ajay-p wrote: post #33

I worked a long, long time in the food service industry and it was the tipping that drove me away. I just could not smile and bear it anymore. I never got angry at a customer, never lost my cool in front of them, and did my best to be polite and humble, but it just wore me out. I felt like every day I was begging, hoping for them to like me so I could pay rent. If I didn't have to worry about that I could do the job…

Tipping is filled with issues of discrimination. Tipping also allows for the owner to steal from workers more easily (wage theft). https://www.eater.com/a/case-against-tipping There's no good argument in favor of tipping. It's a bad practice that we should stop immediately.

I used to work at high ticket fine dining restaurants and tipping at those sort of places was great for me, it was one of the few non-professional jobs I had that I could actually support myself on.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#566

Post by remram »

yepthatsreality wrote: post #106
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.

Automation doesn’t solve every problem. Sometimes you want human interaction and there’s no reason that can’t be a part of the cost.

The fact that you enjoy that intersection is not an excuse for the terrible pay we give people to do it. If you want premium customer service maybe you should be charged a premium price.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#567

Post by nerdponx »

gscott wrote: post #555
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…

Even driving now is more difficult. I live in San Diego and it seems now people have more cars and are driving more then pre-pandemic. Half the time I can't change lanes because no one lets me in. I can't get off on some freeway off-ramps because some are backed up many hundreds of feet (so I go to the next off-ramp as I have been nearly hit by people trying to slow down to get into the off-ramp line). Strange things…

Driving in New York and New England is ridiculous now. What used to be occasional antisocial dangerous behavior is now commonplace: tailgating, speeding, aggressive lane changes, boxing people out from changing lanes. It's like everyone lost their marbles.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#568

Post by gruez »

luffapi wrote: post #526
gruez wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It’s neither rational nor fact based. The government isn’t “paying people to sit at home” it’s providing the bare semblance of a social safety net (kind of, not really) in the middle of an unprecedented pandemic. That might be the intent, but that's irrelevant to the actual distortionary effects that it causes on the job market that gp is talking about.

If it was fact based they would have provided those facts. They didn’t. It’s also highly irrational to suggest the government is paying people to sit at home, since they are not. The comment was correctly flagged dead for being flamebait.

>If it was fact based they would have provided those facts.

What facts do we need here? That the program exists? I doubt that's in dispute.

>It’s also highly irrational to suggest the government is paying people to sit at home, since they are not.

1. I think the "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize." guideline[1] applies here. The weaker interpretation you seem to be using is "the government's unemployment policy was deliberately designed to get people to stay at home" (as opposed to providing safety net), but the stronger interpretation would be "the government is effectively paying people to stay at home by enacting a policy that gives people money, but will withdraw it should they find work".

2. An argument could be made that the government literally wants people to stay home, as a matter of policy. After all, there would be much less people complying with stay-at-home orders if they ran out of cash, couldn't buy food, and had to find a job.

>for being flamebait.

I fail to see how that's the case. If the commenter called the people on unemployment "lazy" or whatever, you may have a point, but they didn't.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#569

Post by paulcole »

itsoktocry wrote: post #530
browningstreet wrote: post #498

I think some businesses are going out of businesses because they stubbornly refuse to raise their wages. In the vacation community where I live, there are two grocery/delis about a mile apart from each other. One is at a marina, the other is at a beach. They have almost the same business offering. Traditionally, both are fully mobbed during the sunny seasons. Two weeks ago, I visited the one I usually go to -- at the…

> I think some businesses are going out of businesses because they stubbornly refuse to raise their wages I'm skeptical that a business would choose to go out of business rather that give raises. Have you considered that margins are tighter than you think? I know small businesses like that.

I mean this is HN where the solution to the problem is obvious to a software developer but invisible to someone with decades of experience in the restaurant industry.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#570

Post by dundarious »

WalterBright wrote: post #412
flunhat wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in that example, Columbia made students big promises that it simply couldn’t deliver. It’s more like a deeply dishonest salesman than a hapless waiter who gets your order wrong. From James Stoteraux: > Many of the students in my class who didn’t turn their degrees into industry success were insanely talented, but Columbia traded on its reputation to sell them big dreams that it could never deliver. > During my 2n…

> scam There is a legal concept called "due diligence" where a party to a contract is expected to take reasonable steps to know what they're doing. Googling "starting salaries for [my major]" is a very, very low bar for due diligence. The posts in this thread absolving the student from making any effort whatsoever at due diligence is illustrative of the point I was making.

It doesn't apply for film school, but there are plenty of scam law schools that sell students on the prospect of massive future earnings my juking the stats. For example, it's common to say that some high percentage of past students are employed after graduation, but it's often an outright lie or the numbers are padded by the university giving low-wage sham jobs to most graduates.

Of course, you _can_ find information and protect yourself from even these scams _most_ of the time, but I don't think the "just do your due diligence" argument holds enough of the time to dismiss the general argument being made, even if it applies to specific cases.

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