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Restaurant workers quit at record rate

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Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#581

Post by josephcsible »

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…

It's not that businesses stubbornly refuse to raise wages - it's that they can't afford to. A lot of local small businesses were barely staying afloat even before March 2020.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#582

Post by robotresearcher »

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.

Naive question: why not raise prices?

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#583

Post by weimerica »

Spooky23 wrote: post #460
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…

I don’t think so. Hilton Head Island, SC is a great example of the trend that COVID accelerated. Hilton Head is a popular vacation destination, but as development started radiating inland towards I95, all of the workers are priced out. The housekeeper at the hotel I stayed at in 2019 commuted 2.5 hours daily, and restaurants started reducing hours due to labor shortages. COVID made it worse, but the problem existed b…

So, I’m from Hilton Head and that is a fairly accurate telling of the issue (though the 2.5 hours commute is a bit uncommon.) They’ve attempted to alleviate it with shuttles from Bluffton and even Northern Beaufort County to little avail.

We have similar issues up in Charleston, with my girlfriend ‘s restaurant in an HCoL (Mt. Pleasant) really struggling to find staff beyond the 16-26 “living with mom & dad” crowd where HCoL is little of a factor.

I would add I have at least a half-dozen friends in BoH that intentionally (an)used our state pay benefits for a free vacation to smoke weed and play X-Box though sadly citing it as their first vacation in a forever. There’s definitely a problem a multi-faceted problem here.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#584

Post by shados »

bluGill wrote: post #323
namdnay wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess it depends how often you expect to eat out. If it’s once a month, I think most can afford more expensive restaurants

Once you learn to cook you won't eat at anything less than the most expensive. It is really hard to enjoy a meal when you are thinking "I could have done this better myself at less cost". Chains and fast food just don't provide the quality I demand for the most part, and even the independents are hit and miss.

Time is money, and cooking is a lot of work. We cook a lot, have a kitchen that's better than what the average restaurant has, and have eaten at some of the most prestigious restaurants in the world.

Yet sometimes I crave a fried chicken sandwich and to hell if we're going to spend the time doing that ourselves. Life's too short and that's way too much work.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#585

Post by greedo »

nickff wrote: post #365
_delirium wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> most workers do not fully report all of their tips, which saves them both income and payroll taxes I wonder what percentage of tips are still cash tips, which is the only case where you can get away with that. I imagine the percentage of tips that are on a credit card (or even app like Doordash/Seamless) vs. cash has been increasing over time, but I can't find solid numbers.

Most credit and debit card tips are paid out to servers with cash from the register at the end of the day. The amount of the tips is recorded, but the recipients are not, and taxes are not assessed against the tips. Technically, servers are supposed to declare the cash they receive as income, but it is accepted practice not to do so.

I'm not sure about that. It's been thirty years since I waited tables, but our restaurant required us to turn in tips (they were pooled and distributed to everyone who worked that shift). The withheld taxes on them, and if we skimmed tips and didn't turn them into the pool at the end of our shift, we'd get ratted out by coworkers and fired.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#586

Post by koolba »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #554
awillen wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that for a lot of businesses, it's a question of what will happen when extended unemployment ends in September. If employees are going to flood the market and you can keep paying the wages you were paying pre-pandemic, then it makes sense to hold out, since if you raise wages now, you can't really reduce them later. You lose out on sales now because you're short staffed, but you keep your costs low in perpetu…

pandemic unemployment has already ended in a bunch of states. If it's the problem, we would be seeing those states rebound.

That’s exactly what’s happening. The States that ended the extend benefits have lower unemployment rates. Ex: https://apnews.com/article/business-health-alabama-coronavir...

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#587

Post by trophycase »

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.

Kind of disagree. I know waitresses in high-end casual sit down restaurants making $30-50/hr with a large fraction of that going untaxed.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#589

Post by greedo »

fragmede wrote: post #575
greedo wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure a waiter at a good steakhouse is making a good living. It's been a while since I worked food service, so I might be making some poor assumptions, but: 1. Most waiters don't get health benefits 2. Most waiters don't get retirement plans 3. Most waiters are at the whim of the restaurant managers 4. There's only so many tables you can turn in a shift, and tips average under 20%. 5. Most waiters don't get an…

Your numbered points stand - no healthcare, no retirement, or other benefits a FAANG employee would have, but your numbers are low for a high end restaurant. A good steakhouse for 4 might cost closer to $500, $800 for just food at the highest end, with booze being another couple hundred on top of that. And then there's the cash aspect of it. Each night's tips are required to be declared to the IRS, and not reporting…

A "good steakhouse" doesn't charge $200 per customer unless it's selling Kobe/Wagyu. And the percentage of customers buying Wagyu over the $50 ribeye is very small.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#590

Post by WalterBright »

dundarious wrote: post #570
WalterBright wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 informatio…

If you can show me that simple google searches won't show reasonably correct information, that would be a good point.

Besides, it seems weird that the senior class would never notice that the class that graduated just ahead of them is working at the car wash?

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