Restaurant workers quit at record rate • Hacker News Board

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#841

Post by vladvasiliu » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 8:38 AM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #538

mjevans wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare, retirement, everything required for living should be socialized. Old people today have Medicare and Social Security, but we need to finish the progression to Star Trek and just make sure there's enough to go around and that it does go around. The other part is that misery, fire bad customers and bad managers. It really isn't that difficult to be polite.

> Healthcare, retirement, everything required for living should be socialized. Indeed. Many small businesses can't even afford sponsoring a sick leave directly AFAIK. At my location (in Europe) you pay a part of your monthly wage to the social security fund and once you get sick it covers your salary in the amount like if you kept working (and also pays you basic pension once you get too old).

In which country is this?

In France, the "social security" (run by the state) doesn't cover the full salary, not even close. It only covers up to 50% [0], and only after three days (if you have 10 single sick days, you lose 10 days' pay).

You have to have your own insurance ("mutuelle", usually chosen by your employer — which you cannot refuse, but can augment) to have a better deal.

---

[0] It covers 50% of the salary, but the maximum salary taken into account is 1.8 times the minimum wage, which is 2 798,24 € before tax.

https://www.ameli.fr/assure/remboursements/indemnites-journa...

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#842

Post by navane » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 8:41 AM UTC

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #807

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. That would mean the people running those businesses were in need of psychological help, it is pretty much crazy to close your business because you refuse to raise wages. I propose a counter explanation - your business has a very tight margin - if you raise wages you cannot afford to continue in business unless yo…

This sounds like a classic prisoners dilemma. If the business owners would both raise both wages and prices, all would thrive.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#843

Post by shadilay » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 8:54 AM UTC

lumost wrote: post #741

71a54xd wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue the move to continue unemployment payments / covid payments is a strategy to "raise minimum wage" without actually having to pass any policy to do so. Politically it's brilliant, you gain the support of your voter base in 2yrs with the assumption that "cheap employers" will simply go out of business because nobody will work for them. And your more conservative base will champion you for "resisting to…

Perhaps depressed wages are partly to blame for the lack of automation in the current economy. If there is labor scarcity it may unlock new innovations by forcing market participants to find more productive uses of labor. Labor force participation has been falling for a long time as labor sellers (employees) fail to find an adequate price for their labor from employers (the buyer). Many economists assumed this was th…

Absolutely this. Wages have been depressed for a long time which has severely hampered innovation. Historically the black death labor shortage led to the renaissance.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#844

Post by bryanrasmussen » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 8:58 AM UTC

consp wrote: post #818

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think some businesses are going out of businesses because they stubbornly refuse to raise their wages. That would mean the people running those businesses were in need of psychological help, it is pretty much crazy to close your business because you refuse to raise wages. I propose a counter explanation - your business has a very tight margin - if you raise wages you cannot afford to continue in business unless yo…

By not raising wages, keeping your employees and staying open you will definitely go under. Maybe you cannot outcompete the other business but by not even trying to go open you have already lost. There is always convenience customers, loyal customers and opportunity customers who do not care about the 2-3% difference in price. I'm not saying you are wrong, it could definitely be this case, just that there might be mo…

>by not even trying to go open you have already lost.

sorry, I thought the store was open until it closed down and posted its reasons?

The problem with following the don't raise wages strategy and wait for your competitor to do it is if they outlast you - you reach the have to close position first.

>By not raising wages, keeping your employees and staying open you will definitely go under.

unless something changes that will make it profitable to raise wages.

>There is always convenience customers, loyal customers and opportunity customers who do not care about the 2-3% difference in price.

In a small margins business this might not be enough to keep you afloat.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#845

Post by bryanrasmussen » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 8:59 AM UTC

navane wrote: post #842

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I think some businesses are going out of businesses because they stubbornly refuse to raise their wages. That would mean the people running those businesses were in need of psychological help, it is pretty much crazy to close your business because you refuse to raise wages. I propose a counter explanation - your business has a very tight margin - if you raise wages you cannot afford to continue in business unless yo…

This sounds like a classic prisoners dilemma. If the business owners would both raise both wages and prices, all would thrive.

exactly, but unfortunately the way to get out of a prisoner's dilemma situation is to communicate with the other prisoners and to trust each other - communication about prices is illegal and who trusts their competitor anyway?

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#846

Post by mitola » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 9:01 AM UTC

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #669

posguy wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like its time for them to raise prices past what they deem to be a reasonable rise. Other restaurants in the area will likely do the same, and not pricing yourself to match can cause a drop in business as people seem to think the more they pay the better the quality (especially when your service or offering is priced on the low end of the market). You might look at this and say charging $4 for X item is alread…

The problem is also the alternatives. I could get a "burek" (pastry with cheese) for 2eur, it's cheap, it fills you up, and you continue with your day. Or I could order a pizza delivery... pizza used to be in the 6-8eur range if you lived near the restaurant, so for 12, 13 eur I could get two pizzas delivered to my home. Then "the plague" came, the local pizzeria was closed, delivery was taken over by "app companies"…

You must be talking about Slovenia for comparison?

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#847

Post by argvargc » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 9:17 AM UTC

dundarious wrote: post #562

argvargc wrote: post #542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 acknowl…

I sympathise, and appreciate your summary. I was intentionally vague about exactly what I was referring to, for the very reasons that form the subject matter.

Specifically, stating it directly leads to wild denials, ostracisation, persecution and generally overwrought and unjustifiable discombobulation from many - as they puff about unwilling to accept it.

From a less-reticent perspective:

"On 12 July the British Government announced that it will be strongly encouraging vaccine passports for venues and events to exclude the unvaccinated from public life. Although they say this is a voluntary act of discrimination, they have explicitly stated that they retain the option to make this mandatory in the future, as they also retain the option to resume police state measures as and when they please. The French government co-incidentally announced the same measure on the same day, only going much further, barring the unvaccinated from cafes, metro etc, and mandating vaccination of health workers – which is to say, putting the unvaccinated out of work. They follow the Irish and Greek governments which have brought in similar measures, along with other countries and states worldwide.

The long-term effects of these measures will be disastrous. It will normalise the discrimination, exclusion and persecution of a section of the population.

[...]

Never underestimate how powerful the motive to retain one’s self image is. The longer this goes on and the more brutal the measures enforced the more powerful this motivation becomes. The difficulty of admitting you have been fooled is directly proportional to how much and for how long you have been fooled. Perhaps my labelling of the new regime as fascist will make it even more difficult for people to break from it, as the immediate instinct is self defence – ‘I’m not a fascist. This guy’s a lunatic, he’s calling me a fascist!’"

https://leftlockdownsceptics.com/2021/07/collaboration-or-re...

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#848

Post by Joker_vD » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 9:31 AM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #681

systemvoltage wrote: post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't take a MBA-like focus to think "Gee..only if we had more margin, we'd pay more". This entire thread is totally out of touch with reality.

>It doesn't take a MBA-like focus to think "Gee..only if we had more margin, we'd pay more". It does take razor-sharp focus and constant innovation to work out how you can increase margin, though. You can't just arbitrarily raise prices without offering any additional value and expect your business to stay alive.

And yet that's precisely what lots of businesses do: raise the prices, cut the wages, drop the product quality. Oh no, the customers start losing the brand loyalty and go to the competitors, why on Earth, those ungrateful pigs!

It seems to be especially popular in the street food business and food industry in general over here: someone thinks that surely one can produce decent at reasonable cost and earn some good profit from it, and indeed they can, the customers are happy, the business is growing a-a-and then something happens and the market self-corrects: the price grows to the level of the competitors', and the quality drops to the competitors' level too, now the "playing field" is level again (all products are more or less equally mediocre and equally expensive), wait about a year for another entrepreneur to rinse and repeat this cycle.

There must be some objective reason why that happens though I am really not sure what it is. But whatever that reason is, it seems to have been working pretty much without exceptions for the past ten years at least.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#849

Post by ookdatnog » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 9:33 AM UTC

Sophistifunk wrote: post #592

In two years we're going to see a lot fewer eat-in restaurants, a lot more kitchen-only joints, and those kids who used to be wait staff will be on the dole, or marching in the streets. Much like movie theatres, cheap quality dining is going away.

I don't see why you compare to movie theaters. The decline in movie theaters was, afaict, driven by a drop in demand, which in turn was driven by affordable home theater setups, increased availability of movies to watch at home, ...

In contrast, your argument for why eat-in restaurants are about to disappear in large numbers is entirely based on a decrease in supply of cheap labor. You don't argue at all for why there would be a decline in demand. Perhaps customers changed their habits after the COVID lockdowns, but at least on the short term, I feel like I'm noticing the opposite effect: people really want to do stuff outside of their house.

I understand that some of the more struggling restaurants would be driven over the edge by higher wages, but it seems spurious to assume that this will cause a large shift in the market all by itself.

And it's even more spurious to just assume that this will drive large swathes of former wait staff into unemployment. Similar arguments are made carelessly in the minimum wage debate, where people mistakenly believe that there is consensus among economists that it drives up unemployment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Surveys_of_econom...).

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#850

Post by AKSucks » Wed, Jul 21, 2021, 9:34 AM UTC

AussieWog93 wrote: post #624

itsoktocry wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'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 run a small business. I know other small business owners. An MBA-like focus on hyperefficiency is rare. Usually people have their views about how the world should work and act in accordance with that. Some people will come around,…

What's exceedingly common is an focus on what they think is efficiency (or really, what they see as "waste") which they think makes them a shrewd, smart, savvy business owner.

Distrust in their employees coupled with excessive monitoring on consumables and the like, I think is the most common.

I've patronized, worked at, or know people who worked at places where the employees are doing everything they can to keep a business running despite the owner....often doing what they can to keep said owner from getting their hands too deep into daily operations or in contact with customers.