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Restaurant workers quit at record rate

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Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#921

Post by BizarroLand »

Aloha wrote: post #500
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 just wages - like alot of what we can do is making shitty jobs less miserable, ensuring everyone gets some amount of vacation and sick time, insuring everyone has cheap or free healthcare access, ensuring everyone has relatively fixed schedule - eliminate punitive workplace policies, on stuff like attendance and other shit that makes being there miserable. Like, you can do a hell of alot to reduce peoples da…

Even letting cashiers & staff sit down would be something, but apparently business owners want modern day humans with the mentality of Victorian era maids and butlers cleaning the silverware for minimum wage and working unpaid overtime as if they expect that is what the customer wants for some reason.

As a customer, I want to see that the people who provide me the goods and services I need and want to function in society are as well treated as I would treat myself and nothing less.

If they're sitting down but upbeat and attentive, I'm satisfied.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#922

Post by rollcat »

xyzzyz wrote: post #427
rollcat wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where's the line, if a "shitty" job is about the only one you could get, and you can't even afford to stay without one for say, one month?

How many people are we talking about here? How many restaurant workers literally have no other job or other option available to them whatsoever? Have you ever actually looked into that, or are you just hypothesizing based purely on feeling-inducing narratives? Or is it just a trolley-problem style hypothetical, not meant to represent real world conditions?

I do have a close friend trapped in a complex situation, so yes, I'm certainly biased, but also very much the opposite of hypothetical.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#923

Post by dreamcompiler »

discreteevent wrote: post #811
square_usual wrote: post #773

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that a cultural thing? I'm always surprised when I see American service workers complain about abusive customers, because in my region in South India I've very very rarely seen anyone abuse their servers. A few complaints, maybe, but no yelling or pressure. IME the class divide in India is wider, so it makes me even more confused.

I was shocked in the US to see an American colleague get really angry with a waitress over the quality of a steak. It's ok to complain but to think you can dump anger on someone who is on minimum wage and who had nothing to do with the problem is beyond me. I lost any respect I had for him.

Several of my single-and-dating women friends have told me they pay close attention to how their date treats the server when they first go out. If he acts like a jerk to the server, they assume he'll eventually act like a jerk to them too and thus there won't be a second date.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#924

Post by lumberingjack »

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…

Then food has got to go up the profit margin is not there. We talking $10 per taco them people will complain about that.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#925

Post by WalterBright »

dundarious wrote: post #798
WalterBright wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ya don't think they'd tell the n-2 year students? Do they have a conspiracy of silence? Do they have no friends from other years?

So everybody should drop out after they first start to hear second hand info about it? And it’s their fault if they don’t or if they do but they’re on the tail end of the grapevine so it takes a few years? And that’s the system working justly? If you imagine the uncertainty and justifiable inertia involved in a realistic scenario, I don’t see how you can dismiss arguments that it’s not necessarily just the fault of k…

> So everybody should drop out after they first start to hear second hand info about it?

Choices are:

1. continue, rack up $300,000 debt with no way to pay it off

2. change majors to something that pays

Which do you think is the sensible decision?

> just the fault of kids

You're infantilizing them. They are adults. They can vote. They can drive cars. They can sign contracts. They can join the military and command others. They go to the big boy prison if they commit crimes. They can consult with their parents or anyone they respect. They can marry. They can have gender reassignment surgery.

They can use google. Just like you and I can.

They're not victims.

Do you really believe they spent 6 years studying a major and had no clue what the career prospects were? I don't.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#926

Post by Zanneth »

diob wrote: post #413
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…

My opinion is it's due to the growing inequality. Folks have almost zero support, and the past year has probably hammered that in more than ever.

It depends on the country but "zero support" is absolutely not the case in the U.S. My stepmother was receiving more money in unemployment than she ever earned as a receptionist. My mother received hero pay and bonus checks as a grocery store clerk.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#927

Post by bena »

_wp3r wrote: post #668
bena wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Be aware that you can't entirely trust his perception of the situation. He has a vested interest in under-paying his workforce. He is going to doom and gloom any situation that results in him potentially losing money. And him losing out on profit to pay his staff probably doesn't enter his mind. If he made $X of profit last year, he wants to make $X+ this year. So he figures if he has to pay people Y more, he will ha…

So you are saying that the employer is under charging(by proxy of labor cost) and the customer is over paying at the same time?

Not quite. You're trying to shift what I'm talking about to ignore the issue.

The owner is under paying for the labor and the customer, in turn, is over paying for the labor.

This is due to information asymmetry.

The employer is only paying the legal minimum, in the case of tipped wages in the U.S., $2.13. The employee is expected to make up the rest of the federal/state minimum wage in tips. But that's what they're incentivized to do. If you've got a short sighted view of finances, you may think that if you manage to cut costs, that always translates to extra profit. And if you're paying a dime more than minimum wage, you can cut that cost. (Also, this is why a lot of restaurants fail, most people who run them shouldn't be running a business)

The customer is obligated by social pressure and what not to tip for the service provided. However, people in the service industry are cagey about how much they pull in, actual effort required, etc. in order to get people to tip more and more. Originally, tipping was around 10% and now we see people trying to promote the idea that a baseline tip is closer to 25%.

So the customer has no clue as to how to price the labor that's been provided to them and it is in the servers' best interest to exaggerate as much as possible to get the most tip possible. That's what they're incentivized to do.

And inbetween it all, you have the servers. Who don't want to let go of the tipping model because they can manage to get paid better than what the actual service would be worth in a fairer market.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#928

Post by acituan »

Aloha wrote: post #800
acituan wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those reasons are valid, but not unique to hospitality industry. I think we might be backgrounding one particular reason too much: customers are a headache. One of the subheadings of the article is "They're just yelling the entire time". I find it interesting that this hasn't been discussed as much, maybe because we are culpable? Maybe at one point of time we were that high maintenance customer? Maybe there is…

Management culture shifted sometime ago, I've often said unions are a problem you earn. We are contributing here to the problem as a society, but management is often just outright hostile now in service sector jobs. Employees are treated as disposable fungible objects, with no inherent value. Like, There was a cultural shift some decades ago, and as corny as it sounds, the shift in culture began when we went from hav…

I must say, as much as I agree with the contents of your argument, and I am not saying this was intentional, I resent the fact that you've co-opted the reply-space to plug back in managerial or organizational culture issues, which was already being discussed in the rest of the thread extensively.

I wish you would have stayed on topic with the idea of customer culture issues, or lack thereof.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#929

Post by mindslight »

71a54xd wrote: post #918
mindslight wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But price inflation is the policy goal regardless of minimum wage or UBI. In fact, government spending makes for better inflation in that it is spread around the economy, rather than lending based inflation that only shows up in CPI after it sends assets through the roof.

Could you go into more detail here? My head is still slow to digest economics concepts like this, but this is something I certainly haven't read about before.

The Federal Reserve's mandate is to make sure there is a steady level of gradual price inflation. The main way they accomplish this is to lower interest rates, so that more money gets lent out into circulation. But this new money only affects the Consumer Price Index via housing assets and other big ticket items that get financed - it doesn't directly bid up the demand for consumer goods.

Whereas if the federal government creates more money (via debt) and gives it out direct aid to the people, it goes right into the consumer market. Prices rise across the board, getting the CPI to the target level without the Federal Reserve having to lower rates.

There will always be inflation as long as the monetary policy is to create inflation. But government spending at least chooses somewhere explicit for it to end up, rather than the default option of just inflating financial assets (which we've had quite enough of).

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#930

Post by ajsnigrutin »

mitola wrote: post #846
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #669

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yes, slovenia, but in other countries it's probably the same, just with different prices, and at some price point, it becomes expensive enough to eat out, that you'd rather choose to cook
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