111–120 of 427 posts
I’m a little confused, wouldn’t this mean that there are people sitting around who seemingly prefer no job than a lower than they would like paying job? I don’t understand how all these unemployed people are surviving.
They are drawing unemployment benefits.
So much of our current drama would be mooted by sharing those record corporate profits with labor, by dialing back executive compensation, by returning to dividends vs buybacks (closing some more tax dodging schemes).
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Curious to see if Labor, agriculture, small businesses, and credit unions in the USA return to their roots: Cooperatives and collectivism.
A lot of progress in governance these last 60 years. Innovations like worker-directed social enterprises and class-B corporations. New orgs using modern bylaws could be far more resilient to vulture capitalists.
There's SO MUCH work that needs doing, needs begging to be fulfilled. And yet. Wall St and SPACs can't seem to figure out how to capitalize anything smaller than a unicorn.
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The United States really needs to kill tipping culture off
Why? What would be different for the customer? The tip would just be rolled into the price of the service to amount to the same number, and quality of service would probably go down. Employees would also be taxed on the "tip" (which would now be included in their base salary). So what would really be the benefit? And I'm not trying to be dismissive at all. Coming from Europe I also thought initially that tipping was…
Also covid and those ipad paying terminals have turned every job into a tip job. Every cashier wants a tip now. And they ask you if you want to tip becasue no one can touch the terminals. Which is awkward to say no to. I see/hear people leaving ridiculous tips for take out. I had one terminal for take out not have a "no tip" option. I had to manually type in $0.
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The issue is the temporary competition from government covid benefits. Businesses understand perfectly well, but it’s kind of pointless to compete with higher benefits for not working. In my state, benefits were $16/hour. So businesses have a hard time competing with that because jobs can’t compete much with unemployment benefits. It would be interesting to see what the trade off is for how much money it would take.…
Studies of states that extended the unemployment benefits vs ones that didn’t seem to show that the benefits accounted for a fairly small portion of the difference in employment. https://www.wxxinews.org/post/what-unemployment-insurance-te...
Painfully obvious too. My little local Mexcian place will be closing down because of a lack of cooks. Talking to the owner, he was complaining about government benefits, and how they all want $20 an hour. I don't understand it, that you'd either a) be willing to drive your business into the ground serving a limited menu because you won't hire a couple cooks at $20 an hour, or b) have a business so close to the brink…
> b) have a business so close to the brink of shutting down that an additional $20-50 an hour will shutter you. This is the default state of businesses in competitive markets. If you could do with less then you could charge less, and one of your competitors will start doing that to take your customers, so you have to do the same. Of course, the alternative is to pay more and then raise prices. Which you might not be…
We should be careful not to make wage depression some sort of abstract "logical" natural state. Wages are low for a reason and active effort has to be expended to keep them as they are.
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> I don't understand it, that you'd either > > a) be willing to drive your business into the ground serving a limited menu because you won't hire a couple cooks at $20 an hour, or > > b) have a business so close to the brink of shutting down that an additional $20-50 an hour will shutter you. Restaurants run on notoriously thin margins ( https://upserve.com/restaurant-insider/profit-margins/ ). There's a reason resta…
Maybe we need buffet-style restaurants that serve nutritious perishable food without all the extra plating, waters, and other frivolities so people can bask in being served and pretend they are aristocracy. Everyone cooking is a massive inefficiency, and yet paying for conventional restaurants is also uneconomical. Eating shelf-stable food is cheaper than cooking for most people, but only until the bad health effects…
1. options: I need to be able to serve two or three meal options tops depending on what is available / inexpensive. People really like having options but that drives costs up which will drive me up a wall.
2. audience: I need a captive audience such as prisoners in a prison or resident college students who pay for the whole semester at a cafeteria.
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The barber shop I went to for years used to charge $35 for a haircut pre-pandemic, which with a ~$10 tip ($45) already felt real high. Now a haircut is $50 and I no longer go, opting instead to cut my own hair w help from my girlfriend. Maybe people don’t want $50 haircuts.
That's fine, then. We shouldn't assume a certain service or job is productive enough to exist because it used to be in the past. If barbershops need to go the way of horse liveries, that's OK.
Automobiles replaced horses, did I miss the memo on something replacing hair growth?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The United States really needs to kill tipping culture off
Why? What would be different for the customer? The tip would just be rolled into the price of the service to amount to the same number, and quality of service would probably go down. Employees would also be taxed on the "tip" (which would now be included in their base salary). So what would really be the benefit? And I'm not trying to be dismissive at all. Coming from Europe I also thought initially that tipping was…
It undermines the norm that businesses should pay their damn taxes.
To wit, we have been able to put off discussing the non-profitability of restaurants for far too long until now. Remember, it is quite arguable that Baumol's cost disease = "progress", not by definition, but by bi-implication.
Painfully obvious too. My little local Mexcian place will be closing down because of a lack of cooks. Talking to the owner, he was complaining about government benefits, and how they all want $20 an hour. I don't understand it, that you'd either a) be willing to drive your business into the ground serving a limited menu because you won't hire a couple cooks at $20 an hour, or b) have a business so close to the brink…
The thing about being a business owner, is that you are the last one on the payroll (if you are a good owner). All the bills get paid (including wages), then you get what's left over. If you had a good week, then you get a nice stack of Benjamins. If you had a bad week; maybe not so much. In fact, you may even need to chip in, to keep the lights on. I have seen, many, many SMB owners start living "high on the hog," a…
It's surprising businesses haven't turned to automation. At the very least, most of a restaurant's and a coffee shop's labor can be replaced with automated ordering, having the customer collect food themselves when it's ready, and using robots to prepare more of the food. they can do lattes with art all by themselves now. A lot of these businesses just can't survive if they meet the wage demands of people who have be…
> At the very least, most of a restaurant's and a coffee shop's labor can be replaced with automated ordering, having the customer collect food themselves when it's ready Automation, automation, digital transformation, sure we can do it all. But in many cases it makes things suck a bit more, and life crappier overall. If I go to a restaurant a real person taking the order is part of the ambiance and expected service.…
>At the last place I visited some guy dropped a tablet on the table. It said 'Next-gen Restaurant Experience' at the back. We got to fiddle a long time to type our 6-person order in. Crappy. Last time I visit there.
I'm definitely okay with fiddling with a tablet if it meant I didn't have to pay a 15% tip.
>They facilitate rat-race shopping. No more small social chat at the PoS with employees that know you. Just in and out, and back to work.
The amount of "small social chat at the PoS with employees that know you" I see happening (ie. when waiting in line) is approximately zero. In that case, the loss is zero.