71–80 of 521 posts
I wonder where everyone has gone. The lazy answer is that companies aren't paying enough. But how is it better to sit at home making $0 than working and having an income? How do they afford rent or electricity or pay for car insurance? The workforce participation rate is still well below pre-pandemic levels. Millions of people just up and left the workforce. It's not as if they are looking for work at the right wage,…
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This can't be the explanation. If it were true, the workforce participation rate would be steady. Changing jobs doesn't raise or lower that figure. A person is employed whether they scrub toilets or do brain surgery. But it's not steady. Literally millions of people have stopped working and looking for work since 2020.
Interesting piece of data that's seldom cited: Sep 2015 labor force participation rate: 62.4% August 2022 labor force participation rate: 62.4% https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
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The average age of a covid death in the US was 80 years old.
The mode was in the 85 and over. The mean was less. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1191568/reported-deaths-... https://blogs.worldbank.org/developmenttalk/too-young-die-ag... You will note that for the US, approximately 25% of the excess deaths in 2021 were from people 64 and younger. That is still a large number. Also note: > And among high income countries, one notable outlier is the United States, which has a…
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I would assume the reputable but cost-cutting hotels would still be doing a full clean between guest visits, just cutting down on the daily room cleaning while a guest is still there.
Every single hotel or motel should be doing full clean between guest visits, otherwise it should not even be allowed to operate. But if a hotel starts letting people stay weeks without checking their room, they will inevitably end up with hoarders and people that keep food lying around and then comes cockroaches and rats and odors, etc.
Yet I think people regularly stay for weeks with Airbnb/Vrbo without any host inspection or cleaning. I agree with your conclusion (filthy guests who stay weeks invite pest problems) ... so if the big bad old hotel industry needs to market their advantages, maybe there's an Institutuionally Clean angle.
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Over a million people died of covid. Many more have become permanently disabled. Many of them were retired seniors but among the people who were not, they were disproportionately service workers who couldn’t wfh.
The average age of a covid death in the US was 80 years old.
A more honest headline would be “Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to avoid paying competitive wages” since that’s really how a free market is supposed to address shortages, isn’t it?
I think your phrasing makes a valid point, but what we're seeing is absolutely expected in a free market, not some sort of aberration.
Some cheap European hotels are made like the expensive toilet booths where they basically just hose them down —-no fancy carpeting. All surfaces except the bedding are washable. Makes for easy cleanup and quick turnaround. It’s not for everyone of course.
In Europe it's not uncommon (or at least, it isn't unheard of) to need to bring your own bed sheets and towels from home.
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If they were able to adequately staff two years ago, and now 25% of a pay raise later they can't, there are likely some structural issues going on.
The primary structural issue is that low-income wages have completely stagnated if not fallen with the inflation over the last several decades while wages for mid-upper to ultrawealthy have gone up, dramatically. The number of places in the US that you can get a 2BR home, rental or owning, on minimum wage is basically non-existent. We're on the verge of large swaths of the US population effectively becoming serfs. Ho…
This is statistically untrue, though a very popular misconception. Median wages have increased slightly after adjusting for inflation over the past few decades [1]. Minimum wage has wavered a bit since then, but most people are not employed at the federal minimum wage [2].
[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N [2] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LEU0203127200A
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>Every single hotel or motel should be doing full clean between guest visits, otherwise it should not even be allowed to operate. The keyword here is "should". I don't have much faith that hotels will actually do this.
Even bad hotels do this, because people lose their shit and do chargebacks if they end up in an uncleaned room. Source: a close friend works at a really bad hotel.
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Look how much the workforce participation rate has varied over the last 20 years. Only a few percentage points even through massive global recessions. Small percentage changes in this statistic can easily deceive the layman into thinking it's not a big deal.
I do not understand why a change from 63% to 62% is a sufficiently big deal to be able to claim “millions of Americans decided to stop looking for work”, especially when we know a greater and greater proportion of the population is elderly who cannot work.