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A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

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Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#391

Post by QuantumGood »

booleandilemma wrote: post #383
QuantumGood wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I washed dishes in a downtown tower with four restaurants, all sharing one kitchen. The output of the dishwasher took four people, mostly because delivering the dishes across the huge kitchen distances was time consuming. I had a lot of generalized anxiety, and so I liked complex physical challenges. I eventually replaced all four dishwashers. Took a lot of intense speed and strategic dish delivery. I came very close…

Did you feel guilty about the other 4 guys losing their jobs?

Three others, and none were lost. One was the nephew of my boss, who was allowed to just go sit in a break room pretty much any time. The other two just hung around looking busy whenever the boss came by. The cooks knew what was going on but didn't say anything. Eventually, my boss figured it out and assigned me to clean pots and baking racks in the bakery. Dysfunctional place for dishwashers.

She told me I could be an assistant baker and get a raise if I learned everything the two bakers could teach. When they day came they said "there's nothing more to teach you" (there was a lot more, but not for an "assistant"). I told my boss and she literally ran out of her office, me running after her, ran into the bakery shouting "he thinks he knows everything!".

No assistant baker job for me. I moved on the next day.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#392

Post by tick_tock_tick »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #178
IncreasePosts wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most landlords don't accept partial rent if your salary isn't earning you enough.

Landlords are part of the problem though; due to landlords, property managers, investors, etc, the cost of housing / rent / owning a house has gone up, meaning that a job that would get you a decent apartment 20, 30 years ago is no longer enough. I'll accept that inflation is a fact of modern economies, but rent and the cost of housing has gone up faster than inflation, and income has not kept pace with inflation: th…

> Landlords are part of the problem though; due to landlords, property managers, investors, etc, the cost of housing / rent / owning a house has gone up, meaning that a job that would get you a decent apartment 20, 30 years ago is no longer enough.

I mean this is one of the few spaces that every economist agrees on the biggest factors in causing housing to become unaffordable are rent control and construction bureaucracy (zoning, environmental reviews, etc).

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#393

Post by infecto »

Talanes wrote: post #233
infecto wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did we go from asking what is the proper wage to suggesting its "not a real job"? All jobs are real but some are less valuable than others. There is nothing wrong with being a grocery store stocker your whole life but I am not sure how you set the wage for a 5+ year worker that never moved on/up from stocking shelves. I think its a fairly difficult problem to answer and throwing in classism and white collar vs bl…

That 5+ year grocery store stocker is the lynchpin that allows them to quickly hire teenagers who are only going to work there for a year at most before moving on. Without the institutional knowledge of the long-term workers, the store would have to spend much longer training new employees, or employ a magnitude more supervisors.

This kind of role exists but not in the store stocker or dishwasher side. Those are for better/worse roles that take a few hours to learn. Maybe some things you pickup on the way but by no means a role where it helps to have experienced folks in.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#394

Post by pbhjpbhj »

yojo wrote: post #253
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Landlords are part of the problem though; due to landlords, property managers, investors, etc, the cost of housing / rent / owning a house has gone up, meaning that a job that would get you a decent apartment 20, 30 years ago is no longer enough. I'll accept that inflation is a fact of modern economies, but rent and the cost of housing has gone up faster than inflation, and income has not kept pace with inflation: th…

I think there’s an interesting question of why housing has outpaced inflation, but I’m not sure you can just pin it on “landlords.” A small, individual landlord has no pricing power. They’re competing in a market against all others. You’d have to control a substantial fraction of a local market to be able to raise prices above the going rates and still rent your units. I think the most likely answer is a combination…

>A small, individual landlord has no pricing power. They’re competing in a market against all others.

Unless there is a deficit of housing, then they don't have to compete because you pay their price or you live on the street.

With a housing crisis as in the UK the cost of housing rises to soak up everyone's income after other essentials (food, water, energy). Rents are higher than mortgages because you pay the landlord's mortgage, then pay the costs of leasing (such as the landlord's insurance and their property managers fees) and the landlord's profits. Very few want to rent, but most can't afford a mortgage (because 'I'm paying way more than that in rent' isn't proof you can pay a mortgage, apparently).

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#395

Post by mschuster91 »

> and a week’s paid vacation after a year of service

Meanwhile in Europe, four weeks guaranteed by EU law, and many states go above that, and many companies top that off. Oh and a truckload of public holidays on top.

Working at the corner hours of the day, in a backbreaking job, for 20k a year and just one week of vacation? JFC.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#396

Post by Animats »

Iulioh wrote: post #387
Animats wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is just the first version of the technology. It could get much cheaper if manufactured in volume, and it can get faster as well. Rule of thumb is that 10x the volume cuts the price by half.

I don't really think that this is really possible. Robots like this are pretty common in the industry (like the mechanical industry) and one costs around 50k and we already produce them at scale. How much can they lease it for, in your opinion?

Cobot prices are dropping. This article claims $20K for a mid-range unit.[1] Nala shows two robots, one at the dirty end and one at the clean end of the dishwasher. Dishwashing is a good opportunity for robots. There are many potential customers for a relatively standardized product. It's much easier than automated cooking.

There are other dishwashing robots. Useful for cafeterias, maybe.[2] Cute, but not too useful.[3] So far, none seem to be deployed much. But that will come.

[1] https://standardbots.com/blog/collaborative-robot-prices-the...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGP-OjkgggU

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoMuS6HPHxI

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#397

Post by JoshTriplett »

astrange wrote: post #280
JoshTriplett wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could establish UBI, and then we wouldn't need a minimum wage. We could decide as a society that we want everyone to have a baseline level of support, rather than doing it indirectly (and less effectively) by forcing the nonexistence of low-paying jobs.

Minimum wages are good on their own and do not appear to have downsides in practice. You don't need to "not need" them. Basically think of it as banning wasting people's time by offering them really bad jobs. (This is the "search theory" explanation, but there's also the "monopsony theory" explanation, which is that they can increase employment!) Of course, wage boards and sectoral bargaining systems are probably bet…

Minimum wages are not "good on their own"; they're a solution to a specific problem: making sure people can survive with at most a relatively reasonable amount of work, though they're currently failing at that goal. If we stop having that problem we stop needing a solution to it. Making it so people don't need to work to survive is strictly better.

And if people have a guaranteed level of support, then yes, there is a downside to saying "you're not allowed to exchange sub-self-supporting amounts of work for money". You don't need to ban wasting people's time; if people don't have to work to live, the uninteresting or unpleasant jobs will be having to raise pay to get people to work them, or figuring out how to automate them when previously it was cheaper to pay minimum wage.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of things people might want to do that aren't valued enough by society to pay even subsistence wages for. In a minimum wage world, those things either don't happen or they happen as side hobbies for people with other means of support. If you have UBI, you create the perverse situation of "I might do that for free because I don't have to work to live, but I can't take any money for it unless I can get someone to give me a lot of money for it".

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#398

Post by WalterBright »

mckn1ght wrote: post #368
akira2501 wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between construction and the kitchen is that if I mess up in the kitchen we're out probably less than $100. If I mess up in construction we're out significantly more in particular if it's a commercial construction job.

There is another kind of mistake than can be made besides procedural. My worst safety screwups in foodservice were 2 things: cutting through my fingernail and about 2/3 of my entire fingertip with a brand new chefs knife (looked away at somebody barking something in my ear while rapidly chiffonading basil) and plunging my entire hand into a deep fryer (slipped while wiping down the edge of the oil vat–again, rushing)…

The framing people I knew were all mostly deaf from the saws and nail guns.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#399

Post by Danieru »

thr0waway001 wrote: post #282

I worked as a dishwasher in the '90s at a fancy hotel for a couple years as a teen. I was in high school, was from a single parent household, my mom needed financial help, I had no skills, and had to learn the language (English). This particular kitchen though was enormous since it serviced 3 restaurants and a lounge. So the days were long and I had to work pretty much every major holiday and/or especial day. The wor…

Why did you not wear gloves? When I did dishwashing at Mc Donald's I wore gloves they worked fine. Maybe my stint was shorter at only a year, but I'm pretty sure McDonalds is using plenty hard chemicals too.

Re: A dishwasher can make or break a restaurant (2017)

#400

Post by bobthepanda »

neilv wrote: post #35
mahoho wrote: post #16

I worked part time as a dishwasher for around 6 years in middle/high school, at a restaurant with no machine, just three sinks and a huge counter. It's definitely a good way to get into the restaurant industry, but also a great way to learn if you hate working at a restaurant.

Related to the importance and underappreciated status of dishwashers... I only sometimes washed dishes at middle school. If you wanted the cafeteria "hot lunch", but your parents didn't pay for it, you could get it that day by volunteering to wash everyone's trays, in lieu of recess. Personally, I think this wasn't a great lesson. In the current very inequitable US environment, I support simply giving nutritious food…

I think this is terrible mostly because it is inequitable.

In Japan, it is customary for elementary school children, all of them, to be doing the food distribution and cleaning. (who is doing what rotates.)

https://youtu.be/fze5s1SlqB8?si=lr9eskf1ty9vqE7k&t=123

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