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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)

#421

Post by dataviz1000 »

edgarvaldes wrote: post #411
dataviz1000 wrote: post #384

I'm a little late to conversation. As a chef for 17 years, here is the advice I was given when I asked someone at age 16 what I should do to become a chef. He said I should get a job as a dishwasher. His reasoning is I needed to learn to appreciate and respect the restaurant's dishwasher because, in his words, 'when shit hits the fan and everything goes wrong, it is the dishwasher who will save your ass.' At 17, I wa…

>when shit hits the fan and everything goes wrong, it is the dishwasher who will save your ass I'm 100% sure I have already read this exact phrase before.

I'm paraphrasing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35276251

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

#422

Post by Twirrim »

viccis wrote: post #356
Twirrim wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>All effective unions are mandatory. That's a very US centric view. Unions are ample powerful in other countries without requiring mandatory membership. Previous places I've worked in Europe it's not unusual to have multiple unions represented in a company, and even collaborating together on various negotiations. It wasn't unusual for employees to change unions based on what the union was or wasn't doing for them as…

Non-Americans thinking their opinion on American politics is wanted or relevant will never stop being funny. >I've joined unions in the past because of the access to all the other stuff that they can provide, like free legal support, representation in disciplinary situations etc, just as much as working conditions. Apologies if English isn't your first language, but those things are "working conditions"

Ahh yes, that's right. I can live here and get to have no opinion of any value whatsoever on what surrounds me.

It's hilarious in a kind of tragic way, how Americans continually tell me things are impossible or can't possibly work the way that other countries manage to make them work.

No, no, it's everyone else that's wrong.

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

#423

Post by sbierwagen »

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?

Consider PV solar: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/solar-pv-prices-vs-cumula...

In 2003, PV panels were a pretty darn mature technology. The technology was decades old. Modules cost about $5 a watt, one twenty fifth the price they were in 1975. More than two gigawatts of them had been installed worldwide. (Millions of panels!) No way could they fall in price by half, right?

Surprise. By 2010 another 38 gigawatts of solar had been installed, and the price per watt was down to $2.32. No way could they fall in price by half again, right?

Surprise. $1.02 per watt in 2012, and another 61 gigawatts installed. $0.52 a watt in 2017. $0.26 a watt today.

Just in 2022, the world installed 86 times as much solar as existed on the entire planet in 2003.

If you build a lot of something, it can get very cheap indeed.

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

#424

Post by netcoyote »

Danieru wrote: post #399
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.

When I worked at Lyon’s Restaurant (a slightly upscale Denny’s, to my mind) as a dishwasher, the heavy-duty rubber gloves they provided were frequently wet enough inside that mold formed rapidly. Only put the awful things on once or twice before giving up on them because they were so unpleasant!

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

#425

Post by luqtas »

infecto wrote: post #418
luqtas wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i dunno where this idea of manual labor being treated as something so simple it shouldn't deserve a decent pay... i worked as a dishy also as a bicycle courier & i bet i'm ballparks more efficient than anyone who never had to these jobs we have a heck of a hard time emulating or creating navigational system for robots, specially if we don't train them million of times for extremely simple tasks like grabbing boxes in…

It’s the intersection of skill, risk and mental requirements. Being an old school drill rig guy, high risk, long hours, bad locations. You get high pay. Washing dishes is unpleasant but easy to replace. There are many labor jobs that pay well for a reason. I asked what is the right pay then for a job that anyone can pick up immediately.

maybe to find a decent pay is to not treat dishies as an easy to replace person?

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

#426

Post by astrange »

carlosjobim wrote: post #379
astrange wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Immigrants do not compete with native workers because they have complementary skills (like different native languages). The evidence is very very strong that immigration does not decrease wages. It generally increases them because it provides new demand, though that's not guaranteed.

Demand is limitless and makes no benefit. Only production is beneficial.

That's certainly what Xi Jinping thinks.

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

#427

Post by mattpallissard »

khrbrt wrote: post #201

This as good a place as any to mention one of my favorite authors, Dishwasher Pete[0], who wrote a zine about dishwashing and dishwashers[1], and a memoir about his quest to wash dishes in all 50 states[2]. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher_Pete 1: https://archive.org/details/dishwasher7 2: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/827458.Dishwasher

"The dishwasher" is a great take of working as a dishwasher. It's from "the ice cream man and other short stores", you can read the whole section on Google books.

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

#428

Post by astrange »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #397
astrange wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> the uninteresting or unpleasant jobs will be having to raise pay to get people to work them

They do /eventually/, but because working takes time, working a bad job reduces the time you have available to find a better one, which has the effect of giving everyone less than ideal work situations. That's why it's called search theory.

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

#429

Post by seabird »

FredPret wrote: post #42
darby_nine wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get paid six figures to fart in a chair and occasionally type. The idea that I'm more deserving than a dishwasher is insane. Of course I won't turn down the paycheck, but the idea that $10 is anywhere in the ballpark of what the dishwasher deserves is delusional. Certainly they deserve the paycheck more than the vast majority of the people on this forum who get paid orders of magnitude more while doing barely any w…

Where do you get this idea? What generates more value - a good thought that can steer a product or a company in a better direction, or a pile of clean dishes? Value is disconnected to the difficulty involved in producing it. In fact, this is a key part of the free market. Precisely because it's easy for people who can do your job to produce a ton of value and hard for dishwashers to do the same, the market tries to p…

The origin of the gripe is that there's a lot of people collecting paychecks for good thoughts that steer a product/company when their most notable contribution is shit into the company toilet that somehow takes 20 minutes to push out. If they are working hard, many people aren't going to respect busting ass on adtech or consulting shakedowns. Since the uptick in work-from-home, I've been astonished at the number of people I know collecting a paycheck for generating completely negligible value. There's a lot of well-paid positions that are almost certainly contributing less value to society than a dishwasher, and it doesn't have much to do with the dishwasher having a prodigious impact.

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

#430

Post by tennisflyi »

infecto wrote: post #21
tennisflyi wrote: post #6

The "heart," but the only mention of pay is $10/hour, and advancement leads to more long nights as a chef in the volatile restaurant industry? Such respect Edit: also, the lip service of the title "porter" - the electric company will surely except that as payment

Honest question, what should they be paid? Its purely manual labor, there is not much if anything to innovate or be creative. The output is fairly binary, clean or not clean. I am all for fair wages but how do we know if $10 is the right price or too low? Interesting how serious questions get so quickly downvoted. I am genuinely curious how you would price a dishwasher when the output is important but the work itself…

Plenty of answers already, but I have a very small passion project I hope to make my full-time living and one of the first things on my list is to employ one person and pay them a living wage - not, "how little can I pay them, or "what's the market rate" for the type of position." I'm sure money is tight, but that'd be a better framing to start with
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