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Restaurant workers quit at record rate

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Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#831

Post by 6510 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #807
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…

>I think some businesses are going out of businesses because they stubbornly refuse to raise their wages. That would mean the people running those businesses were in need of psychological help, it is pretty much crazy to close your business because you refuse to raise wages. I propose a counter explanation - your business has a very tight margin - if you raise wages you cannot afford to continue in business unless yo…

Maybe some a-b testing could be fun. If you want service to operate on starvation wages you stand in line A or sit at the right side, if you want fast service without anyone spitting on your onion rings take line B or sit on the left.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#832

Post by AngryData »

grapehut wrote: post #751
amyjess wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can't stay open while paying people a living wage, you deserve to go out of business. I would rather have nothing but chain restaurants owned by megacorps than have people working for less than a living wage.

That's fair, but would you also rather people unemployed than working for less than a living wage as well?

Most definitely, slaving away at a dead end job not earning anything is sucking up tons of those employee's opportunities by keeping them unavailable.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#833

Post by vladvasiliu »

square_usual wrote: post #773
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…

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.

Could be cultural, but a data point from France is that while I, personally, don't often see abusive clients, I have friends who work in this industry, and they do complain about this.

Some of them are Americans, and they tend to find working here more of a drag than in the States. They mostly complain about people being generally rude, followed by big parties each having extremely specific requests and later quarreling about the check (as in who has to pay for what).

They also mention that they usually make less money here, because although the wages are higher, they don't usually get any tips. Also, cost of living is higher (Paris, as opposed to US cities other than NY / LA / SF).

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#834

Post by Spare_account »

snovv_crash wrote: post #810
Izkata wrote: post #761

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a few possibilities I can think of: * Unpaid sick days * The limitation is the other way around, they don't want to give a single pool of 30 paid days off, you're limited to 15 vacation days * If you have a good relationship with your manager, it's a soft limit and they'll allow you to go over as long as it's not abused * If you're part-time/hourly, trading days/hours with a co-worker Our HR department combin…

In Europe typically there are unlimited sick days, but the company has insurance to cover your salary after a certain number of days per year. You typically need a doctor's note after 3 consecutive days, and if you are abusing the system the insurance company (who is a pro at this) will quickly investigate and terminate / claw back their coverage.

That's a good deal. I'm in the UK and I've never had anything like that. I currently have ten paid sick days per year and after that it is Statutory Sick Pay (SSP, £96.35 pe week) for an additional 26 weeks. SSP is better than nothing but it's not great.

Looking back, all of me previous jobs have offered 10 days sick pay and I've always assumed it is a de-facto standard over here.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#835

Post by the_gipsy »

chaostheory wrote: post #647
Aloha wrote: post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All of that costs money. Are we as customers willing to pay for it? While a lot of us on HN can afford the price increases, not everyone else can. I have a feeling that wage increases will come, but there will be less employees and the remaining better paid employees will be augmented with technology in order to serve more customers ie more automation

A business is not a business if it’s only profitable on exploitation.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#836

Post by ginko »

itsoktocry wrote: post #530
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…

> I think some businesses are going out of businesses because they stubbornly refuse to raise their wages I'm skeptical that a business would choose to go out of business rather that give raises. Have you considered that margins are tighter than you think? I know small businesses like that.

>Have you considered that margins are tighter than you think?

So they need to adjust their prices.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#837

Post by ginko »

brandmeyer wrote: post #593
chrisseaton wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I the only person who thinks restaurant prices are pretty low? I'm sure they could go up quite a bit. Lunch out costs me maybe £15. Surely that could be £20 or so?

20 GBP for lunch? Even at 10 USD I'll buy lunch only once in two weeks. A 20 USD lunch is a rare treat for special occasions only.

That's pretty much the prices in Norway. To be fair Norwegians do eat out less than in other places as a result of it.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#838

Post by vladvasiliu »

crooked-v wrote: post #641
mjevans wrote: post #506

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Healthcare, retirement, everything required for living should be socialized. Old people today have Medicare and Social Security, but we need to finish the progression to Star Trek and just make sure there's enough to go around and that it does go around. The other part is that misery, fire bad customers and bad managers. It really isn't that difficult to be polite.

Socializing those things would also make basic entrepreneurship much more practical and make failures of entrepreneurship much less harmful (such as the many restaurants that fail in their first year), hugely benefiting the economy as whole.

I'd like to see data from other parts of the world, but at least for France, this argument may hold some water.

A crude comparison of business formation between France (with socialized healthcare / retirement) and the US (without those), shows that the numbers are fairly close. Data is for 2020, which saw a 4% rise for France, whereas in the US numbers were stable. France also doesn't have as much of an "entrepreneurial" culture as the US, meaning people are much more likely to "look for a job" rather than found their own business.

France: Population: 67M, 850 000 new Business, 12 700 / 1M pop.

US: Population: 331M, 3 600 000 Businesses, 11 000 / 1M pop.

---

https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/index.html

https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/5359569

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#839

Post by wiether »

chrisseaton wrote: post #574
itsoktocry wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think some businesses are going out of businesses because they stubbornly refuse to raise their wages I'm skeptical that a business would choose to go out of business rather that give raises. Have you considered that margins are tighter than you think? I know small businesses like that.

Am I the only person who thinks restaurant prices are pretty low? I'm sure they could go up quite a bit. Lunch out costs me maybe £15. Surely that could be £20 or so?

No, you're not. But I guess it depends on what you call "restaurant" and "lunch out". Some people will basically eat every working day in a restaurant. So more than £/$/€10 will be seen as expensive. Some people, like me, will go to[1] a restaurant once or twice a month. In this case, £/$/€50 will be totally acceptable. And giving what is sold in places where you eat for £/$/€10, they will avoid going to those places in the first place.

So I guess restaurants that sells food are having a hard time, but restaurants that sells a service have a different story to tell.

[1] See how in the first case it's "to eat in a restaurant" and in the second it's "to go to a restaurant". To me that's the big difference : when you are here to fulfill a natural need (eating), you don't want to pay a lot for it, while you are here to have a nice time out, you will gladly pay more.

Re: Restaurant workers quit at record rate

#840

Post by megablast »

it wrote: post #706
anonytrary wrote: post #705

Free market at work: 1. Restaurant workers quit 2. Restaurants raise wages 3. Restaurants get workers back Minimum wage seems to be out of this equation. Natural market dynamics will self-correct and the wages will naturally rise as literally any other price rises when inflation occurs. To be honest, I'm not sure what minimum wage is other than an artificial constraint. Workers obviously are willing to quit jobs with…

You forgot to mention the part about the restaurants that can't afford to raise wages either cutting hours or shutting down for good.

Think of all the cool restaurants we could have if slavery was allowed again.
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