Bailout / Stimulus Discussion (Hints Missed & Shartz Fired)

got mine yesterday, was a nice surprise.

i got mine about a week after submission.

Unemployment ending in SC, Montana, Ark, Mississippi and Alabama. More GOP states expected to follow.

This isn’t going to work as well as they think. The number of people on unemployment in red states is hugely overblown. They’re short workers in restaurants + long term care because they do not pay anything close to what those same workers can get elsewhere, COVID death rates for line cooks and long term care employees were as bad as it could get, and because they laid off the majority of restaurant workers last year… a great many of whom didn’t even qualify for unemployment.

They basically forced these people to go out and look for other jobs and the majority of the people in the 20% of the restaurant/long term care workforce who did 80% of the work found work in other fields months ago. They’re never coming back.

The silver lining is that when they lose the ‘people just don’t want to work because of unemployment’ excuse we might see those industries capitulate and update their pay to match what their labor force can get elsewhere.

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They’ll start using conscription to staff the Taco Bell drive up window.

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If what you are saying is true, I’m anticipating a massive disconnect between the quality of restaurant applicants that employers are expecting and what they are going to get.

My understanding of the job market is most employers would rather leave a position open than hire someone they have to train or is otherwise suboptimal. So we’ll see how that goes.

This has been kind of a constant refrain from people like Matty Glesias and Karl Smith - it’s now been roughly 20 years since business owners have had to operate in a world with tight labor markets. So you’ve got this entire generation of owners/managers who think that all you have to do is put out a want ad saying:

  • Staff accountant wanted
  • 3-5 years experience required, CPA preferred
  • $12/hour with medical benefits
    and you’d get this enormous pool of ultra-qualified applicants who you wouldn’t have to train at all and who would be willing to accept very low wages.

But that’s not really an equilibrium labor market. What should be happening is that it’s actually somewhat difficult to attract new employees, and to do so you’ve got to offer a competitive wage and be willing to train people who don’t have the experience you’d ideally like. It’s going to take a while for that mindset to sink in imo.

Forget to mention here that I believe I successfully applied for an increase in my EIDL from $24,900 to the originally offered $81,000. Given that we are self-employed and have more difficult access to loans, seems worth taking for now. If nothing else, the wife has school loans for grad and law school (unlikely to be forgiven?) that are over the 3.75% rate. We have enough business expenses in the time window to support.

We shall see what happens.

and lol red staters. they gets what they vote for the dumbasses.

On q zoom call with an urgent care doctor this morning while he was bemoaning that he couldn’t find clerical staff because they make more on unemployment

I wanted to spin my hand and say “go on, you are so close”

But instead I just told him to gfh in my head.

I cannot possibly stress how little sympathy I have for employers here. I say this as someone whose costs are up like 50% YoY (not that I have been harmed by this, quite the contrary since I was able to drum roll pass it on).

If major costs go up to the point your business stops making sense and you can’t get your customers to pay higher prices to at least mostly make up for it you were never profitable and were doomed long run. That’s literally capitalism telling you that the economy has better uses for your inputs lol. I suspect a whole bunch of mediocre restaurants are being told that right now.

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Unfortunately, restaurant quality frequently does not correlate with business success.

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My dad worked as the general manager of a pretty successful nightclub/steakhouse for 20 years. He was extremely anal about food quality, so much so that he once spent a week or so trying to find the perfect french fry that would stay hot the longest.

He gave me a lot of tidbits about the restaurant industry in general, from his perspective. I think he’d probably agree with you, but food quality is definitely very high on the list. You also need to provide great service and a good ambience, not to mention manage costs/inventory well simultaneously.

It’s one of the hardest industries to become successful in as an owner. Almost no one makes it. His advice to me was to invest in a bar instead of a restaurant.

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Same thing needs to happen with higher ed.

Anecdotally, all the elite small/local places are getting/got killed with COVID restrictions and the awful major chains survived.

Market kinda sucks at times.

It would be nice if this could work its way into science.

I’m doing okay, but the job market has sucked for me for a long, long time.

Man, I just can’t figure out why a company like Costco that pays good wages, has good benefits, and treats their employees well isn’t having a labor issue. Just can’t put my finger on it.

Maybe somebody can get a few hundred economists on it to figure out the secret.

While this is all true and they deserve plenty of respect for it, I was never a fan of their staunchly anti-union views.

True.

Though, does anybody want to unionize if you work for an employer that respects their staff?

It’s a fair question and the one Costco brings up when the idea of unionization comes up, and all I can say to that is, yes, it’s great that Costco respects their employees… currently.

That last word is why unions are vital. It’s great when the status quo is great. But with nothing to stop that greatness from changing, it’s highly possible it some day will.

Leadership changes hands. Values change. Board members change. Change is inevitable. Workers should protect themselves as much as possible from that change being negative.

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