Honestly I can see their position being a problem but I think the vote would fail massively
It 100% would. Costco has one of the lowest churn rates in almost any industry. Their employees are happy. I hope it stays that way. I doubt Coscto would ever become an Amazon type baddie, but the potential for abuse of power is always there.
In a similar vein of the Costco discussion -
The Lowes in my neighborhood has customer service that is about 45x better than the local home Depot. Do they treat their employees that much better or does mine just have excellent management? Rather than having to hunt the entire store for someone to help me, I got asked by 3 different Lowes employees if I needed help in my last 5 minutes trip to the store.
It’s been that way forever everywhere. I don’t know what the underlying reasons are, but generally people who have access to and experience with both stores prefer Lowes by hudge margins.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/05/24/restaurant-workers-shortage-pay/
Yeah no shit. I have never understood why anyone would work a restaurant job except for the best paid 20% of servers and upper management. Everyone else could make 1.5-2x what they currently earned before the pandemic elsewhere. Unsurprisingly all the good restaurant employees will have figured that out when forced to go job hunting.
Every restaurant I’ve ever worked in (only 2 so take that with a grain of salt) and every restaurant I’ve ever paid attention to was getting 90% of the restaurants viability out of 10% or less of their workers. Without those workers everything would definitely collapse, and they got paid just like everyone else. You can get back the people who are actively trying to make sure the restaurant is only getting its money’s worth (they get new jobs every 3-4 months and are why the turnover rate at most low wage jobs is so high… they’re also the people who generate 100% of the horror stories about restaurant employees) but the people the restaurant absolutely depended on?
They’re fucked. Those people aren’t ever coming back and similar people who have worked in other industries cost seriously 4-5x.
1 Like
Seriously. I’m friends with someone who used to work in a subway for heaven’s sake (thankfully she’s moved on now) but she was diligent and hardworking beyond sense. She locked up and sorted and banked the days takings and who knows what else. She was on minimum wage and nearly always arrived earlier and stayed later than she got paid for. I think she got “promoted” to “manager” for 50p more per hour or something equally jokeworthy. The people who actually believe the nonsense they tell you at school about hard work being rewarded are always the most exploited.
2 Likes
Yeah I was a trash low end employee. That the whole thing was a scam on the employees was obvious generally by the middle of the first shift. I’m proud to say that I’ve had my attitude referred to as cancer by more than one manager. That I’ve worked less than 120 days in restaurants but have worked for two of them seems relevant. I also worked in a gas station for 2 weeks before being fired for doing <50% of the stuff I was supposed to do. Oh well fuck you mister manager sir I’m making 12 bucks for this shift and this restaurant is making 950 after food and labor costs. Sure seems like a you problem.
And yes 16 year old BoredSocial absolutely was keeping tabs on how much was coming into the till during a lunch rush vs how much the crew working the restaurant was making. We were below 10% lol. It’s a good thing they fired me, the only way I could have stayed and lived with myself was by stealing.
Yep. This is the real fear the republicans had about the 600 a week we gave out in Pandemic unemployment.
Now that people know they are worth more than the shit they were being paid, they’re actually going to demand to be paid what they’re worth… and then who is going to serve them their english breakfast at the country club?
4 Likes
This is what illegal immigrants are for. The desperate poor from other countries will work for a fraction of the minimum wage.
1 Like
But I don’t think they are, which is kinda the problem. I think the industry as a whole are gonna see people, immigrant or no, saying “Fuck your 2.11 an hour bullshit.”
And we as the public should support that as well. Pay your staff a living way and stop expecting the customers to subsidize their salaries with tips.
I hope you’re right.
Incredibly the restaurants around where I live that are actually doing well are all offering 15-20 bucks an hour now. Literally a big yellow sign hanging in front of Tacodeli saying they’re hiring at 15-20 bucks an hour.
There are a bunch of restaurants that need to go out of business tbqh, and if the pandemic kills them it won’t be the 1000th saddest thing that happens because of it.
The restaurants that survive will pick up the volume that the zombie restaurants cough up. I don’t actually think the corporate chains are going to do all that well from this either.
1 Like
Restaurants in particular may have an issue because, I agree with others, as a former restaurant worker there are easier ways to make money and people just working there out of habit had to go explore other opportunities.
Not sure it applies more broadly because there’s going to be an increasing push for more stringent unemployment rules even if the benefits are better. Already starting in the red states and Biden pushed it in his recent press conference as well.
Yeah it’s amusing. I actually told my dad, when he had his business, that we needed to pay entry level people more to take us out of the bottom of the barrel competition with lots of bad choices. Also by raising rates you limit turnover and thus training costs.
He listened and it made a significant difference. Any business I have had since then has always made sure to have above average wages.
At the entry level when someone can find 20 other jobs paying minimum wage they have little to no motivation to worry about keeping that job. Those positions are essentially disposable.
1 Like
This is spot on. During my time in restaurants / bars a handful of people were responsible for success and there is no meritocracy.
When I worked at Home Depot in 1999, I was hired at $14/hr. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank were still there. Then they left and Rob Nardelli took over. He immediately made changes like putting a salary cap on wages and making merit badges less valuable. If you did a good job, a manager would give you a merit badge. If you got 4, you could hand them in for $100. People would get 4 in a pay period to make an extra $100 on their paycheck. Then it became 5. Then it became you were lucky to get 1 merit badge a month. I left in 2004. I don’t think I got one the last 6 months I worked there.
Long story short, fuck Rob Nardelli.
I saw a sign at a Hardee’s saying “Now hiring up to $10/hr.” Fantastic! Where do I sign up?
1 Like
Like 90% of the reason I want to see a UBI is that I want everyone who hates every second of their job and does the minimum or less to quit and never return. Ideally those people will go out and find stuff that they don’t hate so much, but honestly if they sat at home smoked weed and played video games for the rest of their lives it would also be fine with me. ‘People need to work’ is not a good argument in a world with cheapish industrial robots. Why do they need to work?
I can easily argue that they don’t deserve to be homeless or starve to death because they aren’t a good fit for the work that needs doing, but I can’t find a single rational argument for why I should have to interact with them as a consumer or a business owner. I would rather pay 4 people 30 bucks an hour to operate my business than 40 people 7 bucks an hour and not just because it’s cheaper… but because those 4 people are going to be legitimately awesome and make everything easier/better for both me the owner of that business and my customers.
It’s better to employ well paid people who are genuinely good at the job than it is to pay people less than a living wage and deal with the kind of people who will fill that trade.
In other news our school system is training people to work for peanuts and do repetitive tasks instead of think critically and solve problems which is basically the main thing humans do better than AI (and since our brains are incredibly complex and powerful organs designed to be problem solving hunter gatherers I don’t think AI catches up anytime soon).
4 Likes
I am fine with a large percentage of restaurants going out of business in hopes of a new baseline being sought.
Most of the employees have already been dealing with it so if a large percentage of crappy restaurants don’t return it will be okay. Heck fewer restaurants may allow for higher prices leading to better wages.
Simply way too many restaurants and one of the Go tos for people who don’t have any other ideas for a business.
Yeah I would like to see more regional restaurant groups that buy super wholesale good ingredients locally and then distribute across a variety of concepts in one market. These things exist in both Louisville where I moved from and Austin where I moved to and honestly in terms of quality/price ratio for consumers, employee pay/treatment, and just about every other metric I can think of they’re a meaningful step up over national chains and single restaurant mom and pop’s.
They also serve as a really good entry point for cooking talent. It’s just a very good model that I hope to see grow like kudzu nationwide.
And before anyone says something silly like ‘but poor people can’t afford an 8 dollar hamburger’ remember that I don’t want there to be any poor people anymore. I don’t want poverty programs, homeless charities, or any other form of poverty aid. I want to end poverty and put those guys out of business.
You can afford to pay 8 bucks for a hamburger if you make a living wage. The difference between the 8 dollar burger and the 5 dollar burger quality wise is hard to overstate. The ingredients are better and the preparation is better too. I don’t want there to be anyone who has demand for the low end restaurants as currently built out. Chipotle is the new floor goddamn it… and Chipotle can afford to pay 20-25 an hour.
1 Like