Coronavirus

RobertB wrote: Hence Taco Bell is offering $15/hr and it's still not enough.

My personal experience with four teenage kids was that they never got the number of hours they wanted. They'd get weeks with only 15 scheduled hours and, even if you're getting paid $20/hr which is unheard of in the fast food industry, that's $300 gross for the week. Someone looking to make money is going to turn down that job because it doesn't pay well. It has nothing to do with hourly rate.

So when I see the signs up at fast food restaurants saying "sorry, nobody wants to work anymore" I think to myself "sorry, nobody wants to work for you anymore." Treat your employees the way would want to be treated and you'll get all the people need.

This is a correction in the market long overdue. It required a catalyst, but it is organic in nature now that it's kicked off. Everyone on the right thought that when unemployment benefits ended everyone would come back for their abuse. Turns out people have found alternatives. Bully for them. My fast food burger meal is going to cost a dollar more and if that's going to the people behind the counter I'm ok with that. Won't do me any harm to have to pay more for food that shortens my life.

One thing that has come up for my wife and I out of the pandemic is not eating out or getting takeaway like we once did. I make all the meals and have learned to make a damn fine Detroit style pizza so we don't even get Jet's anymore. I recently started making my own masa from corn I have nixtamalized and ground.

I am wondering how far away we are from fast food places that are 90% automated. Not that it would fix the McD Flurry machine uptime.

We're in violent agreement on the wage issue. My wife and I went to Put-In Bay for vacation this summer. One of the restaurants on the main drag was closed, with a sign whining about being closed because they couldn't afford to pay the staff. If their prices were the same exorbitant prices like at all the other restaurants, they could have paid a busboy $20/hr and not noticed the cost. Every time I'd see that sign the veins would bulge on my forehead and I'd rave at my wife for 10 or 15 minutes.

Sagrilarus wrote: So when I see the signs up at fast food restaurants saying "sorry, nobody wants to work anymore" I think to myself "sorry, nobody wants to work for you anymore." Treat your employees the way you would want to be treated and you'll get all the people you need.

Saw some wag, maybe on Reddit, pointing out that:

- if you go to the store to buy beer
- and you see that all the beer costs at least $12/sixpack
- and you don’t want to pay that much

… then that is fine, but don’t go complaining that there is a beer shortage. There is plenty of beer. The supply is not the problem.

If there's one ethic the very conservative people in my life all hold without fail, it is the conviction that all things should be cheap. The idea of the price of some good or commodity going up is enough to end just about any conversation, and there are very few large systemic evils that cannot be overlooked in the name of low, low prices.

Have said many times since this phenomenon began: if people aren't willing to pay a living wage, this isn't a labor issue, it's a profit issue. It's not a labor strike if people are willing to work but you're not willing to pay enough to bring them to work. It's a capital strike. It's portrayed as a labor strike because Americans in general and American media in particular are predicated toward pointing the finger of accusation at poor people and not the rich people that are actually causing the problem. If you can't pay your people a living wage then you shouldn't be in business.

Isn't this capitalism working as intended? Low supply (of workers) and high demand means prices wages go up?

I do wonder if this is a sudden hard correction for the uncoupling of labor productivity and wages that employers have managed to engineer over the past 30 years which used to be a hardish empirical rule: www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

dysjunct wrote:

Sagrilarus wrote: So when I see the signs up at fast food restaurants saying "sorry, nobody wants to work anymore" I think to myself "sorry, nobody wants to work for you anymore." Treat your employees the way you would want to be treated and you'll get all the people you need.

Saw some wag, maybe on Reddit, pointing out that:

- if you go to the store to buy beer
- and you see that all the beer costs at least $12/sixpack
- and you don’t want to pay that much

… then that is fine, but don’t go complaining that there is a beer shortage. There is plenty of beer. The supply is not the problem.

The one I saw was beef. If the price of steaks go up, you don't see restauranteurs on the news complaining of a 'steak shortage'.

san il defanso wrote: If there's one ethic the very conservative people in my life all hold without fail, it is the conviction that all things should be cheap. The idea of the price of some good or commodity going up is enough to end just about any conversation, and there are very few large systemic evils that cannot be overlooked in the name of low, low prices.

This has been (and now I am completely off-topic) a fundamental strategy of the Republican party since the late 70s. Kick the legs out from under labor, dis-empower them, force them to work as cheaply as possible. Never raise the minimum wage. Remove the social safety net so that they have no alternative but to take any job, no matter how bad, in order to get by. Blame every bad thing that happens on people being lazy (often with a tinge of racism/class-ism worked into the rebuttal in a barely subtle way) and not exhibiting the proper Christian work ethic that would make them rich simply by working part time at minimum wage (or less -- bussers get $3.63 per hour in Maryland and in my boy's case a slice of his tips went to the house.)

Now, interestingly enough (and coming back into topic) you have another class of people opting to leave the job market -- the voluntarily-unvaccinated. There's a percentage of all workers in must-vax jobs (generally around 5%) stepping down from their jobs rather than submit to the grand conspiracy. The result is that in the coming weeks the labor pool will tighten even more, giving willing workers more opportunity to capture a higher wage.

The same people that devalue others’ work also expect to be paid well for their own.

Yeah, I saw the other day that 2300 Massachusetts state troopers were protesting the vaccine mandate. "Don't make me get vaccinated or I'll quit, and you'll be sorry!" But a state trooper's salary in MA starts somewhere north of $90k + a nice pension, and all of two troopers quit.

RobertB wrote: We're in violent agreement on the wage issue. My wife and I went to Put-In Bay for vacation this summer. One of the restaurants on the main drag was closed, with a sign whining about being closed because they couldn't afford to pay the staff. If their prices were the same exorbitant prices like at all the other restaurants, they could have paid a busboy $20/hr and not noticed the cost. Every time I'd see that sign the veins would bulge on my forehead and I'd rave at my wife for 10 or 15 minutes.

While you and others are correct in that it isn't a labor shortage but a wage shortage issue, I think its more nuanced than simply "pay more" and problems go away . Pre pandemic the restaurant industry was overall a pretty thin margin business. Most weren't getting rich , esp small operators. Ironically the highest priced places were often the worst margins. The perfect storm of the pandemic coupled with supply chain issues driving up prices drove up two of the biggest expense issues for restuarants - labor and food costs. The third big cost is rent, and that was already pretty high to begin with. The academic answer is that if your costs go up, so must your prices. But its a brutally competitive industry, and nobody wants to stick out as being "over priced". And many of these operators don't exactly have business degrees ) one reason for the overall high failure rate .

I think long term it will be a good thing - many argued that pre pandemic the restuarant business was overbuilt . And at the same time there was starting to be a recloning that many of the industry's accepted practices were incorrect - wages, workplace safety and mental health. Those are now more out in the open and will hopefully be fixed.

Msample wrote: I think long term it will be a good thing - many argued that pre pandemic the restuarant business was overbuilt . And at the same time there was starting to be a recloning that many of the industry's accepted practices were incorrect - wages, workplace safety and mental health. Those are now more out in the open and will hopefully be fixed.

This is right. There was an article from a decade ago on Twitter the other day that was suggesting that there were many more restaurants than the market could reasonably sustain. It somehow lasted longer than anyone expected and then the pandemic just tore the bandage off. An extension of that acknowledgement of reality is that the restaurant business is cyclical, like many, and is also usually temporary. Even the best places don't last like corporate chains do and the latter are a very recent/modern phenomenon.