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Restaurant workers quit at record rate

• pm90 5y ago
  > That's because for many, leaving food service had a lot to do also with its high-stress culture: exhausting work, unreliable hours, no benefits and so many rude customers. I didn't realize that rude customers was that widespread.
  • theonlybutlet 5y ago
    I suppose you just need that one clown to come in and ruin your day. The odds are stacked against you.
  • pphysch 5y ago
    All you need is 1 jerk customer to have a bad work day, and those jerk customers are probably eating out multiple times a week at different locations
  • shakezula 5y ago
    Have you ever worked restaurant or food service? I worked at McDonalds a few years after high school and it was the most demoralizing, depressing, and abusive job I've worked. Bussing tables wasn't much better in comparison either. But at least when bussing tables people didn't talk to you like you were human waste. I had people actually tell me that I was stupid, I had someone throw an ice cream at me because they were mad I was parking them to wait for their order, I got screamed at far more regularly than you would think. That's just the tip of the iceberg, and management was usually worse. No exaggeration: I would be homeless before working at McDonalds again. Not because of pride, but because it put me into a really bad depression.
    • Ajay-p 5y ago
      Related: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9Cec9Fb6JI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9Cec9Fb6JI
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • thrill 5y ago
    It's even worse than the article touches on.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    Go on a cruise and spend some time people watching. People can be awful.
    • speg 5y ago
      Cruisers specifically? People are awful everywhere :(
    • Aboh33 5y ago
      Likely where the whole "Karen" Stereotype came from in part
  • ashtonkem 5y ago
    It doesn’t take a lot of rude customers to really ruin your day. Even a 5% rate of toxic customers will weigh on your emotions heavily, given the outsized impact they can have. And the rate might be much higher than 5%.
  • foxyv 5y ago
    The terrible customers are rare. Maybe 1% of the public. However when you service 200 people you will have an ~80% chance to run into at least one terrible customer. If you don't feel protected or supported this can be soul crushing. Even worse if you come home to poverty.
    • maerF0x0 5y ago
      I think you're hitting the nail on the head here. 1) Lack of general(outside work) support for what essentially is an empathy job (care about the customer experience) 2) Lack of social enforcement of dont be a piece of shit. People used to call out people more for behavioral standards (swearing, presumption of positive intent, codes of dress, on and on the list goes...) Next time you see someone being treated poorly speak up. Everyone is too busy recording for youtube rather than interacting in the environment. We've become passive observers rather than active partakers in life.
  • happytoexplain 5y ago
    Part of it is a numbers game. One asshole per unit of time is stressful regardless of how many non-assholes you serve in that same unit of time. Now consider that a waiter working a 30 hour week can serve hundreds of individuals at even a modest restaurant. Less objectively, I feel like assholes are much more likely to express their negativity in a service scenario. You may run into these people all the time and not see their behavior until you're the one serving them. The ways some people not-uncommonly behave can be absolutely gobsmacking. It's hard to relate to what is going on in these people's emotional thoughts. Spontaneous stress reactions like road rage are at least relatable, but the purposeful way some people treat others when being served by them can be, frankly, totally alien.
  • devwastaken 5y ago
    In my experience out in more remote areas rude customers are a daily occurrence. People like to feel power over others, and have very little in terms of self control. Companies won't boot them because there's plenty of people whom are intentionally dishonest and will then label the company as being "sensitive liberals" or otherwise. Which then gethers people around it whom are just looking to take a bat to the "other team". It's a scapegoat for bad behavior I've seen multiple times.
• yepthatsreality 5y ago
  The restaurant industry has known the solution for a long time but everyone wants to pretend it would be too difficult. Stop the tipping guilt trip placed on the public, raise your prices 20%, and pay your employees a livable wage. The public will still show up to eat in your restaurant.
  • namdnay 5y ago
    Honestly, as necessary as that is, it’s not a magic solution. People are quitting the restaurant industry in France too, despite having none of the tip silliness. It’s just that people are realizing that there are easier minimum wage jobs than working in a kitchen
    • ashtonkem 5y ago
      Perhaps the industry is not sustainable then.
      • AnIdiotOnTheNet 5y ago
        I agree. It seems that most people's "solutions" to this "problem" are various ways to make people's live more miserable and keep them desperate enough to work shit jobs for low pay. I guess a lot of people are just fine with having a slave class as long as it means they don't have to be inconvenienced in any way. If this industry literally cannot afford to pay people a living wage, if no one wants to work for them and they can't remain profitable by making working conditions better, then they just shouldn't even exist.
        • wonderwonder 5y ago
          Most eye opening part of the pandemic was the fact that in the US the majority of people dubbed as essential and forced to work were also the people paid the least. Grocery workers standing there with 2 masks on making minimum wage while the rest of us waltz in take what we need and return to the relative safety of our remote work. Then making fast food workers essential instead of paying them unemployment was just taking things to another level of pettiness.
• boulos 5y ago
  If you’re interested in the topic, I recommend the MIT living wage research [1]. They’ve got probably the most useful calculator, letting you compare multiple scenarios. [1] https://livingwage.mit.edu/ https://livingwage.mit.edu/
  • maerF0x0 5y ago
    This is a great resource. I'd nitpick that the childcare expense is IMO a terrible evolution of society. People used to take care of eachother's kids while they were at work (eg, work less hours or compressed days and trade day care days with a friend. ). It's far better for children to have stable adult support (ie same small set of people stably over time) than a revolving door of new employees, whomever is working that shift etc. So we're being less resourceful _and_ giving a worse setup to the next generation.
    • clairity 5y ago
      children used to just go to the workplace with adults and/or spending time nearby playing with other kids. it's the separation of children from adults that creates a problem, not the accounting of it (e.g., childcare cost figures), an extension of a victorian sterility to public life, trying to cast perfect images of idyllic lives for others to admire rather than living carefree.
    • wonderwonder 5y ago
      That requires friends or local family and America has another massive issue with friendless people on the rise.
      • maerF0x0 5y ago
        super agree. But for some reason our government seems focused on fixing this by paying for childcare rather than encouraging community...
    • corpdrone2021 5y ago
      Most of the historical community building was done at faith communities, and by stay-at home parents in the past. As a society we fell hook line and sinker for "The two income trap," and are unwilling to contemplate the horrible idea of allowing families to collect the childcare subsidy to pay the parent providing childcare is upsetting to enough different groups to be a non-starter. Right wingers are upset because "it's socialism" and folks on the left who I've discussed the idea with have repeatedly expressed fear that it will undermine feminism.
• nostromo 5y ago
  I’m sure it has nothing to do with the government paying people to sit at home - something NPR forgot to mention in their article.
  • dragontamer 5y ago
    Based on my discussions with barber-shops and other lower wage earners... at least in my area... people are still afraid of COVID19 and don't want to work in a public-facing role during a pandemic. I'm not sure how money would change that. Even if you doubled wages all of a sudden, if people are literally fearing for their lives, you can't actually get them to come in. ------- In resort areas (beaches, etc. etc.), a lot of these workers were also seasonal. I visited the beach and instead of being greeted by poorly speaking German folk (No offense, but its often obvious when you're interacting with a seasonal worker...) in my favorite restaraunt... I was greeted by Americans (far far fewer of them, because they couldn't find enough workers). German seasonal part-time workers won't come over because of COVID19. Asking them to risk an airplane flight for some money just isn't worth it.
    • karlkatzke 5y ago
      The #1 career field that died of COVID during the pandemic is restaurant cooks.
      • dragontamer 5y ago
        Well, you don't usually interact with cooks, so that's a bit harder for me to gather information about :-) You can actually gain a hell of a lot of information with a brief 30-second talk with a cashier, someone stocking the shelves at a store, waiter, or barber. Keep it brief: they're still on the clock and you don't want to waste their time. Its also their job to respond to you (ex: talk about checkout, to point you in the direction of where items are in a store... or to serve you a meal or cut your hair). So its not very hard to translate a natural interaction into a brief 30-seconds or so question about their perspective in life right now. Sometimes, you don't even need to talk with them. Like the German seasonal workers at my local beach area: I know it without even talking to anyone. The Germans are gone this year: I didn't see any of them. I normally see lots of them (often shy workers who respond "I don't speak English" when you try to talk with them), but I saw literally none of them this past week when I went to the beach. I also studied a basic level of Spanish and German. I'm not conversational, but I can recognize when people speak those languages. So hearing random German discussions between seasonal workers in the background is common under normal times, and that's just missing this year.
• sethammons 5y ago
  > rude customers, whose abuses restaurant staff are often forced to tolerate Service workers in general, I'd love it if more managers and companies would support front line workers in refusing service. The customer is not always right. People should not have to put up with literal abuse. The Alamo Drafthouse theater is famously known for kicking someone out who was using their cell phone and other customers appreciate it.
  • luffapi 5y ago
    While this is absolutely true, it would also make the job very stressful (and potentially dangerous) if front-line staff, or any staff really, has to eject people on a regular basis. I definitely wouldn’t want to do it, the people who you’d be refusing service to would be the worst of the worst and likely not take it well.
    • njovin 5y ago
      Maybe if enough businesses did this it would drive a societal shift. I've had the pleasure of firing a small handful of customers from my very small SaaS business when they were outrightly rude or vulgar. I feel terrible whenever I see an employee at any business having to be sanguine with an abusive customer, it shouldn't be tolerated.
      • luffapi 5y ago
        It shouldn’t be, but just be aware that you’re asking people to put themselves in harms way. I’d rather grin and bear a jerk customer than get shot by one waiting outside after my shift because I personally had to kick them out. I totally agree abusive customers are a huge problem though.
        • deleted 5y ago
          [deleted]
      • cwkoss 5y ago
        If other customers object to rude customers behavior and demand they are kicked out, it destroys "customer is always right" rationale - they have to choose one customer to disappoint and will probably choose the one being abusive to their workers. Also tends to deflate the rude customer.
• Paul_S 5y ago
  Restaurant owners refuse to pay higher wages because that would remove a huge profit source for them - variable pricing. As long as part of the wage is in tips the owner effectively is capable of charging customers different prices. Rich people pay more but poor poeple also visit. If you raise the price to pay a good wage without tips and abolish tipping you lose the poor customers.
  • atty 5y ago
    You seem to be under the impression that rich people tip more. From what I have seen, and from many friends in the service industry, this is simply false. You’re far more likely to get no tip from someone driving a Mercedes than someone driving a junker, at least around where I am.
    • dragonwriter 5y ago
      Rich people don't get rich by giving away money for nothing, so expecting rich people to be more inclined to do so is...odd.
  • arcturus17 5y ago
    Eh, how is variable pricing a source of profit for the restaurateur? Their profit is calculated on a fixed price. Also from what I’ve observed in the US, everyone is morally obligated to pay a tip… Rich people may go above and beyond the average (citation needed) but having tips arguably does not raise demand from more modest people, since they are still expected to pay base price + tip. There is no real price segmentation at play as far as I can tell… Modest people also eat out in Europe or in Japan, where morally mandatory tipping does not exist, so there is that.
    • red_trumpet 5y ago
      > Eh, how is variable pricing a source of profit for the restaurateur? Their profit is calculated on a fixed price. More people dining means more profit probably. > (citation needed) Yes, that may indeed be a problem.
• Ajay-p 5y ago
  I worked a long, long time in the food service industry and it was the tipping that drove me away. I just could not smile and bear it anymore. I never got angry at a customer, never lost my cool in front of them, and did my best to be polite and humble, but it just wore me out. I felt like every day I was begging, hoping for them to like me so I could pay rent. If I didn't have to worry about that I could do the job professionally and know my pay was not tied to if the customer liked me or not.
  • minikites 5y ago
    Tipping is filled with issues of discrimination. Tipping also allows for the owner to steal from workers more easily (wage theft). https://www.eater.com/a/case-against-tipping https://www.eater.com/a/case-against-tipping There's no good argument in favor of tipping. It's a bad practice that we should stop immediately.
    • jimmyjazz14 5y ago
      I used to work at high ticket fine dining restaurants and tipping at those sort of places was great for me, it was one of the few non-professional jobs I had that I could actually support myself on.
  • ngngngng 5y ago
    I've literally never tipped anyone less than 20%. Tipping might be a terrible practice, but to me it's an unwritten contract that since I'm accepting service from you, I'm going to tip at least the standard amount. I'm in a pretty privileged position now but this was the case when I was living on poverty wages as well. I just can't imagine telling someone "you don't deserve to be paid for the service you offered me today." I can't believe anyone is comfortable with that notion, but I suppose it's probably more out of apathy than spite.
• lawnchair_larry 5y ago
  I’m sure many get low pay, but the women I knew were making $50k - $70k in their 20s. That was when housing was far, far cheaper too. Hardly min wage.
• Pxtl 5y ago
  Every time there's an SF Bay area thread, you get libertarians pointing out how the lack of enforcement against shoplifting has destroyed the ability to run stores in the area. From afar in Canada, I have no idea if this is true or not. But you can see the reflection of that in this mess - the lack of enforcement of cultural norms about being a nasty piece-of-work to waitstaff and other front-of-house jobs has raised the labour expectations to the point that it's no longer a worthwhile employment option for many people. There are similar jobs with similar pay but less emotional labor. This is the price of ignoring the emotionally laborious. And yes, "laborious" has a two different meanings when applied to people.
  • maerF0x0 5y ago
    as i've observed it is true in some kinds of stores like CVS/walgreens (like a shoppers drug mart in Canada). But I've never observed such behavior in, say, a Trader joes or a FF restaurant.
    • yurishimo 5y ago
      Yeah, CVS/etc are a special kind of case. They have a lot of the same products as a big box store, even alcohol, (but a limited variety). Because they're so much smaller, they can't justify dedicated resources for loss prevention. Often times when I visit one of these stores, they have 1 or 2 employees working in the entire store, maybe 3 or 4 during a shift change or busy time. Never more than 2 people on a register. I think these companies could alleviate the theft problems with more employees, but they don't want to pay the labor costs.
      • maerF0x0 5y ago
        I think the bean counters are missing lost sales because I dont want to go in a CSV/Walgreens anymore.
• k33n 5y ago
  Great servers at high end restaurants are making 100K a year because of tips. Why would they want to make $20 an hour?
  • efa 5y ago
    I've heard of servers making so much they can't afford to move to a white collar job (or would have to take a pay cut).
  • Ajay-p 5y ago
    I don't agree that "great servers" are making 100K because of tips, but instead it is because of the generalized percentage gratuity. Just because the food was $150 doesn't mean the service was great, and just because the tip was large, doesn't mean the service was good. In my experience only half of the population tips based on percentage, and it's generally those who eat at high end places, or seem to be more affluent. The rest tip based on "service" and that could be 5% on a $150 bill, or 20% on a $15 tab. I've seen both, and I think your example only applies to a very small percentage of wait staff.
    • yurishimo 5y ago
      I know for me personally, I tend to tip a percentage, regardless of the cost of the meal. If I go to a fancy steakhouse and the service is crap, chances are the server is still gonna get $20 out of me. I came from a food service background though and realize people have bad days, but it does put me in a bit of a conundrum on how to handle truly terrible service. Fortunately for my wallet, I don't frequent those upscale establishments so it's not a problem I think about often.
  • yunohn 5y ago
    Obviously, we should write economic policy for the masses based on the Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaire theory for restaurant waiters. /s
  • boulos 5y ago
    That’s a fairly high end restaurant in NYC, San Francisco, etc (e.g., servers at Zuni did about $70k/yr including tips [1]). The person in the article though is in the back of the house. Those workers almost uniformly make minimum wage across the country. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/Legendary-Zuni-Cafe-is-getting-rid-of-tips-16157619.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/food/article/Legendary-Zuni-Cafe...
• ericbarrett 5y ago
  Wages/insurance/tips are an ongoing concern of food service work, but I want to set that aside and talk about the other half of the article. Customer entitlement is out of control and anybody who works with the general public will tell you it’s gotten even worse since the pandemic—and it wasn’t trending in the right direction before. Flight attendants, park rangers, government clerks, the anecdotes are everywhere, in whispers and on social media. A good friend of mine is a doctor and he has a hair-raising story for me nearly every day, often indistinguishable from fast food customers’ behavior. I’m trying to get him to retire before he gets shot by somebody who was told they’d have to wait 3 days for an appointment. What’s going on? I have my own theories but I want HN’s take.
  • JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    Folks are nervous and tense. It was a tense year.
  • oramit 5y ago
    I think there has been a general rise in selfish behavior now that pandemic restrictions are being lifted. You have people who never took the pandemic seriously and now that things are back open, but are not the same, they are lashing out. That's one part of this. I also think you have another camp, which I'll admit to being a member of. I did everything I was supposed to do. I stayed at home, used masks everywhere, took no trips, and had very few social engagements for more than a year - and it sucked. Now that things are open all I want to do is go out. Even though I know that I should lower my expectations, I can't help emotionally but feel entitled to having a good time now. The thought rolling around my head is: I did everything that was asked of me for a year and a half, I deserve to have fun now. As I write that I know intellectually how self-centered, selfish, and delusion it is but I feel it intensely.
    • motohagiography 5y ago
      After a year of piety, it's possibly just "moral licensing." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-licensing) I can't remember the other term, but there is a related concept where we do things like separate our recycling, then fly private. Someone with a job helping other people becomes an abusive disaster at home. Or the classic relationship anti-pattern of partner who "does things for you, and now you owe them," (covert contract?) It's related to indulgences and self-licensing, and there is a calculation where we decide our past or even current good behaviour justifies poor behaviour now because we have an imaginary idea that we are somehow bargaining with the universe and it owes us something. (It doesn't care.) It's not the universe, it's your mother, and people are rude because they are caught in a psychological feedback loop of expectation, shame, and rage. For years I thought it was economically broken that even restaurant and café jobs required a college degree, but now I don't understand how anyone without a psychology degree could be equipped to work with the public. We are hell.
• legitster 5y ago
  I wonder if tipping took a huge hit in 2020. The kinds of people still eating in person at restaurants were often not paragons of conscientiousness in the first place. And I could see a lot of people cutting back on tipping when just patroning a place could feel like an act of charity in itself.
  • boulos 5y ago
    Actually, IIUC people were more generous tippers “during” the pandemic [1]. Some of the reopening discussion included a note that average tipping went down. [1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/Data-show-the-pandemic-made-San-Franciscans-more-16258558.php https://www.sfchronicle.com/local/article/Data-show-the-pand...
    • tablespoon 5y ago
      > Actually, IIUC people were more generous tippers “during” the pandemic [1]. Some of the reopening discussion included a note that average tipping went down. Yeah, previously I wouldn't tip if I had to order my food from a counter, but I changed that during the pandemic (especially if it was a smaller mom an pop restaurant).
  • TheFreim 5y ago
    My tips have significantly increased since business has started to pick up again. Making way over my wage now.
• WhompingWindows 5y ago
  I go to a breakfast shop a lot, they lost around 1/2 of their staff permanently due to COVID, It majorly jostled the restaurant sector around here. I asked the owner, "Well, why'd they leave?". He claims "They're getting more on unemployment than if they worked." Well, why is that the case? Don't you provide them with enough to live on? If they're getting $500 a week from unemployment, that would mean you're paying people less than $24k to work for you, without healthcare or retirement benefits, might I add. He later stated if minimum wage was $15 an hour, he'd have to raise his prices and lose some staff who aren't efficiently employed time-wise. He stated this like it was a huge negative, but to me, he should pay great employees a great wage to work hard, not have extra employees all of whom are paid poorly to stand around a bit on the downtimes. And anyway, as a customer, I'd happily pay $10 instead of $5 for breakfast, if I had the option to support the employees properly. $5 vs $10 for us in technology? Many of us make $30 hour, or FAR more, so these $5 differences are much smaller to us than to restaurant workers.
  • JoeAltmaier 5y ago
    Folks raise that spectre when a living wage is mentioned. "So many service jobs lost!" I shake my head at that - folks who imagine themselves Free Market advocates, and here they are agreeing with Karl Marx that a capitalist system can't survive without a slave-wage class to prop it up. Paying everybody a living wage should be the minimum bar for any economy. If ours can't do it, we need a different one.
    • gruez 5y ago
      > and here they are agreeing with Karl Marx that a capitalist system can't survive without a slave-wage class to prop it up. The employers aren't obligated to employ anyone. What do you think happens to the "slave-wage class" when the job disappears entirely?
      • wonderwonder 5y ago
        Issue is that the only reason this slave wage class exists in food services is because of a coordinated lobbying campaign to influence politicians to keep it like that. Most people in this thread would be pretty upset if all tech companies got together tomorrow and decided to artificially cap salaries and bought politicians to enforce it.
• moate 5y ago
  Good. Here's my story from the industry I was a part of for a better part of a decade: One time while I was a line cook, I was cleaning a meat slicer and sliced 3/4ths of the way through the tip of my thumb (just the meaty part at the end, not bone or anything). I realized I had 2 options: Leave work, go to the ER, miss my shift/pay, and incur a bunch of medical debt I could barely afford OR; leave work, go to the CVS around the corner, buy a bottle of superglue, and patch myself back up. My boss even told me if I just needed to run to CVS, I wouldn't need to clock out, what a great guy! This was at an upscale Italian place on the Asbury Park boardwalk that was doing millions of dollars in sales every year. When I left the industry to go into tech, I never looked back. I will always have a love/hate relationship with the industry. I love the creativity, the people, the experience of dining. I hate everything about the exploitative labor practices. I wish everyone leaving the industry good luck on their new, hopefully better paths. I wish every manager crying poor and bemoaning that nobody wants their poverty wages in a physically crushing industry a very fuck you.
  • himinlomax 5y ago
    This is the most incredible thing about the US. Employers should be responsible for workplace safety and pay for it.
    • sigstoat 5y ago
      his employer surely had workers comp insurance, and big signs about it in the breakroom, which are required by law.
      • moate 5y ago
        Of course they do! I was like 24 and just out of culinary school. The courses of action I talked about were the ones I was told I had by my boss (who probably didn't want a claim.) 10+ years late I'm much more aware of labor laws/practices but at the time I had no clue.
    • PragmaticPulp 5y ago
      > Employers should be responsible for workplace safety and pay for it. In the US, employers are responsible for workplace safety and there are serious repercussions for violations like this. Some small businesses rely on employees being too fearful to report incidents, but that’s not unique to the US. Worker’s compensation would have covered the injury mentioned above, and any employer interfering with that would face serious consequences up to and including loss of business license and closure of the restaurant.
• txsoftwaredev 5y ago
  When you pay people to stay home what do you expect?
• janitor61 5y ago
  Why not bring back the Automat to take the increasingly-rude public out of the equation?
  • ceejayoz 5y ago
    Isn't that basically what online restaurant pickup ordering is? If I order from Chipotle via the app, I don't have to interact with a human at all unless there's an issue with the food. There's a bag on the rack for me to grab.
    • agentwiggles 5y ago
      You don't even necessarily have to interact with a human if there _is_ an issue. The Chipotle app which I use to order has a support chat (which I'm pretty sure is automated). If I'm missing an item or have pretty much any issue, they issue a refund for that item, no questions asked. Pretty crazy. (Also very convenient, and shockingly pro-consumer).
    • xeromal 5y ago
      I'd say there's a slight difference. The food is prepared without your interaction in an automat. You would just walk into the store and open the door for the food you want. Everything is pre-made but replenished only when someone takes it.
  • petra 5y ago
    Efficient technologies, some new ones also, exist. Some say people pay for the experience, for being served when going to a restaurant. It would be interesting to see if that's true, or if highly automated restaurants with the right experience and price will become a hit.
• lrdswrk00 5y ago
  Covid has made me question eating out at all. It’s trivial to cook something that’s better tasting and healthier than fast food, most cafes. With all the practice in the last year, it’s not hard to come close to my favorite upscale restaurants for 1/4 of the price. I don’t need to find a recipe, I can “just cook” now. Eating out seems like an antiquated division of labor given how streamlined procurement (grocery delivery from anywhere), and no commute have made my life.
  • throwawayboise 5y ago
    Agree. My consumption of restaurant food basically stopped in March 2020. I have eaten out or gotten take out maybe once a month since then. Pre-covid I was eating at least one meal from a restaurant almost daily.
  • SonicScrub 5y ago
    Agreed. Especially when a big part of the value proposition of a restaurant, the time savings, are negated when I can do my cooking while simultaneously in a meeting. Plus I can be in my underwear the whole time!
  • xanaxagoras 5y ago
    Agreed. Restaurant food is generally speaking unhealthy and overpriced. Low quality ingredients are doused in fat and salt to make them palatable and I'm expected to pay an exorbitant fee for someone to remember what I asked for and carry it across the room. It's cheaper and easier to eat real, whole foods at home. There are too many restaurants and we've come to rely on them for our daily sustenance. A healthy relationship to restaurants would make it a once or twice a month kind of proposition, yet it's not uncommon for people to use restaurants as their primary source of nutrition (don't even get me started on F-ing delivery). The more of them that shut down after COVID and don't come back, the better.
  • Bhilai 5y ago
    Yes agreed. I hate cooking but I decided to bite the bullet during covid and learnt to make simple meals. The whole chore of cutting, cooking, cleaning up, dishes and utensils still seems like a burden to me but I enjoy eating home cooked meals and have improved overtime to modify internet recipes to my liking. Eating out now seems expensive and unhealthy in most cases and I often doubt the quality of ingredients too.
• lfmunoz4 5y ago
  These types of jobs should be done by 14-21 year old as they are unskilled and help develop social skills. Always found it weird that we have so many career restaurant workers.
• markus_zhang 5y ago
  Have worked in various restaurants for short periods of time. One of the most miserable jobs IMHO, would never go back. No wonder people are quitting.
• bawana 5y ago
  It's actually worse for physicians. Incomes not only declining due to increases in expenses, but reimbursements in Medicare dropping too, in nominal non inflation adjusted dollars. Yet the corporate side of organized healthcare is seeing healthy pay raises. Bottom Line: anyone who actually does the work gets shafted. Those who delegate win.
• throwaway5752 5y ago
  Why wouldn't they? Customers have lost their minds. The notion that "the customer is always right" has combined with what can only be described as a mass-psychosis among a population of patrons. The level of behavior among these customers is borderline criminal in terms of attacking staff and restaurant property. Why deal with that for minimum wage?
• monkeydust 5y ago
  Maybe this will lead to adoption of automation in kitchen and front of house? There are a number of startups and concepts in this space and this might be the catalyst for meaningful adoption. Not sure I find it appealing as a guest.
  • ianbicking 5y ago
    I feel like a company like Sodexo could create some vertically integrated restaurant or delivery service that radically changes the margins and process. While the result would feel a bit dystopian I suspect I'd still go along as a consumer.
  • darkwizard42 5y ago
    Anecdotally I've seen "counter service" restaurants and fast-casual eats popping up more and it definitely helps without sacrificing all of the human element. I'm sure it helps drive down personnel costs allowing you to have a single front of house and just runners for the food
  • paxys 5y ago
    Money isn't a barrier to automation, technology is. The whole "if we raise minimum wage the workers will be replaced by robots" argument is bogus. The workers are being replaced regardless of what their wage is, as and when the technology is ready.
• jokoon 5y ago
  I live in france, and I recently went to some presentation by some "restauration job industry" school director, who tried to encourage us to apply. I was open to other jobs and I discovered that it was mostly about working in a restaurant after arriving at the presentation. It's summer, france is a destination for tourism and there is a big shortage of workers. Post covid, people want to go out and have a good time. I've talked several times with skilled and competent cooks in the industry I met, and apparently it's hell on earth. That industry has the most drug users: you work at times when others are having a good time. Competition is very high in france, restauration is a big big industry here, the culture of food is amazing and I'm pretty sure we're one of the best of the world. In my view, preparing food for others is a form of slavery. It's one the most obvious form of social inequality. Of course people love to eat good food, sitting nicely in a cozy place in a nice terrace. Of course people are going to spend their money for this. Except it's hard work, and there will always be a culture of "I pay, I decide, you work". Honestly the more I eat at restaurants, the more I realize I'd be ready to eat slightly expensive frozen MRE and some picnic just to not make those poor people work like that. Plus there are many people out there who cook nice meals for their friends. I love that part of the french culture, but honestly, clients will quickly realize eating at a restaurant is expensive for good reasons.
  • Gortal278 5y ago
    It's not slavery, that's a ridiculously naive and dumb statement. It's a shitty job, but it's not slavery.
    • dsr_ 5y ago
      There's no inherent reason why it has to be a terrible job, either.
      • amiga-workbench 5y ago
        They're dealing with the general public, they're nowhere near well compensated enough to put up with that.
      • 5y ago
• partiallypro 5y ago
  I've gone to multiple restaurants of late that have had to close early (even very early, like 3pm) because they are so short staffed. Other restaurants have people waiting but have empty tables because there is no one to work them.
  • minikites 5y ago
    There are plenty of people to work them, the owners are just not willing to pay a market wage.
    • ngngngng 5y ago
      It's difficult for one restaurant paying living wage to compete with those relying on people working poverty wages. The businesses paying good wages will not be able to compete on costs and that benefit might not be passed to the customer. Certain businesses, for whatever reason, are more effective at hiring and retaining workers at low wages. Instead of forcing businesses to do the right thing and try and compete with lower prices due to horrible wages, we need to mandate living wage so all the competition has to move together.
      • partiallypro 5y ago
        That would just benefit big businesses that can absorb the cost. Small businesses wouldn't be able to compete as their margins get crushed. I don't think people realize how cut throat the restaurant business is. It is possibly the most probable business model to go under with. I am not sure I want to live in a world where it's all mega corporations that I can eat at without spending a lot of money. Also as many have pointed out, this doesn't really address the problem since this is on a global scale including in places with much higher wages and no tipping.
• yawaworht1978 5y ago
  Avoid this kind of mostly seasonal work, it's a chain of pressure all the way down. High rent pushes the restaurants to increase prices and reduce the good content of the menúes. The food in the vast majority of restaurants these days is more unhealthy than a mc Donald's menu, they use a lot of oil, the meat is minimal, you get the fatty parts instead of the lean parts and they add the most economical sides like fries to fill the gaps. It contributes a great deal to obesity, people's lazyness, I simply do not support any of this. And all the jobs are unthankful, be it in the kitchen, waiter or door staff. If the quality of the food would be amazing, i would change my opinion. By amazing quality, my standard is the evening buffet , all you can eat events in a Hilton, and in most places it's a good price. You can include Marriott as well, but the vast majority of random restaurants serve worse food than mc Donald's(which at least is fairly priced, fast, clean premises and tasty enough). Tip or no tip is not the issue, it's a dead end job with zero perspective and requires shift work or worse , seasonal availability. You learn nothing that could advance your career in a meaningful way. Treat the job as such.
• MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
  I've never worked harder than in restaurant work. It is the worst job with the worst people with unattainable expectations. The only time it's worth it is if you don't care about walking out even in the middle of a shift.
• skibby 5y ago
  Bring in the robots
• oliv__ 5y ago
  "Food service jobs have been 'plagued with low wages for an extraordinary long period of time'" Plagued? Isn't that just how supply and demand work, ms "economist"? The only reason workers are quitting at record rates is because a new business opened up in town with unlimited resources handing out free dollar bills.
• BuckRogers 5y ago
  There is only one thing to do in this situation! We have enough people available. So raise wages until the labor shortage is resolved. Pretty simple, let's go, Team USA. Hello? Team?? Oh, I'm sure we're all onboard with the plan and in this together.
  • frankydp 5y ago
    There is no wage discussion if workers never apply.
    • BuckRogers 5y ago
      This easy solution is already being found by businesses everywhere. https://www.businessinsider.com/ice-cream-shop-doubles-minimum-wage-pay-flooded-with-applications-2021-5 https://www.businessinsider.com/ice-cream-shop-doubles-minim...
      • frankydp 5y ago
        Bless your heart.
        • BuckRogers 5y ago
          No, bless your heart. You don't believe the story? It's a simple one. No applicants, advertised $15 an hour, got 1,000 in a week and the bottom line isn't affected, less turnover and happier employees.
          • frankydp 5y ago
            https://www.linkedin.com/in/h-jacob-hanchar-ph-d-72b1a013/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/h-jacob-hanchar-ph-d-72b1a013/
            • BuckRogers 5y ago
              https://birdwatchinghq.com/live-bird-cams/ https://birdwatchinghq.com/live-bird-cams/
• sprafa 5y ago
  Let us keep remembering that there is no evidence that raising minimum wages increases unemployment (The Big Lie the economists use to defend their hypothetical model of how this works).
  • a123b456c 5y ago
    Here is some evidence. https://www.nber.org/papers/w23532 https://www.nber.org/papers/w23532
    • sprafa 5y ago
      Gosh. Thanks this actually forced me to review the literature and actually yes you’re right and I was wrong. Turns out some pop econ articles I read recently where deceitful. The thing I did read about and seemed to hold up was rent control and construction - the effect there was small or minimal.
• dgudkov 5y ago
  All those people who write "Just raise wages!" clearly never managed a restaurant.
  • forz877 5y ago
    Yep, but that doesn't matter. It's another item they can advocate for with absolutely no impact to their lifestyle at all, so they can virtue signal.
  • ragnot 5y ago
    Why do you say that? Genuinely curious...not trying to troll.
    • frankbreetz 5y ago
      Restaurants operate with notoriously small margins, it is probably hard to raise wages and keep prices down enough to be competitive.
      • frankydp 5y ago
        Not to mention the 20-30% increase in COGS that the last year has driven, especially disposables and proteins.
• vletal 5y ago
  Last week we went to a great local restaurant. At least it used to be in the pre-covid times. Now most of the stuff had a "temporary worker" or an "apprentice" sticker on their chest. You could see their hands shaking while serving heavy glasses of beer, improper way of serving food. They forgot about us at one point. We kindly asked to get served. The new hires were not even able to take our orders without being apologetic. After that a young waitress passed me a boiling hot soup over a head of our 3yo son! Just a year ago, this was one of the most professionally stuffed family friendly restaurants in Prague. Now they have to train a new crew and build their reputation from scratch again. Was working as a waitress here in the Czech Rep. / EU really that bad that the ones who managed to find a different job during the pandemic do not want to go back?
  • judge2020 5y ago
    You're supposed to dream big and have career goals, so I would be surprised if any young wait staffers dreamed of staying wait staff for the rest of their life. Covid was just an opportunity to get out for a lot of people who otherwise couldn't be without the paycheck.
• fleddr 5y ago
  I think in the coming year, we're going to find out that the "return to normal" isn't going to be very normal. I spot a longer term "convenience" trend in consumers that has been further propelled by the pandemic, creating permanent shifts in demand. There's many examples of it regardless of the pandemic... Visiting a theater to see a movie is on the decline, as people use Netflix on increasingly large and capable screens. ecommerce has marginalized physical stores. And so on. We were already on this trend, and the end game for pretty much anything is smartphone-level convenience. If I want something, it should in most cases not require more effort than the push of a button. Even to change the light in the house, of which the switch is 3 feet away from me. The pandemic has "delivered" new services, or existing ones that we now got used to. There's going to be far less business travel, as now every rank in every company has been forced to make remote work operate somewhat efficiently. This will permanently change office real estate and business locations. Not to mention the car industry, as a lot of usage is based on commutes. Gyms may also see structurally less demand, as people found alternatives, and got used to them. In my country (Netherlands), ecommerce was already normalized yet now even the less tech savvy got accustomed to it, further accelerating the decline of physical stores. Luckily, people still did grocery shopping at the store itself. Not anymore. Now many people have tried home delivery of groceries and are unlikely to give back the time won. Finally, restaurants. Before the pandemic, all you could get delivered here was junk food. Now you can get a high quality meal. Further, home cooking is back, the convenience type where they ship fresh high quality stuff with clear instructions. Surely, visiting a restaurant is still a rich and social experience, but I would not be surprised if demand is significantly reduced if the home option is pretty good. As for the convenience trend, a cynical view is that people are lazy. A more optimistic view is that people optimize their time, which is scarce. Speed and convenience wins, and will take over everything.
• acover 5y ago
  Would a Costco style membership work for food? Attract better behaved customers, match fixed vs variable expenses better, attract more regular customers. Though you run into restaurants being a terrible industry with too much competition.
  • bittercynic 5y ago
    I would go to that restaurant! I don't love the membership fee - it seems a wrong to me to exclude the people who see $55/year as a barrier, but I LOVE the no-BS aura of Costco's employees. At Costco, more than any other store I've been to, I get the impression that you must be respectful to the staff if you'd like to continue shopping there. Maybe the membership model helps enable this, as the store could revoke your membership if you cause problems.
  • headcanon 5y ago
    you know thats really not a bad idea, although you'd have to get around people not wanting to visit the same place every day. I think it could work for a market-style place (think nice food court) for variety, but you'd still have to solve for having a place that people will want to go to at least twice a week to justify the membership cost.
    • acover 5y ago
      I was thinking a coffee shop. Find a spot with 5 coffee shops all in one spot. Open a sixth and target the regulars by offering cheaper better coffee by subsidizing it with a monthly fee. Imagine during off peak hours $1 lattes. Or do salads and compete in a similar manner - like a gym membership, prepay to incentivize healthy behavior. The core problem is retail is a bad industry with high competition and there is a huge desire for variety.
• Rd6n6 5y ago
  The title cites a record rate, but I can’t find where they say what the previous record rate was. It makes sense for a time like now to be when a record number of people are changing jobs. Is this a massive increase though, or a slight one?
• browningstreet 5y ago
  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 marina. They had a sign at the front door, "Due to the labor shortage..." and they weren't operating their deli counter. No sandwiches. When I sent inside, it was empty. No customers. The one employee at the register was on their phone. Nothing going on. A couple of people pulled up in their cars, read the sign, pulled out and left immediately. Drove up the road a mile to the other one. No sign -- it was busy like it usually was. Full house, busy counters and registers. My son asked me why the other place wouldn't just raise their wages.. I couldn't answer, but I guessed it was more on a matter of principle than calculated reality. There's no way they were surviving or thriving. I joked that maybe the owner was an old cahoot who remembered when a soda was $0.05 and there was no way they were going to raise their hourly wages to $15 or more.
  • 29083011397778 5y ago
    > I think some businesses are going out of businesses because they stubbornly refuse to raise their wages. I'm sure you're right. Some business owners are stubborn and don't want to offer higher pay. That said, to quote TFA: > But in one recent survey, more than half of hospitality workers who've quit said no amount of pay would get them to return. Paying more will get some people. But it clearly won't be enough for all, and maybe not even most.
  • Aloha 5y ago
    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 day to day misery. There used to be some sort of a tradeoff, there used to be a ton of jobs that didnt pay well, but they were not miserable places to work at, that was kinda the tradeoff, you know - you like, didnt get a ton of money, but the workplace wasnt awful. Those jobs still exist but they're rarer.
• ramesh31 5y ago
  No kidding. $9/hr with no benefits is literal slavery. If I can pay someone a days wages for the cost of my lunch, something is seriously wrong with our society.
• sakopov 5y ago
  I can't wait to see how this will workout considering that a typically restaurant business runs on tiny margins. My prediction is quality is going to tank at most of our favorite places to eat (it actually already has). We'll have experienced pre-COVID service workers chasing better pay and benefits while restaurant businesses continue to hire and train those with no prior experience and continue paying same wages. In about a year or two we'll forget about all of this.
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• mullingitover 5y ago
  It's interesting that when labor costs shoot up (and let's be honest, that's what this is, you can get people to take those jobs if you pay enough) it's a 'shortage,' but we don't really call skyrocketing medical costs a 'medicine shortage' or skyrocketing rents and home prices a 'housing shortage.'
  • frankydp 5y ago
    They literally call high rents and prices "affordable housing shortages".
    • jackson1442 5y ago
      Maybe we should take a hint from the modifier here and call it a "cheap labor shortage."
      • frankydp 5y ago
        More accurately an entry level labor shortage.
  • 29083011397778 5y ago
    Per TFA: > Low wages are the most common reason people cite for leaving food service work. But in one recent survey, more than half of hospitality workers who've quit said no amount of pay would get them to return. Note that over half of survey respondents directly refute your claim of "Just pay more". Paying more will get some people in, but having your restaurant half or three-quarters staffed is still an unenviable position.
    • mullingitover 5y ago
      > more than half of hospitality workers who've quit So this is only sampling existing workers who've quit, not potential workers who would enter the market for the right wages.
• Sophistifunk 5y ago
  In two years we're going to see a lot fewer eat-in restaurants, a lot more kitchen-only joints, and those kids who used to be wait staff will be on the dole, or marching in the streets. Much like movie theatres, cheap quality dining is going away.
  • asciident 5y ago
    I would be thrilled if kitchen-only joints replaced sit-down restaurants. I have about 20 sit-downs within walking distance, only about 5 are easy for takeout, none which serve higher-end food. If there were a few higher-end food options ($20 lunch instead of $10 lunch, $30 dinner instead of $15 dinners), especially without having to deal with tipping, I would carry out and eat at home a lot more. I have my own silverware, wine bottles, and napkins.
  • ookdatnog 5y ago
    I don't see why you compare to movie theaters. The decline in movie theaters was, afaict, driven by a drop in demand, which in turn was driven by affordable home theater setups, increased availability of movies to watch at home, ... In contrast, your argument for why eat-in restaurants are about to disappear in large numbers is entirely based on a decrease in supply of cheap labor. You don't argue at all for why there would be a decline in demand. Perhaps customers changed their habits after the COVID lockdowns, but at least on the short term, I feel like I'm noticing the opposite effect: people really want to do stuff outside of their house. I understand that some of the more struggling restaurants would be driven over the edge by higher wages, but it seems spurious to assume that this will cause a large shift in the market all by itself. And it's even more spurious to just assume that this will drive large swathes of former wait staff into unemployment. Similar arguments are made carelessly in the minimum wage debate, where people mistakenly believe that there is consensus among economists that it drives up unemployment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Surveys_of_economists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#Surveys_of_econom...).
    • Sophistifunk 5y ago
      No, my prediction has nothing to do with a false labour shortage, and everything in common with movie theatres. They were precarious businesses, and there's been a huge shock to both industries from which I don't think most of the individual businesses will recover. Theatres might have made it, if hollywood wasn't also at an all-time low in customer esteem and (IMO) quality of output.
• mchusma 5y ago
  This is an atypical time. Of course right now there is huge churn, due to covid, the pandemic unemployment benefits, and the fact that restaurants have had to quickly hire anyone with a pulse to keep up. This all leads to obvious churn. The real question is whether things will be meaningfully different in 10-30 years. I suspect the answer will be yes, because automation will be more capable, combined with legislative pressure to eliminate low paying jobs.
• Datsundere 5y ago
  I'm amazed with the amount of ignorance in this thread from people who've never run a restaurant yet alone run a business for that matter.
  • frankydp 5y ago
    I am not shocked that employees of businesses with 70-80% profit margins based on knowledge barroning are ignorant to the economics of businesses with sub 5% profit margins.
• armchairhacker 5y ago
  Not trying to sound unsympathetic to those with struggling businesses, but: I don't get why there were so many restaurants in the first place. Everywhere I've been, it seems like there's literally 10+ restaurants per square mile. In cities it's 100+, not exaggerating. And it's not even unique restaurants either: in my local town there are multiple Mexican restaurants, Italian restaurants, Chinese restaurants, American restaurants, with a lot of overlap in the menus. Why? My parents hate to cook and get takeout almost every night. And even they don't get every restaurant, in fact they like to get the same few. Meanwhile, I cook for myself and almost never get takeout because it's healthier, cheaper, easier, and even IMO it usually ends up tasting better anyways. It's mostly common knowledge that the restaurant business sucks to get into anyways. So why are there so many restaurants?
  • devoutsalsa 5y ago
    Does your area have a lot of immigrants? A lot of immigrants start a restaurant because they struggle to find meaningful employment elsewhere (e.g. was a doctor in home country being forced to do minimum wage home healthcare in the country they immigrated to because of licensing issues).
  • soared 5y ago
    I think brand awareness plays a role here. A low quality restaurant can stay in business forever because many people don’t do a lot of research (foot traffic, ordering online, etc). I live in a city and it takes a long time to learn what restaurants are good and bad. Probably plays a role in why there are so many - you can do a bad job and still stick around, at least for now.
  • jandrewrogers 5y ago
    Where I live, there is a high density of restaurants -- no corporate chains either -- and they are all packed full of people most days. I'd say it is a simple matter of supply and demand. There are so many restaurants because there are so many customers. But you are correct that the restaurant business is terrible from an investment perspective. For some people, the restaurant business is their calling and what they know well, can't fault them for that even if the margins are poor. It is like being a startup founder. Mostly a bad idea on a purely economic basis but many people feel compelled to do it.
• anonytrary 5y ago
  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 low pay, so why does the lower bound of pay need to be enforced? It seems contrived. If anyone can explain how minimum wage affects the above scenario, I would be grateful.
  • it 5y ago
    You forgot to mention the part about the restaurants that can't afford to raise wages either cutting hours or shutting down for good.
    • anonytrary 5y ago
      Unsound business models can only exist for so long -- are all restaurants closing, or just those with extremely small operating margins? If a restaurant is operating on such small margins that they can't raise wages to keep their business open, then it makes sense for that space to be used by a restaurant owner who can run the business more effectively. I fail to see how this isn't just capitalism and competition working as expected. The majority of restaurants react to this by raising all prices -- including wages. The food costs twice as much now, and they are paying their staff twice as much. If people don't want to pay the price, maybe it's best that a better restaurant takes its place or the restaurant improves their offering?
    • megablast 5y ago
      Think of all the cool restaurants we could have if slavery was allowed again.
  • ffggvv 5y ago
    you forgot the part where the socialist government is printing unlimited welfare and handing it by the truck load. it’s hard to compete with free money but luckily part of it ends in september
• ffggvv 5y ago
  just wait till the free welfare handouts stop in september. unless i guess they just keep it going perpetually
• HNfriend234 5y ago
  The truth though is that when the generous pandemic stimulus ends, the labor shortage will also end.
  • SixDouble5321 5y ago
    How then, do you explain the shortages in places it has been forcibly expired?
• rswail 5y ago
  Amazing that the US still, for the most part, considers health insurance should be tied to employment.