14 ms·

It's a shame that the comments here are laser focused on the tipping parts of the article, and not the bigger picture items. The author outlines the struggles o

It's a shame that the comments here are laser focused on the tipping parts of the article, and not the bigger picture items. The author outlines the struggles of getting service jobs filled in high CoL areas, the vicious cycle of turnover in these jobs, and all the commenters here want to discuss is the 2 paragraphs on tipping.

CPLX 5y ago
Indeed. The part about getting your income on an ATM card with mandatory fees no matter what you do seems like the best anecdotal example of how fucked things are for the little guy these days.
- mynameishere 5y ago
  For many low-wage employees the alternative to this is check cashing fees which is even worse. The issue of why so many people are unbanked is a separate discussion.
  - michaelt 5y ago
    This writer isn't unbanked, though - he's a former labor secretary. He was charged a "fee" to get his pay despite that.
    - mcv 5y ago
      Having to pay a free to get your pay is ridiculous and should be illegal. Your pay should simply be deposited in your bank account with no other obstacles to access.
  - mindslight 5y ago
    Access to banking is indeed a problem, but pragmatically there is always cash or a non-fraudulent [0] check drawn on a local bank. And for tips specifically, they can just be bundled with the rest of the pay rather than creating a second problem. [0] for example checks drawn on Bank of America accounts are generally fraudulent, as BoA refuses to pay the specified amount when presented for payment at a branch. They're trying to run a similar scam to the ATM card fee described in the article, but they're doing it with the much older technology of checks and thereby inducing their customers to commit check fraud.
    - rnk 5y ago
      Can you explain. You left off your reference, but are you saying boa refuses to pay legit checks or what exactly?
      - mindslight 5y ago
        It was a reference to clarification, which was the following paragraph. https://www.valuepenguin.com/banking/where-to-cash-check-without-bank-account https://www.valuepenguin.com/banking/where-to-cash-check-wit... Apparently it's not just BoA, but also Chase, Suntrust, TD, and Wells Fargo now want to demand a nonsensical "check cashing fee" to cash a check drawn on one of their accounts. But the entire purpose of a check is that it is an order to your bank to pay someone an exact amount of money, and thus subtracting such a fee is impermissable. The proper way to assess such a fee would be to the account holder as an additional amount out of their account. If you're a customer of one of these banks and write someone a check for "$100.00", they are seemingly unable to present it to your bank and receive $100 as you had promised. As such, you have written a bad check and stand to be prosecuted for check fraud. Of course only the powerless will get tripped up by this corner case, as it's much easier for anyone with a bank account to present the check to their own bank who will turn around and present it via ACH. But I'd love to see someone in just the right position record their interaction with the dishonoring bank, return the dishonored check to the payer, and demand a proper payment plus a $35 rejected check fee.
        rnk 5y ago
        Wow, that's horrible. Yes, a huge tax on people without bank accounts.
    - exhilaration 5y ago
      Why single out Bank of America? Nearly every single (big) bank will refuse to cash a check for non-customers. The days of taking a signed check to a local branch for cashing have been over for decades. I'd love to find out why this changed, I suspect it's because they can go after their own customers if a check turns out to be fraudulent but not some guy walking off the street.
- hotpotamus 5y ago
  Keep in mind that the majority of money these days goes through credit card processors that take a percentage off the top. Not saying they don't provide a service for the money, but it doesn't seem that different.
  - DarylZero 5y ago
    It's very different. The credit card companies are offering credit! And they handle chargebacks! It's not just a bank transfer.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Is it the only aspect of the article that most on this site can relate with? I take it most have not worked service industry or it was a very long time ago. I'm interested in what seems to be the growing incivility toward other people. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/us/apt-cape-cod-restaurant-workers-covid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/us/apt-cape-cod-restauran... > The verbal abuse from rude customers got so bad, the owners of one farm-to-table restaurant on Cape Cod said, that some of their employees cried.
- dollarsuck 5y ago
  An outcome of little to no consequences for actions. Come visit my local grocery store. Few replace carts at the store or in the stalls, there will be 2-6 vehicle using the clearly-marked "Fire Lane - No Parking" lane as their personal parking spots plainly blocking the doors of the foyer (and this is not drop-off, not pick-up, not having their spouse load up in a rain storm). Have "About 12 Items or Fewer" - well have fun, there's two carts loaded for bear ready to use the checkout lane. The manager will watch it all and dare not life a finger nor raise a voice. The restaurant at which my S/O works, it's in the nice part of town. The nicest part of town you could possibly not afford. For the lunch crowd, there will be a dozen or so regular folks filtering in with absurd, demanding, bespoke requests (I want the meat of sandwich A, the bread off sandwich B, the condiments from an item on the Sunday Brunch menu). The owner will not let them refuse a request. Ever. Regardless of the problems it will cause for everyone around. Regardless of how long it will waste table space. That $18 lunch order must be fulfilled. The local pizza joint, my go-to spot for two NY slices and a PBR for a cool $7 - they're not allowed to refuse service to rude patrons regardless of how awful. I once had the barkeep slip me a note asking that I (a large, eternally angry looking man) please wait at the bar for another patron to leave and that my drinks would be comped. Why? The belligerent customer refusing to leave, who entered the facility screaming at (we assume) "incompetent cunt" of a secretary. It's a bit fascinating and frustrating. One makes an off-color joke on Twitter[0], or an elected official makes a frustrated comment about double-standards[1] and a lynch mob forms to harangue a corporation into punishing the textual predator. Some of those same companies (See: [1]) will not oust a belligerent man attempting to start a fight in the produce section over a road rage incident. It's all appearance over substance. [0] - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/anheuser-busch-cuts-ties-with-beer-money-fundraiser-carson-king-after-racist-tweets-surface-2019-09-25 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/anheuser-busch-cuts-ties-w... [1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/costco-pulls-palmetto-cheese-founder-calls-black-lives-matter-terror-organization/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/costco-pulls-palmetto-cheese-fo...
ajmurmann 5y ago
What's always disappointing to me is how for many the first instinct is "lazy young people" while often times the exact same people espouse "the free market". It seems to me that often times the same people really only care about low taxes for themselves and making away with regulations that annoy them, rather than truly embracing the mechanism and tradeoffs that come with a free market and for sure don't understand the circumstances needed to make the market effective to work towards a given goal.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    I naively thought the whole point of the market was to effectively route resources to where they are most in demand and allow innovation from the ground up where it's needed without central planning
    - wbsss4412 5y ago
      This is the difference between analysis of markets as a concept and “believing in the free market” as an ideology. The latter uses markets as a stand in for morality. When bad outcomes occur, it definitionally cannot be due to the market, but some other bad actors.
    - hotpotamus 5y ago
      I don't think markets have a point; they just are. The systems and regulations we create around markets are what give them meaning.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      It is. Free markets do not preclude social safety nets, or things like universal basic income.
      - 5y ago
glup 5y ago
Besides the author’s v points about the poor working conditions, I was struck by the points about transit costs. I am curious how much of the current labor situation in the US can be explained by the combination of 1) geographic wealth segregation —- richer consumers clustering together while generally poorer service workers have to live far away —- and 2) high gas prices / underdeveloped public transit. At some point as both of these factors increase, there should be a big drop off in available workers. Is this consistent with the pattern we are seeing?
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  There's a saying I like, "A rich country isn't one where the poor can afford cars. It's one where the rich take public transportation"
  - JKCalhoun 5y ago
    So, Tokyo.
- kfarr 5y ago
  Basically cars are a huge relative cost for the working class. With our land use and transportation policies we have created a world where the costs of getting around are so high that it can trap you in poverty for life. Sorry for the paywall but this was the quickest article I could find on the topic: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seven-year-auto-loan-americas-middle-class-cant-afford-their-cars-11569941215 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seven-year-auto-loan-americ... If you calculate the total cost of owning car(s) during your lifetime and consider alternative use such as interest bearing savings account some estimates have shown it costs you approx $1M during your life.
- gravypod 5y ago
  It's not even just lower class workers. Taking public transit to my FAANG job each day would be ~$20 total and be ~2hrs of commuting each day. That comes out to ~5k/year in commuting costs and about 65 workdays in hours wasted on trains and subways. I can eat this cost but I'd feel extremely bad for someone who doesn't get paid as much as I do who had to do this kind of commuting (which MANY people do daily).
ashtonkem 5y ago
Personally it took me a second to get past "Death threats drove him from town and to Austin". That is quite the fact to cover in a single sentence.
- sjostrom7 5y ago
  There's a link further down but tldr, he ran a department that struggled to disperse unemployment benefits to the people of New Mexico during 2021. Hard to say if anyone else would have done better in his place, but his address and family info were getting shared online and a car got blown up at his place of work.
  - ashtonkem 5y ago
    I understand the anger (but not to the point of terrorism or threats), but it's also pretty obvious to me that blaming one guy for the failures is kind of missing the point. The entire unemployment system has been deliberately undermined for ideological reasons, with the goal being making it as hard as possible to get and keep benefits. It's not shocking that one person could fix a decade or two worth of systemic rot when suddenly the system is strained to the max.
chiefalchemist 5y ago
Welcome to HN. An early comment goes off target and too many others follow. But we're all intelligence free-thinkers, yes? But then make an unpopular observation on the aryicle / topic and you get down-voted. Humans are "complicated", to put it kindly. p.s. Yes, I senses the irony.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > But then make an unpopular observation on the aryicle / topic and you get down-voted. Isn't that tautological? Anyway, it's also not true as a general rule. The comments I see net-downvoted on HN are ones that either contain falsehoods and/or are poorly (often "rantily") written. I've seen many comments about a topic generally downvoted because they fit that pattern, but comments that express the same POV but avoid falsehoods and are reasonably written end up without a net negative. If you're going to have votes, some things will get net-downvoted. There's no way around that - people have different opinions and scoring systems, and some comments will do poorly with some people.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

CPLX 5y ago

Indeed. The part about getting your income on an ATM card with mandatory fees no matter what you do seems like the best anecdotal example of how fucked things are for the little guy these days.

mynameishere 5y ago
For many low-wage employees the alternative to this is check cashing fees which is even worse. The issue of why so many people are unbanked is a separate discussion.
- michaelt 5y ago
  This writer isn't unbanked, though - he's a former labor secretary. He was charged a "fee" to get his pay despite that.
  - mcv 5y ago
    Having to pay a free to get your pay is ridiculous and should be illegal. Your pay should simply be deposited in your bank account with no other obstacles to access.
- mindslight 5y ago
  Access to banking is indeed a problem, but pragmatically there is always cash or a non-fraudulent [0] check drawn on a local bank. And for tips specifically, they can just be bundled with the rest of the pay rather than creating a second problem. [0] for example checks drawn on Bank of America accounts are generally fraudulent, as BoA refuses to pay the specified amount when presented for payment at a branch. They're trying to run a similar scam to the ATM card fee described in the article, but they're doing it with the much older technology of checks and thereby inducing their customers to commit check fraud.
  - rnk 5y ago
    Can you explain. You left off your reference, but are you saying boa refuses to pay legit checks or what exactly?
    - mindslight 5y ago
      It was a reference to clarification, which was the following paragraph. https://www.valuepenguin.com/banking/where-to-cash-check-without-bank-account https://www.valuepenguin.com/banking/where-to-cash-check-wit... Apparently it's not just BoA, but also Chase, Suntrust, TD, and Wells Fargo now want to demand a nonsensical "check cashing fee" to cash a check drawn on one of their accounts. But the entire purpose of a check is that it is an order to your bank to pay someone an exact amount of money, and thus subtracting such a fee is impermissable. The proper way to assess such a fee would be to the account holder as an additional amount out of their account. If you're a customer of one of these banks and write someone a check for "$100.00", they are seemingly unable to present it to your bank and receive $100 as you had promised. As such, you have written a bad check and stand to be prosecuted for check fraud. Of course only the powerless will get tripped up by this corner case, as it's much easier for anyone with a bank account to present the check to their own bank who will turn around and present it via ACH. But I'd love to see someone in just the right position record their interaction with the dishonoring bank, return the dishonored check to the payer, and demand a proper payment plus a $35 rejected check fee.
      - rnk 5y ago
        Wow, that's horrible. Yes, a huge tax on people without bank accounts.
  - exhilaration 5y ago
    Why single out Bank of America? Nearly every single (big) bank will refuse to cash a check for non-customers. The days of taking a signed check to a local branch for cashing have been over for decades. I'd love to find out why this changed, I suspect it's because they can go after their own customers if a check turns out to be fraudulent but not some guy walking off the street.
hotpotamus 5y ago
Keep in mind that the majority of money these days goes through credit card processors that take a percentage off the top. Not saying they don't provide a service for the money, but it doesn't seem that different.
- DarylZero 5y ago
  It's very different. The credit card companies are offering credit! And they handle chargebacks! It's not just a bank transfer.

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago

Is it the only aspect of the article that most on this site can relate with? I take it most have not worked service industry or it was a very long time ago. I'm interested in what seems to be the growing incivility toward other people. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/us/apt-cape-cod-restaurant-workers-covid.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/us/apt-cape-cod-restauran... > The verbal abuse from rude customers got so bad, the owners of one farm-to-table restaurant on Cape Cod said, that some of their employees cried.

dollarsuck 5y ago
An outcome of little to no consequences for actions. Come visit my local grocery store. Few replace carts at the store or in the stalls, there will be 2-6 vehicle using the clearly-marked "Fire Lane - No Parking" lane as their personal parking spots plainly blocking the doors of the foyer (and this is not drop-off, not pick-up, not having their spouse load up in a rain storm). Have "About 12 Items or Fewer" - well have fun, there's two carts loaded for bear ready to use the checkout lane. The manager will watch it all and dare not life a finger nor raise a voice. The restaurant at which my S/O works, it's in the nice part of town. The nicest part of town you could possibly not afford. For the lunch crowd, there will be a dozen or so regular folks filtering in with absurd, demanding, bespoke requests (I want the meat of sandwich A, the bread off sandwich B, the condiments from an item on the Sunday Brunch menu). The owner will not let them refuse a request. Ever. Regardless of the problems it will cause for everyone around. Regardless of how long it will waste table space. That $18 lunch order must be fulfilled. The local pizza joint, my go-to spot for two NY slices and a PBR for a cool $7 - they're not allowed to refuse service to rude patrons regardless of how awful. I once had the barkeep slip me a note asking that I (a large, eternally angry looking man) please wait at the bar for another patron to leave and that my drinks would be comped. Why? The belligerent customer refusing to leave, who entered the facility screaming at (we assume) "incompetent cunt" of a secretary. It's a bit fascinating and frustrating. One makes an off-color joke on Twitter[0], or an elected official makes a frustrated comment about double-standards[1] and a lynch mob forms to harangue a corporation into punishing the textual predator. Some of those same companies (See: [1]) will not oust a belligerent man attempting to start a fight in the produce section over a road rage incident. It's all appearance over substance. [0] - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/anheuser-busch-cuts-ties-with-beer-money-fundraiser-carson-king-after-racist-tweets-surface-2019-09-25 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/anheuser-busch-cuts-ties-w... [1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/costco-pulls-palmetto-cheese-founder-calls-black-lives-matter-terror-organization/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/costco-pulls-palmetto-cheese-fo...

ajmurmann 5y ago

What's always disappointing to me is how for many the first instinct is "lazy young people" while often times the exact same people espouse "the free market". It seems to me that often times the same people really only care about low taxes for themselves and making away with regulations that annoy them, rather than truly embracing the mechanism and tradeoffs that come with a free market and for sure don't understand the circumstances needed to make the market effective to work towards a given goal.

DarylZero 5y ago
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  I naively thought the whole point of the market was to effectively route resources to where they are most in demand and allow innovation from the ground up where it's needed without central planning
  - wbsss4412 5y ago
    This is the difference between analysis of markets as a concept and “believing in the free market” as an ideology. The latter uses markets as a stand in for morality. When bad outcomes occur, it definitionally cannot be due to the market, but some other bad actors.
  - hotpotamus 5y ago
    I don't think markets have a point; they just are. The systems and regulations we create around markets are what give them meaning.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    It is. Free markets do not preclude social safety nets, or things like universal basic income.
    - 5y ago

glup 5y ago

Besides the author’s v points about the poor working conditions, I was struck by the points about transit costs. I am curious how much of the current labor situation in the US can be explained by the combination of 1) geographic wealth segregation —- richer consumers clustering together while generally poorer service workers have to live far away —- and 2) high gas prices / underdeveloped public transit. At some point as both of these factors increase, there should be a big drop off in available workers. Is this consistent with the pattern we are seeing?

SuoDuanDao 5y ago
There's a saying I like, "A rich country isn't one where the poor can afford cars. It's one where the rich take public transportation"
- JKCalhoun 5y ago
  So, Tokyo.
kfarr 5y ago
Basically cars are a huge relative cost for the working class. With our land use and transportation policies we have created a world where the costs of getting around are so high that it can trap you in poverty for life. Sorry for the paywall but this was the quickest article I could find on the topic: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seven-year-auto-loan-americas-middle-class-cant-afford-their-cars-11569941215 https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seven-year-auto-loan-americ... If you calculate the total cost of owning car(s) during your lifetime and consider alternative use such as interest bearing savings account some estimates have shown it costs you approx $1M during your life.
gravypod 5y ago
It's not even just lower class workers. Taking public transit to my FAANG job each day would be ~$20 total and be ~2hrs of commuting each day. That comes out to ~5k/year in commuting costs and about 65 workdays in hours wasted on trains and subways. I can eat this cost but I'd feel extremely bad for someone who doesn't get paid as much as I do who had to do this kind of commuting (which MANY people do daily).

ashtonkem 5y ago

Personally it took me a second to get past "Death threats drove him from town and to Austin". That is quite the fact to cover in a single sentence.

sjostrom7 5y ago
There's a link further down but tldr, he ran a department that struggled to disperse unemployment benefits to the people of New Mexico during 2021. Hard to say if anyone else would have done better in his place, but his address and family info were getting shared online and a car got blown up at his place of work.
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  I understand the anger (but not to the point of terrorism or threats), but it's also pretty obvious to me that blaming one guy for the failures is kind of missing the point. The entire unemployment system has been deliberately undermined for ideological reasons, with the goal being making it as hard as possible to get and keep benefits. It's not shocking that one person could fix a decade or two worth of systemic rot when suddenly the system is strained to the max.

chiefalchemist 5y ago

Welcome to HN. An early comment goes off target and too many others follow. But we're all intelligence free-thinkers, yes? But then make an unpopular observation on the aryicle / topic and you get down-voted. Humans are "complicated", to put it kindly. p.s. Yes, I senses the irony.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> But then make an unpopular observation on the aryicle / topic and you get down-voted. Isn't that tautological? Anyway, it's also not true as a general rule. The comments I see net-downvoted on HN are ones that either contain falsehoods and/or are poorly (often "rantily") written. I've seen many comments about a topic generally downvoted because they fit that pattern, but comments that express the same POV but avoid falsehoods and are reasonably written end up without a net negative. If you're going to have votes, some things will get net-downvoted. There's no way around that - people have different opinions and scoring systems, and some comments will do poorly with some people.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]