Americans spend a phenomenal amount of money consuming food outside their homes, and a major reason is that with restaurant labor so cheap, the convenience and price are attractive to people who don’t feel like cooking. If the wages go up, that calculus shifts. And unfortunately those “rich bosses” can’t just take it out of their profits, because margins in the industry are under 5 percent, and the difference between making that profit and closing up shop can be surprisingly thin. Empty seats don’t just cost you rent; they make it hard to get good servers, because empty seats mean lost tip income. You can end up in a vicious spiral where your service gets worse, so your restaurant loses more customers, so the service gets even worse . . . and it’s time to call the bank and tell them you won’t be paying off that loan.
The economic ignorami don’t seem to understand that restaurants have competition in addition to other restaurants — cooking your own meals at home. In fact, the high cost of dining out is one of the reasons (though not the only one, also I can feed myself more healthily, and I really don’t enjoy sitting around being served by people) that I rarely eat out unless I’m traveling. With 25% unemployment of black youth, raising the minimum wage (or in fact having one at all) is a moral atrocity.
I grew up in and around the food service industry. I’ve done everything from washing dishes and swabbing floors, to being a store manager.
I have also traveled all over the world, and there is a HUGE difference in our food service industry and anywhere else in the world. Part of this problem is NOT the minimum wage issue or tips or both combined. In most foreign countries, a ‘gratuity’ is INCLUDED when the tab is totaled up, at 12^% to 17% depending on where. And it works great, you have professional waiters and waitresses.
But we don’t do that here.
At one time, unless you were working in an upscale restaurant or in a sit down restaurant of some type, there were very few F/T jobs that paid well enough to support a family. In point of fact, when I worked at the Golden Arches in 1971, unless the MAN hired was in Mngt, the jobs were P/T, at minimum wage [plus any raises for time / experience] and they ONLY hired HS age or College aged MALES.
My girlfriend, now my wife, worked at Roy Rogers, who did hire females, BUT all Mngrs were men, many with families. Again, ONLY Mngt had a F/T job.
When I worked my way up, I went through various stages of jobs and levels of Mngt, it was that same all over. MOST of the people who worked in those places were P/T, going to HS or college. It was not until I got to the sit down, table cloth level that I began to see adults, who were able to make enough money from wages and tips to support a family. But a Top Grade Chef at a top restaurant made more than a Regional Mngr for the fast food places. Even the lower kitchen help, clean up crew, prep staff were rarely F/T in those days, in a ‘real’ restaurant.
At some point, many of those P/T jobs were taken by older and older adults. Now we have an entire industry where ADULTS think they can, or should, hold the Corporations hostage so they can make more per hour. I’ve seen a number of adults on TV and online, who have been working at a fast food outlet, running a register or making food for 10 or 15 years. None of them has moved up the food chain into even a Shift Sup’s position.
Uh, if you worked for me, doing basically manual labor, or entry level work and showed zero desire to learn any more or try to move up the food chain, you’d be damned lucky to still be working there at 5 years much less 15 or 20!! How good a job is someone going to do, who thinks there is NO need to make more of themselves? Or, if you are not smart enough to move up, again, WHY should the ‘company’ keep that employee?
IMO, a great deal of the problems in our country today, are caused by the idiot corporations and idiot business owners who will NOT fire people who aren’t worth keeping, or who just won’t do the job! Hell, I’ve seen check out people and stockers being openly rude to customers in the grocery, in front of Mngt, and they never say a word.
Same goes for insurance offices, doctors offices, gov’t offices. I went to the Register of Deeds Office over a Deed problem, one of the Clerks started screaming at some older [and seemingly befuddled] lady, over an over due tax bill. screaming at her to, “…just pay your damn taxes and stop bothering me!” As it turned out, the old lady was right, it’s NOT up to her to pay taxes on property she sold 2 years ago. That was overheard when 3 Supervisors got involved. I had to go back twice more, and there was that surly clerk, snapping and bitching at other customers.
I’ve run into the same stuff elsewhere too, or had it happen when I called 800-we-aint-hlpn!
Because I’m disabled now, I do most of the buying, paying, calling, directing, decision making for our household. It is SO rare that I actually encounter a human being who is DOING their job, HELPING me as the customer or SOLVING the problem for which I called them, that when it does happen I’m shocked. Same goes for food places, it’s so rare that they get the order right, I’m shocked. As a rule in America, customer service is a joke.
So then, WHY should a 41 year old, 24 year employee at the Arches, who is STILL just running a register, getting the order wrong, and barking at the customers deserve a raise?
Here in Australia, if you don’t like the service you just don’t go back to the restaurant. This happens in about 50% of the places I try for the first time, and I set my standards for service very low compared to my experience in the US.
Here’s “good” service in Australia:
* You don’t stand around waiting for a table for more than 5 minutes
* When they seat you they actually have the menus
* They don’t immediately run off after you’ve taken your seat
* Pen & Paper to write down your order, which they read back to you without prompting
i.e., if you think you’re going to get a server who introduces themselves at the beginning of the meal, asks you if you want drinks before asking for a food order, offers to top up or replace your drink when you finish it, is available and comes to your table when you need anything, etc, etc, you can just forget about it.
der Schtumpy, that clerk is most likely a Unionized employee. They couldn’t get rid of her even if they had just cause or wanted to.
I see nothing wrong with a 24-year employee who never moves up from the ranks of clerk or cashier if he/she is good at his/her job and enjoys what they do. Some people just don’t have the skill set and/or ambition to move up to a higher rung on the ladder, and every business needs to have that sort of motivated workforce and institutional memory. When they start breaking down and yelling at customers, that’s an obvious sign of issues, but if I owned a restaurant and had a dedicated, pleasant, and competent cashier who had worked there for 20+ years, why fire them for lack of ambition?
For that matter, if I ever won a large cash lottery and didn’t need to work for money, I would probably be just fine working as a cashier or other low-level position somewhere, to keep myself busy, be social with people, and make a difference to someone.
Not everybody is cut out to be a manager, supervisor, or other; requiring people to constantly seek promotion is just feeding the same dangerous precedent as giving in to demands for constant pay increases.
IMHO, the reasons most of those in favor of raising the minimum wage mostly don’t look at the consequences is they tend to view issues in isolation. They tend to do this a lot.
If there’s a better definition of ignoramus, I’ve not heard it.
Broken Window concept.
My guide in Vietnam back in 2011: “Following reunification in 1975, Vietnam was a socialist country. Do you know what socialism is? It’s where if I work hard and you don’t, we both get the same thing. So nobody worked hard. About 20 years ago, the government changed the rule. Now, if you work hard, you can prosper. Things are much better now.”
There will always be those who want more pay for the same or less work. For them, socialism has great appeal which explains a lot of the popularity of Democrats in general and Bernie Sanders in particular. They life the idea of earning a “living wage” for doing what is basically a kid’s job with no need to work hard to improve yourself. They’re the ones who made a political issue of income disparity seem to believe that a fry cook and a brain surgeon get paid the same thing. What could possibly go wrong?
You give them too much credit, ACJ, by painting them as well-meaning but naive.
Public employee unions are usually paid at some multiple of minimum wage. A raise in the minimum wage is thus a way to give raises to all the public employees.
Not so innocent anymore, is it?
I was discussing the issues in Seattle the other day and I am wondering if raising the minimum wage will give a huge competitive advantage for immigrant-owned restaurants where all the employees are the owner’s kids. They don’t have to really pay those, and if they do it just all goes back into the family pot anyway. That means their bottom line would be unaffected by the wage increase while all their competitors are forced to raise prices or reduce service, and as a result they should gain market share and thrive.
That already seems to be the case around here. Many of the fast-food places seem to be family businesses, owned by the parents and staffed by their kids and young relatives. I’ve thought myself that it’s probably a good way to avoid the cost of minimum wage hikes.
We eat out quite a bit, but then we discovered that the cost of eating out and being served was a bit cheaper. Right now, there is a parity. But yeah, raise the cost, and we will cook our own meals at home. Fortunately, there’s places in Texas that still understand basic economics.
“With 25% unemployment of black youth, raising the minimum wage (or in fact having one at all) is a moral atrocity.”
Moral atrocity is what the Left is best at.
One thing that many folks who advocate for higher minimum wage don’t mention (or even understand) is that large fast food places, like McD’s, BK, etc. are publicly traded companies. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their stock-holders to keep profits up. When wages go up, they can’t just ‘absorb’ the additional costs, even if the people running the company wanted to. Just like most folks here say, the cost just makes either (1) fewer workers or (2) higher prices.