Alternative headline:
Local business shutters after 10-year run of paying poverty-level wages comes to an end. https://t.co/PjQXGWVGZB
— The Hoarse Whisperer (@TheRealHoarse) April 15, 2021
Or so the ‘small bidniz owner’ and his right-wing media accomplices would like you to believe…
Baffling. No one wants to be exposed to COVID hundreds of times a day in red counties where no gets vaccinated. Not even for that sweet $11 an hour.
— JustPassingThrough (@coloradonelly) April 15, 2021
But wait — there’s (so much) more!
frankly I do not understand why no one wants eleven bucks an hour to clean grease traps for a guy who says covid deaths are fake pic.twitter.com/MTSFSvdvXa
— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 15, 2021
so about two weeks ago, bill anderson, owner of dale’s diner in waterville, ohio, gets a micro-burst of stories in the news on his diner’s pending closure; three different headline variants through the same outlet pic.twitter.com/8GZSGDbj6f
— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 16, 2021
now bill anderson is not just “a dude”. he’s an ex-corporate executive from a family in a long line of ohio agriculture & industry magnates. pic.twitter.com/Sq5MyPbF2H
— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 16, 2021
because in addition to not revealing that bill anderson is not just some random dude who got hammered by covid, what they don’t tell you is bill enjoyed turning his restaurants into covid petri dishes pic.twitter.com/1nlmQizB36
— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 16, 2021
yet again, the “who is bill anderson and what has he done to get here” element of bill’s story is mysteriously absent. bill blames stimulus payments for his downfall and not, you know, paying $11 an hour to bus tables inside a virus arboretum.
— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 16, 2021
TA-DAAAAAA! (you totally guessed this, didn’t you, you jerk) pic.twitter.com/VsMV1cNb45
— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 16, 2021
and that’s how a dude who spent the last year trying to poison his woefully underpaid workers with a virus by purposefully violating basic safety measures turns “no one will work for me because I’m a crazy entitled dickhead” into “joe biden ruined my teeny tiny poor business”
— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 16, 2021
wrapping up here, it took me maybe ten minutes of googling yesterday to unwind this whole thing. ten minutes. at any point along the way, any node of the right wing media system that adopted bill as their new pet cause could’ve just googled the guy. but that would ruin the fun.
— the women of kilgore trout’s office (@KT_So_It_Goes) April 16, 2021
We need an American equivalent term for ‘poujadist’. Other than just ‘Republican’, I mean.
zhena gogolia
I hate them all.
cain
Why is the button now “Post + Comment”? Is that a new change or has it always been there?
Also yeah.. but you know this happens all the time.. even in the old days but thanks to 24 hour news it propagates so much quicker.
ETA: Oh myyyyyyyyyyy… #2
MomSense
@zhena gogolia:
Word.
Baud
The bill was better than I realized. Also, too.
dnfree
Post + Comments has been there a long time (at the bottom of the part of the post that shows on the front page).
Ryan
I lived through Joe the Plumber. They’re getting better at packaging this act.
H.E.Wolf
Qjadist? It kinda rhymes….
Baud
Seriously, though, there should be plenty of business owners who benefit from Dem policies. Get them out there to talk about it.
zhena gogolia
I posted this below, but how cool is Jen, and what a cute dress besides.
JPL
Were they willing to let them eat cake?
@zhena gogolia: I understand the feeling.
zhena gogolia
@JPL:
I’ve rehearsed my early-morning run-in with my mask-denying dentist in two other threads already, so I decided to just leave it at that.
zhena gogolia
Fox News should be shut down. Really. What a source of poison.
ETA: I hate the fact that I can’t just have a Republican dentist and live and let live. They fill people’s heads with such insanity that you simply cannot tolerate it and maintain any kind of human dignity.
Cameron
@Ryan: I dunno – I kinda liked him. Just the facts that his name wasn’t Joe and he wasn’t a plumber shouldn’t have denied him the opportunity to speak his mind. Or whoever’s mind he was speaking.
zhena gogolia
My own mother was a Republican, for God’s sake. Why does it now have to be a synonym for insane, cruel, stupid, God, I’ve run out of adjectives?
mrmoshpotato
@zhena gogolia:
Come sit 6 feet away from me.
zhena gogolia
Some more fun stuff coming out today:
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
I’m sure the counterargument from the right-wing and these dittoheads like Bill is that they can’t pay their workers more because the economy is being strangled by Democrat regulations and arglebargle!1!
Seriously though, what do these people expect? I remember a few weeks ago seeing a local news report about the PA Governor Tom Wolf wanted to raise the minimum wage and the head of some state small business association was interviewed and his argument basically amounted to businesses can’t afford minimum wage increases. People like this and that Bill from Ohio can’t seriously expect paying somebody $7.25/hr is adequate or fair. It hasn’t been raised in 12 fucking years! You can’t run a superpower like that and expect to remain no. 1 or be a beacon to the rest of the planet
L85NJGT
If they don’t care about COVID safety, do you think they care about food safety?
??
Baud
Maybe he should support more immigration?
Kay
Just amazing they fell for this.
There is a huge Anderson’s facility an the port of Toledo – grain elevators, the whole works. I can’t believe he got away with posing as an ordinary small business owner.
Baud
@zhena gogolia:
What do you expect, given the high cost of labor these days?
WereBear
A person who is not a journalist just created a compelling piece of journalism. Without even being paid for it.
Just what is our Press Corpse, for, again?
Baud
@Kay:
Bullshit.
Kay
This is actually not the first Anderson closing:
God almighty. How these people get away with this stuff is really something.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud: I’m familiar with the thinking of a few small business owners and I think costs in general have been skyrocketing for them. I know one who pays 16/hr and can’t really attract employees. They’re worried if the minimum wage were to be raised to $15/hr, they’d have to raise what they pay employees even higher, with costs having to be passed onto their customers, who already complain about high prices. It’s not the type of business that has high volume or anything, either
Redshift
@zhena gogolia: Fundamentally, conservatism the world over is the belief that there really should be an aristocracy, and figuring out ways to fool a democratic electorate into electing what they consider the “natural” ruling class. It’ll be hard to convince people who support it that there’s anything wrong with our “betters” demanding to be served. At least there are more of us than them.
mrmoshpotato
@zhena gogolia: Didn’t Pompeo have staff doing grocery shopping, or am I thinking of a different pile of Trump trash?
Kay
@Baud:
Also, and not that it matters since this whole thing is fiction, but Waterville is kind of snobby and fancy – in the context of that area, which is Toledo. It’s not a diner kind of place. It’s a mini mansion kind of place.
No wonder he can’t find anyone. No one who would work there would come all the way out there.
Spanky
You people keep saying he got away with this charade, but the simplest solution is that this is the narrative that the media wanted to push, and he was all for it. “The media” being this one TV station, at the least.
Jeffro
Hey whoa Whoa WHOA….ten whole minutes of Googling?
What kind of sick person does that? More like ten seconds, maybe.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
My editing timed out: At least, that’s what they’ve told me anyway
Kay
It’s heartening to see the Anderson family have gotten so misty eyed and sentimental about small business. Way back in 2017 they were brutal job-cutting plutocrats.
Suzanne
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Then they should pay more and raise their prices, if necessary.
If you need to attract labor, then be an attractive place to work.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
Silly Kay, those jobs are meant for teenagers! Grown adults shouldn’t be taking these jobs! These people need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and work for poverty wages and multiple jobs to take out predatory private student loans! Also too, it’s just fine underpaying teenagers I guess for their labors.
That reasoning has always bugged me too. It’s exploiting teens to pay them so low. Wages should be determined by the work being done. Dignity of labor and all that. It shouldn’t matter if they need the money to live on or not
NotMax
This isn’t your grandfather’s
OldsmobileAmerican Legion.Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
No business wants to pay more for anything, but they feel entitled to cheap labor. And the Dems plan was to phase in the increase anyway.
Roger Moore
That this kind of thing keeps happening is a deep indictment of contemporary American journalism. There is a systematic problem that either nobody is catching that the people they’re talking to are not ordinary business people or they know but are happy to act as their messengers.
Jeffro
DOJ is suing Roger Stone for millions…hoo boy!
Kay
@Ryan:
Joe the Plumber is in the same county as the fake small businessman. They’re about 10 minutes apart.
Baud
@Jeffro:
Taxes.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Roger Moore:
Maybe the “journalist” of the original report should be asked about this
rikyrah
Baud
@Roger Moore:
Similar to how they keep identifying Republicans as independents when they criticize Dems.
Jeffro
@Baud: hmmmm…Manafort linked to Kliminink publicly and now Stone getting sued for tax evasion, just in one week.
It would be both just AND smart for the many, many crimes of the trumpov maladministration and trumpov’s associates to be drip-drip-dripped out there across the next four years. Looks like folks are hard at work ensuring that happens. GOOD.
Kay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
No Waterville teenager is working in a diner. They’re all at lacrosse practice.
What’s happening to wages in Toledo is this- large companies are paying better than small businesses. Much more- 6 or 7 or 8 dollars an hour more, and a lot of them are offering benefits. The problem isn’t the federal minimum wage. The problem is small businesses can no longer compete with big businesses on wages.
We haven’t raised the minimum wage and this is happening. The giant businesses are so big and so efficient they can throw some to wages. Costco, Kroger, Amazon, Menards, Wal Mart – and that’s just retail. You can make 17-18 as an “operator” (unskilled factory work) in Toledo right now.
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
Not nearly as much as I do.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: Go after the Mercers next!
Cameron
@rikyrah: I passed an Eckard’s today that was advertising walk-in vaccinations. Big change from a couple months ago.
Baud
@Kay:
Ah, so he’s complaining about capitalism.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
@Ryan:
Don’t forget Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame. Guy likes to peddle pro-business propaganda and was an actor who was trained at Juilliard. He’s a despicable shill. His S.W.E.A.T pledge is bad, especially the bit about being lucky to be born in America and how you should disregard safety to “get the job done”.
debbie
@JPL:
Only if they paid for it.
hueyplong
@Jeffro: Yes. Yes. Keep their wrongdoing constantly in the news. Roll them out in stages.
Has the additional benefit of terrifying Trump and driving him to ground until uncle dementia finishes him off.
debbie
@zhena gogolia:
Both of my parents were Republicans. They would be horrified to see what their party has come. Right after my father smacked my brothers for supporting T****.
lollipopguild
@H.E.Wolf: How about “common clay”?
mrmoshpotato
@debbie: Now kids. It’s not a contest to see who can hate these Rethuglican shitstains the most. We can all hate them to our own heart’s content.
Kay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I didn’t even have to watch that and I smelled scam. After the Louisiana family with the duck calls who were all actually well groomed golfers I grew very wary.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud: The commie!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
Well, in this particular business’ defense, they’re already having problems with competitors sometimes outbidding them and stealing customers. I suppose they’re just worried that they won’t be competitive if the minimum wage goes up further. I think the current economy was making them nervous I suppose
Gin & Tonic
@Baud: That’s how they nailed Al Capone, no?
Suzanne
@mrmoshpotato:
Let’s make this a contest. Would be fun.
Baud
@Gin & Tonic:
Headline says it’s civil, so no jail time unfortunately.
Mike in NC
@Baud: Lock the ratfucker up just like they did Al Capone.
ETA: #59 beat me by a couple minutes…
Jeffro
So very, very jealous here. Both of my parents are Republicans who followed the con man’s racism and fake nods to religion right down the spiral with him. They’re both still in a state of shock, in their own way.
mrmoshpotato
@Suzanne:
I must advise against that. All hating energy should be directed at Rethuglican shitstains, and we shouldn’t risk wasting any on one-upping each other.
Kay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I am a small business so I’m sympathetic to the group, but good lord. No one is “stealing” anything!
What does “outbidding” mean? The customers went somewhere else? How unfair! I’m outraged.
Can we please stop romanticizing everything? No one owes these people a small business! You’re supposed to like competing- that’s the thing.
bbleh
@H.E.Wolf: I like it! But I’m gonna have to go with “greedy dickhead.”
mrmoshpotato
@Jeffro:
Shock that Dump lost, or did they finally realize they were supporting a Soviet shitpile mobster conman?
Gravenstone
In the Dark Ages before the widespread proliferation of “superstores”, a trip to the Andersons was actually an event when you were a kid in NW Ohio. Yes, the region was just that boring…
Bill Arnold
@Jeffro:
You do not want to know how many tabs I have open in this browser. (Less than 4K :-)
Baud
@Bill Arnold:
I hate having multiple tabs open. I don’t know how people stand it.
Kay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
This is a hard thing and maybe we want small businesses for reasons other than decent wages, but if you can’t find employees because you don’t clear enough to compete on wages you may have to examine whether your small business is actually profitable enough to survive. Either that or cut some from the owners take, but the solution is not to pay 5 dollars less than everyone else – that just isn’t going to work. Employees aren’t a discretionary expense.
Omnes Omnibus
I have been banging the poujadisme = GOP drum for years now.
L85NJGT
Driver demand isn’t growing particularly fast, but U.S. drivers are old and available replacements are much more diverse.
debbie
@Kay:
Besides, where would these businesses be without their workers? The workers are what make businesses succeed. It takes very little to come up with a good idea; takes much more to make it work.
Kay
@debbie:
They’re no longer talking about the value of their employees though- it’s no longer about “employees contribute to businesses”. They’re saying “we can’t find people to work at the wages we’re paying” which is not really a political or ideological discussion, but an actual problem they have to solve.
They’re going to have to offer something else, in place of the higher wages at the bigs. Flexibility or proximity or “family friendly”.
NotMax
@Kay
Strictly for rhythm ‘n’ grins, Toledo Surprise?
:)
Baud
@Kay:
The average Democrat would kill to help these people compete with big business in ways that don’t hurt workers. But they are committed to the GOP religion.
RobertB
@Gravenstone: It was an event for me when I first moved out here, and I was 28. The store here in Columbus had really good bakery, deli, and meat counters. They had really good chicken salad, and pairing that with croissants or what they called “English Muffin Bread” was a great lunch.
Suzanne
@Kay:
The interesting thing about this is that some of the bigs are now more open to flexibility and family-friendly policies than they used to be, because the pandemic has shown they can work.
Hoppie
Interesting factoid: Gov. DeWine’s family money was the feed & grain business. At least he seems to have turned out a little better than this piece of work.
Kay
@Baud:
Well, it will be sad if they don’t survive because the real value of a small business is it buys the owner a comfortable living, and that is nice- that someone can start one and work hard, etc and clear 100 or 150 k for themselves. So the owner will have to take a pay cut to pay employees more and attract them and then “small business” isn’t so attractive anymore and it isn’t a way to move up. That would be a shame.
MagdaInBlack
@Kay: You’re speaking my language tonight, Kay. I’ll just sit back and enjoy. ( my rants about this usually involve a lot of cursing)
zhena gogolia
@mrmoshpotato:
He had them making reservations at the Cheesecake Factory, among other embarrassing things.
Baud
@Kay:
It would be a shame, but what can you do. Like the white working class, they’ve committed to the GOP dogma as the one true way.
Speaking generally, of course.
Kay
@Suzanne:
Employers need to re-learn that loyalty works both ways. We keep employees (only two, but they’re great and we keep them) by not cutting their wages or laying them off when the economy gets worse. Amazon will cut them in a heartbeat. I’ll take a pay cut before I cut theirs. They know they can rely on the job.
Mallard Filmore
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Is that why I can’t find any open McDonald’s or Burger Kings while school is in session?
Baud
@Kay:
You really do need to run for the Senate.
Bill Arnold
@mrmoshpotato:
They have a lot to answer for.
Particularly Rebekah Mercer. She has too much money and not enough connections to reality.
Parler, backed by Trump donor, says it’s at ‘war’ in leaked tapes – While Rebekah Mercer’s early financial backing of Parler is widely known, leaked recordings of internal meetings provided to Bloomberg News offer new insight into her involvement in the platform since it was forced offline in the wake of the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.
I’ve been playing with training language models using the text of the Parler download done right before it was shut down in Jan 2021. Frankly, it deserved to be shut down for unmoderated violent talk. The trained language models often generate psychotic-sounding material.
patrick II
@Kay:
If a restaurant has to pay its employees $15 an hour, but so does the garage down the street and the Walmart at the edge of town, people will be able to eat out at the restaurant more often, so it works out. The starting wage for McDonald’s workers in Norway is $22, and they still get business. The race to the bottom for wages helps no one.
That is probably too obvious to say, but I can’t help restating the obvious sometimes. It seems to be my niche.
Suzanne
@Kay: Having just quit my job at a small firm, I am sympathetic, but only to a point. My salary is good, but I also got two offers that equal it, and then accepted one that exceeded it. So it’s the going rate.
Lots of firms in my industry say they want “loyalty”, but they don’t want to pay for it. They want to keep you on the line, with vague promises. But they are gonna sell that business and you’re not going to get a payout. There’s a generational crisis with firms not being able to offer ownership to younger employees because they’re paying out Boomer owners as they retire. So they say they are really looking for loyalty, but don’t do much to deserve it, in my opinion. Two of my colleagues, senior to me, have worked there for over 20 years with no ownership stake. I do not see the value proposition.
Another Scott
@NotMax: Toledo reminds me of all the other towns and cities in Ohio named after places in Spain, Mexico, and South America (even Saudi Arabia – Mecca, Medina). If one didn’t know better, …
Wikipedia.
Cheers,
Scott.
Bnad
Is Twitter down? I can’t connect to any of the Twitter links or even raise twitter.com.
Another Scott
@Bnad: “Something went wrong. Try again”
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@patrick II:
How many employees you “need” is a number that isn’t dependent on an hourly wage rate. It doesn’t go down when the wage goes up. If you need 5 at 8 dollars you need 5 at 10 dollars, because you needed them- they weren’t optional spares you were paying to stand around and if they were why were you paying them 8 dollars an hour? Just don’t hire them at all.
mrmoshpotato
@Baud:
So you have multiple windows open? YOU! MONSTER!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Baud:
It’s not so bad on mobile
L85NJGT
@patrick II:
This doesn’t give any agency to the employees. The issue isn’t the chefs or servers leaving for McDs or Amazon. They’re leaving for a restaurant that isn’t run by idiots.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
“You said it. They stink on ice!”
Suzanne
@Kay: The other thing…. if you have good employees, don’t pay them the market rate. Pay them ABOVE the market rate so they don’t leave, because them staying is saving you money.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kay:
@Suzanne:
Oh I agree, guys
@Kay:
Again in their defense, they do a lot of the work themselves and have to deal with some real buttheads for customers. It’s a lot like retail and dealing with the public
They resent it when some other company that’s crappy swoops in and lowballs them on the price after they’ve invested a lot of time and money into doing quotes/work for a customer, customers giving them the runaround and shopping the work they’ve already done/quotes to a company that will do it for far less just to get the client. These particular SB owners like to pride themselves on the quality of their products too
debbie
@Kay:
Did you see who’s joining Bernie Moreno’s campaign? ???
H.E.Wolf
Hee hee to you both. :)
Those don’t rhyme with “poujadist”, though.
We could do “common pou” and “greedy pouhead”, maybe, and all the 5-year-olds in our vicinity would applaud our scintillating wit….
Dan B
@Another Scott: Hey! My draft board was in Medina.
They’re the board that said I was not a homo because there weren’t any in the county. Brainiacs.
H.E.Wolf
@H.E.Wolf: PS to my 2 compatriots and myself in my previous comment: Why are we wasting our time on silly stuff when Kay is right here in the thread, talking excellent sense on a substantive topic? :-) I’m going to quit chatting and read all of her comments.
Baud
@Dan B:
You should have kissed one of them.
WaterGirl
@cain: Actually, Ruckus reported that the front page was loading slowly, so I put some of the longer posts “under the fold” to see if that made a difference. That’s when you see the Post + Comments link on the front page.
raven
Four of the eight killed in Indy were Sikh.
White & Gold Purgatorian
We saw a similar story about local restaurants that can’t hire employees on the noon news today. I believe this is the link. Hartselle Alabama is a smallish town in a very conservative part of the state. At the end of the story we saw on the news, the woman running the bakery said she would be willing to pay over minimum wage for a master baker and someone to work the counter. That seems awfully cheap for a master baker, or even just a competent baker who could do the work with no supervision. I felt like she didn’t want to pay enough to get the help she claims to need and was just looking to whine for a tv audience.
Baud
@White & Gold Purgatorian:
You can hire a Master Bater for much less.
debbie
@raven:
Shooter had been fired. Guess he thought they had stolen his job that was meant for Americans only. ???
raven
@debbie: and the other 4? collateral damage
Villago Delenda Est
@patrick II: Some obscure Scotsman glammed on to this idea way back 245 years ago.
debbie
@raven:
I was really kind of hoping Joe would have made a much stronger statement. He’s trying to reason with the gunidiots. That will never work.
raven
@debbie:
Martin
Where I live minimum wage for restaurant workers is $19/hr right now. $14/hr normal min wage + $5/hr hero wage. They are not having trouble hiring. Ms Martin has been making a point to order from each new restaurant that opens. We have a lot of restaurant turnover here, but there are always new ones willing to open. The center across the street from me currently has two new places that have lines forming before they open and persist until they close. I’ve never seen fewer than 25 people in line at one of them.
White & Gold Purgatorian
@White & Gold Purgatorian: My google skills are not great, but it looks like both business owners interviewed for that Alabama “news” story took PPP loans in 2020 to keep employees on. Kind of ironic they are now complaining about that federal money making life hard for them.
E.
@Baud: Let’s be careful who we’re talking about here. I own a small business and I support a minimum wage increase. I start my employees a dollar over minimum wage (I’m in CA) for even the lowly counter position. Bakers get more. My bakers make more than I do and this year I did not come close to making minimum wage. There are small businesses and there are “small” businesses. The story is nuanced and tough, and changing the wage really will affect some businesses.
debbie
@raven:
They definitely need a better assessment.
debbie
@White & Gold Purgatorian:
Because of course.
The Moar You Know
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): That’s why they call it “business” instead of “money handout”. Every business owner has to deal with this sort of thing. It’s part of the territory. If your friends find it to hard to compete with this, they will fail and someone who can succeed will take their place. Being in business for yourself is a rough ride and it has to be.
just remember this: the Constitution does not guarantee anyone the right to a profit, nor to success. Just the right to try.
E.
@Kay: I face this every day. I cannot compete with the big guys in anything at all but quality, and quality is not adequately valued to make up the difference. I don’t believe the system is sustainable. We are going to lose everyone but the very biggest players.
Ken
And this is a problem because…?
The Moar You Know
@White & Gold Purgatorian: Hartselle is a tragedy. The highest percentage of Trump votes in all of Alabama. The whitest county in Alabama too. I’ve got relatives from there, relatives buried there. The place is fucked up beyond belief. Their entire water table has been declared (and then reclassified out, several times) as a Superfund site. They have no money to even put crude filters on the water system, because taxes and Those People. It used to be the wealthiest place in the entire state and its lovely beyond belief; but if you live there you’ll die, and fairly quickly.
The feds need to redeclare it a Superfund site, evacuate everyone for fifty miles around, and burn the entire area to the ground. And that will be a horrific cultural tragedy, but it will stop the ongoing human tragedy that is costing everyone who lives there their lives.
White & Gold Purgatorian
@The Moar You Know: Holy crap, I had no idea Hartselle was such a mess. Little wonder no one wants their minimum wage jobs.
Jay
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
it’s all part of the race to the bottom.
the reality is that wages, flow upwards. Pay minimum wage workers more, and the money goes right back into the economy.
40 years of stagnation and Billionaires hoarding means that everybody but them, has less money to spend, so everybody is cutting corners to get by.
People who were willing to pay for quality and workmanship are fewer and farther between now.
Brachiator
Coming late again to a great thread. I am really enjoying the comments.
I don’t think the Democrats have done enough for small business. I hope that they do more with respect to tax and economic policy in the future. I think their hearts may be in the right place, but too often it sounds like they talk more about workers, but not as much about small business owners.
Some restaurants have had problems attracting workers because of pandemic related disruptions. Many businesses are starting to hire again, so the marketplace is more competitive. This is good for job seekers. Also, in Southern California, and other places, restaurants would hire actors, musicians and others who were willing to accept jobs with flexible hours. But a lot of these people have had to move on because their primary jobs are no longer there, and this hurts restaurant hiring. Other communities have similar problems for other reasons.
A recent NPR story notes that some economists love to study McDonald stores precisely because they are all over the world. But no easy conclusions can be drawn. In most US cities, McDonald’s pays slightly more than the minimum wage. But when they raise wages, they tend to raise the price of a Big Mac. They in effect pass the price increase along to lower wage workers who are more likely to buy their food.
NorthLeft12
@zhena gogolia: I wonder how often the Pompeos did any personal tasks for the State department employees?
Actually, I don’t. I have a damn good idea that it was never. I’m sure that if anyone had dared to ask, they would have been cashiered, or whatever is done to civil servants.
HumboldtBlue
There’s nothing better when the orchestra gets out of their seats and just start dancing to Leonard Bernstein.
Jeffro
@mrmoshpotato: oh, just shocked that he lost/that the ‘dream’ is over
Jeffro
Yes, exactly this. So many folks ‘go into business for themselves’ and just…need to rethink that.
Soprano2
What I thought that story lacked was input from even one employee. I particularly wanted to hear from the kitchen manager who quit 2 days after getting a $1,500 bonus. I figured they must treat their employees badly for something like that to happen.
Finding employees is a problem right now, and it’s not just wages. It’s a combination of people finding other jobs because restaurants and bars were closed, people not wanting to be exposed to maskless customers, women who dropped out of the workforce because their kids are at home, servers who think they can’t make enough money at 25% or 50% capacity, and yes, some people are taking a break because of the unemployment supplement. Most people I know think it’s just the unemployment; I think that’s the lazy explanation. I also think ongoing immigration restrictions have shrunk the restaurant workforce. Covid has shaken things up in the restaurant/bar industry; it may never be the same.
Jeffro
Truth. And a good reason for making sure that no one has enough spare billions to interfere with/destroy the whole of society.
HumboldtBlue
Sorry, here’s the orchestra.
Sister Golden Bear
Too many business owners (small and big) got used to being able to treat employees like serfs. Demanding loyalty, but not offering any back. Seeing employees as “cost centers” that needed to be minimized. (Yeah, I’m a jaded Gen Xers who’s worked for both.)
I’ve also run my own business, as others have said, running a business is tough (although it can be rewarding). There’s a reason 80 percent of new businesses fail within the first five year. So color me less than sympathetic about those whining about not being able to find employees who are willing to be underpaid to work in shitty conditions.
I think part of the problem is that a number of small business owners go into business for themselves because they’re not capable working for anyone else. People like my sister-in-law: self-centered, horrible people skills and feeling utterly entitled, who goes on tirades about the ongoing turnover of her employees. #NotAllBusinessOwners, obviously, but too many.
James E Powell
@Soprano2:
On a related note, it’s long been my complaint that when the FTFNYT goes on the diner safaris, the never talk to the dishwashers. Maybe I’m just bitter because my first real job was dishwasher in a diner.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Why the press is running with these stories the Wantabe Oligarchs are feeding them is obvious; everyone enjoys listing to an a-hole boss getting his due. Anderson and country club pals think the public will be outraged and not get more like the public will be gloating over his problems.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Kay: This Andersons and in the Andersons grocery store chain?
Heywood J.
Great Twitter thread, and the author is of course spot-on in pointing out the process by which the GQP noise machine laundered the Dale’s Diner non-story. But I’d lay a $20 on the Times, the Post, CNN, and/or Politico catching up with Reg’lar Ol’ Bill Anderson and His Troubled Diner In Real ‘murka by the end of this month.
Every so-called journalist at every one of those supposedly librul outlets would slit their own throats before talking to one of the workers at Dale’s Diner, much less just maybe for once interviewing a few Biden voters with the same rigor and devotion they lavished on random Trumpkins for years. The media didn’t “learn” anything because they never intended to.
Mustang Bobby
@Kay: I grew up in Perrysburg, and I remember Waterville as being exactly that: quaint and snotty.
evodevo
There’s another aspect to this, too…the 4-year ongoing onslaught of ICE going after immigrants, and Trumpy’s cuts to immigration quotas from Mexico, etc. All the scutwork jobs in KY were filled by Hispanics for the last 20 years…even the local Chinese restaurant employed Mexicans as kitchen help. The tobacco farmers employed Mexican crews to cut and house tobacco during harvest season (work that is almost as bad as being a roofer in August in Alabama). Well, with the ICE crackdown, that all ceased, and the farmers were left trying to get local help – many times not succeeding, and the restaurants were up that proverbial creek. Conservatives seem absolutely oblivious to the fact that their policies all interact to produce these results…and then the whining starts…
Soprano2
@evodevo: i agree, this is a part of the problem that lots of people don’t know about. A lot of these workers are in jobs that are hidden from the public so they don’t realize how much it’s changed. I get frustrated by people who think it’s all caused by the unemployment because that’s way too simplistic. Sometimes I ask them if they’d want to hire people who they think are that lazy to begin with? They know they wouldn’t, but bitch anyway. I guess the proof will be in how and whether the situation improves.
Kattails
deadseasquirrel
@zhena gogolia:
1. get a new dentist.
2. get a tee shirt like the one i have that reads, ‘if you don’t like face masks, you are going to hate a ventilator.’
3. wear that shirt when you go pick up your chart from your former dentist.