Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The poor and middle-class pay taxes, the rich pay accountants, the wealthy pay politicians.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.

Let there be snark.

These days, even the boring Republicans are nuts.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Republicans cannot even be trusted with their own money.

White supremacy is terrorism.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

This blog will pay for itself.

“The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.”

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Those who are easily outraged are easily manipulated.

You’re just a puppy masquerading as an old coot.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

We still have time to mess this up!

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

You are here: Home / Economics / C.R.E.A.M. / Friday Evening Open Thread: The Peasants, They Are REVOLTING!

Friday Evening Open Thread: The Peasants, They Are REVOLTING!

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Or so the ‘small bidniz owner’ and his right-wing media accomplices would like you to believe…



But wait — there’s (so much) more!

We need an American equivalent term for ‘poujadist’. Other than just ‘Republican’, I mean.

Reader Interactions

143Comments

  2. 2.

    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

  4. 4.

    Baud

    The bill was better than I realized. Also, too.

    In my Inaugural I laid down the simple proposition that nobody is going to starve in this country. It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By “business” I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.

  5. 5.

    dnfree

    Post + Comments has been there a long time (at the bottom of the part of the post that shows on the front page).

  8. 8.

    Baud

    Seriously, though, there should be plenty of business owners who benefit from Dem policies.  Get them out there to talk about it.

  11. 11.

    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.

  12. 12.

    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.

  13. 13.

    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.

  14. 14.

    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?

  17. 17.

    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

  18. 18.

    L85NJGT

    If they don’t care about COVID safety, do you think they care about food safety?

    ??

  20. 20.

    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.

  21. 21.

    Baud

    @zhena gogolia: 

    IG report finds that Mike and Susan Pompeo asked State Department employees to carry out tasks for their personal benefit more than 100 times.

    What do you expect, given the high cost of labor these days?

  22. 22.

    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?

  24. 24.

    Kay

    This is actually not the first Anderson closing:

    MAUMEE, Ohio, Jan. 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — The Andersons, Inc. (Nasdaq:ANDE) announces today its plans to exit the retail business and close its remaining four retail stores in the second quarter of 2017. The retail closings will have no impact on the Company’s grain, ethanol, plant nutrient and rail operations.

    God almighty. How these people get away with this stuff is really something.

  25. 25.

    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

  26. 26.

    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.

  28. 28.

    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.

  29. 29.

    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.

  30. 30.

    Jeffro

    Hey whoa Whoa WHOA….ten whole minutes of Googling?

    What kind of sick person does that?  More like ten seconds, maybe.

  32. 32.

    Kay

    “The decision to close The Andersons stores was not easy for anyone involved,” says CEO Pat Bowe. “Choosing to cease a business that has spanned 65 years and employs about 1,050 people is tremendously difficult.”
    The closing will eliminate approximately 650 positions in the Toledo area and 400 positions in Columbus

    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.

  33. 33.

    Suzanne

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    I know one who pays 16/hr and can’t really attract employees. 

    Then they should pay more and raise their prices, if necessary.
    If you need to attract labor, then be an attractive place to work.

  34. 34.

    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

  37. 37.

    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.

  39. 39.

    Kay

    @Ryan:

    I lived through Joe the Plumber

    Joe the Plumber is in the same county as the fake small businessman. They’re about 10 minutes apart.

  42. 42.

    rikyrah

    The # of open vax appts in NYC right now is stunningly high.* Javits: 3k * Medgar Evers: 20k* York: 19k* Bay Eden: 1k+* City-run hubs: 1000s* Walgreens citywide: 1000sIf you know anyone who's been discouraged from booking, tell them NOW IS THE TIME (links to book below)— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) April 16, 2021

  44. 44.

    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.

  45. 45.

    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.

  50. 50.

    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”.

  52. 52.

    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.

  53. 53.

    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****.

  55. 55.

    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.

  58. 58.

    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

  63. 63.

    Jeffro

    @debbie:Both of my parents were Republicans. They would be horrified to see what their party has come.

    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.

  64. 64.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Suzanne:

    Let’s make this a contest. Would be fun. 

    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.

  65. 65.

    Kay

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

    outbidding them and stealing customers.

    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.

  67. 67.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Jeffro:

    They’re both still in a state of shock, in their own way. 

    Shock that Dump lost, or did they finally realize they were supporting a Soviet shitpile mobster conman?

  68. 68.

    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…

  69. 69.

    Bill Arnold

    @Jeffro:

    What kind of sick person does that? More like ten seconds, maybe.

    You do not want to know how many tabs I have open in this browser. (Less than 4K :-)

  71. 71.

    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.

  73. 73.

    L85NJGT

    “Compared to 20-25 years ago when the typical driver profile was a white male from the southern half of the U.S., the explosion in drivers from other cultures is often one of the untold stories in trucking.”

     

    Driver demand isn’t growing particularly fast, but U.S. drivers are old and available replacements are much more diverse.

  74. 74.

    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.

  75. 75.

    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”.

  77. 77.

    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.

  78. 78.

    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.

  79. 79.

    Suzanne

    @Kay:

    They’re going to have to offer something else, in place of the higher wages at the bigs. Flexibility or proximity or “family friendly”. 

    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.

  80. 80.

    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.

  81. 81.

    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.

  82. 82.

    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)

  84. 84.

    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.

  85. 85.

    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.

  86. 86.

    Mallard Filmore

    @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):

     

    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.

    Is that why I can’t find any open McDonald’s or Burger Kings while school is in session?

  88. 88.

    Bill Arnold

    @mrmoshpotato:

    Go after the Mercers next!

    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.

  89. 89.

    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.​

  90. 90.

    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.

  91. 91.

    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.

  92. 92.

    Bnad

    Is Twitter down? I can’t connect to any of the Twitter links or even raise twitter.com.

  94. 94.

    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.

  95. 95.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Baud:

    I hate having multiple tabs open.  I don’t know how people stand it. 

    So you have multiple windows open?  YOU! MONSTER!

  97. 97.

    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.

  99. 99.

    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.

  100. 100.

    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

  102. 102.

    H.E.Wolf

    @lollipopguild: @H.E.Wolf:  How about “common clay”?

     

    @bbleh: @H.E.Wolf: I like it!  But I’m gonna have to go with “greedy dickhead.”

     
    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….

  103. 103.

    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.

  104. 104.

    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.

  106. 106.

    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.

  108. 108.

    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.

  113. 113.

    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.

  114. 114.

    raven

    @debbie:

    FBI Indianapolis Special Agent in Charge Paul Keenan said in a statement sent to CNN that the gunman, Brandon Hole, was placed on an immediate detention mental health temporary hold by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department. He also said a shotgun was seized at Hole’s residence.
    “Based on items observed in the suspect’s bedroom at that time, he was interviewed by the FBI in April 2020. No Racially Motivated Violent Extremism (RMVE) ideology was identified during the course of the assessment and no criminal violation was found,” Keenan said in the statement. “The shotgun was not returned to the suspect.”

  115. 115.

    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.

  116. 116.

    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.

  117. 117.

    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.

  120. 120.

    The Moar You Know

    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.

    @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.

  121. 121.

    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.

  122. 122.

    Ken

    @Bnad: Is Twitter down? I can’t connect to any of the Twitter links or even raise twitter.com.

    And this is a problem because…?

  123. 123.

    The Moar You Know

    Hartselle Alabama is a smallish town in a very conservative part of the state.

    @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.

  125. 125.

    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.

  126. 126.

    Brachiator

    Coming late again to a great thread. I am really enjoying the comments.

    Seriously, though, there should be plenty of business owners who benefit from Dem policies.  Get them out there to talk about it.

    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.

  127. 127.

    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.

  130. 130.

    Jeffro

    @Kay: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.

    Yes, exactly this.  So many folks ‘go into business for themselves’ and just…need to rethink that.

  131. 131.

    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.

  132. 132.

    Jeffro

    @Bill Arnold:Rebekah Mercer. She has too much money and not enough connections to reality.

    Truth.  And a good reason for making sure that no one has enough spare billions to interfere with/destroy the whole of society.

  134. 134.

    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.

  135. 135.

    James E Powell

    @Soprano2:

    What I thought that story lacked was input from even one employee.

    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.

  136. 136.

    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.

  138. 138.

    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.

  140. 140.

    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…

  141. 141.

    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.

  143. 143.

    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.

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