people are going to hate the idea that if you can’t pay people fifteen bucks an hour your joint should close but just between you and me if your joint can’t pay fifteen dollars and hour it should close up shop.
i like small business. i support them. you have to pay people money. https://t.co/1DDIboeJSZ
— World Famous Art Thief (@CalmSporting) July 22, 2021
Tell you a secret, buddy — the world changes. You can change with it, or you can get run off, end up in some dingy resort town bitching about how everybody is wrong except you. No malarkey!
For like ten fucking years conservatives gloated about how they where gonna replace uppity restaurant workers with robots and then the moment the labor market actually started to tighten they threw a fit demanding someone make all their employees come back.
— Syndicalist Weedle Collective (@Weedledouble) July 22, 2021
hope so! https://t.co/A2Yeydftkz
— World Famous Art Thief (@CalmSporting) July 22, 2021
i can’t run captain jim’s seafood garbage shack unless all the dishwashers are paid three cents an hour.
then you can’t run captain jim’s seafood shack! shut that shit down. you’re out of business.
— World Famous Art Thief (@CalmSporting) July 22, 2021
why would i care if a restaurant that pays its workers $9.75 an hour goes out of business. there isn’t a single restaurant that good that i would side with their shit food over workers. fold. go out of business. go do dishes at somebody else’s restaurant. i bet it sucks!
— World Famous Art Thief (@CalmSporting) July 22, 2021
people like working. what they want is to be treated with respect.
— World Famous Art Thief (@CalmSporting) July 22, 2021
Side note:
An early look at states that curtailed unemployment benefits finds evidence that the policy is hurting people, but no evidence that it is driving faster job growth.https://t.co/q4VCUtzwrX
— Binyamin Appelbaum (@BCAppelbaum) July 22, 2021
Spanky
They would like to pay their workers what they think they’re worth, but the Federal government won’t allow wages so low.
Baud
I’m still confused as to why labor supply problems are different from any other type of supply problems.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The poor must be punished for being poor is a religious belief among conservatives.
PenAndKey
@Baud: Same. Whether someone is selling a business the raw materials to build a widget or the labor to actually do the building shouldn’t matter. Yet somehow the business world has conned itself, and much of society, into thinking that the equations of supply and demand don’t apply to employee labor. Honestly I think business owners, large and small, have simply gotten used to a market where they didn’t have to think about it because they basically held all the cards. They don’t now and they’re completely lost. They can’t even wrap their head around the idea of market elasticity and how it affects the price they have to pay for labor, or if they can they’re in full public denial about basic reality.
...now I try to be amused
This. The new labor market doesn’t just demand more money from small business owners, it also demands that they manage their people better. Many of them can’t or won’t do that.
Jeffro
I like the framing that it is actually *capital * that is on strike here, by refusing to raise wages. That’s excellent.
Look, the world doesn’t need a gazillion half-busy restaurants. How about if we have a half-gazillion busy ones instead? Everyone else can go get a teaching certificate (there’s a HUGE teacher shortage on, in case folks haven’t heard) or learn to install solar panels.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Baud: They aren’t different. The quantity of labor supplied rises with the price, which is the wage rate. Every GOPer I’ve ever met claims to be an expert in supply and demand but they can’t ever figure out that the same rule applies to labor markets.
Revrick
As the late business management expert, Peter Drucker, pointed out, wages and salaries are but a small fraction of total business costs, sometimes as low as 10%! You have to add in all the overhead represented in the cost of the facility itself and the costs associated with the raw materials. In the case of,say, a McDonalds, that would be food-like substances.
Even if labor costs represented one third of total expenses, doubling the pay of lower pay end workers would mean, at most, a 16% hike in the price charged customers. And let’s not forget that half of all wages and salaries go to the top 10% of earners.
PenAndKey
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?: I swear, they act like labor is some sort of magical black hole where they don’t actually get anything for it and the money gets eaten when they spend it. If you REALLY want to throw them for a loop have them explain how business labor expenses relate to monetary velocity.
Spanky
@Baud: Labor is the only supply capable of getting uppity.
Another Scott
Change is scary.
Change is hard. (Reporters don’t like change, either.)
I have some sympathy for businesses that made plans based on certain expected levels of costs and certain expected levels of income. But life is hard. Unexpected things happen.
No business is guaranteed a profit or to stay in business or anything else. Economies and markets change.
There are no guarantees.
The market says Labor is worth more now. Figure it out.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jeffro
@Revrick: this is why so many right-wingers’ arguments against raising folks’ wages are dumb.
Raising minimum wages to $15 an hour only gives those folks a couple extra bucks per hour. It doesn’t mean that some trumpy’s burger is now going to cost $15 more, or even a couple extra bucks more. It means the burger’s going to cost a dime more – whoop dee doo.
Roger Moore
@PenAndKey:
I think there’s something more subtle going on. What business owners are thinking is that the current labor shortage is transient, but any wage increase they have to give to deal with it will be sticky and hard to claw back when the transient shortage is over. If that’s true, they gain a lot by sticking to their guns and refusing to give in. They have some short term problems with short staffing, but in the long run they get lower wages and a cost advantage over competitors who raised wages.
I think they’re wrong, particularly in that the competitive advantage they’re chasing is largely illusory. Even if they can pay less in the long run, they’ll get what they pay for. The employers who pay a bit more will get a better grade of employee, and the ones who try to cut corners will get worse workers, higher turnover, and all the problems that come with.
NotMax
@Enhanced Voting Techniques
“They were trying to save their souls – and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?”
– Upton Sinclair
.
rikyrah
I love Twitter detectives ?
Bradford Pearson (@BradfordPearson) tweeted at 8:31 AM on Thu, Jul 22, 2021:
This “small business owner” runs Thunderdome Restaurant Group, which brought in $66 million in revenue in 2020.
(https://twitter.com/BradfordPearson/status/1418201953633505285?s=03)
Roger Moore
@Revrick:
I agree that labor is only one small cost, but for someone like a McDonald’s franchisee, it’s the only major cost they actually have some control over. They have to pay their franchise fee. They have to buy supplies from the franchiser, and they can’t negotiate on price. They can’t do much about overhead like rent and utilities. Squeezing their employees is the only place they can plausibly save money, and every little bit they save goes directly into their pocket.
Leto
Apologies now for this being long.
Activision Blizzard Sued Over ‘Frat Boy’ Culture, Harassment
Click here for the full lawsuit filed by the state. This pretty much reminds me of the Navy Tailhook Scandal.
Thread by Stephanie Krutsick, former Game Master, Senior Game Master, Producer at Blizzard:
Thread by Alex Frostwolf, PR Writer, Social Media Manager, Blizzcon Contest Manager:
And there are so many more women who used to work at the company who are sharing similar experiences to this via twitter.
billcinsd
@Revrick: yeah, there was a study that showed that doubling the wages of everyone (CEO included) at McDonalds would raise the cost of a Big Mac by 25 cents.
Also, fast food may be a little more sensitive to wage hikes than other business, but a 10% rise in the minimum wage increases prices by at most 0.7%, although you have to be careful with these studies as some of them use very poor assumptions
Wapiti
@…now I try to be amused: Yup. Respect means, in part, not expecting your worker to have two other gigs because you won’t give them enough hours.
OzarkHillbilly
Curtailing unemployment benefits was never supposed to drive faster job growth and this individual should know that. It was supposed to lower the unemployment rate by making slave wage jobs more appetizing than starving to death.
Matt McIrvin
@Roger Moore: Franchisees often say things that imply they’re squeezed so hard by the franchiser that they can’t afford to pay reasonable wages. In which case maybe the whole fast-food-franchise business model is unsustainable.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@rikyrah: Did the aspiring Master Of The Universe not know these records are public?
Danielx
@Baud:
“The free market is for me, not for thee” is the rough translation.
rikyrah
I will come back to this.
At the low end, we lost 600,000 due to COVID
Maybe actually up to 900,000.
THEY WORKED SOMEWHERE.
WHY IS THIS NOT BEING BROUGHT UP WHEN TALKING ABOUT NOT BEING ABLE TO FILL JOBS?
Another Scott
@rikyrah: “Small Business” is one of those terms that everyone thinks they know what it means, but the meaning varies a lot. The GQP takes advantage of that ambiguity.
Fundera:
$66M in retail sales at a restaurant empire would seem to be outside the usual “small business” category…
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@rikyrah:
That tweet is responding to Townhall, which I think is a right-wing media outfit. Elon Musk is a small business owner in their eyes.
Frankensteinbeck
@Roger Moore:
I think you are giving most of them too much credit. 9/10ths don’t want to do it and that’s the motivation. Any thoughts they put around it are on the order of ‘Why should I pay those lazy fucks more of my money to do an easy job?’ Some are schemers, usually the richest because they’re socially pressured to look like they have a plan, but even then it’s mostly words thrown on top of ‘Because I don’t want to pay them more.’
EDIT – I will be nice. There is a significant proportion whose thoughts they invent as justification for their desire to pay less is ‘I can’t afford it because I have found a way to spend all the money I’m making now.’ Note that they may not be spending all the money they’re making now.
lowtechcyclist
Karl Marx said that capitalism was dependent on an army of the unemployed to hold wages down.
According to Marx a large supply of unemployed workers would maintain the | Course Hero
I don’t think capitalism so much depends on having a huge supply of unemployed replacement workers (cf. Revrick’s reference to Peter Drucker in comment #8) so much as they just want to keep wages low. It just seems really important to most rich people and corporate bigwigs to maintain their power over workers, even if paying them more would make no more than a tiny dent in their bottom line.
They’re fighting a class war, pure and simple.
ETA: Looks like Frankensteinbeck said pretty much the same thing right before I did. :-)
Spanky
@rikyrah: Very very many, especially early on, were long past their employed days. I’d like to see some numbers on this, but have no idea whether anyone has teased it out.
Peale
I don’t even know what they are expecting the government to do for them. Round up citizens into chain gangs to work for them? Seems kind of Stalinist to me.
OzarkHillbilly
@rikyrah: Because they were all old retired people happy to sacrifice their lives for the benefit of their grandchildren’s economy. Get with the program here, girl!
Ol'Froth
The local McDonald’s in my suburb of Pittsburgh has a sign out offering workers $22 an hour. I guess they CAN afford to pay more.
Roger Moore
@lowtechcyclist:
A huge part of it is just mentality. Too many business owners see themselves as lords and their employees as serfs, and that power dynamic is exactly why they want to be business owners. The cruelty is the point. Anything that threatens their power is a threat to their very reason for owning a business, and they have to fight it tooth and nail.
Roger Moore
@Peale:
They want the government to get rid of the safety net. They think employees only have negotiating power because the safety net provides them with better options, so destroying it will give employers back the upper hand in negotiations.
Baud
@Roger Moore:
They could demand legalization for undocumented workers and more lax immigration policies. Win-win, no?
scav
@Leto:
I swear we need to starting looking for the little pull strings running out of HR and spokepeoples’ backs that activates these classic spiels. Oh, wait, it’s tech. Maybe they’ve advanced to a button or a remote.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Roger Moore: “a lazy, discontented rabble instead of a thrifty working-class!”
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: I’m sure the managers of all thirty-nine restaurants in The Thunderdome Restaurant Group (really?) are scrupulous in verifying the immigration status of their employees. Just like the trumps have always been.
(I mean, I’ve never actually seen the movie, the first two were enough for me, but my recollection from the Tina Turner video is that The Thunderdome wasn’t a family friendly place to gather with friends and enjoy the most authentic Mexican street food in (checks notes) the Over-The-Rhine neighborhood of Cincinatti.)
Ohio Mom
Peale @30:
That was my question, what was Mr. Restaraunteur asking Biden to do for him? Manufacture a cadre of young, white and perky servers just for him? (I’ve been to a few of his restaurants, there’s one a mile or so away from my house).
He delivered his question in a whine and a sneer and kept the sneer up as Biden gave him an honest and somewhat nuanced (especially considering the venue) response.
Like many of the other people asking questions last night, he was not acting in good faith. He wanted to set Biden up and I imagine that resonated with his fellow Republicans.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Ohio Mom:
Do they wear flair ?
Drdavechemist
@rikyrah: Well over half of those who died were over 70 and/or in some form of nursing care-they didn’t work anywhere. (In Rhode Island, 80% of the fatalities are associated with nursing homes and assisted living facilities.) The economy is short millions of workers. The couple hundred thousand you’re talking about is a minuscule fraction of the “missing” workers. It’s a huge issue for their families and friends, of course, but the effect on The Economy is negligible.
subcommandante yakbreath
Small business, hell. I am the owner of a femto business consisting of one serf (me) and a supervisory cat.
Kattails
My dear governor, Sununuke, dropped the extra funding under the premise that jobs were going unfilled and they needed to whip everyone back to work. The unemployment rate in the state at that time was 2.8% ffs. It was a bullshit statement designed to feed the usual red meat diet of the right wingers.
Also note that the last time businesses had to deal with an actual minimum wage increase was July 24, 2009, from $6.55 to the current $7.25. I wonder if they justify this in the back of their minds as it being a “training” wage and then wonder why as soon as someone gets trained they go off to a real job? Because the raise one usually gets at the end of the probationary period is a fucking joke. I worked at TJ Maxx for a while, about 10 years ago, and the first raise was like $.10 an hour. I almost laughed in her face. I mean they could raise their prices by a lousy fifty cents and pay their workers better. I hear they’re up to $10 or something now. Problem is, the newbies get the higher wage but it is often NOT retroactive for long-term workers, who don’t get a proportionate raise.
But again, that minimum should be $22 an hour as a starting point, and they have not had to deal with this reality in a long time. Minimum wage should be kept current with inflation and updated yearly. This is nuts. How do business owners think anyone can afford to buy their stuff? I agree, it really is a master/serf mentality in so many cases. The people at the top believe in piddle-down economics — workers can have whatever these guys care to flush down to them.
Brachiator
There is a lot of evidence that a wage increase will not by itself get you more restaurant workers. All kinds of businesses are having to compete for workers as the economy opens up again, and often people simply prefer to work somewhere other than a restaurant.
So for example, a person might prefer to work for a company that offers better benefits and opportunity for advancement even though the restaurant job offers a higher starting wage.
Pandemic lockdowns also disrupted the pool of workers more likely to seek restaurant jobs. Musicians and actors would often work restaurant jobs between gigs. But the lockdown forced many of these people to give up their preferred professions and seek full time work in other jobs. Others moved away. In either case, you end up with fewer people who might even be interested in restaurant work.
Drdavechemist
@OzarkHillbilly: Snark aside, the vast majority actually were not part of the work force. See my reply at #40.
Leto
@scav: I thought the same thing. One of the people directly mentioned in the lawsuit, Alex Afrasiab (who was a very long time director at Blizzard) only just left LAST YEAR. Left during the investigation. Other big names within the company, also name, only left within the past few years. When they say, “we’re not that company”… b#$ch, you’re still that company! You’ve been that company all along.
The women in my life are unsurprised by this, and to a degree so am I. It’s still fucking abhorrent and I hope heads roll. Probably won’t but I can hope.
West of the Rockies
I ask from a point of true and general ignorance on the subject…
I’ve heard for years that the restaurant business operates on a razor-thin profit margin. Will upping staff wages 10, 25, 50% really not ruin a lot of good restaurants? Will price increase off-set the raise for workers?
The biz seems to be a wobbling Rube Goldberg contraption, but as I said, I come from a place of not knowing. My food-service experience is limited to about one month at a frozen yogurt shop in the late 80’s.
OzarkHillbilly
@scav: “Click here”.
Mike in NC
Not so long ago I would see Letters to the Editor in the local rag, where retired conservatives stated that people should be willing to work for 50 cents an hour.
The Pale Scot
@Spanky:
Line cooks had the highest COVID death rate among jobs
Brachiator
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
The crackdown on immigration has had an impact on restaurants and the construction industry. I know for an absolute fact that in Southern California tons of restaurants employ undocumented workers. They not only save on wages, but on payroll and employment taxes.
Some restaurants never advertise for employees for some job categories in English language newspapers or job sites.
OzarkHillbilly
@Drdavechemist: I know, and I’m giving the GOP spin with a heavy dose of sarcasm.
PST
The beauty of decent minimum wages, from a business owner’s point of view, is that they shield you from the competitive disadvantage that you would face if you raised wages unilaterally and raised prices to do so without squeezing your margin. It really ought to be a win-win — make your employees happier while maintaining a level playing field — and I really don’t understand why more owners don’t advocate for it. As has already been pointed out, labor costs tend to be a small part of total costs in those businesses that pay minimum wage. And although the increase in prices would be borne by consumers, those upon whom the price burden would be greatest would tend to in the pool of individuals benefiting from higher wages.
West of the Rockies
@Jeffro:
Hey, here’s a thought… how about colleges and universities transform 50% of adjunct faculty jobs into full-time positions? Maybe eliminate the stale crust of Peter Principle administrators and spend dollars on students instead?
NotMax
@Ohio Mom
The Stepford Waitrons, coming soon to drive-ins (and drive-thrus) everywhere.
Baud
@Mike in NC:
People seemed to be content
fifty dollars paid the rent
freaks were in a circus tent
Those were the days
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
I’m pleased to report that here in Louisville, dishwashing jobs that are now offering $18-$20 an hour in “not super fancy” locally-owned eateries are going unfilled.
I’ve done that job in the past in a busy kitchen. It’s shitty work – hot, gross, detail-oriented with a multitude of tasks all needing to be timed out.
People are completely over being treated like shit by ownership and feel like their efforts should command more pay.
Take, for example, the Pappy Van Winkle thefts at Buffalo Trace. The employees taking the stuff were generally making $12-$16 an hour creating a product with kinda big production loss ratios, and you get the impression that literally everybody from the management team on down was lifting bottles (which were selling for thousands of dollars apiece). Why wouldn’t you expect the guys you’re underpaying to take a piece?
*as an aside, that’s one of the best distillery tours I’ve ever taken, the place is fantastic. Also, I’ve had Pappy 20 on one occasion, a single shot. It was great, but my palate isn’t so refined that I could say that the experience was worth the expense at the time – $35 for the shot. I think it’s well over $200 for a shot now.
Sure Lurkalot
@Baud: I’d say not a win win. Immigrants can’t live on 9 bucks an hour any more than a “real American” can. I’d rather go with the half cartoon…”rich countries shouldn’t have poor people.”
OzarkHillbilly
Define “good restaurant”.
As to your larger point, yes they do live on a thin margin, but wages have less to do with success than one might think. I’ve seen good restaurants come and go in less than a year and MickyD’s survive for decades. It makes no sense to me.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Mike in NC:
“You should take pride in work and strive to give 110% all the time, regardless of how little you’re paid.
Also, only rich guys are motivated to get richer and work if more money goes their way. The poor have to be motivated by privation.”
– AEI Board Opinion Statement
Geminid
@Leto: A few days ago, twelve women filed suit against Liberty University over the handling of on-campus sexual assaults. I think Liberty will settle this one, and for a lot of money. The allegations are devastating.
rikyrah
@Geminid:
You have a link to the story?
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@OzarkHillbilly:
Whenever I look at restaurant budget issues, where things usually go off the rails is inventory control and ridiculous rents charged by distant landlords.
Wages are a vanishingly small issue overall.
NotMax
@Baud
Ah, but two hours of pushing broom
Buys an 8 by 12 four-bit room
I’m a man of means, by no means
King of the road
.
Brachiator
@Jeffro:
It is obviously not easy to achieve some kind of employment equilibrium. People may not have the skills for certain jobs or even be interested in certain jobs.
There are people who might not want to be a teacher at any price or who simply might not be good at teaching even if they had a certificate.
Also, supply and demand doesn’t always align well with social need.
stacib
@Roger Moore: Here is the sticking point for me – why won’t employers recognize if you pay people $8 per hour for a five – six hour work day, their total loss for missing work is under $50, so people can miss a lot without any substantial financial pain. If you add in poor management, there’s even less of an incentive to come to that place. Instead of paying that one person more, the employer hires another person to fill the gap at the same flippin’ low rate, so now you have two people who only kinda sorta come to work. Additionally, they’ve increased their workman’s comp and unemployment insurance payments, so in the end, they are still losing. I just don’t get it – pay people a fair wage, and your lack of employee issues will disappear like magic.
Geminid
@rikyrah: No link, but I think reporting can be found by looking up “Liberty University sexual assault lawsuit.” I found several stories that way, from local and national news sources.
sdhays
I still come back to the wing nut owner of Papa John’s crying in a fetal position about having to add 10 CENTS to the cost of his crappy pizza to pay for his employees’ health care. It took my breath away. 10 CENTS per pizza and all those people could have health insurance! And he said it out loud, in public, for people to hear, as if everyone would draw “obvious” the conclusion that no one could pay an extra 10 CENTS for healthcare for Papa John’s workers.
He thought he was making a point about the cost of Obamacare proposals, and he really outed himself as a vicious monster.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: That’s what happened to one restaurant owner I knew; they had a good business for years, then the property owner doubled the rent on them and that was that.
stacib
@Ol’Froth: The McDonald’s near my job has a sign up, too. They are offering $12 to start, and that’s here in the Chicago area at a very busy location. I hope that sign stays up there forever because they can’t get anybody to work. Other franchisees are offering $15 per hour to start.
Fair Economist
@Drdavechemist: The number of working people who died is “only” a few hundred thousand, but serious Long Covid affects 5-10% of those who get it, including the young, and that number is in the millions, plenty to cause a significant shift in the labor market.
Anecdotally the one person I know who died was 70 – but he was still working, because no pension.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Brachiator: That is absolutely true. Restaurants are big employers of undocumented immigrants, as is construction. If undocumented immigration were at the levels we saw a few years ago, workers would not be in a position to push for higher wages. This is why immigration issues are a complicated issue for the GOP. Businesses want a flood of workers who can be blackmailed into slave wages. Cultural conservatives want all immigration to cease, especially from non-European countries.
West of the Rockies
@OzarkHillbilly:
I’m not talking about fast food places as they seem to be a different animal with decades-long and vast name recognition and marketing campaigns. I’m referring to people who run a single restaurant, the amazing Thai place downtown, the funky upstairs vegan joint, the seafood spot on the coast.
In the 80’s I worked for an NPR affiliate. We produced a show called Chef’s Edition. The two hosts, a restaurateur (owner of our local fancy restaurant) and a university prof always went on about the difference between existence and shutting down was wafer-thin.
Perhaps they were exaggerating. As I said, I genuinely don’t know.
piratedan
somehow I wonder if the immigration policies of the GOP in regards to stopping the caravans of illegals has had a trickle down effect on labor. If you can’t exploit them because they’re not here, then those jobs remain unfilled. I would imagine that a good many companies that rely on “unskilled” labor are feeling the pinch and if that pool is dramatically reduced, then there would be competition for those people in that pool for the first time that I could ever remember.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I’m somewhat amused by all the conservative media and political figures, from “Michelle’s a Moocher” Charlie Sykes to “Max Cleland is a traitor” Rick Wilson sounding like Eric Boehlert.
I’m disgusted that pretty much no one at Politico, much less Axios, or even the Washington Post– which I think is one of the better legacy media institutions– will think that maybe, just maybe, they at long last need to pull their heads out of David Broder’s or Tim Russert’s ten-year-dead ass.
Geminid
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Immigration is a big wedge issue for Republicans, maybe their biggest. I look forward to Democrats bringing up Comprehensive Immigration Reform legislation later this year. That will make McConnell sweat.
In February, I caught a segment of Hew Hewitt’s radio show devoted to immigration reform. Hewitt describes himself as a “wet” on immigration reform, and favors increased immigration in general, and green cards for most workers here illegally. About half his callers agreed with him, mostly for pragmatic reasons. The other half disagreed, and they got pretty hot about it.
matt
@Leto: They’re based in California? LOL, they are so screwed…
matt
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Wow, even Charlie Sykes isn’t as big of an asshole as Cilizza. That’s kind of amazing.
Booger
Why does this always get viewed through the lens of restaurants?
One of this country’s foundational problems is our relationship with food and the expectation, nay, assumption, that food must be cheap at any cost. My local burg has strip malls full of empty H.J. McChilligans in addition to every variation of something that can be ordered via an intercom board and paid for and delivered through a tiny opening with a bifold window.
Maybe in reality the market can only support 1/3 of them at realistic prices and not in an economic bodge where every corner must be cut in order to keep the franchisee in new Escalades every year?
ETA: I’ll wager that Mister Small Businessman get special treatment from the line cooks anytime he shows his smarmy face in one of his stores.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Yup. Then there are the ones with annual financial audits and “foot traffic surcharges”.
My personal favorite was a well-reviewed Indian restaurant in what was basically a strip mall. The mall had been bought up by a Boston conglomerate, and landlord responsibility/rent issues blew up the partnership. Monthly rent on the space was $4500 per month as memory serves – the restauranteurs were 35K behind, and they were in a match race with each other to strip every dollar possible before losing it.
I was engaged by a young Pakistani man who wanted to buy it to do a combined Mediterranean-Indian menu with some fusion items, but was having trouble interacting with the representatives of the landlord. I reached out to them and was told that they wouldn’t talk to us about lease assumption until the rent arrearage was cleared, nor would they commit to automatic first renewal with no changed terms in six months time, period. In a spirit of compromise, I suggested the following:
– commitment to lease assumption and auto renewal contemporaneous with delivery of bank check (they said no)
– delivery of funds to escrow of their choosing, with release contingent on approval of assignment and auto renewal (they said no).
These clowns tried to tell me that this was because of Dodd-Frank requirements, and offered the helpful hint that if the assignment and renewal didn’t happen, they could just sue the original owners (I guffawed at that). I told my guy to walk away from it. He found better space elsewhere.
That strip mall Indian restaurant sat empty for at least three, maybe as much as five years.
Baud
@Booger:
It shouldn’t be cheap “at any cost,” but we really don’t want to be in a situation where food isn’t affordable
ETA: Not talking about restaurants per se, but food generally.
matt
@stacib: The help wanted signs in Portland are off the hook. This last week I’ve seen car wash Washman offering $18-20 an hour. You have super fancy grocer New Seasons with Help Wanted signs. Starbucks. And a bevy of other entry level type businesses.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
all the good people who died of Covid, and this asshole survives, and MY TAX DOLLARS will probably pay for his long-term effects, if they didn’t pay for the treatment he already received– I’m not good at guessing people’s age
along those lines….
Ramalama
@Roger Moore: There are plenty of McDonalds restos in countries that have better pay and worker protections for employees. Same thing for Walmart and other corporate asshats. Canada, for example is one such country. Somehow they are able to abide all of the rules and regs and still stay in business.
Frankensteinbeck
@sdhays:
Jesus, Schnatter. That fuck. I worked for Papa Johns way back when. He had enough money to start a business, but you know how he made it take off? He paid his employees better than his competitors and told them to focus on making a better pizza. Then he got actually rich, and decided that made him a god and fuck the puny peons. While freezing wages, he tore down his (10? 20? I can’t remember) most successful core stores, one of which I worked in, and rebuilt them with marble and bronze as fancy testaments to his glory. He put himself on every advertisement. He and his board would change all the rules for running a store about once a month, and the only consistent thing was the demand that staffing be cut to the bone. Oh, and forget being promoted if you were black. Zero surprise he eventually got caught complaining he can’t use the n-word but blacks can.
Leto
@matt: Yup. It’s the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing that’s bringing the suit. And I want them to go hammer and tongs with them. They’re not the only ones to do this, of course. Had a friend tell me about her friend’s experience at SpaceX just a few years ago. It was this woman’s dream job. She was hired and then basically left the place a number of weeks later because of stuff like this. It’s destructive to people, our economy, our future.
Leto
@Booger:
Go look at comment 17.
Betty Cracker
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I’ve sampled Pappy 20 once too. My palate isn’t all that refined either but DAMN!
The Pale Scot
The thing these people aren’t willing to accept is that the cream of their cadre is gone. To work the front of the house requires social skills, multi tasking and physical endurance. Those skills translate in today’s economy. Call centers, office work etc. If you got sucked up into the restaurant culture at a young age the action, camaraderie and after work socializing is addictive. If you didn’t have a plan to move on the last year pushed people out of the swirl and allowed them perspective. Especially the world outside of working nights and weekends. What the Europeans call “unsociable” hours. Being off nights and weekends is different world, and people got the thought What Am I Doing!? I’m still watching for the first time TV shows from the 80’s an 90’s because I was working when they came on. The only people who aren’t reconsidering are the ones who aren’t reliable.
A year went by before the additional assistance was provided, I’d bet many workers lost their cars and housing. The eviction moratorium only applies to leases, renting month to month got no protection. I you lost those things why would you go back? The thing that’s not mentioned is that if it’s slow you get sent home, the owners are use to overstaffing then reacting to how many people are walking in. That happens to the back of the house also
The long term drop in the birth rate is a factor. The biggest drop is in the middle and upper middle class. The majority of my friends have one kid or no kids. The only big breeders are the trust funders. That’s the population the restaurant industry desires for the front of the house.
This is extinction level event for the industry. The cooking shows have really screwed up customer’s expectations too. If you’re reading Wine magazine don’t go to Appleby’s expecting to have a conversation about the wine list and then give a shitty tip because the server “isn’t knowledgable. You wasting the server’s time.
Jeffro
@rikyrah: exactly right
Brachiator
Another example of competition for workers.
Jason Cabrera runs a branch of the Layne’s Chicken Fingers restaurant chain, which has promoted teenagers to management roles because of a severe staff shortage. Cabrera, who earns a $50,000 salary, estimated that he’d need to replace 11 of his 22 junior employees in the coming weeks as many go off to college out of state….
Garrett Reed, the CEO of Layne’s, told Insider in a separate interview that he would “usually have at least a handful of seasoned managers, people in their late 20s, early 30s,” running his eight restaurants but that the labor shortage led him to promote three workers who are 18 or 19 to manager roles, including Cabrera.
Reed said that he’d found it “tough to compete” with places like Walmart and McDonalds that can afford to offer higher wages and that many of his workers had left to join bigger companies.
Ohio Mom
Jim, Foolish Literalist @40:
They are definitely gimmicky restaurants. Most of them tend to have very limited menus (for example, there’s a fried chicken with “southern” sides chain and a Mexican street food chain) — in this aspect, they are sort of an upscale takeoff on fast food — with lots of options for beer and booze.
Then there’s the healthy salad chain, the chicken tenders chain (talk about adopting the lessons of fast food), and a sit down chain that mimics farm-to-table.
I have to add that I don’t mind most of the ones I’ve been to (except the chicken tenders one but Ohio Son likes it). They are just all that not interesting if you are even only somewhat an adventurous eater (their core audience isn’t).
gvg
@West of the Rockies: If it happened just to one restaurant alone, it could drive them out of business. If it happens to all of them at the same time, it should be fine. This is one reason for things like minimum wage and all kinds of rules…to make everyone play by the same rules and not enable one to drive everyone else out of business by underpricing, and then raise prices sky high when they are the only one left…Sometimes industries have actually requested rules so that they could all do something necessary without having to trust all the other competitors.
Jeffro
@West of the Rockies:
I think you’d need 4 or more adjuncts to equal 1 FT faculty member’s pay/benefits. But it’s worth looking into
scav
@Brachiator: Horrors!! Competition between businesses! What fresh Socialist hell is this?
Just Chuck
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
No, but you get a hell of a show with your meal.
The Pale Scot
@OzarkHillbilly:
There’s a lot of “upscale” restaurants with crappy food. We took my dad to Ruth Chris’s in Ft Myers for Father’s Day, the service was excellent. The food on the other hand was over seasoned, the escargot was salty, I sent it back for tuna, which was crusted in peppercorns like it was steak au pauvre, the steaks were coated in salt. That happens when the kitchen is not tasting the food, or they’re all cokeheads who don’t have taste buds. The small family run ones are being squeezed out by corporations, not just the chains but private LLC’s that run 5 or ten shops
Fair Economist
@Brachiator: Any restaurant that can’t afford to match wages with a confirmed labor exploiter like Walmart deserves to go out of business.
Roger Moore
@West of the Rockies:
Those razor thin profit margins are a result of price competition. If every restaurant has to raise wages to attract workers, they can all get away with raising prices a bit to compensate without losing competitive advantage. This is the difference between a micro and macro POV of the economy.
As an example of this, there are 7 states (AK, CA, HI, MT, MN, OR, and WA) that don’t have a separate, lower minimum wage for tipped workers. The restaurant business is in no worse shape in those states than it is in the rest of the country. Every restaurant has to operate under the same rules, none of them gets an unfair advantage compared to the others, and they aren’t forced out of business by the need to pay a bit more. If anything, I think restaurants here in CA benefit from waiting staff being able to treat their jobs as a career rather than a lousy job they’re going to quit the moment something better comes along.
The Pale Scot
@West of the Rockies:
That their amazing and funky is all good, if they are only open by not paying a living wage then they’re not viable. Mistreating staff so the amazing an funky places fit’s your budget is the problem. Eating out was a treat, now people expect to able to afford it regularly
JaneE
Working for a jerk of a boss will keep employees from coming back even if they stay in the same job somewhere else. More money will help get people to come back, but “not for a million dollars” is a metaphor that becomes reality when the number is less than a living wage. That may be $15 or more or less depending on where you are. If you want better employees, pay better than average wages.
gvg
A problem for this issue for democrats is …brainwashed working class who are most hurt by this management class propaganda who really think other working class people are staying home because of government unemployment being more money than getting a job, and swear they know someone who told them that is why they weren’t coming back to work. The lower and middle level managers who actually hire, don’t have the authority to offer higher wages. School boards don’t have the funds in hand to pay too much more. And then you have the issue of established employees rightly thinking they should be paid more than brand newbies. It takes awhile to adjust bigger institutions. Those fellow workers are really invested in the myth of lazy moochers that aren’t them.
Roger Moore
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
The compromise is that we get a flood of workers (or did before COVID) who can be blackmailed into slave wages by the threat of la migra. The solution shows you who has the real power in the Republican party.
Ruckus
@Spanky:
@Baud:
Both of you really are making the same, valid point. Yes it takes a person in charge to make a company work, but the employees who actually do the dirty work, the day to day grind, they are what make the business successful, because they do the dirty work, the day to day grind.
As a past small business owner I saw this growing up within the company I one day owned. Yes the boss has to organize and run the place but the people who actually do the dirty, day to day stuff, that makes the company run, that if they aren’t there the company doesn’t actually exist as an operational entity. The brain may operate the whatever but it’s the stomach and bowels that give the heart and that brain the ability to function, those parts that do the dirty work, the parts that the whole can not live without.
Hoodie
@Roger Moore: That last point is particularly salient. There’s nothing wrong with working in a restaurant or any other manual labor job, but our wage structure makes it seem like there is because it’s tied to social status. Low wages generally mean low status. The guy that owns a string of Hardees franchises is often just someone who had the capital to pay the franchise fee. It’s not like he’s a restauranteur or a famous chef. Americans are conditioned to award the most bullshit job (where what you actually do is of somewhat nebulous value) the highest pay at least in part because people with high social status are not supposed to have to work.
cain
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
I think some lawsuits from the govt needs to happen. There should be a penalty for grifting. I would say take back the money and then add a huge penalty.
Jeffro
OT but poor Gary Abernathy is just sick and tired of trumpov voters being unfairly maligned
you know, because they’ve been expressing their well-reasoned policy positions so civilly these past six years…
gvg
Another reason some are having trouble is their lack of loyalty. Places that laid everybody off quick, don’t seem like a good long term career choice now. Those should be having the toughest time getting hire backs. Sometimes it is a panicky no loyalties boss, sometimes it’s just the industry was always unstable but this drove it home to many people that were living paycheck to paycheck, it’s time to think about working your way up a different ladder starting now. Companies that kept friends employed would be the prime target. Because the pandemic was just bigger and more widespread in impact, but the underlying economic stability of each industry was pretty much the same anyway.
Also benefits…….seem much more important after a crisis. If a company is able to offer not just good jobs but pensions and benefits, they can hire.
The Pale Scot
@Geminid:
The UK has set in motion the dissolution of the kingdom because well pensioned retirees in the former Labour strongholds in the north are pissed off that the kids they’re proud of have all moved to the south for a career, leaving them to spend their last days with the knuckleheads that stay and the immigrants that are moving into towns declining in population. Just gobsmacking that “expats” move to Spain because of all the immigrants in England.
Roger Moore
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes:
Yes, I think a lot of property owners just don’t know what they’re doing. There’s a commercial property on the next block over from my home. When I moved there a decade ago, there was an Albertson’s as the anchor of the place. It was a bit small for a supermarket, but it got reasonable business from the surrounding community, many of whom liked not having to travel an extra mile to get to the next supermarket. Then the property owner decided to raise the rent and refused to give any promise not to raise it again. Albertson’s decided it wasn’t profitable enough to justify the increased rent and shut down. It’s been 7 or 8 years now, and they still haven’t found a replacement tenant, and for a lot of that time it sounds as if they’ve barely been looking. The owner is now being prosecuted for criminal code violations for failing to keep the place up, and the city government is trying to force it into receivership so they can actually get appropriate businesses into the open storefronts. All because the owner has unrealistic expectations on rent.
Mike in NC
@Jeffro: I’d be happy if Abernathy went back to his favorite Ohio diner and was never heard from again.
JustRuss
Huh. I’ve only had Papa John’s once, about 20 years ago. It was really, really bad. And that was before I knew what a schmuck he is.
dmsilev
@Jeffro: That’s his usual bit. Oh, those poor misunderstood heartland voters, if only the arrogant liberals would stop condescending to them and just treat them with respect, everything would be great.
JustRuss
@Roger Moore: Yup, we had a cool little store nearby that bought overstock and closeouts, never knew what you’d find, always a bargain. Owner jacked the rent and it’s been empty for at least 3 years now.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
I’ve seen this concept many times, but there is an element here that I think needs to be stated. It will be a bit round about. Most people are competent at some level. When I lived in OH I noticed that a lot of the baggers were people on the spectrum. They could work, they were actually pretty good at the job, but it took training and understanding to get to that point. The market chains that used the people I talking about got far more of my business because they took the extra mile(s) to be better, they hired people who could do the work, with just a bit more effort from the company. It was a win win for all concerned. But it had to be recognized by the company that the effort was worth it even if it required extra effort. I’ve not seen this anywhere else in the 20+ yrs since. Every company that thinks that employees are a drag upon the company deserve to die a painful death. Because it’s the employees that are the most important part of any company. It gets me to think back to the military. If you treat everyone as being the minimum, at some point they will do the minimum effort. Especially if they have no escape, no ability to change. OK that’s not exactly true, there are always people that will rise, but they do get tired of always rising and being screwed at the same time. And they leave, at the earliest possible time, without ever looking back. And the structure never changes. BTW never changing is a staple of conservatism, the concept that they are perfect the way they were and never need to improve or change, often from a position that was critically bad and has only gotten worse over time.
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
This is not entirely true. Eating in restaurants is discretionary. And this makes them vulnerable if they raise prices too much.
Before the pandemic, many restaurants were struggling. Some casual restaurants started cutting back hours or started to do more catering and breakfast service.
Then the pandemic hit and there was more remote work. With people not going into the office, the breakfast market took a hit.
So many restaurants are struggling again. They also have to deal with increased rents and leases and increased food costs, along with any wage increases.
And they also have to deal with an almost iron rule. If they raise menu prices past a certain level, customers disappear. Does not matter how good the food is, except for certain super chic eateries. And it doesn’t matter if all restaurants of a certain category equally raise prices.
This can be especially hard if a class of workers receive a meal allowance. I know of a place that was popular with police officers and firefighters. The coffee shop raised prices past some magic threshold and the cop and firefighter business evaporated.
Fast food restaurants often had a dollar menu or value meal menu to attract walk in traffic. They would have this even if prices for other products increased. Some of these places are trying to get rid of the value meals. The results in some markets ain’t pretty.
The Pale Scot
@Roger Moore:
Every strip mall owner thinks they deserve an anchor store, and they’ll wait forever for one to arrive.
There was a poignant NYT story a couple of years ago listing all these small multi generational storefronts that are closing because of rent hikes. The best place to get an egg cream, the Italian restaurant staffed by opera singers, all dying from the law of the barcode.
“Every restaurant is Taco Bell’s”
Ruckus
@Another Scott:
I used to run across those when I owned my business and was just amazed that there was no real understanding of the size of so much business in this country. And the expectation that if you weren’t that size, you had no business being in business. Almost everything was effected by the concept that a small business was 200-300 times bigger than most of the businesses that I knew. But it is the way many think of business. A single restaurant may have what, maybe 20 employees, not a thousand or twice that as a minimum. I think the most employees I ever had at one time was 8.
Ol'Froth
@Brachiator: I’m in that boat. Sure, I could quit my current $15 an hour retirement job and go to McDonald’s for $22 an hour, but where I’m at now I have union representation AND a defined benefit pension plan.
Barbara
@Brachiator: The reality is that many people eat out only for convenience and not because they actually love what they are eating. So if the cost is high enough they will cook for themselves. I can say that this does make me sorry for restaurants that are, essentially, trying to price compete with home cooking, which is vastly cheaper than just about any restaurant that isn’t straight up fast food. I don’t know what to do about that but it is not the burden of restaurant workers to shoulder on behalf of restaurant owners. It’s just not.
Technocrat
@Brachiator:
The lab I worked at previously employed roughly 2000 people. Probably the largest employer in a 15 mile radius, and the lunchtime traffic was a sight to see.
During the shutdown, the lab went to 25% occupancy, and while the pizzeria across the street hung on, at least two other eateries in the area closed their doors.
Princess Leia
What I find fascinating is that none of these owners of “small businesses” ever want rent control to hold down rent like they want to suppress wages. No uproar at all. Guaranteed that that has been the biggest cost increase over the last 30 years. But the landlords are considered good and smart for squeezing as much rent as possible – no labor necessary- where someone who works at a shit job should just shut up and stay poor.
Just Chuck
@Princess Leia: Not surprising to me, just more of the same “free market for thee but not for me”.
matt
If people don’t want to pay $15, they are 100% free to have lots of kids and pay them less.
Princess Leia
@Just Chuck: So true!
narya
I also have to wonder if the past year of cooking at home has made at least some folks realize that they can make much better food much more cheaply than the mediocre places. Personally, I’m still willing to drop some serious coin on a very good place (and I’m fortunate to be able to do so), but I’m not particularly willing to spend $60 on mediocre bar food. I also want to go back and read some history of dining out in this country–when I was a kid, we mostly didn’t do it, and I know a lot of folks on this site are my age or older. We had the occasional pizza, or cheesesteaks (cheesesteaks . . . . mmmmmm . . . ), very rarely “fast” food from Mickey D. Plus the last year has meant many folks were working from home, so that going out for a quick lunch because you’re too busy, or grabbing coffee and breakfast on your way into the office, also took a hit.
burnspbesq
Lest we forget, it was reported recently that there is not a single county in this great land of ours where $15/hr is enough to afford rent.
Kim Walker
@Ramalama: Canada has always relied on the steady flow of immigrants (250K to 400K per year) to keep wages low. The only decent wages here are unionized government workers and the happy descendents of the colonial masters.
Robert Sneddon
@Technocrat:
Just up the hill from where I live is the office campus for a big insurance and pensions company hosting thousands of employees. Every storefront nearby was a restaurant, pub grub, snack bar, sandwich bar, fast food, coffee shop, you name it. They lived and died on the lunchtime rush.
And then the pandemic hit. Surprisingly some of those places are still in business, in part BECAUSE of the pandemic since they’re just across the road from the city’s biggest vaccination centre. People dropping Grandpa off to get get vaccinated were dissuaded from going with them into the building unless absolutely necessary to cut down on footfall so they popped into the little coffee shops and snack shops while they waited and kept them alive.
Jeffro
@dmsilev: this one’s a real beauty, though. You’d think that only a handful of trumpies had ever said “fuck your feelings”, or tried to run a bus off a road, or looted the Capitol
Just a handful…
Brachiator
@Barbara:
Very true. But people also enjoy being social, going out to be with other people. And to be free from having to spend time preparing meals or cleaning up.
Also, even though they may be able to cook for themselves, when they go out they might want a variety of cuisine that they don’t normally cook at home.
To be clear, I absolutely favor good wages for restaurant workers. And I note that other business operating costs put pressure on restaurants.
But it also highlights the nature of the problem when people in effect say “I believe you should increase wages because it is a social good. But I will not eat at your restaurant to reward you because staying home and cooking my own food is cheaper.”
You end up with the unfortunate result of higher wages on paper but the real unemployment of workers you were trying to help.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
There can be a feedback loop with hiring. If you hire good people and treat them well, they’ll reward you for the effort. They’ll work hard for their money, and they’ll want to stay with your company. You will save money on recruiting and training and have more money for pay and benefits. It’s a virtuous cycle.
In contrast, if you start with a negative opinion of employees, you’ll get into a vicious cycle. You will try to save money by cutting pay and benefits to the bone, and the only people who will want to work for you are people who can’t get anything better. They’ll be awful and leave as soon as something better comes along. That will convince you that employees are worthless and never stick around, so you won’t try anything to keep them.
The same thing can happen with a particular class of employee. If an employer figures out how to get good work from a category of employee other companies have given up on, they’ll wind up attracting that kind of employee. Maybe it’s realizing your work doesn’t require some kinds of activity, so people with specific disabilities can do it without needing accommodations. Maybe it’s recognizing that people with ASD are a good fit. Or whatever. But the kind of employer who sees employees as a strength rather than an expense will know how to benefit from finding employees others don’t appreciate.
Gravenstone
@Ohio Mom: It occurs to me that Ohio has given the political world “Joe the Plumber” and now “Mr. “small business” restaurant chain owner”. My home state remains a richness of embarrassments.
The Pale Scot
@Princess Leia:
Infinite thumbs up
Ohio Mom
Ruckus:
I don’t know about when you were living in Columbus back in the day but I know as the mom of a young fellow on the spectrum that nowadays employers can get Ohio tax write-offs for hiring people with disabilities.
And you are so right about extra training and coaching needed but eventually resulting in a very able, hardworking employee. That’s the muddle my family is in now, looking for that one special position for Ohio Son. It’s a one-day-at-a-time process.
Gravenstone
Never heard of the joint.
/Googles
*faints in shock at the unit prices*
*recovers and laughs at the bald faced lies about “most expensive distillation techniques”*
Yeah, sounds like someone(s) figured out how to milk the gullible a very long time ago.
Soprano2
*sigh* I’m starting to think everything I post here is just pissing into the wind, because most of you are in love with the idea that if we just raised the minimum wage to “x” amount it would fix all these problems as much as conservatives are in love with the idea that if only the government would quit giving money to all the lazy moochers that would fix everything. I appreciate you, Brachiator, because you are one of the few here who actually seems to understand some about the situation that’s happening in a lot of places right now. There are a couple of others up there who seem to understand something about the rent/landlord situation. (Whoever said landlords don’t know what they’re doing, yep for sure. They don’t understand it’s better to have a tenant at lower rent than to have no tenant at all.) I’m here to tell you that if we hadn’t purchased our building in 2019, my pub would be SHUT DOWN because there is no way in hell I could have paid the rent she was charging for the past year. We lost a bunch of money on the pub side last year, but because we pay ourselves rent now that actually made it not so bad. I was shut down a total of 10 1/2 weeks last year, and operated at 25% for quite a few months. No one is making money at 25%; you’re barely hanging on.
Raising the minimum wage to $15/hr won’t fix anything if there aren’t people to take the jobs. Here in my city of Springfield, MO, the vast majority of employers are trying to hire people right now. High wage, low wage, medium wage – they’re ALL having problems finding enough people. The unemployment rate as of May was 3.9%. Missouri did away with the pandemic unemployment the second week of June, but I haven’t seen many “we are hiring” signs go away since then, so that didn’t fix much of anything. The truth is that, for various reasons (women leaving the workforce because of problems with children/Covid/school and a decrease in immigration of all kinds, to cite two) the labor force has shrunk for everyone. Add in that Amazon and Costco are both trying to hire a bunch of people here, and it’s a real problem for those of us who can’t afford to pay $22/hr or $25/hr or whatever wage rate you think will fix it all.
And yes, I cannot afford to pay that. I’m not McDonald’s or Papa John’s or any other huge company that has economies of scale I can’t even imagine. I’d have to raise the price of a burger a lot more than $0.10 to afford it. At any given time I have between 8-12 employees. The price of a lot of things has soared; to cite just one, the cost of a case of gloves has gone from $50/60 to about $120/130. There are other random increases and shortages that also drive up costs. My manager (who thank God has reconsidered and decided to stay and get paid what I can afford to pay her plus some profit sharing, because amazingly we’re actually making some money this year), does a good job of managing that, but there’s only so much you can do. We pay as much as we can afford. It’s true that raising the minimum wage helps everyone, because then we’re all on a level playing field. It’s true that if I raise prices too much, people will go somewhere else, because there are a lot of somewhere elses for them to go! It’s like being between a rock and a hard place. The job market right now is actually doing a decent job of raising wages, because I don’t know anyone who is hiring at minimum wage, which BTW is $10.50/hr in MO.
As for personnel, we can find good people, but I do agree with whoever said that a significant number of the best ones have left the industry for other kinds of jobs (although I have a hard time imagining someone who likes bartending working at a call center). It’s a struggle, because this industry attracts a significant number of people who are, shall we say, not that dependable. We treat people well, at least as well as we can money-wise. They all know I don’t expect them to put up with rude, boorish customers, or any sexual harassment (we’ve banned people because of that). I’m not an asshole, and I’m not making money hand over fist while I pay my employees almost nothing (saw a lot of that up there). That guy who talked to Biden is not a small business owner – I’M a small business owner, and I’m here to tell you that the issue is a lot more complicated than just raising the minimum wage to some larger amount.
OK, flame away at me.
Gin & Tonic
@Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes: I’ve had the 20 and the 23, and have to say that the additional three years in the barrel were not an improvement. This was at a dinner with Julian van Winkle, so the supply was not an issue
ETA: Weller’s Special Reserve is the same mash bill and the same distillery, but doesn’t have the name, so it’s actually affordable.
Soprano2
Wow, you’re funny. I absolutely would have wanted rent control if I could have had it.
Uncle Cosmo
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: And not just restaurants. For years I got my hair cut at a little shop in a strip mall north of Baltimore. Then one day my Sicilian barber asked me for contact information and promised he’d let me know where he ended up. Turns out the strip mall ownership had doubled the rent and the barber shop owner was closing the business. The staff briefly considered opening their own place but eventually just drifted off to existing venues.
Uncle Cosmo
Just FTR the only COVID fatality (so far) I’ve known personally was 65 and still working.
Barbara
@Brachiator: I would want to see a whole lot more documentation before accepting this assertion as true across the board. Obviously, it might be true for individual establishments, but not true for the industry as a whole or on average. Studies in the retail sector that look at profitability as a function of paying higher wages do not support your assertion.
Roger Moore
@Princess Leia:
I think the big thing is what they can control. When it comes to negotiating rent, the small business owners are in a weak position and they have to accept what they can get. When it comes to negotiating wages, they’re using to being in a strong position and able to dictate terms. That’s what’s freaking them out right now; employees finally have some leverage and can’t be pushed around.
J R in WV
@Betty Cracker:
I bought a bottle of Pappy on the way to AZ one winter while building the winter camp, we drank it together, worshipfully, one shot each, after especially productive days of construction. When a big thing was accomplished. Also, of course, for cousin Vicky, where we stayed.
Great stuff, no surprise there’s a lot of shrinkage in those aging warehouses.
Geminid
@Soprano2: No flames from me. Your knowledgeable comments are appreciated here.
narya
@Soprano2: No flames, no “but what abouts” from me. I have a fantasy that one of the ways this will sort out over time is that decent places to work will actually be able to hire and keep people, even if the wage rate is a little lower than BigCompany, but there’s no guarantee that even that would be enough for you, or that you can survive that long. Your point about owning your place is SO important–and I firmly believe that a lot of the rent issues are from landlords/property owners who want a cash cow–or who want a writeoff of some kind.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Gin & Tonic:
Love me some Wellers. And yeah, that’s actually in reach, pricewise.
J R in WV
@Gin & Tonic:
Regarding Pappy Van Winkle’s bourbon:
This is true, Weller’s is also very good bourbon, if you can find it. Even in Kentucky, Pappy’s and Weller’s Special are very hard to find at any price.
WhatsMyNym
@The Pale Scot:
And California, Florida, and Portugal; basically anywhere warm/hot near the water.
ETA: I really don’t think they care that much about the immigrants. They’re Brits, they like to complain when they can.
Le Comte de Monte Cristo, fka Edmund Dantes
@Gravenstone:
Grains+water+yeast+heat+time+column still=whiskey
Always does. No functional difference exists between the expense for the production of Buffalo Trace, Eagle Rare, Weller Reserve or Pappy Van Winkle….
Eric K
I have a couple points I make so often I should have them saved in a file so I don’t need to retype them:-)
1) I admit to being as much an anti big business hipster as most liberals, but in reality most small businesses treat their employees far worse. Starbucks may not pay great, but they do have some benefits at least, the mom and pop coffee shop? no way. Same for Amazon vs local shops. The fight we need to have is getting a livable minimum wage, mandatory paid time off, medical and retirement benefits for everyone, etc. The size of the business should be irrelevant, ideally decouple most benefits from employment altogether.
2) Conservatives in the past: We don’t need a minimum wage, the market will take care of it. The reason pay is too low is all the immigrants willing to work for less. Get rid of them and the wages will rise and Americans will gladly do the jobs people claim they won’t (remember McCain saying something like pay $50 an hour to pick watermelons and people will flock to those jobs).
Conservatives now that one sector of the economy has a shortage of workers: People are lazy bums, they need to be happy taking whatever piddling wage their betters will pay them.
Why I could almost be convinced that every argument they ever make is totally in bad faith…
Uncle Cosmo
IOW – unless I miss my guess very, very badly – that’s the TacoBell’s Canon. ;^p
Uncle Cosmo
The next economic crash will be triggered by a collapse in the value of commercial real estate. With no chance of repurposing the awkward and badly constructed building stock for any other constructive ;^D use. Book it.
Ruckus
@Matt McIrvin:
Come on man! Serving crap disguised as eatable food for more than it’s worth is the American way! Just because some have to work extra hours to make ends meet is no fault of those taking advantage of them!
Soapbox time.
This country has been about the business of making money my entire life. And when I say that I don’t mean earning a living I mean making serious money. We had a depression because of it, we’ve had several recessions because of it. A life is not enough it has to be a life with not just one home but with several ginormous homes that are just waste and glorified dick waving. SFB (and yes I’m going to continue to use that, get used to it) is the poster child for this. Between his perceived wealth and his racism is it really any wonder that he’s adored by the very people who think that unbridled capitalism is the best thing since sliced bread because they can get rich by cheating? We can do better and we have to do better. People wonder why the right is now calling for vaccines? It’s because they are losing, power, money and least of all, supporters. The first two losses are the most important to them. Reality is taking away their scam. When it was just taking away their supporters they didn’t give a damn, because they didn’t give a damn about them, they were conning them and winning, it’s now taking away their scam and making it more obvious to far more people.
StringOnAStick
I have to wonder if why we see these empty commercial properties after the owner jacked the rent and drove off their tenants is because the tax code lets them harvest the losses to minimize their total tax bill. In effect, the tax code works to keep those properties empty and thus blighted; a true waste of existing capital.
Soprano2
@narya: I think a lot of landlords overestimate what their space is worth, and don’t understand the principle that some rent is better than no rent. When we were talking about buying our building we also looked at some spaces, because we were contemplating moving. We looked at the space where our place used to be (before we bought it), which is on a major street here. It’s about 200 less square footage than what our building is, and the inside was in terrible shape – it looked like there had been a pretty big water leak, because the booths in there all had mildew on them! They wanted as much rent as we were already paying, although being on that street would have been a plus for business. That was in January 2019, when the space had already been vacant for about a year. That space is still vacant! To me that indicates they want too much rent for the market, but I’m sure they haven’t lowered it.
Soprano2
I totally believe this is true. Lots of empty big stores and empty or almost empty strip malls in this town, some that have been vacant for a couple of years or more.
Roger Moore
@StringOnAStick:
It seems like a really dumb thing to do. Unless you’re generating paper losses rather than real ones, losing money to keep your tax bill low is cutting off your nose to spite your face. You’d be much better off making what profit you can and paying tax on it.
Low Key Swagger
@Soprano2: Another thing most people don’t get about commercial leases is that repairs/maintenance is not included in the base rent. So, an large HVAC repair can run thousands. My joint was 5000 sf, and the cost of heating and cooling the size place will scare the crap out of ya. I had a busy bar, so it made up for the losses I took on the food side. One thing I did made a big difference…I cut my bartenders in. If my pour costs were below the baseline I set, they whacked up the difference. My theft went nearly to zero. That helped. Lastly, the risks are higher in you first 3 years or so, by then you have paid off your equipment and have a steady flow of regulars.
ProfDamatu
@Jeffro: Very likely. What I’d actually like to see is additional TT professor lines, but also a major expansion of tenure-track or at least long-term lecturer roles, which would have limited to nonexistent research expectations. Why? Because if we suddenly replaced the vast majority of adjuncts with traditional TT lines, most of the current adjuncts would simply be out of a job, because if you’ve been freeway-flying (or teaching a shit-ton at a single institution, like me) chances are you haven’t been able to keep up a research program that would be competitive for a TT position.
Heck, there was an entire “lost cohort” of PhDs that occurred during the 2008-2009 economic implosion – there was a de facto hiring freeze in much of academia for 2-3 years, and a huge chunk of those unfortunate enough to earn their PhDs during those years got shut out completely when hiring resumed, because despite *watching the damn implosion, and often seeing their own retirement accounts cut in half!!*, hiring committees passed up those folks for shiny, newly-minted PhDs (because clearly you must be a shit scholar and teacher if you couldn’t will a job into being during a generational recession). Same thing happens once you’ve been adjuncting for a few years, even if you’ve still published.
But yeah, depending on course loads, it’s probably anywhere from 2-4 adjuncts whose pay would be equivalent to a single full-timer. And you’d actually need probably at least 2, probably 3, full-time lines to do the requisite teaching work of those adjuncts. Yeah, lots of adjuncts teach just one or two classes, but others teach way more than that, and generally TT faculty have hard caps on their teaching loads. (This is one thing that militates against my uni offering me a full-time role; they’d be paying me more, plus benefits…and they’d be getting LESS teaching out of me! Right now, I teach the equivalent of a 5-5 load, but the standard load for a FT faculty in my department, including lecturers, is 3-3.)
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
Having been an employer for 2 decades, what you say is true. An employee does have to be able and have the desire to work within the limitations of the job and the employer. I have found over the years a lot of people start working with the idea of a paycheck and no idea of the job or where it might lead. If they are a good fit for the job requirements they can do well and prosper, even if they change jobs. However I’ve also seen those who get hired and have zero skills for the job. Mostly that’s small employers though, bigger companies usually have a personnel department that may or may not have much connection to the realities of the particular job but they also I think just as often hire incompatible people, based upon the people willing to work for the pay, not the job.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
It depends on a number of issues. If you own a few commercial properties you might own some of them outright or close so rents are mostly profit. Having an empty one can be advantageous for tax purposes and it very often will not reflect much if anything in the resale value of the property. Place I rented in northern CA was a 4 unit street front location and for a year during the last recession I was the only occupant. The leasing company was working for the owners and quit because they’d find a lessee and the owners would screw up renting it. One time the a tenant was parked out front with a full rental truck, had the cashers check in his hand and they changed their minds for no good reason.
Gvg
@Soprano2: it is not all a matter of them not paying enough, BUT almost all of the ones who whined loudly on the news that the government was paying too much unemployment and that was why they couldn’t hire….turned out to be offering ridiculously low wages and the republicans made a big show of cutting unemployment off, which naturally had no noticeable effect.
And then there is the historical record that we all lived through where conservatives are always against raising minimum wages, or union power or anything else that would give lots of people a better life. So people like me have a lot of built up resentment and are going to flame those fools.
nothing real is ever simple though so of course there are other things going on.