This article is much better than I expected it to be.
It communicates the changes that are happening with low-wage workers more vividly than the many articles on the statistics. It's hard not to feel moved by the stories of the people in the article and hard not to cheer for them. Remarkable reporting.
Agreed, refreshing to see a main headline and story actually capturing the state of low wage labor in the US, along side a small but growing movement of people no longer willing to put up with it.
It'll be interesting to watch this play out. As someone who eats way more fast food than he should(once a week on avg), I've noticed this big time.
I was in Savannah this summer and had to go to 3 different places to find one even serving. So many places had one employee taking orders and cooking, both. Even Chik Fil A only had 2 people working, and a 45 minute wait.
The BK near me, open til 12, has totally random hours, and is often closed by 7. The Arby's is staffed by people who give food first and act weird when you stare because you need to pay still. Corporate? They don't care. I've tried to contact BK twice about a gross overbilling - they just don't care and don't respond. The credit card company said they never even replied to their inquiries.
It's all cheap food, and I don't blame the workers at all. Fast food work is awful. I'm just curious how all of this is going to end. People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac, and people aren't going to work at McD for minimum wage.
> People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac
I think people used to say this about Starbucks, where you might pay close to $8 for just the drink.
Fast food can probably save itself by going premium (as Starbucks did, although I don’t know if they are still considered premium) and raising prices and quality. McDonald’s has made that play in the past with the pivot to McCafé and the nicer restaurant design that is now predominant.
What may have to go away is the idea of fast food as something that is attainable for just about everyone. I remember when I was much younger and McDonald’s was a treat - we didn’t have much spare money but my parents could make McDonald’s happen occasionally.
Nowadays I’m totally price insensitive and happy to pay for DoorDash to deliver McDonald’s and tip handsomely. The people who don’t have software jobs or a similar tier probably can’t. Big business will be fine regardless, and if they can’t make it work, the leadership is not worthy of their overpriced MBAs.
I worry about the lower classes though. An under appreciated (for the wealthy HN reader) aspect of the relative success of American development is the broad accessibility of luxuries to the masses. Even the poor masses. If you (dear reader) don’t recognize a fast food meal as a luxury, you are blind to the real consequences of what is unfolding. I understand the desire to cater to labor, but ultimately there are far more consumers than laborers (by definition - all human laborers are also consumers). The grand economic experiment of yanking away the _one_ aspect of the American project (abundance) that has until now been continuing to succeed will have consequences. Not for me, but for the people you think of when you think of labor.
There is a whole class of premium "fast casual" places. Five Guys, Shake Shack, In-N-Out (whose prices are a bit lower), etc. As well as Panera and a whole bunch of chains in that general category.
I rather like them especially when traveling and needing a quick meal (while mostly hating most traditional fast food). But not really places where you take the family for a cheap meal. Heck, I'm in tech and I think the prices are pretty steep a lot of the time. Not that the big fast food chains are exactly dirt cheap if you don't make a lot of money yourself, but maybe doubling their prices for a better product--even if the McD fries are probably still better :-)--pretty much puts them out of reach of many.
This also starts to shade into just regular takeout once the prices get high enough. I rarely order from places like Five Guys unless I have a specific craving for a burger, because once I'm paying $10 for a cheeseburger, I have a whole range of takeout options in a similar price range. More often than not, I end up going for my favorite local Indian place that has excellent entrees priced around $11-13.
Definitely. I don't eat out much at home in part because I don't have a lot of options and I'm mostly fine with cooking myself. Five Guys-class stuff tends to be for places like airports or late night traveling when I don't have a lot of other decent alternatives. For a regular mid-price dinner in a city, some ethnic meal is probably my go-to option.
Burgers also just aren't a good actual takeout option. While takeout/delivery doesn't help any food, Indian/Chinese can usually tolerate it better than burgers. Chicken is another semi-regular go to for me; a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket is something like $5 and fried chicken works pretty well too.
I honestly don't get how Five Guys is an option at all. It's like a half sized burger that has too much on it and it's smooshed up usually and not well put together so it ends up just coming apart on me half the time.
For basically the same price I could get a pub style burger on a nice brioche bun with twice the beef.
I think the value add in Five Guys is in the fries. Apart from the obvious generosity of the amount of fries they give you which completely dwarfs any other restaurant, they go through a serious effort making them taste really good as well. They soak the cut potatoes in running water for 5 hours before frying them in peanut oil with a special double dip method to give a good consistency of fluffy on the inside and crisp on the outside.
I agree the burger itself is pretty mediocre for what you pay. The “all ingredients included” mantra also encourages people to make burgers that fall apart as you pick them up. There’s also nothing really special about it - the company even actively advertises that they use common big box grocery vendors to source their ingredients and anything you eat there is mostly available off the shelf at your local grocery. When I worked there all of our stuff came on a Kroger truck.
>They soak the cut potatoes in running water for 5 hours before frying them in peanut oil with a special double dip method to give a good consistency of fluffy on the inside and crisp on the outside.
FWIW, this is standard procedure for pretty much any place that makes their own fries on location. It might be a step up from most big chains that use frozen fries, but there's probably dozens of small eateries in any decent sized town that do the same.
I actually really don't like their fries so maybe that's part of the problem. I used to work at Chick-Fil-A and would always fry my waffle fries a second time right before my lunch break. That's pretty much the only thing I miss from that job. Being able to make the perfect fried chicken and fries meal for myself in about 5 minutes.
In my (entirely US) experience they haven’t done a good job making sure quality keeps up in restaurants far from their home site.
Their corporate HQ is in Northern Virginia, and the restaurants in that area are excellent (especially the one actually owned by corporate). The same cannot be said of the Midwest. I’m not surprised they didn’t cross the pond very well.
Yeah, I've had this experience with Five Guys here in Britain - the few times I've had one in London, it's been great. Slightly expensive, but quality 'plain, old fashioned burger'.
Visited one in Harrogate on a stay up there a couple of years back and it was ... bad. Given it was a wee treat for myself after a long day, very disappointing.
I brought up Five Guys, mostly because they're one of the bigger and more geographically distributed chains. But I generally agree there are other chains in this general category that are better, sometimes significantly--not that I eat enough at them enough to have a strongly formed comparative opinion. Five Guys is also one of the more expensive and, as someone else mentioned, all their "free" toppings encourage people to toss on a bunch of stuff that makes the bun soggy.
If forced to choose, I'd probably go with In-N-Out though they don't exist around where I live and McDs fries are still better.
5 Guys is a certain type of burger. It’s a high fat burger that is literally smashed into a griddle and usually served with a buttery bun. It’s not trying to be a gourmet burger.
It's affecting them, too. The Five Guys near me, which still advertises hours of 11am-9pm 7 days a week online, is actually only open 11am-3pm M-F, and about half the time is randomly closed for no reason. When I am able to go in, there are half a dozen or more people working.
I'm not sure if it's scheduling or wages or what but this thing seems to be happening across the board, not just places like McDonald's and BK. But those are similarly affected - BK's quality has dropped significantly just in the last 2-3 months, and McDonald's has kept the quality at the expense of closing the dining room more often than not and long drive-through lines.
I cannot trust Uber Eats to deliver food that has fries without the driver dipping into them. Twice in the last few months I've gotten a hand off from a greasy fingered driver and a short order of fries.
I give myself a break from cooking on the weekends and order out, it's been a pretty fast decline in the service offered AND the price has increased.
There's not much recourse either. I can remove the tip, and report the interaction, but haven't gotten my money back. A lot of the stuff I liked to get take out I just can't order anymore, and my trust in the system has eroded.
McDonald’s has always had sealed bags when I’ve ordered, with large tamper-evident tape. They’ve also got advanced stay-fresh fry technology to prevent them going soggy, according to a planet money episode I vaguely remember: https://www.npr.org/2019/10/23/772775254/episode-946-fries-o...
Which depends on how hard the employee presses down the tape. Often, the tape is hardly attached and would be trivial to "remove"/open, and after grabbing what you want, putting it back
That's us. My wife is an excellent cook, I'm completely spoiled. But she wants the weekends off cooking, and we end up looking for easy food. That's what led me down this path of 'what in the world is going on?' and similar thoughts. We're currently spending like 25 a hit(family of 3) for bland to mediocre food and inconsistent service, which just feels wrong.
It is good news. The people that used to have to work for low pay in bad quality of life jobs like restaurants have better options life, so $8.3/person/cooked meal is not possible anymore.
Although, where I am in the US, it has been $15+ per person per cooked meal for years.
A Five Guys about a 20 minute drive away is one of my few delivery options. Whenever I'm tempted I close the computer and maybe call my favorite local pizza place and drive 10 minutes to pick up the order. Burgers want to be eaten right away.
> Fast food can probably save itself by going premium
Here (California) it seems fast food has priced itself into premium territory already but the food is the usual lowest possible quality.
I used to eat lunch at fast food chains way too often for the usual reasons: fast, consistent, cheap.
These days it is pretty slow (for the issues covered in the article) and nowhere near cheap, so they have priced themselves out of relevance to me.
I used to get a handful of tacos as Taco Bell for $5 but now it is $11. Right across the parking lot there is an authentic taqueria with better quality food, happier service and the owner works the counter (so not some chain) and the price is the same. So now I go to the taqueria every time.
Same with sandwiches. There's a very nice local sandwich shop but I didn't go very often since it was somewhat expensive. So I'd go to Subway or Togos for a $6 sandwich. Last time I went to Togos I paid $12 for my usual! But the much higher quality local sandwich shop is $11. So now I go there every time instead.
A burger combo at the various drive throughs is also up to the $11-$12 range. So if I want a burger I'd rather go to one of the many semi-upscale local burger places for a far higher quality burger for around the same price of just a bit more.
Aside from the large cost increase of my lunches, I'm fairly happy with the decline of the fast food convenience. It has driven me to higher quality food and supporting the local businesses instead of the big chains.
American relative[1] abundance was also a thing around 1940 after the Great Depression was over and before Perl harbour lead to increased government debt.
At this time there was low government debt and roughly no cheap Asian imports. Therefore, I don’t really believe your hypothesis.
[1] I mean relative to peer countries in Europe before the war—obviously abundance in 1940 could be attributed to the impact of war on those European countries.
> I'm just curious how all of this is going to end. People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac, and people aren't going to work at McD for minimum wage.
Research on the effect that raising minimum wages has on prices, specifically fast food prices, found that for every 10% increase in wages, some prices increase by 0.36% and other prices decrease[1].
We're in a weird world where it's hard to find roots and causes. All I know is that wages in the lower end are way up, and so are prices for -everything-. A simple minded person may link the two.
But I'm not going so far as to call the research wrong, as wage increases have been caused by a worker shortage and not legislation.
That's always been my fear, in a way. I've long been a proponent for higher minimum wages, and met with folks telling me it would raise the price of everything. On paper, they were wrong.
Today we see it play out, and they are right. But not because they were strictly right, but by happenstance inflation hit everything.
>That's always been my fear, in a way. I've long been a proponent for higher minimum wages, and met with folks telling me it would raise the price of everything. On paper, they were wrong.
Even on paper, they were not wrong. The point of raising minimum wages (which has not happened federally in the US), is to transfer wealth from those who have it to those who do not.
The goal would be for labor prices at the the low end to increase faster than prices, so that the people who were previously consuming more have to consume less, and the people who had to consume minimally can consume more.
When the poor kid who has to work at burger king doubles his wage, the hope is that he can have enough money to save for a somewhat reliable car, at the expense of a richer kid being unable to eat burger king as often.
>The goal would be for labor prices at the the low end to increase faster than prices, so that the people who were previously consuming more have to consume less, and the people who had to consume minimally can consume more.
You're right but the real problem is that those who have the money don't actually spend it on consumption. If they did then you wouldn't need to raise the minimum wage as there would be enough well paying job opportunities for everyone.
A lot of other people have pointed out the current circumstances are extraordinary and possibly not a good read through for a legislative minimum wage increase.
Another POV, anecdotally, from the article:
> Matt and his best friend from McDonald’s, David Putnam, were making $12 an hour at Tim Hortons doughnut shop. The extra money meant David, who was raising his 2-year-old son on his own, no longer needed donated food from the “Blessing Box” near his house. He had recently even been able to treat his mother and stepfather to dinner at the Hunan Buffet across the parking lot from his new job.
Everyone shouts how adding more money will make everything more expensive. In some countries the added dollars don't even circulate once. Inflation is dead.
It seems like you're ignoring that we're coming out of a global pandemic which has led to reduced productivity and efficiency resulting in a goods shortage.
Or, you know, the (global) supply chain is clogged.
> It’s been a troubled few months on the economic front. Inflation has soared to a 28-year high. Supermarket shelves are bare, and gas stations closed. Good luck if you’re having problems with your home heating system: Replacing your boiler, which normally takes 48 hours, now takes two or three months. President Biden really is messing up, isn’t he?
> Oh, wait. That inflation record was set not in America but in Germany. Stories about food and gasoline shortages are coming from Britain. The boiler replacement crisis seems to be hitting France especially hard.
[…]
> In other words, the problems that have been crimping recovery from the pandemic recession seem, by and large, to be global rather than local. That’s not to say that national policies are playing no role. For example, Britain’s woes are partly the result of a shortage of truck drivers, which in turn has a lot to do with the exodus of foreign workers after Brexit. But the fact that everyone seems to be having similar problems tells us that policy is playing less of a role than many people seem to think. And it does raise the question of what, if anything, the United States should be doing differently.
> So why does the whole world seem to be running on empty?
I wouldn't trust any minimum wage research in today's politicized academic climate. These are all models of a complex nonlinear system, it's trivially easy to build a model that will back fit your selection of target data while simultaneously outputting any future results that the modelers want (intentionally or otherwise).
If you can raise wages without any damaging effects that just means you were underpaying your workers. In other words, raising a low minimum wage just works by accident. It's not a very reliable policy tool.
You didn't set a time bound on "today's politicized academic climate," so I had to guess. There's always a new conservative bugaboo with some aspect focused on schools, and it tends to come on 5-10 year cycles.
It's CRT today, teaching about gay people existing around then (post-Obergefell v. Hodges), Sharia law allegedly taking over communities not that long ago. It seems the merits and hazards of paying people enough to live is next with this new labor movement frustrating people who are used to abusing lopsided power relationships.
It's dishonest to dismiss valid concerns as "conservative bugaboos". Pew surveys have consistently shown that the majority of global muslims, for example, support establishing Sharia Law and placing it above local laws in foreign countries. I won't get into the issues with CRT but they're not nearly as cut and dry as you are implying. Nor is your interpretation over labor law. I'm at least willing to acknowledge that the progressive aspect is not entirely without merit; are you truly so arrogant as to blithely dismiss the views of about half the country in their entirety?
Half the country? No, of course not. A quarter at best, and I charitably assume most voting Republicans (the quarter) are as concerned about what's happening to their party as the other ~75% of the country. Some of its leadership, most now dead, decided to lean hard into extremist evangelical beliefs some decades ago and people who took up the reins after are still dealing with the fallout.
But it's incontrovertible this class of bugaboos is almost exclusively shared among people who self-identify as conservative. I didn't say all conservatives; you read that into my comment. I have other criticisms for liberal, leftist, Democrat, etc bugaboos. I'm talking about your comment. You do not represent half the country.
A lot of services used by middle class and even upper middle class people essentially depend on wage differentials.
Compare the level of home personal services that people in the US have compared to Southeast Asia for example. American do use gig services and tradespeople, but even lawn services, housecleaners, etc. aren't all that common. I use the latter two as lightly as possible and I view them as something of a luxury/indulgence. And certainly people mostly don't have personal chefs and that sort of thing.
It's not that hard to imagine even fast food becoming more of a luxury good--although something like my local pizza place that I maybe go to every few weeks seems to be mostly high schoolers so maybe there's still a lower wage demographic that seems reasonable to be lower.
But, yeah, I mostly get takeout there because I'm lazy and if prices doubled, I'd just make more at home.
It's definitely in a weird place. People used to do fast food, expecting not much, for not much money. But plenty of premium options exist. A burger from a steakhouse is like 7 bucks. My local food truck, 6 bucks. And that dude makes it fresh in front of you, and puts tiny fries on it(Venezuelan style, apparently).
That Wendy's charges 5.19 for a single is almost an insult, when 80 cents gets you something worlds better.
So does fast food just disappear? It simply doesn't compete with more premium offerings today. Or do they compete with the steakhouse/foodtruck, and eliminate the fast/cheap aspects?
I've gotten back to traveling over the past month and a half or so and the restaurant business is a complete sh-tshow even outside of fast food (which I rarely eat--at least at the big chains).
Have eaten at a place the past couple of days that was only operating at about 50% capacity outside seating (I assume lack of staffing) and still had about a 20 minute wait. A couple weeks ago was at a place in a different city. Arrived and just got a seat at the bar shortly before 3pm closing because the place was packed. Wasn't opening again until Thursday.
Personally I wouldn't care if McDs went away tomorrow but obviously a lot of people depend on or at least think they depend on stereotypical fast food. (And a lot of "fast casual" at places like Five Guys is a fair bit more expensive. Non-chains are often cheaper.)
Seriously - Carl's Jr's six dollar burger came out in 2001, which was about what a burger cost in a full service restaurant back then. That was 20 years ago.
Bit of an oddity, but I went to a food truck (then known as "burger 2.85") back in 2015. It's now $3.99. Canadian dollars. just proving that such things do exist!
There's no big mystery. In the short term this will will all end with higher employee wages, higher fast food prices, reduced customer demand (more home cooking), and closure of some marginally profitable restaurants. In the long term more restaurant jobs will be automated, and more of the food prep work will be moved to high volume regional plants.
This article is about a small town in Pennsylvania that is literally 1 mile from the New York border. In New York, the workers are being paid $15 an hour while these guys and gals are <$10. You could easily compare prices with a short drive.
I'm up here in northern Illinois where, based on advertisements, fast food workers are getting $13+ for starting wages. They are all hiring, for sure, but all through this summer and fall you would not have guessed that there was a Great Resignation going on. They all have enough staff to make shifts, there is no unusual wait times, etc. And prices are not crazy, either.
You just have to pay the people! And here's an interesting thing that probably also helps:
> The Fair Workweek Ordinance requires certain employers to provide workers with predictable work schedules and compensation for changes.
We have a Taco Bell / KFC combo restaurant in the area. I went to the drive-thru several months back and was told that I could only order from the KFC menu because all of the Taco Bell people had just picked up their stimulus checks and decided to leave.
Similarly I was in DC and my Uber driver told me that he had been living illegally in a friends house he knew was empty but up for sale. When the house sold he had to sleep in his car which was not Uber worthy. When he got the stimulus check he was able to buy a used police car and converted it to an Uber himself by replacing the seats, dashboard, etc. Both these stories show me how valuable those stimulus checks were to others. I would definitely support direct income relief in the future and those types of programs may be the easiest and most direct way to help those in poverty.
>People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac
And this is what's wrong with people. It doesn't matter how much suffering and misery and other negative externalities went into something, it doesn't matter that they're confronted with the truth of these externalities, they will do whatever they can to save a literal dollar.
True, some people are "forced" into consooming only the cheapest things to survive, but many more people really do have an option to free themselves of Big Corpo, they'd rather just submit in order to save that dollar.
There's one fast food restaurant around me that doesn't lack employees and its Chik Fil A... I'm not sure why but it almost feels like they have too many of them.
McDonalds in particular is becoming very poor value.
I've noticed something very odd lately with their pricing as well.
The value menu meals are advertised as $X on the drive through menu. You order one, and they ask you what you want for a drink, and the POS rings it up as $X meal + $1 drink.
If you don't want the drink, they scrub the meal and enter it as $Y sandwich plus $Z french fries, and $Y+$Z = $X + ~$3.
I do not know the incantation required to get a value meal at McDonalds for the advertised price.
>The value menu meals are advertised as $X on the drive through menu. You order one, and they ask you what you want for a drink, and the POS rings it up as $X meal + $1 drink.
why not just call them out on it? ie. "the menu says the value meal should be $x, why am I being charged $x + $1?"
> People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac
They will. Grocery prices are getting out of hand. I live in a particularly expensive part of Canada, but a single steak is $25 at the grocery store. A pound of ground beef is around $10-15. A single beet is like $2-3. A pound of potatoes is $5. 12 eggs is $8.
I'm spending $30-40 to cook dinner for two typically. Restaurants seem like pretty decent value right now.
Those prices are not at all representative of what an average Canadian will be spending though, so probably not relevant to the overall trend. Very few Canadians are going to be spending $40 on cooking dinner for two people unless you want to have steak every day.
I did say the prices where I live are a tad extreme. However rising grocery prices are near the #1 concern of most Canadians right now. There's literally articles written about it on every single news outlet right now.
Are you living way out in the Northwest Territories or something? Those prices would be way high even in the most expensive parts of the US, even at high end grocers, and I am taking into account the CAD->USD conversion.
Just north-ish Alberta. Like I said, expensive even for Canada, but it's pretty easy to see both inflation's effects as well as the effect of supply chain shortages on our food prices as we import most consumer food items.
Even the 7-Elevens near me are no longer open 24/7. The closest one to me closes around 12 and doesn't open until sometime between 5 and 7 am when someone happens to show up. I was surprised the first time I got there at 4 am (couldn't sleep, needed something to eat) and there was a piece of paper on the door saying they were closed because of short staffing.
You don't need a crystal ball to see where this goes. Several European countries have labor policies which set a high floor on the cost of labor compared to the US. What you see there is pretty much what you would expect: Fast food restaurants are more upscale than their American counterparts and restaurant food in general is less popular due to the higher prices.
> People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac,
1)The price of a Big Mac isn't just facilities, labor, material, and marketing. It's also profits.
2)So? McDonalds doesn't have a right to sell a product a particular price point. Someone's unsustainable-for-society business model is not society's problem.
3)That big mac is costing us all money because McDonalds, like other starvation-wage employers, is relying on government assistance programs to keep their workers fed, housed, and healthy.
Wallyworld hires people to help their employees file for welfare. Wallyworld made $183BN in profits last year. That's roughly $80,000 per employee.
Tell me with a straight face that they can't pay people sufficiently that they don't need to be on welfare.
Let's say that means a dollar or two more an hour. Two dollars an hour more for every employee (I don't know how many of Walmart's workers are minimum-wage retail, but it's certainly not all of them) would mean taking $4,000 out of that $80,000.
A five percent profit loss.
For an employee making federal minimum wage at $7.50/hour, a two dollar raise would be 27% pay increase.
>For a firm, gross income (also gross profit, sales profit, or credit sales) is the difference between revenue and the cost of making a product or providing a service, before deducting overheads, payroll, taxation, and interest payments.
Profit after deducting all expenses is net profit.
If $183 billion gross profit is $80000 per employee, you're talking about $5900 net profit per employee. Two dollars per employee wouldn't be a 5% profit loss, it would be an 85% profit loss.
> “There are better ways to go about this,” the regional supervisor replied. She had been thinking about boosting pay at the Bradford McDonald’s, she said, but she was not going to give into threats or give up control. Because of the petition, no one was getting a raise.
If I was one of those workers I'd be insulted she thought I was dumb enough to believe that old lie.
I worked at McDonald’s 25 years ago, for a year during college. It’s still one of the hardest jobs I’ve ever had. The work is unrelenting; customers treat you like a machine; the pay sucks; the hours are constantly changing; there are no meaningful benefits.
All of this is done to reduce the cost and increase the homogeneity of the final product. The product itself has been engineered for decades to be as palate-pleasing and inexpensive as possible. The humans preparing and serving the food are the only weak link in the chain, and they’re treated as such.
All of this so we can eat cheap, predictable burgers. It’s the worst kind of poison — that which kills slowly, and sucks the joy from your life as it does so.
I worked there first job as well. 1995/1996. Tough job, but not too bad. I worked up front running registers and helped in the kitchen as well. I was 6’1/6’2” back then and climbed in the play place tunnels to clean up kid shit and vomit, often smeared everywhere in there. Worked on an Interstate. One night 30 minutes before closing the Tampa Bay Buccaneers rolled in and ordered an insane amount of food. No one was even annoyed. It was impressive how much food they ordered. Honestly, I don’t remember too many issues or “Karen” types back then. The occasional upset customer over an order mistake or something. I always went home smelling like McGrease. It was not an easy job, but I suppose I was treated alright. I’ll take my desk job any day.
What would you consider a bad job? In relation to my current not actually a job job where I do computer shit, I would consider my menial, back breaking, minimum wage first job to be bad.
>In relation to my current not actually a job job where I do computer shit, I would consider my menial, back breaking, minimum wage first job to be bad.
Sorry, but nearly any skilled job could end up in the "bad job" sector, if your benchmark is "cushy IT job". Even Doctors. They may get paid handsomely, but considering the many years they have to spend grinding away studying and taking exams, and the overtime they have to do (in the public sector) plus the on calls and dealing with many sick people, that aint no cushy job.
The easiest cushy job I could think of is tram driver in my city. Don't need to think about steering, just watch the lights, and either hit the gas or the brake pedal, then push the buttons for opening and closing the doors.
The boredom of that would make it very difficult for me.
It's one reason why I didn't opt to be an airline pilot. Trying to be alert during hours and hours of doing nothing but constantly checking things would be very hard. I felt sorry for the crew that fell asleep and overflew their destination by an hour. They were promptly fired after they landed. While I know they had to be fired, I have a lot of sympathy for them.
Same! By the time i completed a private pilot license I was already pretty bored with the actual flying. I thought commercial might be interesting with larger and more complex machines but talking to other pilots, it seemed not to be the case. Also, first decade or so was said to be a low paying grind.
It's obviously a self selected sample, but the airline pilots I've talked to enjoy flying and don't get bored. Their complaints are more about scheduling and management policies.
My father was an AF pilot for 20 years. When he retired, I asked him why he didn't become an airline pilot. He called it "boring holes in the air" and said it was just driving a bus.
As opposed to flying combat fighters.
If the pilots you talked to enjoyed it, that's great. It's just not for my father, nor for me.
> The easiest cushy job I could think of is tram driver in my city.
You are vastly underestimating how difficult it is to drive a tram or any rail vehicle.
It doesn't have a simple throttle and brake like your car has. There are two or three independent braking systems and the throttle needs monitoring of the current going into the motors.
And on top of the complex systems you are responsible for managing the inertia of tens of tons of steel rolling up and down hill in the middle of traffic.
Especially doctors. My doctor asked me the other day if I was working from home. Yup, doing like 4-5 hour days mostly. He was jealous. It’s tough being a doctor all day and though you’re well compensated it’s still so many hours of your life given away to work each day.
Really it’s hard for me to imagine any job cushier than working in software in the comfort of your own home. The work can be mentally stimulating when you want it to be and usually isn’t very difficult if you know what you’re doing, and it’s well paid. Thank god most people don’t have the mind or patience for it, else we might be paid far less.
Doctors also work in a highly credentialed industry that ensures that they will always be paid exceedingly well for the entirety of their career. Their job security is second to none.
A few of my partner's friends do "social media" operations for a large company and I think they work less than 10 hours a week while getting paid a
I can assume that's your experience in your own bubble (in the US maybe?) But where I am in Europe the market is a bit worse and there are companies who will try to squeeze 8 hours worth of coding out of you due to an oversupply of talent and a shortage of innovative companies to work for.
In my experience yes but I live in small country in western Europe that's never on the radar of recruiters from the US, unless they're looking for a holiday destination :).
I never found US tech jobs open for remote candidates that were not some off-shore sweatshop kind of slave work looking to undercut the local US market wages with candidates willing to work longer hours for less pay than the local talent.
The good US tech companies never put their crown jewels in the hands on remote workers from abroad they haven't already known before or gotten through some internal referral.
I'm sure there are a few exceptions and glad to be proven wrong though but that's what the market looks like from my PoV.
It's not a firm requirement, probably just need a bit of overlap with mountain time for logistical purposes. We have one person who works in Spain already.
xwdv, the comp range is listed on the job post and it would be straight salary with benefits for a US employee. [can't reply any deeper, just email careers@carvesystems.com and reference this discussion and I will find you].
> Sorry, but nearly any skilled job could end up in the "bad job" sector, if your benchmark is "cushy IT job". Even Doctors. They may get paid handsomely, but considering the many years they have to spend grinding away studying and taking exams, and the overtime they have to do (in the public sector) plus the on calls and dealing with many sick people, that aint no cushy job.
That is their point. McDonald’s is a bad job because of the bad quality of life at work and low pay. Bad quality of life at work offset by pay, such as with doctors, is not a bad job.
Maybe in your city? In Japan train drivers are basically forced to act like robots. There's actually an ongoing lawsuit over 56 yen (about $0.50 USD) because a train was 1 minute late.. not arriving at a station, but just entering the yard.
I dunno. Other than standing a lot it was not a very hard job. I was treated like a human and my boss would let me schedule stuff around whatever I had going on. I was a teenager in high school though so I only worked like 15 hours a week. I also didn’t need a lot of money living at home. Mostly dangerous jobs, ones that break your body like construction, and ones where you work with people who don’t treat you well are “bad” in my book. Wages and making a living would be a problem is this was your main job though, obviously. I didn’t like cleaning the play tubes, but it never bothered me much.
Whether a job is bad pretty much is exclusively dependent on whether or not you, your manager(s) and/or your coworkers have an adversarial relationship.
It's always interesting to hear this from employees of McDonald's in the US. Here in Australia, it's widely regarded as a great first employer that pays well and provides fantastic experience to young people.
A lot of it has to do with management practices for low wage workers in the US. They aren't treated fairly. Part of the reason why this sector is struggling to hire in the US right now isn't just because of pay: it's the fact that you get treated poorly by management. Better paying jobs that aren't as grueling opened up during the so-called "great resignation" and tons of former low-wage workers have stepped in to fill those roles.
This is sad, but true. One thing I've heard about is flex scheduling, where you don't know your schedule until the last possible minute. Sure, great a project for a guy in IT like me and the VP who manages him back at HQ to get some costs down, but it's absolute havoc on peoples lives. That's one example, but it's nonstop.
One rumor that occasionally makes the rounds is that managers specifically seek to disorient and fatigue workers with hostile flex schedules in order to keep employees too exhausted to seek better work.
It's a little dramatic for my taste, Occam's Razor probably applies, but there might just be a grain of truth to it... at least in the darwinian sense where incompetent time management just so happens to somehow beat workers into submission better than competent time management happens to retain them. The incompetent managers win out over time and a dominant pattern emerges.
I know small business owners in the hotel business that use this tactic to prevent workers from finding other jobs. It is a very common tactic that I would say most small business owners hear or figure out very quickly.
Another is using immigrants or poor people trying to establish themselves as managers in name, but in reality they are there to fill in for the lower paid shift workers who are constantly quitting or unreliable because they are paying the lowest wages.
The “managers” put up with this to earn a steady salary paycheck, but per hour worked, it frequently comes out to less than minimum wage.
Obama admin increasing minimum salaries to $48k from $33k had the small business owners I know frothing at the mouth.
I've seen small to medium sized programming shops doing contract work on web sites or some unknown game company paying people between $25K to $30K a year, and working teams of them 60 hours a week... People with masters degrees in CS, actually making around $10 an hour, so they can have a programming job on their resume... far more evil than fast food, if you ask me.
I do not see the point of ranking it, but I would factor in the probabilities of advancement and improving quality of life for a person with history of programming versus fast food.
Flex scheduling should be downright illegal for part-time jobs, since it requires you to keep your schedule so open that it disrupts your life to the same extent as working full-time hours. Force employers to lock down schedules long enough in advance that people can actually plan to live their lives.
Flex scheduling is one of those things that's had far more staying power in the heads of people in ivory towers than in the heads of people in boardrooms. (not that that doesn't mean some dunce isn't implementing it somewhere at any given time). It bounced around various industries in the 2000s and mostly ran its course when people figured out it increases errors, increases lateness and no-shows, increases turnover and the benefits were scant if measurable. I know of at least one chain of retail stores where the results were bi-modal. The bottom distribution was the stores that just implemented the schedules at face value. The top distribution was the one where managers realized the schedules were insane and came up with their own off the books. I don't think that chain will be trying to push flex scheduling on its locations again for a very long time.
A lot of it is also the American public being selfish and inconsiderate of others. Even at a low wage, I'm sure the job would be more bearable and perhaps even enjoyable if the employees were not treated so poorly by the public and their coworkers.
That’s how Chick-fil-A is in the US. Staff is very well paid, well trained, offered support for college. Customers gush about how well run the places are.
During parts of the worst sections of the labor shortage, I was seeing CFA owners on my Facebook feed saying that they couldn’t hire anyone offering $19-23 / hr so they couldn’t imagine what everybody else must be going through.
Eh, the two CFAs in my area are both franchises. My daughter has worked at both. One has amazing owners who treat the staff fantastic and have low turnover. The other is run by a totally disengaged guy who is not very nice - the place is a disaster with high turnover.
CFA has this unusual model where operators are buying the job of running a location. Hardly any locations are "Corporate Owned" but that's more technicality than reality.
It will all sort itself out. If you can’t hire employees at a certain wage then either wages increase or the job changes. There is no other option. The “job changing” could also be changes to make it more palatable.
Or you change your product/market in a way that is more tolerant of higher wages even if it changes your target customer in a way that excludes a segment of your previous market.
You can increase the price of your product. This is what’s happening throughout the entire economy - workers demand more money, wages go up, prices increase, inflation hits 5%. It’s not surprising.
Maybe. It depends if the wage increases are going to the buyers of your product or not. If the wage increases are indeed flowing to low-paid fast food workers and others in the same general category who eat a lot of fast food, then you can probably just increase the price of Quarter Pounders. If someone who doesn't eat Quarter Pounders is getting the money, not so much.
The obvious other adjustment would be to decrease the rent, but that would affect loan valuations, and we can't have another round of bank failures.
(The other problem is the building materials shortage because you can't inflate yourself out of the shortage of available housing, you need to actually build new construction, but we are getting sidetracked.)
Or this narrative is being used to drive price increases. McDonald’s increased their profits and increased their prices last I heard and one didn’t necessarily drive the other.
Brain Drain is just a theory, and a pretty contentious one at that. There's quite a bit of evidence to suggest that the positive effects of emigration can outweigh the negatives.
They have a massive industry over there training up nurses with the explicit intention of sending them overseas. The net result of this is a top class health care system.
Cash remittances make up 10% of their GDP. This is in addition to a culture of overseas workers sending massive gift boxes back home once a year (often containing expensive things like smartphones and laptops for the younger generations' education).
Plus you have the soft power and less tangible benefits (cultural exchange, etc.)
The Government actually actively encourages people to emigrate, in fact, as it's a great way for the country to get ahead culturally and economically. They simply don't have the industry locally to support the high number of skilled and educated workers they produce.
>What can outweigh intelligent people not improving life in home country but building career in 1st world?
This statement carries with it a couple of assumptions:
- People in a corrupt society will work hard to get an education when it doesn't give them an opportunity to make a better life overseas.
- Educated people who remain in their corrupt, third-world countries of birth will have the opportunities to use their skills to improve their home country.
- People in poor, but non-corrupt and growing economies that have the opportunity to stay and improve things will instead leave.
I'm sure you can find multiple examples to shatter every one of those assumptions (Nigeria really sticks out for the second one).
You actually confirmed my assumptions about self-perpetuating corruption. Tell me who is going to actually improve that if most people with necessary skills and mindset leave? Sending back money alone won't do it. These people may personally have worse life if they stayed, not denying that. But what about global view? First world will eventually have to deal with resulting political turmoil.
>Tell me who is going to actually improve that if most people with necessary skills and mindset leave? Sending back money alone won't do it.
You're ignoring the WhatsApp factor.
Immigrants experience first hand how well Western democracy works and then share that with everybody back home.
It's also quite common, at least in my experience, for people to follow politics back home. Invariably, they advocate quite vocally for more democracy, less corruption and less discrimination.
Whatsapp is not enough! Some of them need to stay there and actually get elected. Democracy needs not only advocacy but also competent politicians, and that's a rare talent. Probably there are enough of them in your country so you can't even imagine that as a requirement. Count yourself lucky.
So the children born in developed countries (who got developed on the backs of undeveloped countries) are entitled to living better lives than children born in undeveloped countries, who should not have the opportunity to move out to developed countries?
If providing a decent life to a hard working, aspirational individual whose work ethic and talent would have been pissed up the wall back at home counts as "developing off the back" of poorer nations, then I don't really see it as a bad thing at all.
Don't forget that many developing countries have a wide array of policies in place to ensure that they can't make proper use of their human capital.
My father-in-law, for example, is an environmental scientist who simply couldn't find work in his field (public sector) back in South Africa in the early 00s as there were racial quotas and affirmative action policies that didn't work in his favour.
He was offered a job in NZ, after a solid year of being unemployed, and jumped ship immediately. His talent wasn't stolen by the developed world so much as it wasted by his underdeveloped home.
I was referring to the era when resources were extracted to developed countries or labor (slaves) were moved around as needed to developing countries as “developing of the back” of poorer countries.
Intelligent people moving abroad, making bank, and sending home a sizeable portion of their cash back home to support their family and used to build their home country's capital stocks.
It's individual persons in the developing world that make the choice to move or not. Why are you so keen to build barriers to prevent them from making that choice?
FedEx using the name FedEx for Express (employees? more highly paid?) and Ground (contractors? Cheap labor?) seems stupid to me.
Fedex has come up in conversation over the past year as the worst logistics company, even from people who know nothing about logistics. All they see is that if it is coming via FedEx, then it very well might not come when it says it will.
Why would you want to tarnish your entire brand image like that? Would you not want FedEx Express to be a different name than FedEx Ground so that people still think to go to your more valuable product than just thinking screw it, I am going with UPS or USPS?
And it seems to be paying off. I'm a manager at a large Unnamed Parcel Service, we had a big conference call 2 days back where the execs were raving about how much business we were winning from FedEx.
They still make us go through a yearly training on how to prevent unionization though...
Most McDonald's restaurants are independent franchises so despite some standardized training there's a huge variance in how managers treat workers. Some are fine, others are terrible.
When I worked at McDonald's in Canada, it also was a hard job, and seen as a good early employer... because it showed you were capable/useful. It was "hard" in that you need to get used to the beat of things, then it becomes sort of fun. But the schedule was no good. Pay was the same as other restaurants (like 6-7$/h back then).
I'm in the USA. Worked for McDonalds starting as a junior in high school and through college. It was a great job for a young kid, I learned a lot about business and restaurant operations. Pay wasn't super, but it was spending money. Never intended to be the sort of job to support a family.
Where does this idea of “Never intended to be the sort of job to support a family.” come from? Half or more of the people I see working at any given fast food chain are adults, which makes sense considering they need some mature people around and people to work during the day when kids are at school. What about those people?
Managers can make good money, I think OP was referring to the entry level positions.
And I would agree, they aren’t intended to provide a wage to support a family. That doesn’t stop people who are doing just that to work those jobs.
And there are also plenty of adults who don’t need to work who do those jobs. I know a few older guys who work part time at Home Depot making peanuts but they don’t need to the money, they need some routine and interactions.
> they aren’t intended to provide a wage to support a family
What are these jobs good for then? How is society benefiting from having people doing this for so little, as opposed to them getting a proper job (that is supposed to support a family)?
The people quitting their jobs to find a living wage and consistent reasonable working hours at McDonald’s aren't 16 though. They’re the people who these jobs aren’t “intended” for. Now that they’re gone where are all the 16 year olds that these jobs are “intended” for?
They’ll either find people at that wage or they won’t.
I’m not sure I understand the handwringing. If some guy opens a used computer shop and asks $1,000 for an old 486 chip I don’t worry about “who is going to buy it?”.
I recall one profiled in the Seattle Times a few years ago. He was working as a Walmart greeter into his 90s. He said he didn't need the money, but the job got him up, out of the house, and socializing with people.
If the greeter didn’t show up for work one day I feel comfortable saying it wouldn’t matter at all, it’s not the same as when the cooks at McDonald’s don’t show. It is nice to have them welcome you though.
That is not the kind of jobs we’re talking about though. People who don’t need to work are not who’s being discussed.
Since we’re using anecdotes instead of data I’ll add some. More than one retiree in my family left the workforce because of Covid because they were afraid of contracting it. I don’t know if they’ll go back to work, but they’re not in the labor pool regardless.
No, I don’t have numbers, I just know several people. Not wealthy by any means. People on pensions, etc.
And sure, some people works those jobs since they can’t find anything else. Not sure what you’re getting at. Would you prefer those jobs just didn’t exist?
Some simple jobs exist so mentally challenged people can find pride and purpose in their lives because they are doing useful work, rather than sitting around being pitied.
Do the mentally challenged universally care about pride in their work and purpose? Isn’t a pointless job still pitiful?
Some people are excluded from being paid the minimum wage and in some cases are exploited. That’s likely not in many or most cases, but my point is that I doubt the jobs were created with the mentally challenged in mind.
Anecdata: I'm a number that supports that, I couldn't live with myself if I wasn't able to do meaningful work. You sound like a cohort of friends I have who run around with "eat the rich" feel-good campaigns and can't be bothered to have dinner with their families; that was presumptuous but I feel like the world would be much happier with more people finding meaningful work (understanding of course that "meaningful" is different for everyone and it's rare that you find a perfect fit at your first/second job) and fewer people asking for the world to change in ways that stroke their ego. Life is an adventure, and an adventure where you never get hurt or face challenges isn't much of a life now is it?
> The humans preparing and serving the food are the only weak link in the chain, and they’re treated as such.
I worked nights at a McDonalds about 4 years back (first year of university) in Canada. You are spot-on about them treating humans as the weakest link.
For instance, I noticed that every carton in the freezer contains an illustration of the item inside (in addition to names in English and French). My understanding is that they simply do not trust their workforce to be able to read the contents of the carton and will gladly slap an image on top to remove any unpredictability from the process.
They’re just not assuming that all their workers are fluent in English nor French, which 1.8% of Canadian residents are not (according to the 2016 census).
And there's a not always inaccurate stereotype about the back-of-house at 'real' restaurants being entirely immigrants who only speak enough English to communicate with the servers.
I used to do package design for frozen and refrigerated foods, stuff they sell at Costco. We were always doing little illustrations showing how to, like, open a bag of croutons and pour it onto a salad. As if we were drawing the manual for how to put on an oxygen mask in case of depressurization. I always get a kick out of looking for those things on food packaging these days.
Labeling something in every way imaginable is basically a free way to reduce the long tail of errors.
I think there's a wide gulf between that and "treat literally everyone like they have the intellect of a toddler" kind of policy making which you see advocated for a lot on Reddit (less so here, but sometimes). McDonalds definitely does that, but my impression is that it's more of an acknowledgement of things getting missed in that kind of work environment than people being stupid. When two school buses pull up and you've got every machine beeping and buzzing things need to be stupid proof.
I still can’t get over the pay people are willing to put up with. I worked at a busy Central PA Red Robin location during high school in the late nineties and usually bused tables. Often the dishwasher would be MIA and I would offer to cover, but only after the restaurant slowed down for the evening (so I could collect on the tip-out from servers) and the rate was $10/hr. I could make a few dollars more bussing and the servers could clear $20/hr or more on busy nights. Over 20 years ago!
I saw a NY Times article about garbage men who make only $15/hr in southern states.
Those that have no other option? I don't get the question at all, not everyone has the chance or luck in life to become a surgeon or a software engineer.
It's more of a rhetorical question to the idiot quotes from the Facebook group about how fast food is a "teenage job". Even as a teenager 20 years ago I wouldn't work for less than $10/hour.
What I don't understand is how people don't see the wage pressure exerted by corporate America in the last few decades. NAFTA to remove a bunch of "real jobs", then move remaining manufacturing to "two-tier" systems where new employees can't attain wage rates that their parents would have made at those jobs, then all the shenanigans at low wage places (just-in-time scheduling, wage theft, toxic customers, no benefits, etc. etc. etc.).
Don't even get me started on how the American "safety net" forces people to work in these shitty jobs. Dare to make over some ridiculous poverty threshold and you get no assistance.
> Even as a teenager 20 years ago I wouldn't work for less than $10/hour.
Lucky you. Sometimes even teenagers have to provide for their family, for even more ridiculous rates because they're teenagers and thus somewhat exploited by society. Not everyone can afford saying no to bad paying jobs.
I'd work for $1 an hour if the alternative was starving or selling my body or dignity. Though in fairness it's much easier and more lucrative to just enter the crime world. No age checks there, but promises of riches and they're always hiring.
Or we could remove luck from the equation and decide as a society to support everyone: living wages, food, housing, health care.
I recognize my luck, which is why I find society so absurd at times. And I for sure have no problem paying higher taxes to extend the guarantees above to all citizens.
I do not know about cheap. I could easily live on healthy (or healthier) food[1] in Eastern Europe, but would not be able to live on food from McDonalds, financially. I come from a poor family, and going to McDonalds was always a reward because we did it on rare occasions due to the high prices. Most of the time we just bought the ingredients, and cooked, which was always the cheaper option, and surprisingly the healthiest.
[1] Food you make yourself from scratch, say: stew of lentils with meatballs
The economics around the world will make how cheap it is vary by quite a lot.
Compared to buying a high quality hamburger in America from people who are paid and treated well, McDonalds is very cheap (i.e. it is easy to find ten times more expensive burgers)
How cheap is McDonald's considered to be in the US? I don't think it's fair to compare a McDonald's to an "expensive burger", just as you wouldn't compare an entry-level cheap car to a Rolls-Royce. Yeah, they're both "burgers", but that's about it.
I also think GP's point was a bit different, as in eating out altogether may have been seen a treat, not McDonald's specifically. Eating in was more the norm, for price reasons.
Over here in France, I do consider it expensive for what it is. I can easily whip together food that is healthier, tastier and cheaper.
And when I say "easy" I also consider the time factor. It takes me less time to chop up some vegetables, throw them in a pot over some minced meat and do the dishes while it cooks. I can also cook some rice / pasta / whatever to go with it. It usually takes around 30 minutes from start to finish. Unless the McDonald's is right next door, it won't even be faster.
It's been years since I haven't been in a McDonald's, but a menu used to cost some 7-8 €. Most other fast-food places (think kebab joint) used to cost roughly in the same ballpark. The kind of recipe I'm talking about above will usually come in a bit cheaper, and there are multiple servings.
Of course, there are cases when you're out and about and can't cook, so YMMV, but for many places where people work "inside" (as opposed to, say, construction), there usually are microwave ovens available, so you can reheat your own food.
Right now where I live there are 5-10 McDonalds I could visit within a 30 minute round trip time. The cheapest burger (just a burger) is 400 calories and $1.39. $7-$8 is about right for a meal, but being fair one of those has more than half the calories a person needs in a day, and it would be possible to live off only that once a day for a long time.
I could make a healthier, better tasting meal for $1.39 in ingredients but that would be quite restrictive. I don't know that I could make a burger. More importantly though I would have to make sure the perishable ingredients were fully used before they went off, I would have to have kitchen equipment and knowhow, and I would have to have the time and energy to make this food. Some of those things are luxuries not everybody has (even though they're quite a bit better financially, healthwise, etc. in the long term)
When I cook for myself realistically, I usually spend more than I would have at McDonalds (not counting whatever my time is worth and kitchen equipment cost).
Could I eat cheaper than McDonalds without cooking myself? Not really, unless we're talking about a few cents.
Could I eat cheaper than McDonalds by cooking myself? It depends on my choices but generally yes, but requiring some careful overhead management.
You can find burgers much more expensive than at McDonald's in Eastern Europe, too. But you also can buy cooked, healthier food and even steak for cheaper. It depends on town, though.
I worked for BoJangles in the 90s at a starting wage of $4.75. They called it a training wage, for 90 days. It sucked, but not the job, or really the customers, it was the management. Managers never had, nor cared for, the respect of their reports.
It's true that it's a cynical interpretation, but at the same time I feel that as a society we shouldn't romanticize poor people working themselves to death as some kind of noble struggle. Same issue I had with the Nomadland movie.
How much more homelessness would there be if there weren't people like Matt? I wonder sometimes if rising housing prices push the Matts of the world out and whole families end up on the street.
There have been several times recently when I realized I was being drawn by the siren's call of fast food - honestly, so similar to addiction cravings - but when I suppressed my emotional response and analyzed it, it was obvious that the labor & time involved with me prepping my own food (or having it ready in advance) was far less stressful than the idea of wrestling with traffic, waiting in a drive thru and dealing with all the other potential negative variables which wouldn't exist if I simply cut that whole loop out.
My emotions were screaming at me that someone else making my food hot and ready was the far better option, but when I really looked closer this was a lie. Sometimes it's true, for sure, but not usually.
Fast food isn't unhealthy. A fast food burger is generally better nutrition (fewer calories) than similar fare from a sit-down restaurant. A diner burger and fries will often have twice as many calories.
There's a pretty wide variety of options at fast food. A quick look suggests you can get a Burger + Fries at McDonalds that totals 1230 calories: Double Quarter Pounder w/ Cheese + Large Fries. A large drink adds another ~300 calories.
Right, and that's a lot less than a meal in a sit-down place.
For example, two days ago here's my lunch from Black Bear Diner:
French Fries: 790kcal
Parm Sourdough Burger: 1010kcal
Soda: 280kcal (same stuff everywhere. Personally I got an Iced Tea which is 0cal at both places)
That's 1800kcal for the meal, almost 50% more calories at the sit-down diner.
Red Robin? Same, unless you take advantage of the limitless fries in which case the calories are endless ...
Nearly any sit-down restaurant will have a burger meal that is substantially worse for you than McDonald's, nutrition-wise. They're bigger and have more fat and sugar, generally speaking.
The ingredients in a burger meal is generally the same, but McDonald's has far healthier portions.
But it also seems like they aren't too happy with their new jobs. I think they pulled the trigger on the strike a little early. "Hey Bradford, 100% of employees here think we need a raise of X dollars an hour. Need to hear back from you end of week latest. Thanks." Might've been a better approach.
There is a tiny window where the workers have more power than usual. I wouldn't be surprised if fast food automation becomes the #1 growth industry in a years time. I applaud anyone with the nerve to fight for better conditions at their workplace, but they need to consider carefully when the best time will be to take their wins before automation is used to crush them.
It wouldn't surprise me in the least that the big fast food companies haven't had plans in the works for a really long time. I think they must know to some extent that human workers will become, perhaps already are, much less economical than robotics. At the same time, automation at that scale and complexity hasn't been battle tested, and public perception may be tainted by replacing people with robots, hence if they are smart then they should be taking their time implementing and deploying automation.
In fact it's already happening at a very small scale:
I find it hard to imagine that more advanced systems haven't already been in the works for a very long time. If all fast food workers around the world rebelled, I imagine we wouldn't even see Flippy the Robot at first; we'd see all the McDonald's buildings gutted and replaced with complete automation systems that work off of conveyor belts.
It’s not obvious to me that the window is tiny. The pandemic shook up the job distribution a lot with some people going into retirement and others changing industry. The dynamics of the labour market will surely be quite different if America approaches full employment (roughly, people are unemployed because they are between jobs in the short term and not because there are no jobs to be had). Likely some businesses will have to raise pay or benefits to compete for workers and those companies that cannot will go out of business. Probably that will be good for employees, particularly low-wage low-skill workers and possibly bad for consumers who will not be able to get so many things as cheaply as they used to, though perhaps producers will just become more productive somehow, or increase quality to match increased prices.
If automation were possible, it would have happened already. Our technology is really far from the point where you can get a machine to reliably construct and sell burgers with no human supervision. Way easier to pay people 25% more than rebuild restaurants from the ground up, and then take the risk your robots don't work as well as you think they do.
“There are better ways to go about this,” the regional supervisor replied. She had been thinking about boosting pay at the Bradford McDonald’s, she said, but she was not going to give into threats or give up control. Because of the petition, no one was getting a raise. If the workers did not like it, they could quit."
She wasn't planning on doing shit. This was just a copout. Heard those exact words dozens of times.
I wonder what the situation is from the business point of view. Have big chains thinned their margins and optimized everything to the point they can't raise pay without raising prices?
These lines from the article about the owner, Enrico Francani, should tell you what you want to know:
>The owner, ferried by his driver, typically visited the Bradford location just once a year, employees said, and not even that often once the pandemic hit. Dustin believed that Francani was relying on his Pennsylvania restaurants — with their low salaries — to offset higher costs in New York where he had to pay his McDonald’s workers $15 an hour.
>Francani did not respond to a list of detailed questions regarding his Bradford location. In a statement he said that he had initiated a series of “listening sessions” with workers and was adding paid sick leave and raising starting wages in Bradford. “We’re very grateful for the outstanding efforts of the McDonald’s Bradford team,” he wrote.
Here is a video of their latest robot. Seems like a joke. The additional seconds taken while its thinking is time that a normal worker wouldn't waste and that is time wasted. Seem like they are using off the shelf robots and bolting on their software. Finally, the mistake GM, Ford and eventually Elon Musk made with robots is that the process needs to be designed from the beginning with robots in mind. Robots follow the BOB acronym: Blind, One-armed, Builder. Make your design so that a blind person that is one armed can do it easily or else a robot will not be able to. These guys are bolting a Robot onto existing processes and this will not work long term(I suspect this was to do cost reduction but it will cost more in the end once it fails to produce effective cost reductions)
Seriously? We have an article about people working poverty wages and fighting hard to get a little more pay and better working conditions and your response is to worry about how we can automate away their jobs? Wtf.
The low pay isn’t the worst aspect of most McJobs. Automating them entirely is probably the best way to improve working conditions. You may magically enforce a mandate that managers are non-abusive, but customers will be just as entitled to always being right as before.
> The low pay isn’t the worst aspect of most McJobs.
It is, though. Being poor is incredibly nerve wracking and expensive, and having more money directly fixes that problem. It's easier to put up with other people's bullshit for $50k/yr vs $25k/yr, all other things being equal.
There's no requirement that to get someone out of poverty we must stick them in front of a McDonald's frier even if it costs us more than letting it run itself.
I think both actions should happen now, wages of the low paid workers should rise and we should still try to optimize the jobs as the market changes (via automation or other means). If somehow we end up with no jobs that make sense to pay humans for in my lifetime then we're on to a different economic model, UBI perhaps. My guess is we won't hit that in my lifetime but at least we won't be paying premium to force people to work shitty jobs instead.
> A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the percentage difference between a $15-an-hour wage and a $9.25-an-hour wage as a more than a 60 percent difference. It is about 40 percent. The article has been corrected.
Let's imagine the government did give the entire of Bradford back to the Indigenous, how do you get rid of all concrete, buildings and pollution while not getting bankrupt because of cleaning costs? How do you actually make concrete back to trees and grass?
A lot of materials from housing can be recycled, not sure about the concrete. Sure, it will be expensive to demolish numerous buildings, factories, replant trees and migrate residents to new thriving cities. But that's a one-time short term cost for long term gains. Think of all those south eastern US cities that get destroyed year after year by tornadoes and hurricanes, yet the government/FEMA still provide aid for them to rebuild... in the same danger zone.
For a $9.25 to $10 raise to do the same shit in a dying town, you might as well leave and go to a big city with more people, mixed cultures and better opportunities.
If someone has been making $10/hr for the past n years, they certainly cannot afford to move to a big city, unless you expect them to live in a homeless shelter.
Love to understand where are these workers went is it one of the following or a mix of things...
- Working now for Amazon, Door Dash, etc which offers flexible hours
- Some to more passed away due to Covid
- Some are scared to even go back to work
- All that unemployment (friend was making 1k a week off it for awhile) money changed people's attitudes towards working and or they saved/invested the money and still are living off of it. If this factor is the largest piece of the pie/puzzle i personally do not want to live in a society in which services that use to be available to readily available are no more cause huge chunks of people aren't working/govt is paying them to do nothing. Wasn't Ycombinator folks pushing for free money ... that didnt work out well for historically for other countries and now here in the US if this is the biggest factor in this puzzlie it's not working out for us (fast food is just the first in line to be negatively affected).
> i personally do not want to live in a society in which services that use to be available to readily available are no more cause huge chunks of people aren't working/govt is paying them to do nothing.
what it seems like you're saying here is that creating a permanent class of mindless worker-drones being forced to work two $9-an-hour jobs is ok as long as you can get a burger for $4.
No i am happy and having been paying more and tipping a lot more (30 to 40 percent) as I appreciate those who are working hard. From restaurants to sub shops (jersey mikes has tipping system built into their P.O.S).
Let's keep the economy and service industry running as strong as it was prior Covid by paying such workers a lot more per hour and tipping them a lot too.
Handing out free money will definitely have a negative affect on being able to enjoy service industry businesses as we did pre-COVID .. we are seeing it now even if its just half the reason of what happened/where all the workers go.
>jersey mikes has tipping system built into their P.O.S).
Everywhere except big box retail does nowadays.
> Let's keep the economy and service industry running as strong as it was prior Covid by paying such workers a lot more per hour and tipping them a lot too.
Let’s keep the economy and service industry running by paying people a salary such that customers don’t feel like they need to do charity work.
Not every is going to be or can be generous ..though the ones that have the means should as it will come back to them in more rewarding ways then filthy money.
> huge chunks of people aren't working/govt is paying them to do nothing.
This is an objection I don't understand.
If I have some solution that can solve some major $PROBLEM, but a side effect of that solution is that some small group of people "get paid to do nothing", I'm completely OK with that. There is, of course, some analysis required (how much waste the "paying to do nothing" consumes, versus the scale of the problem), but I don't have a fundamental issue with it.
However, there seems to be people for whom the idea that people could get free stuff is enough to cause them to completely disregard such a solution.
Why is the idea of people getting things for free (or "being paid to do nothing") so objectionable to people? Can we not acknowledge that it could be an acceptable downside in some cases?
I think I agree with you, but you have to admit it's deeply rooted in people's idea of fairness that everyone's gotta contribute.
This is especially the case if you're already a contributor, it's not hard to find someone who will ask why they have to work all day while someone who sits at home gets benefits for nothing.
It's really only once it's easy to satisfy all our needs that you can get most people to not care. For instance if there's a machine that only a small number of people needs to operate to service a large crowd.
Perhaps it's coming from a perspective of others who feel that they are being abused as well, treated unfairly and hate their job and would very much like to get paid to do nothing, so if then someone "less deserving" (at least from their perspective) would get the thing that they themselves want but can't have, then that leads to strong feelings of resentment and unfair treatment.
"If I can't have it, others shouldn't as well" is not constructive, but a quite widespread, unsurprising perspective.
You are ok with society changing where you can't just go out to a restaurant after 7pm and finding many services you once enjoyed are now hard to come by or don't exist at all cause there's no people to offer such services? Even those sitting around making money for nothing are going to miss that and sitting around being idle is a good thing for people in terms of emotional and in turn physical health?
No doubt we are seeing the affects of what free money (whether it's 50 percent of the cause or more or less) does ..how it changes society ... next time you want a service and it's not readily available like before or doesn't exist at all ..the free money is partly or more to blame!
It is more important to some people's sense of fairness that other people are forced to work, even if this is ultimately fatal to them, than everyone in society is kept as safe as reasonably possible. This causes so many problems.
if your in the US check out your states unemployment website .. google "whatever state you live in" file unemployment claim.
You might be able to get free money which I have in the past as needed but much prefer to work/contribute/reap rewards of working which isnt just all financial it's social..emotional and thus physical.
I've been in horrible jobs too and definetily quit them.. i recommend find where you best fit and make sure you are a team player ... a good bandmate who plays in rhythm and tune with everyone else (aka be chill .. do your work as well as you can and be kind ... it will come back to you). Where I work we just got rid of this control freak developer who wanted everyone to work just like him ... umm no dude this is a band and you are throwing us off ... as we are a chill group who do great work together cause there are no egos and b.s. (work in govt. where people are there to do good work not have a pissing contest or climb ladders).
