A Fast-Food Problem: Where Have All the Teenagers Gone? | Hacker News Reader

A Fast-Food Problem: Where Have All the Teenagers Gone?

nytimes.com

29 pointscribbles43 comments

I note from the article: "Mr. Kaplow has tried everything he can think of to find workers, placing Craigslist ads, asking other franchisees for referrals, seeking to hire people from Subways that have closed."

it does not say anything about 'Mr. Kaplow has tried offering higher wages'. This relates to an older HN article - "Employers will do almost anything to hire workers, except pay them more" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17506044

Well, there's one example of higher wages in the article:

> Tamra Kennedy, who owns nine Taco John’s franchises in the Midwest, started offering $100 as a bonus to new employees who reached 100 hours. She has started offering merit increases twice a year, and she pays all employees more than the minimum wage.

100 dollars bonus is risible. That's not even 15 hours of federal minimum wage. Does the landowner not realize that when she goes on the record in the NY Times?

> 100 dollars bonus is risible

I don't know of any teenager who would laugh at getting an extra $100.

Thanks for teaching me a new word!

I find it funny how businesses always complain about not getting the workers. If it's the other way around they're happy to pay bottom rate wages. So in this case they just have to spend 15 or $20 or whatever it takes to get employees.

If they can't pay that then that's the market regulating itself away from too many fast food restaurants.

$10.93/h is still a pittance if you want to live anywhere near Manhattan.

Supply and demand. It's that simple. And businesses always whine around when it's not working in their favor. Suck it, close your Subway if it's not profitable to pay market wages.

It feels like if a person can't find a job they are to blame, if a company can't find people the "market" is to blame.

So they talked about Lower Manhattan and Northern California. This is at least partially a housing problem. Nobody who works in fast food can afford to live anywhere near those places.

If you're a teenager and you're living near those areas, your parents are probably rich enough that they would prefer you to spend more time studying or doing extracurriculars to pad your college applications rather than getting a part time job.

Or the parents assist in finding nicer jobs.

I feel like this might as well have been titled "Where has all the cheap, legal labor gone?"

The answer is probably as simple as they aren't offering enough pay or benefits to attract employees. This is probably an indicator that the average employee is finally getting a little more power in the Employee/Employer relationship, at least in the areas where this is true.

I would love for workers to be able to confidently expect to be able to leave a job that is mistreating them and get a new job right away. As for now, it's relatively common to be asked to work off the clock, not get paid for overtime, or work in conditions that are awful as a low-wage worker.

I don't think the average employee is getting more power. I think it's going the opposite way

"Mr. Kaplow has tried everything he can think of to find workers, placing Craigslist ads, asking other franchisees for referrals, seeking to hire people from Subways that have closed."

Everything except paying more.

I had the same thought. But they do write that "Fast-food wages began rising in 2014, and have increased faster than overall wages since."

Less young people getting exploited as cheap labor? Seems like a win to me!

I have a suspicion this generation of parents is not pushing their children into fast food as a way to learn life skills and responsibility. For most, this is a dead end job with a low ceiling.

Although, this has been true for ages. Has anyone ever played Jones in the Fast Lane?

I dunno...does anyone really believe that the job they had in high school was going to be the start of a lifelong career? For most of us, having a job at that age was more about learning to cope with real life. Learning to work with others, maybe dealing with customers, and allocating whatever wages you earned are all important life lessons that are best learned while you have the support structure of living at home rather than later when it can mean the difference between rent and homelessness.

But that's fine: today's young adults can't afford their own homes anyway, so their first job after HS/University still have that support structure.

Agreed, fantastic news. And if it raises the prices of fast-food, that's probably a win as well.

If it costs $2,000 to replace an employee, and the award incentive to stay on is $100. Then I would say the employee is getting screwed out of $1,900.

(If the military can get contractors to run a fast food joint in a war-zone then I imagine that an employer can get employees to work in NYC.)

Listened to a podcast on similar topic, Planet Money [1]. Journalists were exploring why students don't want to take on Summer Jobs anymore. I was listening to it and it was weird for me to listen why it is such a mystery. Commodities are getting cheaper every year, and meaningful things, like college education, housing prices are skyrocketing. What the point to of getting summer job if only thing you can get with earned money is an extra drink in a club. I'm not saying that this is always the case, but from my experience, this is reason why people around me didn't take summer jobs.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/06/21/622312015/teen...

P.S. I'm not a student for a long time. I teach some kids how to code and talked with them on this topic.

Inability to find workers seems to be a very common issue we have here in Utah. There are way too many >$15/hr opportunities that don't require experience or credentials. It's a miracle to keep competent employees at anything less than that. You can also afford to buy a house here for around $15 per hour.

It is going to be interesting in the next few years. We are starting to see a lot more push back about wages.

I wonder if the underlying problem is that owners are irrational, and the reason they are irrational is because franchising selects for irrational people with capital to invest. I'm thinking that even if owners on average lose money, the company selling franchises can be successful, and as long as there is a supply of such owners, the industry keeps on keeping on.

> Since 2010, fast-food jobs have grown nearly twice as fast as employment over all (sic), contributing to the economic recovery.

That seems like a dubious claim, we're talking about low-paying part-time jobs with no benefits in a volatile industry.

"an industry where cheap labor is an essential component in providing inexpensive food"

Guess people have better things to do than to feed late stage capitalism.

Every general labor problem like this can be solved by offering more money until an equilibrium is reached.

If that costs too much to be profitable, the business has an unworkable model.

Unless they have venture capitalists to subsidize them....

Employing a large number of people in small locations all around the country to manually do something seems like the exact opposite of late stage capitalism to me. It's traditional capitalism isn't it?

Maybe, it was a tongue in cheek kind of comment.

What I wanted to say, is, teenagers just got better options today than to sweat away in such an establishment

People also have different definitions of what is a "better option". Even if they all paid the same, I would prefer mowing lawns, cleaning up a construction site, stocking shelves, or an "Office Space" type desk job to anything that mainly involves customer service and the general public.

When I was a teenager, I did have a customer service job for a while, but it still was 10 times less stressful than working in a restaurant.

What kind of options? They sure aren’t mowing grass. Seems like jobs for teenagers are now the domain of illegal aliens.

As a teenager I was working in IT department of a mid-sized industrial company. Which meant helpdesk jobs, assembling server racks, manually installing software on dozens of PCs when it was difficult to automate, maintaining industrial PCs (mostly removing dust or replacing cards), manually wiping HDDs and all kinds of assorted jobs that were tedious but not very difficult with basic understanding how computers worked.

Surely other industries must have similar jobs.

the only teenager interviewed for this story was doing just that.

Twitch and YouTube streaming or Instagram :D

Why is the knee-jerk response to industry labor shortages always to pay more?

It's stated in the article that it's been tried. One biz owner stated there was a $100 bonus in it for anyone who manages to rack up a hundred hours. I don't know how you were as a teenager but when I was a teen $100 wasn't living it large, but it was definitely motivating. Plenty say they offer above-industry wages, so obviously that won't fix the problem by itself.

I believe what's being asked for is an order of magnitude adjustment, and that would significantly change the economics of the industry. I'll hazard a guess and say that nobody's going to really like the quick-service restaurants that manage to turn a profit in this brave new world.

Then again, I've never seen a Chick-Fil-A understaffed. I'd love to see that become the new normal. Demolition Man got it wrong.

A one time bonus of $1 per hour isn't really all that much money.

Especially decades after you were a teen, old man (I'm inferring that you must be a crotchety geezer here).

If $100 for 100 hours is supposed to be motivating, maybe the business owner should start out by raising the hourly rate by $1.

What makes you think they didn't? The article clearly said they tried. Why does everyone assume it wasn't tried?

A $1/hr raise seems like strictly more than $100 for the first 100 hours. It doesn't make sense that someone would try something and then when it failed, offer less.

1. $100 when I was a teenager is ~$170 now. 2. $100 when my dad was a teenager is ~$1500 now.

If nobody likes the fast food restaurants that manage to turn a profit, then they won't turn a profit and it will reduce the use of capital for fast food.

That's a big crux of the issue. Why should a teenager spend X amount of hours on a volatile schedule to get a pittance of money that quite literally gets eaten up nearly as quickly as it comes in? McJobs have been a recurring joke for years, and now that minimum wage cannot actually pay for a living, what's the point?

Or a Freddys. They workforce seems to be a few adults with mostly teenagers. Zero illegal labor.

Demolition Man didn't get it wrong. Just wait until Amazon gets into fast food.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com