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Comment by aazaa | Hacker News Reader

> “You put an ad out and nobody even interviews,” Wilderotter said, echoing Barrios.

That's because you're not offering enough money. Raise it by 20%, 50%, 200%. Keep raising it until you get qualified applicants.

You will eventually find a price that attracts the people your business needs. And if that price is too high to turn a profit and there's no other way, shut down.

Article after article with business owners acting like they're entitled to pay workers sub-market and/or sub-living wages.

Time to wake up and face the fact that large sectors of the service economy are no longer viable due to decades of misreported inflation, trickle-down economics, and disastrous, unchecked monetary policy blunders.

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The issue is that a lot of places are ran on thin profit margins. You would have to raise the price of goods, which then means you have to raise the quality of goods as well to outcompete highly optimized chain restaurants.

So the alternative seems to be…don’t do that, and be short-staffed while paying those who do continue to show up poverty-level wages for an ever-increasing workload. The quality of service and the reputation of the business suffers that way, causing them to fail or at least give up more business to other places that are raising prices accordingly.

> outcompete highly optimized chain restaurants.

This makes no sense in context.

Highly optimized chain restaurants are not known for paying waitstaff high wages.

> You would have to raise the price of goods, which then means you have to raise the quality of goods

You use the same ingredients as the day before: “This is the price of a steak in Lake Tahoe now.”

Thin profit margins? Oh, boo hoo! So frickin what?

The free market runs in both directions. When labour is available, businesses use it to cram down wages - “if you don’t like it, find another job”.

But why is it, now that there is a wage shortage, we cannot use those same words back at businesses? “If you don’t like the lack of workers, increase the wage you are offering”?

Because that is exactly the problem. The free market is looking at the offered wages, and are showing businesses that those wages are not high enough in the simplest and most unambiguous way possible - with zero applicants.

And yet, businesses are squalling like spoiled, entitled babies that have just hit themselves with a hammer, and are blaming anyone but themselves.

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