Perhaps the industry is not sustainable then.
If this industry literally cannot afford to pay people a living wage, if no one wants to work for them and they can't remain profitable by making working conditions better, then they just shouldn't even exist.
If your average American working a full-time job can't afford to eat out at high enough prices to keep restaurants afloat while paying decent wages, that sounds like a systemic problem—and we already know that one of those exists here.
This isn't really true. Restaurants exist to fill a bunch of different needs; experience, novelty, convenience etc. And expense isn't a particularly good predictor of quality.
I do agree that once you can cook well you're much less likely to be happy at an overpriced generic version of something... which is right where fast casual and big chain casual is aimed. But sometimes you go for the company and not the food, etc.
This cuts both ways, some types of pain are easier to take on at home. During service, time and focus are at a premium - which is way almost every place cuts corners on e.g., risotto.
Once you can cook well you learn that cheap is typically bad food. Expensive food can be good or bad, the good is worth it for those other reasons you state.
Not really. I had a great tacos the other day from a food truck, and great Ethiopian dinner on the weekend. Both cheap and not something I could reproduce easily or at all.
On the other hand, what you say usually applies to the ragu at a fast-casual.
So it depends.
Yet sometimes I crave a fried chicken sandwich and to hell if we're going to spend the time doing that ourselves. Life's too short and that's way too much work.
A couple of decent summaries:
* https://www.thedailymeal.com/eat/why-home-cooked-food-never-...
* https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1f1vr6/e...
People always need to eat.
It’s not fiscally viable closed system. Restaurants operate on tiny margins and come and go as frequently as software startups.
We keep trying to hitch biological necessity to ridiculous memes of social capital accumulation, inventing more abstract and Byzantine math as if literal reality will implode if the rich can’t earn a profit.
Like healthcare, the routine is eating is obviously necessary. Is the industrialization?
If you are a KFC/Burger King/McDonalds franchisee then it seems to work but I have lost count the number of establishments that open/closes in that one spot of our local mall.
Pub/Indian/Pizza/Chinese/Fish & Chips/ - they come and go.
McD is more strategic: They want a good business plan, location, etc. and are very picky at the cost of some false negatives.
Wrong.
"From the beginning, the minimum wage was meant to be a living wage—meaning families could live off of the pay comfortably, rather than struggling paycheck-to-paycheck" https://www.lendio.com/blog/minimum-wage-livable/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carriesheffield/2014/04/29/on-t...
And who worked the day shift?
There are a lot of people who like having a job, but don't really need the money. Those that need the money move up to management if they can.
These people exist, I do not believe that any of them work at fast food restaurants. That’s an incredible amount of stress to put yourself through to “get out of the house” and meet new people.
> Those that need the money move up to management if they can.
I think you’re overestimating the size of management by quite a bit.
Most people decide fast food management isn't for them, and move elsewhere. The ones who remain dropped out and need the free training.
> Most people decide fast food management isn't for them, and move elsewhere.
Perhaps it was too stressful? Just a thought.
Management is more stressful. That is a different from the line worker who has been working the same position for the last 5 years, with no interest in advancing. I saw several people refuse advancements because they didn't want the stress: they knew how to do their job and it wasn't stressful at all anymore. (they learned to shut off the customer who yells at them while the cook is behind on orders - this coping is an important skill)
Then your experience is atypical.
> Management is more stressful.
But you said it wasn't stressful. Which is it?
> they learned to shut off the customer who yells at them while the cook is behind on orders - this coping is an important skill
Uhhh, this is not a good thing. You're describing someone shutting down in the face of excessive stress.
I'd also point out that claiming that it's "not stressful" and being shouted at by customers are mutually exclusive. Being shouted at is a stressful experience, definitionally.
Deskilling, derisking, outsourcing. Companies used to run their own email, which required a competent mailadmin, nowadays you outsource it to Google or Microsoft.
Most companies didn't hire a competent mail admin, their IT guy would run Exchange on the company fileserver as a part of his other duties.
Most of the large companies that used to hire a competent mail admin to run their mail servers still run their own mail servers.
That's an odd way of looking at it. Surely what happened first isn't that the expectations of fast food jobs changed out of the blue. Could it instead be that other jobs which adults worked to support their families went away?
2) Have you actually looked back and compared that salary to the cost of living back then? I think you might be surprised how many people could, and were, supporting a family on a job that “anyone with a pulse” could do.
Any sane economist that has to solve for the constraint "everyone has to provide for themselves" aka the mythical republican "responsibility" would first start by creating enough jobs to reach full employment. When you leave everything up to responsibility you also have the duty to provide everyone with the ability to live up to their responsibility.
Society as a whole doesn't benefit from exploitation or unsustainable businesses.
In a pandemic with vast spending deficits, the government is giving out mortgage holidays, 95% mortgage scheme, stamp duty holiday etc.