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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

It's not just wages - like alot of what we can do is making shitty jobs less miserable, ensuring everyone gets some amount of vacation and sick time, insuring everyone has cheap or free healthcare access, ensuring everyone has relatively fixed schedule - eliminate punitive workplace policies, on stuff like attendance and other shit that makes being there miserable. Like, you can do a hell of alot to reduce peoples day to day misery.

There used to be some sort of a tradeoff, there used to be a ton of jobs that didnt pay well, but they were not miserable places to work at, that was kinda the tradeoff, you know - you like, didnt get a ton of money, but the workplace wasnt awful. Those jobs still exist but they're rarer.

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All of those reasons are valid, but not unique to hospitality industry.

I think we might be backgrounding one particular reason too much: customers are a headache. One of the subheadings of the article is "They're just yelling the entire time".

I find it interesting that this hasn't been discussed as much, maybe because we are culpable? Maybe at one point of time we were that high maintenance customer? Maybe there is a general culture problem we all have regarding how we treat strangers, especially those who are bound to serve us to an extent. And looking at that need for transformation might be hard on our ego than the transformation of structural non-industry-specific inequities.

I highly second this.

I've worked retail before (Apple Retail, Genius Bar specifically, so probably one of the more decent and better paid retail jobs in the grand scheme of things), and dealing with customers was one of the primary reasons I changed careers.

You only need so many people looking down on you because of nothing other than your job, to make you want to do something else.

A purely introspective approach is fundamentally limited to addressing the cases where the problem is within ourselves. It cannot address cases where the problem is within other customers or within business practices.

Is that a cultural thing? I'm always surprised when I see American service workers complain about abusive customers, because in my region in South India I've very very rarely seen anyone abuse their servers. A few complaints, maybe, but no yelling or pressure. IME the class divide in India is wider, so it makes me even more confused.

I believe so. When I was working in customer service, I had an English coworker. He said that the way customers treated us regularly would probably never have happened in England. Not once. Things haven’t gotten better since then.

I can only compare the USA and The UK but my experience is that the customer/server relationship in the USA often takes on a “master/subservient” tone whereas in the UK that kind of behaviour would be considered “posh” and somewhere between laughable and despicable by the majority.

This is my experience too comparing UK and USA. I worked as a cleaner for some summer schools at university and only the American students (c.f. UK and Japanese students who were also there) treated me like I was complete trash. It was very eye opening.

I was shocked in the US to see an American colleague get really angry with a waitress over the quality of a steak. It's ok to complain but to think you can dump anger on someone who is on minimum wage and who had nothing to do with the problem is beyond me. I lost any respect I had for him.

Several of my single-and-dating women friends have told me they pay close attention to how their date treats the server when they first go out. If he acts like a jerk to the server, they assume he'll eventually act like a jerk to them too and thus there won't be a second date.

Could be cultural, but a data point from France is that while I, personally, don't often see abusive clients, I have friends who work in this industry, and they do complain about this.

Some of them are Americans, and they tend to find working here more of a drag than in the States. They mostly complain about people being generally rude, followed by big parties each having extremely specific requests and later quarreling about the check (as in who has to pay for what).

They also mention that they usually make less money here, because although the wages are higher, they don't usually get any tips. Also, cost of living is higher (Paris, as opposed to US cities other than NY / LA / SF).

Management culture shifted sometime ago, I've often said unions are a problem you earn. We are contributing here to the problem as a society, but management is often just outright hostile now in service sector jobs. Employees are treated as disposable fungible objects, with no inherent value.

Like, There was a cultural shift some decades ago, and as corny as it sounds, the shift in culture began when we went from having a "Personnel Department" to "Human Resources" - resources are something you often extract and use up, to the point we have a special way to call out resources that are renewable.

As much as I hate the "words matter" phrase, I think here they clearly do, as they've clearly subtly altered peoples thinking about people who work for them, and their disposability.

At eery restaurant job I worked and every restaurant job anyone in my family worked, the management was poor. Their worst sin was writing the schedule last minute every damn week and wielding it like a weapon. Get on the wrong side of the boss and you get the worst shifts posted at the last possible notice.

Changing Personnel to Human Resources was definitely the start of that process.

It was an attempt to "professionalize" the work that Personnel departments did and make it sound more important.

It meant that you could have "Vice President of Human Resources" which sounds as "impressive" as "Vice President for Manufacturing".

It also leads towards today's stupidities where these same people are called things like "Leader for People and Culture" or some other BS touchy-feely title.

Employers do what they can to commoditize and standardize their use of workers. Anything to make them more fungible makes them more replaceable and therefore easier to a) lower costs (ie wages) and b) automate.

I must say, as much as I agree with the contents of your argument, and I am not saying this was intentional, I resent the fact that you've co-opted the reply-space to plug back in managerial or organizational culture issues, which was already being discussed in the rest of the thread extensively.

I wish you would have stayed on topic with the idea of customer culture issues, or lack thereof.

Sorry for the late reply.

Who do you think allows customers to get away with this bullshit? Spineless management.

Everything goes back to this as a root problem.

I've worked in various retail jobs. Most customers range from kind to inoffensive. The negative experiences from the exceptions stand out and occupy more headspace.

If you (general - not you) think you could improve how you treat people, please work on improving, but most people here are probably fine and have nothing to feel guilty about.

Healthcare, retirement, everything required for living should be socialized. Old people today have Medicare and Social Security, but we need to finish the progression to Star Trek and just make sure there's enough to go around and that it does go around.

The other part is that misery, fire bad customers and bad managers. It really isn't that difficult to be polite.

> Healthcare, retirement, everything required for living should be socialized.

Indeed. Many small businesses can't even afford sponsoring a sick leave directly AFAIK. At my location (in Europe) you pay a part of your monthly wage to the social security fund and once you get sick it covers your salary in the amount like if you kept working (and also pays you basic pension once you get too old).

In which country is this?

In France, the "social security" (run by the state) doesn't cover the full salary, not even close. It only covers up to 50% [0], and only after three days (if you have 10 single sick days, you lose 10 days' pay).

You have to have your own insurance ("mutuelle", usually chosen by your employer — which you cannot refuse, but can augment) to have a better deal.

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[0] It covers 50% of the salary, but the maximum salary taken into account is 1.8 times the minimum wage, which is 2 798,24 € before tax.

https://www.ameli.fr/assure/remboursements/indemnites-journa...

You write that 50% of nearly 3k Euros is bad. I can see where it would be bad. But in the US, you would have to fight tooth and nail for YEARS to get disability coverage that "good." US Disability payments average around $1500 or so a month, and you often get rejected your first application or for several rounds of appeals.

Source: am on disability.

Thanks for saying this. I feel that a lot of the time people forget about post scarcity. People can focus on the dystopia but I feel that it's important to remember there are other options. A lot of us are already living post scarcity and helping others. We are so close to limitless energy generation it is a matter of when not if it happens. Thanks

Socializing those things would also make basic entrepreneurship much more practical and make failures of entrepreneurship much less harmful (such as the many restaurants that fail in their first year), hugely benefiting the economy as whole.

I'd like to see data from other parts of the world, but at least for France, this argument may hold some water.

A crude comparison of business formation between France (with socialized healthcare / retirement) and the US (without those), shows that the numbers are fairly close. Data is for 2020, which saw a 4% rise for France, whereas in the US numbers were stable. France also doesn't have as much of an "entrepreneurial" culture as the US, meaning people are much more likely to "look for a job" rather than found their own business.

France: Population: 67M, 850 000 new Business, 12 700 / 1M pop.

US: Population: 331M, 3 600 000 Businesses, 11 000 / 1M pop.

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https://www.census.gov/econ/bfs/index.html

https://www.insee.fr/en/statistiques/5359569

Interesting statistic. The one year may be a bit of an outlier for the relationship. If you look at the 2010-2020 period in the data linked above, the US had a significantly higher growth rate in business formation (75% vs. 36%). This is not explained by growth in population which were identical over the period (7.2%, wikipedia).

That's the dream, hopefully it comes to pass, but for now implementation remains problematic.

How do you pay for it?

Will it be run by the same entities that are having so much trouble balancing Social Security and preventing Medicare fraud?

How does Germany do it?

In Germany it's reverse. In the typical case the waiter verbally abuses the paying customer. Like when are not friendly enough to the waiter. Or you only can pay with credit card

Is Medicare fraud really a meaningful amount compared to how much it pays out? Europeans have had the same issue for decades, you can’t give things away without some grifting. But that’s part of the cost. Usually not a very large one either.

Just a quick looks suggests it is a big issue. Hard to get firm estimates (presumably because we only know about the people who get caught) but one estimate has it at 7% of total expenditures of $700 billion which puts it at around $49 billion / year.

https://safeatlast.co/blog/medicare-fraud-statistics/

which is less than the fraud in private insurance industry, which is 10%.

https://www.propublica.org/article/we-asked-prosecutors-if-h...

I think I get 15 paid sick days a year, 15 vacation days with an extra day added each year, and 12 lieu days that I get off but no pay. This was the first year having it. What a difference it makes to my mental well being. I spread my days off out so I get lots of 3 day weekends and I feel a lot less burnt out. The sick days are a big one. If my kid is sick or I hurt myself or I have a bad tooth or just feeling down or something just call in at least half hour before my shift and it’s all good.

From a European perspective, it boggles my mind that sick days can be limited. What happens when you run out? You get fired for not coming into work, I imagine?

Sometimes, yes.

There's a few possibilities I can think of:

* Unpaid sick days

* The limitation is the other way around, they don't want to give a single pool of 30 paid days off, you're limited to 15 vacation days

* If you have a good relationship with your manager, it's a soft limit and they'll allow you to go over as long as it's not abused

* If you're part-time/hourly, trading days/hours with a co-worker

Our HR department combined vacation days and sick days into one pool several years ago when they realized most of us were faking sick days to get more vacation time.

In Europe typically there are unlimited sick days, but the company has insurance to cover your salary after a certain number of days per year. You typically need a doctor's note after 3 consecutive days, and if you are abusing the system the insurance company (who is a pro at this) will quickly investigate and terminate / claw back their coverage.

That's a good deal. I'm in the UK and I've never had anything like that. I currently have ten paid sick days per year and after that it is Statutory Sick Pay (SSP, £96.35 pe week) for an additional 26 weeks. SSP is better than nothing but it's not great.

Looking back, all of me previous jobs have offered 10 days sick pay and I've always assumed it is a de-facto standard over here.

In my last job (Ireland) one of my team mates had a serious health issue, and was off sick on full pay for an entire year

The Family and Medical Leave Act protects most (IANAL) employees for up to 12 weeks of unpaid time off per year at the federal level. At some point Americans with Disabilities Act protections kick in and after a few months of a serious illness temporary or permanent disability insurance comes into play.

It's not the dystopia its made out to be but even in the best states the inconsistencies between the layers of protection and myriad of rules cause a lot of people to fall through the cracks.

While this is true technically, in practice many companies will make an excuse to fire employees who take "too many" sick days. Like if there are layoffs, the sickly employee will be in the round of layoffs.

Also, if you work a service job and miss too many shifts due to illness, they'll just fire you for being unreliable.

From European perspective, yes the sick days absolutely can be limited - see Poland or Czechia. When you run out you better have acquaintances among doctors and at the appropriate public offices. Otherwise you're sick, fired, no income.

Well if I ran out of sick days I can use some vacation days and if that ran out I could get a doctors note and go off on medical leave. It is like unemployment in a sense and I would be eligible for I believe 55% my wage while off. If I just needed a few extra days and not really wanted to deal with the hassle of medical leave paperwork I am in good standing with my employer and would simply need to ask and could have some unpaid sick days for sure. So essentially the 15 days is just what you can take off and be paid my the company. Also not all companies offer these benefits I work in health care.

> There used to be some sort of a trade-off, there used to be a ton of jobs that didn't pay well, but they were not miserable places to work at,

I think protecting this enviroment is also important for middle class if only for selfish reasons. As if you have the fall-back of 'stuff it I'll go flip burgers for a while' then middle class jobs are more protected as employees know some people will walk out for the lower paid but stress free job as its an option, which in turn flows up the chain at each level.

> Its not just about wages … insuring everyone has cheap or free healthcare.

That is exactly the same as raising wages.

Outside the USA (or at least HN), its common for companies to negotiate remuneration on the total cost to company [1].

This includes wages, taxes (e.g. training taxes), pension, health-care, phone, etc, etc.

Its weird that commentators here somehow think that companies don't incur these freebies you want as real costs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_to_company

The problem I have with that is getting the actual number. Employers aren’t sharing that and I don’t know how much I actually cost my employer per year. I can guess by summing my salary, PTO, healthcare, taxes, etc. but that’s probably grossly inaccurate. Is also Very hard to comparison shop companies benefits packages when many are very reticent to hand out the official rate and coverage documents including their contributions.

All of that costs money. Are we as customers willing to pay for it? While a lot of us on HN can afford the price increases, not everyone else can.

I have a feeling that wage increases will come, but there will be less employees and the remaining better paid employees will be augmented with technology in order to serve more customers ie more automation

Businesses might ask customers to pay more. They might instead pay CEOs and investors less.

Automation is coming regardless.

Most businesses are small businesses, not ones run by mega millionaire CEOs.

but where do most people actually work?

Still small businesses.

JP Morgan Chase don't agree with you in 2014:

"48 percent of all US employees work for small businesses, down from 52 percent in the early 2000s."

https://www.jpmorganchase.com/institute/research/small-busin...

The NYSSCPA didn't agree with you in 2017 either:

"Since 2014, the latest year for which there is census data, this is no longer the case. At this point, 39.2 percent were employed at either a large or very large company, while 26.5 percent worked at mid-sized companies and 34.3 percent worked at small companies."

https://www.nysscpa.org/news/publications/the-trusted-profes...

Atkinson & Lind ("Big is Beautiful") didn't agree with you in 2019 either, specifically taking on what they call the "myth of small business as the engine of job creation"

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/small-business-job-creati...

The Small Business Administration didn't agree with you in 2020:

"According to small business statistics from SBA, small businesses make 99.9% of US businesses and employ 47.1% of US employees."

https://smallbiztrends.com/small-business-statistics

In terms of registrations, sure, but what about surface area? I can only think of very small pockets of places where the heavy majority of establishments are part of some megacorp

The suburbs are especially bad....

In a lot of small business it are the land lords who get the best deal by a huge margin.

When a deli closes up shop because they can't afford to hire people - it isn't for lack of customers interested in food. Food is a basic necessity that people will consume in as many varied forms as budget and tastes allow.

The notion that a deli would simply close up shop because they couldn't hire people at a wage they deemed reasonable means they either couldn't be bothered to try higher prices/quality - or for some reason they are unable to (e.g. high debt service costs). The building sitting empty and idle costs the business money, so it's surprising they don't at least try something.

Around here, 16” cheese pizzas have gone from “around $10” just 8 months ago to “around $15”.

Pizza places that would be jammed from 6 to 8 PM with a line for pickup are now ghost towns. The one I was in last night at 8:15, workers outnumbered customers (dine-in plus pickup).

The roast beef place that I’d frequent on a particular errand went from $6.50 for a large roast beef to $9.50. What used to be a 15-deep line at lunch is now “walk straight to the register and order”.

Customers are only willing to pay so much for food. That well isn’t infinitely deep. (Maybe some of the gap is COVID, but people are out doing plenty of other things, other restaurants seem to be doing well, and these places were jammed during the pickup-only phases of COVID, so I think pricing is a significant driver of reduced volume.)

Anecdotally this is me. I work from home 3 days a week, 2 days in office. Pre-pandemic I ate breakfast, lunch, and sometimes dinner in the road...2.5 hour commute. Food prices have increased 10-40% at each one of those stops. Now I eat one lunch per week out to socialize. The other 5 meals that I used to eat out are groceries I buy at the store and carry in.

The reason I was at this second-choice (also virtually abandoned) pizza place last night was that our normal/preferred pizza place had jacked up their prices so much. This one had done the same, which ensured that parking was plentiful right in front of the joint, but also meant that the owner was forlornly leaning on the empty parking meter rather than being needed inside selling pizzas.

I suspect I'll now mostly eat out when the company is keeping me on the road (and paying for it), but will overall eat a lot more at home now.

Probably healthier anyway, but this can't be good for restaurant owners and workers.

> Food is a basic necessity that people will consume in as many varied forms as budget and tastes allow.

Food has supply and demand like anything else. People have to eat, but they don't have to eat at the delhi.

For example, if they charged $50 a sandwich it would probably not work. Maybe the business owner is just being stupid, but its also not impossible that they ran the numbers and they just didn't add up. That happens sometimes in business. I havent seen their books, i dont know what the numbers on their business look like.

The most import parts don't cost money. Fixed schedules, non-punitive work rules, flexibility, treating your employees like they have value. The shift in culture began when we went from having a "personnel department" to "Human Resources" - resources are something you often extract and use up, to the point we have a special way to call out resources that are renewable.

A business is not a business if it’s only profitable on exploitation.

A business is a business if it has customers. It only stops being a business if it loses those customers or it's no longer profitable. Whole Foods was one of the 1st grocery retailers to treat their workers better, yet at the same time many people nicknamed the store as "Whole Paycheck". What customers are willing to pay for or more importantly what they are able to pay for is also an important part of the conversation.

Even letting cashiers & staff sit down would be something, but apparently business owners want modern day humans with the mentality of Victorian era maids and butlers cleaning the silverware for minimum wage and working unpaid overtime as if they expect that is what the customer wants for some reason.

As a customer, I want to see that the people who provide me the goods and services I need and want to function in society are as well treated as I would treat myself and nothing less.

If they're sitting down but upbeat and attentive, I'm satisfied.

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