The fast-food workers’ season of rebellion
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.)
We've actually found places, by chance, that have huge awesome kids burgers for 5 or 6 dollars.
Apparently some places just sell the same foods cheaper under the kids guise. We aren't scammers, we do have a kid.
In 2001 a Whopper was less than $2, for comparison.
Definitely seems like an abundance of businesses that are not profitable. They are just able to effectively rob their employees enough to keep going.
All the trips to tropical islands, or even eating out even at McDonalds regularly.
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.
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.
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.
For basically the same price I could get a pub style burger on a nice brioche bun with twice the beef.
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're pricing themselves against the likes of Honest Burger or Byron here and not even close in quality.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you ignore tips, you can usually get a (chain) steakhouse burger and fries for about the same (i.e. about $14-15.
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 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.
Although, where I am in the US, it has been $15+ per person per cooked meal for years.
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
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.
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.
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].
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.
Today we see it play out, and they are right. But not because they were strictly right, but by happenstance inflation hit everything.
Good luck convincing those folks now, I guess.
And that money isn't doing much:
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?
* https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/opinion/inflation-global-...
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.
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.
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.
If those are the consequences, bring it on.
But you're right its from an allegedly independent organization.
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.
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.
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.
It's not 183, it's 138 (see https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/gross-... ), but that's not the error. The big error is that the $138B they make is gross profit. To quote Wikipedia:
>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.
Wal-mart's net profit in 2021 was 13.51 billion: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-in....
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.
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.
This is uncharitable. It could be as simple as an $8 Big Mac changes the value proposition (quality/cost) enough that people move elsewhere.
If the main selling point of your product is that it's cheap are people wrong to not buy it if it's no longer cheap?
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.
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?"
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.
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.
https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/bacp/supp_info/fairwor...
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.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/food-costs-calgary-vi...
https://torontosun.com/news/national/cost-of-food-rising-acr...
If I was one of those workers I'd be insulted she thought I was dumb enough to believe that old lie.
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.
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.
Still wondering why or who intends this?
Do you have any numbers on that? Your comment sounds like what an out of touch rich person would say, since only rich people can do without money.
> That doesn’t stop people who are doing just that to work those jobs.
And why is that do you think?
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.
That's exactly the topic of the person I replied to.
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?
They don't exist in my country and people don't seem sadder for it.
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.
I personally know some. I've seen some profiled in the newspaper. I know of programs that match them with jobs.
> Do the mentally challenged universally care about pride in their work and purpose?
Universally? There are always exceptions. But plenty do, just like with everybody else.
> I doubt the jobs were created with the mentally challenged in mind.
I've seen them, for example, working as ticket takers in movie theaters. Nothing wrong with that, and it's a job that still needs doing.
I call BS.
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)?
If a 16 year old needs a job are you saying the jobs should support a family?
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?”.
The employer of last resort. There's no welfare system in the US.
I don't intend any disrespect, but you're repeating revisionist history.
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.
> Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
With the corollary
> but don't rule out malice.
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.
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.
edit: Wait the TREASURY prints money, not the Federal Reserve. The Federal Reserve just... greases the wheels of banks, I guess?
(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.)
What can outweigh intelligent people not improving life in home country but building career in 1st world?
The Philippines is one that springs to mind.
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).
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.
We are saying the same thing.
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.
You see a similar thing with gas stations, where the "nicer" ones (Buckees, Sheetz, Wawa) are corporate owned, whereas BP, Shell, etc are franchised.
Not that there aren't GOOD franchised locations, but it's much more variable.
They take that stuff very seriously.
https://www.businessinsider.com/what-it-costs-to-open-a-chic...
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?
They still make us go through a yearly training on how to prevent unionization though...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Driving a bus would be much easier.
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.
https://news.yahoo.co.jp/articles/05280713556b763ef4f8cf28fa...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
[1] Food you make yourself from scratch, say: stew of lentils with meatballs
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)
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.
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.
And there are much better fastfood options out there.
I saw a NY Times article about garbage men who make only $15/hr in southern states.
Who in the hell wants to do any of these jobs?
Of course I understand this is the answer.
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.
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.
There is nothing about a diner prepared hamburger that is more healthy. In fact, the opposite is true.
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.
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.
Supply and demand in the labor market is a two way street.
In fact it's already happening at a very small scale:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPTcIutsoTg
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.
She wasn't planning on doing shit. This was just a copout. Heard those exact words dozens of times.
>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)
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.
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.
What? 9.25 * 1.6 = 14.8
Shut it down already. Just give the land back to the Indigenous people. Concrete back to trees and grass, Greta would be happy.
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.
- 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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
"If I can't have it, others shouldn't as well" is not constructive, but a quite widespread, unsurprising perspective.
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!
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).