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Comment by listless | Hacker News Reader

I don’t know where these people are working. Here in the south where the cost of living is SUPER low, Hardee’s will pay you 16$ an hour to start. Waffle House will give you 18. Panera Bread $20.

I don’t think this data has caught up with wage increases after the labor shortage.

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Those are posted signs but do you know anyone who was offered that. They could just post that to look like they’re not avoiding hiring.

Stop listening to BlueAnon.

>Those are posted signs but do you know anyone who was offered that.

Well this is HN, so I'd hazard to guess that most people don't know many people who take those jobs.

>They could just post that to look like they’re not avoiding hiring.

Seems like a conspiracy theory to me unless there's some sort of evidence that they're ignoring applications.

> They could just post that to look like they’re not avoiding hiring.

And achieve what, exactly?

Profit. They need to recoup Covid losses with higher prices and smaller staff.

What you're saying is:

1. Pretend like you're hiring staff

2. ???

3. Profit

What is happening in step 2 that is leading to step 3? And more importantly, why does step 2 need step 1?

“higher prices and smaller staff“

Again, why do they need to pretend to hire people? They can just keep the smaller staff.

I didn't say it was some evil strategy but those signs aren't just for potential candidates, they know customers see them too. I think the appearance that the service industry is working harder at hiring than they are is an effort to justify higher prices to customers.

Remember demand has kept up despite higher prices and in many cases reduction to quality of service. Doing the same thing is the natural state for a business operator, even if they want to hire they may not have time to interview. There is no benefit to taking signs down in that case when every other restaurant has them up.

There is also the question of if a full time schedule is available at some hourly wage, or if they expect to pay part time, with on call availability.

I saw a sign for Papa Johns the other day offering a $1000 signing bonus. Of course they don't specify anything else, so who knows how it's paid out. My girlfriend was offered something similar as a teacher but the bonus was paid over 12 months so came out to something equivalent to $80/mo -- not really helpful.

$1000 dollar signing bonus might be the most money they have had all at one time in one place. $80 a month could be a full tank of gas. Just pointing out it can be a big bonus relatively.

Ah yes, let's throw them pennies so they may afford transportation to slave for minimum wage that they can barely survive on in the first place.

The point though is well made. A 1000 signing bonus is a HUGE improvement over no signing bonus and a wage that you can barely feed one person on. Remember - these jobs require no skill or prior experience.

I don't think that every single human should be required to be heavily specialized just to earn a livable wage, that's ridiculous

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