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Comment by joshocar | Hacker News Reader

In general, chefs, and anyone who works in the kitchen, are severally underpaid for the skill and amount of work the job takes. It's long hours in a hot, cramped, very high stress environment for peanuts. Not to mention the terrible hours. I have a very brief stint in the food industry when I was a kid and it was enough for me to say I would never do it as a career.

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Is them being underpaid not a function of buyers not willing to pay more for the goods?

I'm not under the impression that most restaurateurs are "raking it in" staff be damned. Sure, at the ultra high end, yes, but for most restaurants a chef pay is function of the market, right?

It is a combination of people willing to work for low pay, and buyers not willing to pay more.

The easy money is sucked out through real estate, not management.

The restaurateurs might be raking it if they own the real estate. If you pay rent for your location you are probably scraping by, and whipping your staff to bring in the money for your landlord.

A chef's pay is a function of the market, and that's why everybody is exiting the industry right now. Head chefs and restaurant owners are used to decades of low wages and think it's quite insulting that anybody would dare ask for a better wage. Then they wonder why "nobody wants to work anymore". At the same time, chances of advancing your career are very limited. If you manage to stick around for a few years as a chef, you will already be able to manage your own restaurant, but the salary for that will be just marginally higher. Unless you want to strike it out on your own, and take on massive debt for a business with low margins.

Working in a kitchen is the worst career choice a young person can make. If you have that skill, ambition, passion and drive, you will be much better rewarded in any other sector.

I thought a new means of breaking out on your own are food trucks. A quick search shows that they often net 6 figures, though I don't know if that includes the salaries of the help.

To me that's a whole different game, since the fact of being in a truck greatly limits the quality and variety of food and service you can offer. But I think it can be a good business, with less costs. The main problem with food trucks is that you can't sell alcoholic beverages, so you'll lose the most important part of your income.

Edit: To add to my previous point: A person who can be a successful food truck entrepreneur would probably make a much better return investing his skill and money into a non-food venture. Food trucks are expensive, for the price you need to pay to get that business going, you could buy the equipment needed to start a more lucrative business.

> Food trucks are expensive, for the price you need to pay to get that business going, you could buy the equipment needed to start a more lucrative business

not really, if the skills of the owner is essential to the business (which is true for a foodtruck). You won't be hiring a chef, you will be doing the work yourself.

I would argue food truck business is less capital intensive than opening the equivalent restaurant.

Yes, I also meant for the food truck owner to do the work himself. Still, it's a lot of money to invest, even if it's much less than opening a restaurant. The owner could invest that money and his skills into another type of business and be better off.

A restaurateur who only makes money because they own real estate seems like a landlord with a side hobby.

I don't understand exactly what you mean? He would be his own landlord.

You said: "The restaurateurs might be raking it if they own the real estate. If you pay rent for your location you are probably scraping by..."

He may refer to himself as a "restaurateur" or a "restaurateur who is his own landlord" for social status or tax reasons but I am suggesting that this framing is misleading: if his income is primarily as a result of the real estate he owns then his actual occupation is "landlord".

Non-remunerative avocations like, I don't know, building wooden sailboats, painting, community theater, photography, gardening, raising cattle, or managing a restaurant may be intense and rewarding, but if the expectation is that they will have no marginal impact on income one way or the other then they are more like hobbies.

I agree. It's already $60 minimum for two people to eat out in the US. What's it going to be in order for everyone to have "fair" wages? $50 a plate for hamburgers?

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