A Day in the Life of a California Fast-Food Manager Who Makes $174,000 a Year | Hacker News Reader

A Day in the Life of a California Fast-Food Manager Who Makes $174,000 a Year

wsj.com

33 pointsbookofjoe38 comments

> Raising Cane’s incentivizes Pizano to maintain those sales, offering a monthly bonus of $5,000 to $7,500 for meeting certain financial targets.

10+ hour days every day, and it's possible that 40%-50% of her income comes from performance based bonuses, which means never stopping. Sounds like a drag to me. It's good for her if she enjoys the pace, though.

Sounds like a recipe for burnout.

Lol, a lot of people work a lot harder and longer and don't make 175k, for the right person this is a dream.

A lot of people work a lot harder for less than that 85K base too.

I would love some sort of bonus for a job well done.

More work being the "bonus" for good work is not really a reward.

Single moms seemingly have energy to cheap to meter. I'm sure they don't feel great on the inside, but on the outside they don't respect the laws of physics.

One of the key warning signs for burnout is a disconnect between effort and reward. If an employee feels that their reward matches their effort, relative to peers, then burnout might not be a thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40706748

Which is why so many are shutting down after the minimum wage hike; an industry with barely any margins can't survive it.

The $174,000 is from:

The profiled manager's base pay: $85,000

Monthly bonus for hitting financial targets: $5,000 - $7,500

Much more helpful context than the headline suggests.

They are also operating a location that, according to the article, sometimes sees 100+ cars lined up at the drivethrough. That isn't normal and should not last long. If this was a Starbucks or MacDonalds I would expect another location to be opened across the street in order to meet demand, slashing sales at the first location. The second location would probably be owned by the same franchise but likely not under the same floor manager.

Its a canes, its pretty hyped up and they aren’t a business to open one on each corner. Its not as hyped as chic fil a or in an out that can get a drive thru line spilling out on the street on the moon, but its close.

Which means she's managed to miss just $1,000 of possible bonus; her own bonus range is at least as tight as $6,500-$7,500pcm (i.e. only that wide if it were a single 'bad' month).

I am not sure that the manager in question has ever made $174K. Headlines are often very misleading (this one even says "up to $174,000"), and the only mention of $174K in the article body is:

> her pay can reach $174,000 annually

Hm, weird to go with the less round and incorrect number then though? It can be 175k?

https://www.wsj.com/business/hospitality/a-day-in-the-life-o...

Thank you!

You're welcome.

I have extensive knowledge in the restaurant arena, stemming from over 25 years of managing, owning, operating, and building restaurants.

This article is an absolute fluff piece aiming to tip a nodded hat at the industry as a whole - for maintaining the industry at its status quo.

Unfortunately, the restaurant industry has changed dramatically since 2020 (pandemic initiated). Cost, immutable variables between staff and guests, and likely most fundamentally - an industry unfit for a single entity to operate on his/her/there own.

Socio-economically the industry has suffered far more than other industries and continues to. Add in the decade long push in comfortability (delivery) and the break in social activities due to the pandemic, and the third space is no longer a safe, meal-sharing, getaway.

Dine-in, sit-down restaurants are going to continue to struggle until they regain their 'third space' appeal. In the meantime you can continue to purchase low-quality food, put up with terrible service, and pay extravagant pricing for delivery.

As for wages - the only reason this person has a comparable wage to an entry-level technical programmer is because Cane's is as large and funded as it is - combined with the current 'big boys' competition in the industry. Culver's, In'N'Out, Raising Cane's, and several others from large groups are the only competing brands at the moment in large retail spaces.

And as is usually the case this hails from California where pay scale outweigh most of the country save for the hot spots everyone knows.

This is targeted at the industry as a whole - it's not a reflection of the industry at all at it's current status.

I would visit sit-down restaurants a lot more often if they addressed the noise. Glass, concrete and crowds = painful clamor

More companies need to learn to treat their employees like an asset instead of a liability. Executives are far less valuable than the boots on the ground actually running the businesses. Take care of those people and they will take care of you.

We can thank Jack Welch and the MBAs who aim to be like him. Loyalty is a two-way street.

A MBA program is the equivalent of installing wormable malware into the human mind.

https://youtu.be/vEWGrc0eHLw

Interesting video. When I got an economics degree, there was a lot of discussion about externalities. The focus was something like “here’s what we can model, here’s what we can’t. Be careful, because the stuff outside your model can really matter!”

Then the conversation moves on to how to build better models that integrate a more complicate understanding of the world we live in and our effects on it. This is why the Carbon Tax is/was such an interesting concept. It’s an attempt to enhance the financial system with the ability to price in climate change.

Fundamentally, Economics is about make good decisions about how to allocate scarce resources. Certainly the Lords of Finance have taken it to some pathological places, but prices and markets remain extremely powerful tools.

One great example of this is how Feeding America created a market to allocate foodstuffs among food banks:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2019/09/11/565736836/epis...

Carbon credits are rarely audited and often do not truly offset the amount of carbon they claim to capture.

If externalities were important to the economists, after many decades, there would be a high sense of urgency to model the most important processes and assimilating them into the theory, but after many decades all the work has been put into how to eat the pale blue dot and turn it into money, an abstract concept that won't be useful when the worldwide famines start.

We can also thank Lewis F. Powell, Milton Friedman, Paul Weyrich, and others of their ilk.

How about Adam Smith, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Richard Nixon, Margaret Thatcher.

Smith has mostly been taken out of context and selectively quoted. I don't lump him in with the others.

I'd be interested to see a clip of Milton Friedman saying that executives are the most valuable employees.

Friedman wasn't the least bit sympathetic to non-management workers' plight. All he cared about was the owners. And executives usually own a disproportionate number of their company's shares.

Executives are not owners. They may not own anything. An owner could also be a plumber working for himself. That's not at all like Jack Welch.

To my limited understanding, Friedman's approach to workers was we should make it so competitors can spring up, as your best job security and working conditions and salaries come from the existence of other companies. And additionally that when companies do well, their customers (also most non-management workers for most companies) get better and/or cheaper products, as people are customers of other businesses as well as employees of their own company.

Shareholders are owners. If you have equity in something, you are literally an owner. Maybe not the sole owner, but an owner nonetheless. Also, please note my use of the adverb 'usually' to qualify my assertion re: executives and corporate ownership.

I agree that shareholders are owners. I saw "usually", but given the minor overlap it didn't seem sufficient to support a full assertion that MF sides with executives. Given that owners don't have to be executives and executives don't have to be owners.

We may disagree in some particulars, but we're in broad agreement. :)

Yes! Tl;dr:

Jack Welch - executives are valuable.

Milton Friedman - regular staff benefit from competition (in their own industry to keep wages high, and elsewhere to keep products cheaper/higher quality); owners are important because you made an agreement with them when you took their money; executives exist, but are not particularly valuable.

> More companies need to learn to treat their employees like an asset instead of a liability. Executives are far less valuable than the boots on the ground actually running the businesses. Take care of those people and they will take care of you.

Hey hey, think about the poor executive. Toil and grind until they lay you off. That 3rd yacht isn't going to buy itself.

To be fair, the job of executive and especially CEO is extremely demanding because evaluating executive performance is nearly impossible. To say nothing of legal liability and popular opprobrium.

Any random event can sink a company, and the CEO will be blamed for not foreseeing and preparing for it. Good times can carry your company along even if their policies suck. Bad times can kill a great company with great leadership. Which means bad CEOs can sometimes go for years without the feedback they need to get better, and great CEOs will never get the recognition they deserve.

Some measures of good leadership are concrete and measurable, but lots are very abstract and only manifest over years and decades. So if a CEO does a great job at these, the profits might only show up for their successor, or even their successor.

I'd only do that job for a ton of money.

https://archive.is/3kFMW

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