@LRCuddler101 Why is it the job of the employer to know what the employee needs? I would rather empower people so they can say NO to junk offers. A better way to raise wages is to have employers finding they don't have enough workers coming to work for them. I'm even seeing that locally. For as long as people say yes, all that's telling the business is that's a sufficient offer to entice someone to work for them. If more people say no, that tells the business they need to up their game. That changes the situation naturally instead of artificially through the government, which always has negative consequences you won't realize until you're in the thick of it. 🤷♀️
@UCpaaHVg6u0 Regarding your comment "see the creators of these hoaxes for who they are, often recipients of the same sources of the largesse you just denounced", I couldn't have said it better myself. If only enough people understood this. You have made several other valid points in this thread also.
This thread has been more interesting than I could ever have imagined and many valid points have been made from all perspectives. A lot for me to continue thinking about and I appreciate this.
I do wish that people who resent tipping would stay home, or at least not invite me. Lol.
The people that tell the workers they should get another job if they don't like their pay are the same people who complain that there's a staff shortage. smh
@Mike403 I don't complain about staff shortages (though I know the type of people you're talking about). Or are you referring to my comment about there being jobs? Because that comment was directly regarding jobs with the higher pay people here were saying should be given. I was saying that there are "livable wage" jobs which are not being filled, so the problem goes bigger than just wage. So that comment was in response to a different segment of this conversation.
My general response to staff shortages is just what I said, that it is an indication that what is being offered is not considered worth the time and effort it requires to do the job, so what needs to be done is to fix that equation. Businesses can figure that out without the government forcing them, or they'll slowly go out of business for not being able to find workers. 🤷♀️
Anyway, I am LOVING all the entrepreneurship I've seen building up in my small area since the shutdowns. BEAUTIFUL!!! I love seeing people take control of their lives, say NO to the jobs they've been miserable in, and find ways to make their dreams come true. 💜💜💜 It's not everyone's preferred choice (there are definite pros and cons to self-employment and entrepreneurship), but I just love seeing it when it is.
@achetocuddle Bless your soul
I'm glad that somebody else sees what I'm seeing. Either I'm not crazy or we both are. At the very least I'm not alone in being crazy.
@UCpaaHVg6u0 I often cannot put into words things I see, or think I see Lol. But I often know when someone else has articulated it correctly and well. Not sure if this is the best way to say it, but I think a lot of things don't run as well as they could partly cause too many people don't see and/or understand the big pic. But I digress from the topic here The civilized and intellectual discourse here has been great.
Agreeing with @UCpaaHVg6u0 , @ubergigglefritz and their comments. Also understand some of the opposing comments, I have sympathy for people who are doing jobs with low wages, and when i was working minimum wage it was motivation for me because I sure didn’t want to work this type of job for long term. This was before YouTube and other online resources that have free training on all sorts of things. And when I had my first job I lived at home and then with my second I earned a little more and moved in with a roommate. With my third job my pay went up substantially and I then lived on my own. People need not stay in low wage jobs and no they are not slave wages, they just aren’t great and conducive to having your own place. People live at home like I did or else get two or three roommates and got different training or saved more until they could afford to have roommates or live solo. Anyway this has gone off the topic of restaurant tipping but not unrelated. I do my part like I previously said and tip much more than usual.
@Ironman294 💜 I'm also a very healthy tipper. 😂 And I am WAY too friendly at the town market of local businesses and the art fests with all local creators! If I had more money, that's definitely where too much would go. 🤣 Local small businesses, solopreneurs, and especially food! 😋 I love supporting people. Have been having so much fun getting to know more locals, hearing their stories, and connecting on business struggles and wins...
Even if service is bad and pending where it is I tip the min of 15-20%. Most restaurants take a percentage of sales to do what is called tip share to the hostess and bar tenders. So even if they are bad it should not cost them. The government taxes pending on what state based on sales and or credit card tips. It is a way for them to track what they think you made. That os why cash is king. For example you have a 100 tab. The government assumes you are going to make 10-15 so that is what they tax you on. Then of course the tip share scam. So if I have a 100 tab and I cheap out it actually costs them money. You tip them cash let’s say 30 that’s like them getting 15.00 tax free. Let’s face it that like the equivalent of 20.00.
I used to serve tables for three years. So I will be as polite as possible when I say this. If you can not afford the tip, that’s fine, but don’t go to place you know a tip would be needed.
God bless and don’t forget to tip the bartenders, doormen, valets, servers, or where you may be.
@Cuddler50 "If you can not afford the tip, that’s fine, but don’t go to place you know a tip would be needed." Or if you don't believe in tipping! I'm a libertarian, but I HATE it when some libertarians are all against tipping and just don't ever tip. If you can't or don't want to tip, do takeout. It's rude. 😠
I wasn't familiar with Cuddler50 so I looked them up. They have been banned.
It is embarrassing to me to eat with people who count out quarters for tips, especially when they are upper middle class or well-to-do. Thankfully it's been a long while since this has happened.
@ubergigglefritz I agree. If you are not gonna tip for any reason, do takeout (or stay home).
Putting together everything I've ever heard and read, it's my impression that women that can tip well tend to do so. Sometimes even when they really can't. Chastise me if you must.
@achetocuddle my level of generosity fluctuates mildly in correlation with any financial stress, but in general I'm pretty frugal, and so I figure I can splurge sometimes, and when I do, I like it going towards lifting someone up, giving someone a boost, rather than just going to some big business. I know how much it helps to have those moments as someone self-employed. I guess I figure it's a little form of paying it forward. 💜
If you can't or don't want to tip, do takeout.
I guess the cook still loses out in this case though (if think cooks should get tipped and not just servers) But again, to be fair, you didn't eat the food yet, so how would you know if worth a tip. Because as has been said in this thread, it seems like tips have shifted from service to price... Which I agree just seems so silly and wrong.
For as long as people say yes, all that's telling the business is that's a sufficient offer to entice someone to work for them. If more people say no, that tells the business they need to up their game.
This, so this. People love to complain about things/prices, but seem to forget they have more power than they think.
For example, in Vegas, roulette tables now have triple 0s...wanna know how they get away with it... Because people still play on the table. If you want them to go back to double or better single 0s... stop. playing. If no one plays on the table, they will be forced to change. But this applies to so much. Sure, the change may not be fast or easy, and you may have to do extra work to convince others to also believe in what you do. This is what freedom is about though.
@entwine 💜 you hit the nail on the head. It won't be fast, but natural evolution of change is so much better in the long run than trying to manufacture change. 👍 It's the same with all things in life. Forcing a kid to go to sleep at bedtime works fast, but figuring out how to encourage them to make that choice themselves will have stronger long-term effects. As a silly example. Forcing a dog in a crate doesn't build a positive experience as much as teaching a dog that they actually want to go in a crate. Forcing change virtually always returns unintended negative consequences. Natural progression of change minimizes those. 😇 I could say it a million times in a million different ways.
@UCpaaHVg6u0, @ubergigglefritz, and everybody else who thinks it's a good idea to let businesses pay their workers as little as the businesses want to:
I speak as someone who spent years working two jobs so I could afford to sleep in a basement full of roaches and fill my stomach with water before bed so I could sleep.
I don't care about small business.
If every shop in town had been run by a corporation required by law to pay every worker a fair wage without understaffing or overworking their employees, I would have been thrilled. I would have signed on for a secure "dead end" job that reliably met my needs in a second. I don't care about new business creation or industry competition, I care about not starving in a basement.
"Why didn't you go find better jobs that paid more?" Because there were no better jobs that paid more. Oh, jobs that paid more, yes. If you were willing to kill yourself doing the work of three for the pay of one.
I like not dying.
But "oh," you say, waving a hand, "hardly anybody makes minimum wage."
Sure. Only about 1,112,000 people, as of last year. Hardly anybody. If they're suffering or even dying from something preventable, why should we care? Why should anyone care? Especially, why should businesses care? Let them die. Plenty more workers where those came from.
I don't denounce largesse. Never have, never will. Me, declare generosity to be evil? Unlikely!
What I denounce is a system that not only reaches into the hand of the one given a gift and takes some or all of it away, but also allows the person supposedly dispensing largesse to, in fact, demand payment for their "gift."
That is not generosity; not freely giving to those less fortunate; not largesse.
@JasonCuddles is exactly right: Tips are a restaurant's way of paying people as little as possible. And because this is so, because I know these workers will suffer without tips and their employers will let it happen, and there is nothing else I can do—I tip. As much as I can afford, and expecting precisely nothing in return, not even a smile.
I will never understand what goes on in the heads of people who seem to care more about people who could live comfortably without making money off underpaid employees than they do the people starving in basements.
Employers know what they need to live decently! Why do some people seem to think that it would be so unreasonably demanding to ask employers to figure out, for once, that their workers have the same physical and psychological needs they do?
And why, I wonder, do I waste time linking to studies and data when anecdotes seem to be all anyone cares about?
@DaringSprinter Thanks so much for sharing your story. Trauma or suffering can really make us passionate about certain things (it's the background as to why I do this work in the first place 🤗). It's actually possible to be passionate about freedom and capitalism AND also about people not suffering and deserving a very base survival. 💜 They are two sets of issues as a matter of fact. This is a completely different subject and thread, lol, but I am a huge proponent for the UBI (the strict libertarian version, not the liberal skewed version of it). I absolutely believe everyone deserves a floor to stand on, empowering the individual, disempowering the employer, etc. That can be accomplished in correlation with empowering self-employment and business creation instead of in combat with it, so I go that route, because (as long as the basic need of core survival is met) that trumps empowering corporations and decreasing competition any day. 👍 But I may have opened a can of worms. 🙈 I just wanted to hear you and let you know I absolutely am not saying you deserved any of that...
@DaringSprinter The logic of mandating wages escapes me. For millennia people who were not chattel slaves or indentured servants had a choice to decide if agreed upon wages would feed them, clothe them, and house them. People in Europe decided enough of crap they were handed, and sailed to America. They rode to far flung places on horse drawn vehicles, rough lumber rafts, or walked. They used axes to cut down trees and then planted seeds. They worked every day in dangerous sawmills, steel plants, slaughter houses. But today we need to mandate a wage because, basically places have refused to permit new residential construction to the point that housing is unaffordable. Also the cartel that controls healthcare is out of hand expensive as well as illogically priced. And the big players who reap the financial rewards of these corrupt regimes are the main proponents of outlets like Center for American Progress*, and they say to fix this we must raise the minimum wage. When I worked minimum wage, about A FIFTH of all workers lived on that. Today under two percent of workers make that, and a significant share of them live at home with mom and dad. I say what makes sense is to subsidize a place to live for some people while we campaign for deregulated housing construction in areas that NIMBY planning boards have restricted out of greed. I do care about wiping out small businesses and start ups. Clean out the corrupt practices of healthcare delivery that rent seeking owners pin us down with.
*Look at 2013 exposé on CAP by Ken Silverstein in The Nation
@Ironman294 About these jobs being starter jobs. What do you say to people who don't have the mental capacity or cognitive ability, maybe people just mentally disabled enough to not be able to learn a profession but they can take care of themselves just fine (not diagnosed Intellectual disability and no guardian necessary). Do they not deserve to work, support themselves, afford to live and be happy, earning a living wage at what might be a dead end job to you but that's fulfilling to that person? Not to insinuate everyone who works minimum wage jobs is incapacitated...
@ubergigglefritz This convo, like so many, is a little over my head, but I can tell I agree with you. And it is possible to be passionate about capitalism and freedom and people not suffering and having a base survival because I AM one of those people also.
Also CEO salaries and payments to shareholders were mentioned - we didn't even mention the profit that goes to the owners of businesses. Look at Elon Musk. He essentially makes $0 income for whatever head title he's given himself at each company he owns, so he gets out of income tax, but as owner, he gets the profit, whatever doesn't go back into his companies. The millionaire/billionaire business owners, CEOs, and celebrities of the world could pool funds and literally support everyone. At this point, they just work for funsies. It's like playing monopoly for them. Lol I really am Libertarian though.
@Moxytocin That is a great example as to where the UBI fills in. Everyone deserves a basic income to have the CHOICE to survive with, to find a roof, to eat food, rest safely, etc. A UBI gives people a floor to stand on, which everyone deserves, without having all the negative effects I have listed which result from raising the minimum wage. I am an example of someone who is absolutely against raising the minimum wage, but who is very passionate about people deserving basic survival needs to be met. We exist. 😂💜
Another point, did you ever think that raising the minimum wage would result in MORE job automation and actually FEWER jobs actually being offered? Raising the minimum wage only helps those who manage to keep their jobs. Solving this problem with a UBI instead not only gives everyone a floor to stand on (which everyone deserves), but increases self-employment (much easier to make your own work than to convince someone else to give you work), business creation (more jobs for other people to be employed to do), parents being home for kids (massive benefit to our future as a society), volunteerism and non-profit creation (yay for supporting our communities and those in need), happier workers (seriously, let people who hate their job go home and mooch, I don't care, society is happier when surrounded by people who are actually happy and don't feel like slave labor doing something they abhor), etc etc. Raising the minimum wage just doesn't solve the problem as well as most people seem to think...
@achetocuddle 🤗💜 I appreciate you being here!
@ubergigglefritz I misunderstood. I was not thinking of UBI, I was thinking I wish everyone could take care of their basic needs without thinking about how. I don't have an opinion, especially an informed one, of what a possible solution could be. I'm honest to a fault, if there is such a thing. I appreciate you. I appreciate the forum whether I post or not. Sometimes I think I should just read the forum more and post less, but posting has sure been a good experience.
@achetocuddle don't be shy to participate
@ubergigglefritz I'm not shy about the forum
@ubergigglefritz: I love the idea of Universal Basic Income. But I am every bit as cynical as I've ever been accused of being, and don't see it ever being an option in America. In Star Trek, sure. In real life? Never, or at least not in my lifetime. Profit matters too much here, matters so much more than people. The best we've ever been able to do is fight to ensure companies don't overwork and underpay their employees.
And the key word there is "fight"....
The eight-hour working day. The end of child labor. Minimum wage.
We stopped most businesses from overworking children, which is fantastic, right? There are only about 500,000 child farmworkers in the US today, working over ten hours a day and making up ~20% of farming fatalities—a great improvement on the past!
No, it really is.
I don't see businesses eager to avoid ever going back to the days when labor was so cheap and easily controlled. Companies love kids. Especially when they're not caught exploiting them. If it weren't for child labor laws, we'd have 5-year-olds scrubbing floors again—and I can already hear my father arguing that this would be a good thing, because there are so many families who could use the extra money.
We stopped businesses from directly forcing people to work more than eight hours a day, which is great, right?
Except they can still pressure you in ways other than beating you and/or locking you inside the building, and so over 75% of employees in the US work more than 40 hours a week, despite the fact that it's obviously not necessary.
We stopped businesses from paying their workers literal pennies, which is wonderful, yeah?
Except minimum wage hasn't risen with inflation or with productivity, and a 2019 analysis showed 44% of all workers qualify as "low-wage," with median earnings of ~$18,000 a year. When businesses can pay less, they pay less! There are masses of businesses underpaying and overworking Americans—excluding, of course, most perisex, cisgender, able-bodied, white, straight, financially stable, (etc.) Americans.
People like that tend to have a better shot at getting the "good" jobs (I'm thinking mostly of salaried jobs like office worker).
Meanwhile, after my parents kicked me out for not being what they wanted me to be, I spent a couple weeks working for a family-owned restaurant that paid me in food. Yes, you read that right: I worked a day, I ate that day. If I hadn't been so proud, I could've gotten my food for free at the shelter.
Legal? Yes, if the minimum wage went away!
Every restaurant could own their workers like that, and why wouldn't they? Where will their workers go when everyone pays about the same? Rake in the cash from the salaried workers and the idle rich, and nearly every cent of it profit.
Businesses care about business. They care about money, not people. Give everyone a guaranteed basic income, and off whose back will they be able to make a profit?
Call me a cynic, but....
American is a country of businesses, and they won't allow UBI to succeed if they can help it.
Raising the minimum wage supports big corporations by wiping out their competition, no doubt about it. So they won't be completely against it; so that's one thing we can actually get.
What's our other choice? Let smaller businesses "compete" by paying their workers in food? Big business could actually lower its wages then! They'd like that more: imagine only having to pay your employees a dollar a day to be better than the other guys. Profit out the wazoo, even more than they're already making.
It's a sucky system all around, but we're tied to it. Odds of escape? Low! At least we can decrease suffering.
@UCpaaHVg6u0: Wait.
You don't. Please tell me you don't. Actually believe. That the only people who deserve better lives. Are the ones who are willing and able to kill for it.
"People in Europe decided enough of crap they were handed, and sailed to America. They rode to far flung places on horse drawn vehicles, rough lumber rafts, or walked. They used axes to cut down trees and then planted seeds."
What a pretty picture you have of the religious zealots, conquistadors, and colonizers who murdered and enslaved the people America belonged to.
The logic of making sure no one is paid too little to do more than survive one day at a time.....)
It escapes you.
You think "we need to mandate a wage because, basically places have refused to permit new residential construction to the point that housing is unaffordable"?
The minimum wage was enacted because American workers were being exploited.
You do know what businesses showed us they'll do without laws to stop them, yes? How little they'll pay? How long they'll make people work? Without breaks? Without sick leave? Without safety standards? Without pity?
How can the logic of putting an end to that, of making sure things never get that bad again... escape you?
Conquistadors? That's hilarious! Religious zealots? How about the Protestants that were trying to stay alive? Really I was saying that people mostly came here to get out from under oppression. The imposition of minimum wage is oppressive to small businesses and startups. It's such a drop in the bucket of helping anybody that it's being a topic just because of politics. Aren't we going to deal with real stuff? No? Politics as usual then.
I stopped going out to eat and thus have tremendous savings on both the meal and the tip.Unless the waiter or waitress is intentionally rude I tended to over tip beyond even 20%.Often times poor food quality has nothing to do with the person waiting on you.
@UCpaaHVg6u0 says,
Conquistadors? That's hilarious!
People in Europe who sailed to America, yes? I think we all remember Christopher Columbus, explorer, trader, and slaver. "God, glory, and gold"? "Spiritual conquest"? Spain's claim on the New World? Any of this ringing a bell?
Religious zealots? How about the Protestants that were trying to stay alive?
How about the Protestants that were trying to set up a theocratic society? You know, the Pilgrims we hear about every year right around Thanksgiving: the ones who slaughtered the people who were there first, and then celebrated.
"People mostly came here to get out from under oppression," my... donkey.
[Minimum wage is] such a drop in the bucket of helping anybody that it's being a topic just because of politics. Aren't we going to deal with real stuff?
The second you figure out how to overhaul American society against the wishes of the most powerful people in it, you let me know. For now, about all we can do is our best—keep adding drops to the bucket and hope eventually they add to an ocean.
@DaringSprinter I understand why, but be careful of your cynicism. There are many businesses that succeed on the notion of giving their employees more. There is a small food spot in Charlottesville that is known for paying their workers "living wages" (getting more trendy for signaling which businesses some people may choose to patron over others). Costco is well known for being one of the best places to work in retail, both for pay and benefits. If the minimum wage were eliminated (not something I advocate, but your example), I actually predict that to increase, not decrease. Most businesses just want to be successful and more and more businesses are realizing that these choices not only give them better employees and lower turnover (which saves them money), but a more active and loyal customer base as well. It's not all doom and gloom if we give people freedom. 💜