Anyplace where restaurants are doing well?

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tgfencer said:
Yeah, not sure where that stat comes from. Raleigh/Durham and Charlotte have a bunch of banking/tech/university/medical jobs so I think they throw off the curve somewhat (not sure if they're counting salaries in that wage calculation or not). Where I live in the mountains, the economy is largely tourism centered and wages are probably anywhere from $7-13/hr average depending on industry.
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for every single person who makes 1 million dollars you would need 19 people making zero dollars to average out to 50k. subsequently, for a billion, you would need 19,999 people making zero dollars.

any state with a real tech or finance industry (of which NC has both) will have blown out averages. hence why I pointed to median salary, which works out to where half the people make just slightly north of the state's poverty line for a small family.
 
Ironically the industry I now work in is one of the few areas where I don’t have a global breadth of knowledge and the attendant perspective, so perhaps someone from outside the US can fill in the blanks and either confirm or disprove. But: it seems to me that around here these issues are in large part a function of Americans not caring much about their food nor the people who produce it, a lack of respect for food in particular even beyond the baseline issues of inequality.

An overheard remark in passing that I wouldn’t think I’d ever hear in France or Japan: “it’s not that good but you get so much for the money!” Again I haven’t spent much time abroad discussing or studying the economics of food but it seems from this end that in the countries where the attitudes are beginning to approach the American one, it’s frequently mentioned in terms of American corporate and cultural influence e.g. UK and Mexico.
 
In the United States the people who spend the largest share of their income on eating out are the top 20 percent and the bottom 20 percent. The top 20 percent want to be pampered and fed obscure rare ingredients and eat something special and organic and foraged and gluten free and they are willing to pay for it. The bottom 20 percent eat fast food. It's a lot of calories really cheap really fast. Their kids will eat it without complaining and it will keep them full until the next meal time. It may not be great but it's consistent. And it's cheaper than what they can do for home for a bunch of people from scratch (think of a bucket of fried chicken or something). Most of us fall somewhere in between.
 
There's a mess of issues coming home to roost. One large one is that the prevailing ideology around restaurants is that you grow by adding more locations of the same idea/model/concept because it simplifies your operations - Central kitchen for prep, ordering higher volumes at lower margins of the same product, standardizing training, even the TIs on build outs etc. What it does is allow you to staff your **** with sandwich artists. People end up assembling rather than cooking and you can hire lower skilled people and not invest in training any real skills besides how to put the pieces together. Yet, this also relies on a smaller workforce of people to manage central operations and train/hire/run this model, typically skilled cooks looking to 'move up.' What this does in my experience is basically akin to monoculture farming practices. You destroy the training pipeline for your labor force because you've chosen to de-value that aspect of the business for the sake of efficiency. It therefore becomes other restaurant owners' collective responsibility as they too strive for more locations with leaner staffing models in what becomes a race to the bottom. What it also does is pre-maturely burn out any one with talent who eyes some semblance of stability (trading in that sous chef job that's killing you at line cook wages when you break down how many hours you work for a job running a commissary with daytime hours, a signing bonus, etc.) by putting them in the perpetual soul sucking position of constantly having to find/hire/train new bodies to take the spots at these various locations which still need a body to take money and put things together all while running a crazy amount of logistics at a paltry wage rate when compared to the job responsibilities of comparable jobs in other industries.

Round here, starting linecook wage is $15-16/hr. Rent for a room is $600-900+ not including utilities and the subsequent insecurity of housing sharing. A studio is $900-1300+. Add in normal expenses (health insurance, transportation, food, utilities) and your up against being cash neutral provided that everything breaks your way and nothing breaks (car, body, etc.) Pre pandemic when I ran restaurants, I lost a number of talented cooks to bike accidents, car accidents, medical bills, having to switch jobs to pay culinary school debt (mostly shipping/receiving), not having any family leave, not having childcare, not having elder care, etc. All my staff had at least two jobs. I had 2-3 jobs when I was line cooking. If you want to have a family, maybe buy even buy a house, there isn't a worn path in sight on how to do that around here in this industry. $9/hr? Get the hell out of here.

We treat all things like industries and commodities including housing, education, and health and there's a few making a lot on the backs and necks of the many. As such, making a shift in one and not all the others is like trying to replace one tire to get back on the road when you have blowouts in all of them. You hear about career waiters in the old world? In Vienna, 60% of citizens live in rent controlled well maintained state owned housing. Career line cooks? In Japan, elder care for a month is less than I pay out of pocket for seeing a doctor.

What this whole pandemic thing has laid bare for me to witness is to what extent the powers that be have succeeded in diminishing our empathetic impulses and uncoupling us from the reality that we're far far closer to destitute than billionaire and far more powerful we are when acting collectively vs. individually. I think there's hopefully a reckoning coming in the midst of all this around what exactly is the societally accepted floor for human suffering and what industries actively contribute toward either lowering or obfuscating that bar though we're sure as hell gonna be distracted and pitted against each other wherever possible. Phew sorry for ranting.
 
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I can sense my city is about to pop off, restrictions are gonna be lifted in June. My current spot has been pretty busy and has the same staffing issues as other places but I also dislike its ownership and how its mangaged since before the pandemic so Im leaving for a new spot opening up.

Having a union helps. The major resorts and hotels are mostly union but the smaller mom&pop and local resturants arent.
 
pleue said:
Round here, starting linecook wage is $15-16/hr. Rent for a room is $600-900+ not including utilities and the subsequent insecurity of housing sharing. A studio is $900-1300+. Add in normal expenses (health insurance, transportation, food, utilities) and your up against being cash neutral provided that everything breaks your way and nothing breaks (car, body, etc.) Pre pandemic when I ran restaurants, I lost a number of talented cooks to bike accidents, car accidents, medical bills, having to switch jobs to pay culinary school debt (mostly shipping/receiving), not having any family leave, not having childcare, not having elder care, etc. All my staff had at least two jobs. I had 2-3 jobs when I was line cooking. If you want to have a family, maybe buy even buy a house, there isn't a worn path in sight on how to do that around here in this industry. $9/hr? Get the hell out of here.
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it sure is a real shame that the single largest economy in the world cant solve these problems that have been figured out by... oh everyone else.

frankly there is a simple solution to this problem; either implement a safety net to enable the current system, force wages up to be equivalent, or watch as people do literally anything else. as was mentioned, people are way more keen to work at an Amazon warehouse, the sort of place that's actually pretty famous for mistreating employees, except that it's still a step up so of course people are going to take it. nothing political about this; we are observing the factuality of my premise in real time.
 
tcmx3 said:
as was mentioned, people are way more keen to work at an Amazon warehouse, the sort of place that's actually pretty famous for mistreating employees, except that it's still a step up so of course people are going to take it. nothing political about this; we are observing the factuality of my premise in real time.
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I can attest to this. I seriously considered working for Amazon or Whole Foods, even applied at one point. It is a step up from a lot of places. Scheduled breaks. Able to sit down away from your worksite and eat food. No worries about someone trying to change your hours worked after the fact. And so on...
 
I was scrolling through my linked in contacts the other day. It's crazy how many chefs, banquet managers, restaurant managers, and catering sales contacts have left the industry entirely.

Banquets are starting to trickle in my at old hotel. They are optimistic about the second half of the year. They have a bunch of weddings booked. The workers are union so they have mostly stayed and kept their benefits ($0 out of pocket, no copay health insurance being the main one) just haven't got any hours for a year taking unemployment. It would be a nice system to have for the whole economy if you care about independent restaurants.

But I digress. The middle managers have moved on and are selling real estate and cars and managing dental offices and bank branches.
 
This whole restaurant pay thing sickens me. I am almost sorry to report that when I left the deli biz in late 1984 in Chicago, I was making over $10/hr. For 7A-3P, M-F, fixed 30 min lunch, but no bennies. I wish we could tip BOH instead of the waitrons.
 
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