Is that really what Lemmy needs? Discussion on a topic that’s been hashed out a million times before? It would be more productive to talk about the weather than to keep circling the drain on this shit ad nauseam.
Comment on higher wages for the servers... by the customers. Fnbs
Jackolantern@lemmy.world 10 months agoHow come other countries can do it? Why not ours?
I posted because I want to drive discussions which lemmy sorely needs
TheMauveAvenger@lemmy.world 10 months ago
AnonTwo@kbin.social 10 months ago
I feel like there's been plenty of discussion. Everyone knows it's a problem.
It continues to happen because there's no pressure to change it. Just discussions that fall into the abyss of the internet at this point, repeating things everyone already knows.
wjrii@kbin.social 10 months ago
Part of the reason there's less pressure to change it than you might imagine is that we now have a hundred years of cultural inertia working on, yes, the customers and restaurants, but also on the waitstaff labor pool. At this point, the Americans who seek work as waiters are generally the ones who feel they work with the system and even turn it to their advantage. It's far from all, of course, but the "best" servers at most restaurants probably feel like they're going to make more working the customers than negotiating with their bosses.
So, you've got restaurants keeping their list-prices low and a built-in workforce motivator, customers who expect friendly service and accept that they're culturally responsible for the staff's pay, and servers who stay at the job because they feel like they'll make more than the restaurant would be willing to pay as a "fair" wage (and they're probably right). Now, it's full-on bizarre that we have taken an entry level service job and made it an exercise in theatrical entrepreneurship, and it says some unsettling things about the underlying social order in the US, but I'm not sure that at the nuts-and-bolts level, it's as broken as the people like to imagine.