Prices have skyrocketed, quality has tanked.
Sorry, but I have a hard time buying a salad for $10 when I can grab the ingredients for 10 salads for about $5. And they’ll be higher quality. Not browning lettuce with mayo sauce.
Would you like to leave a tip for the service of grabbing your pre-made salad from the refrigerator?
Seriously, why the fuck does a salad cost as much as a full meal? That’s not an entree, it’s an oversized side dish.
Can be. Rarely is.
At this point, with grocery prices rising, you’d just be paying to have the assured quality from making it yourself.
Shit happens. If restaurants were more fiscally responsible and lives below their means, they would have been prepared for something like this.
Even if you donated all your money to billionaires and worked unpaid, they’d still demand more. The concept of ‘enough’ doesn’t exist in capitalism.
Note the pattern of how the people at the top of the economy continually blame the people at the bottom of the economy for everything going wrong.
They’re pissed that the have nots aren’t gleefully throwing more money at the haves.
When a proper sandwich is 2,50 I don’t mind paying at a restaurant. But when I have to pay 12,50 for a slice of bread with a single piece of cheese and some lettuce on it, I prefer to bring my own, thank you.
Don’t forget the tip, otherwise the server will starve
I live in a country where hospitality staff makes fair wages. Although it could be better. But at least the responsibility for them making enough money isn’t put on customers but on the employers, as it should be.
At the place I worked at for a while we didn’t do tips. There was no system for it. If people insisted on giving a cash tip, we (the employees) would use the money to buy food for homeless people. Everyone was happy with that.
When a meal that doesn’t even fill your stomach starts at $20 and there’s a mandatory minimum tip of 30% at the kiosk it’s not awfully enticing. After tax and a drink it’s now $30 for something you could have just made yourself in most circumstances for $5.
fewer lunches than they did in 2020
When everything was shut down and people were working from home? Wtf?
maybe “february 2020” is the sense here
Poor people should not be allowed to hoard wealth. Only wealthy people should be allowed to hoard wealth.
Remember when fast food was fast food? Now you have to wait 10 minutes for your number and the things you overpaid for are barely describable as food (i.e. McDonalds CEO refusing to eat his own burger).
No, because McDonalds has been trash for decades, now they just raised their prices enough that people are finally noticing.
There is a market for trash food at trash food prices. Sucks we don’t have any sort of mechanism in our communist shit hole country to fill unexploited market niches. Capitalism, real capitalism, would have fixed this. Its priests told me so.
Lmao what is this from
This is from the “The IT Crowd”
If you haven’t seen it, you really should give it a look.
The level of entitlement that just most American business owners / capital holders in general have is actually delusional, insane.
Now of course… not all of them. There are a few that are not delusional, that are not totally full of thrmselves… that are, ironically, conservative, in the sense of low ongoing risk apetite and actually performing due diligence.
… But so many of them act like it is just your responsibility, your social expectation, you disgusting pleb, to buy their product or service, whatever quality it is, whatever price it is.
No, motherfucker.
Literally, that’s not even capitalism, capitalism at least very much acts like / believes that a fundamental element of it is that consumers vote with their dollars, they compare and contrast the idea of ‘would i rather have thing, or the money that thing costs?’
Whats going on is that a whole bunch of people, across many different sectors of business, are actually terrible business people, who did not well predict future demand or input costs, who financed their businesses based off of loans they couldn’t actually afford.
Oh you can’t afford a property tax hike or insurance rate hike for your business location?
Not my fucking problem, maybe you should have considered that that is a thing that could happen.
Oh you can’t afford shipping and input cost increseases?
Again, not my fucking problem, maybe you should have structured a business with less thin margins, maybe you shouldn’t have voted for tariffs and blowing up 1/4 of the world’s oil supply.
You can just keep going with this, farmers with no more immigrant labor to exploit, casinos and tourism businesses baffled that the state doing pogroms with a gestapo is bad for business, landlords in denial over how they’re not actually geniuses and are in fact underwater and overleveraged.
So much of the American sense of cultural hierarchy is based on the idea of ‘i am a business owner’ or ‘i make good investments’.
No, you fucking idiots, you’re mostly all stupid and bad at all of this, and deserve 0 cultural accolades awarded to the ‘successful entrepenuer’ … because you are an incompetent entrepenuer, a failure.
Turns out, no, no this country isn’t actually a meritocratic land of opportunity that rewards something like ‘just giving it the good ole college try’. Turns out its massively full of itself, fake, lying to itself, and broadly systemically corrupt.
None of that can be fixed with individualistic entrepenuership.
It can only be fixed with a collective hang over / come down, realizing we need an intervention, and then realizing we are all more or less wallowing in the same field of pigshit, and will need to cooperate in mutually beneficial ways to get to anywhere better than that.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏
80% of the reason I don’t go out to eat more is because I fucking hate tipping.
I got carry out from a local Mexican restaurant. Really nice food and good atmosphere I enjoyed while paying for my food. which prompted a tip for 18/20/22/0%
Yeah no. I’ve even seen it start at 20 and go up to 28.
Person comes out of their cave to see tipping servers at restaurants for takeout is a thing.
When I worked restaurants I had to do more work as a server for takeout than in house. Way way more work. You’re damn right they get tipped for that.
Learn to cook.
More people should be like you. Of course I want restaurants to pay their workers more than $2.13/hour, but because that’s what they get away with paying, and rely on tips to subsidize their labor, this is the way it’s gonna be until laws change. Because of that, we need to budget the tip into our decision of whether to go out or not. If you can’t afford to leave a good tip for good service, stay the fuck home. If I owned a restaurant and had a repeat customer tip like shit to a known good worker, I’d loudly berate that customer in front of everybody and then ban them. The only thing worse than shitty, entitled customers shitting on retail workers is spineless managers bending over for whatever the shitty customers demand.
Most people hate tipping. But I go out infrequently and only go to good places, so I am happy to leave a good tip for an excellent meal with excellent service, and when I come back I know I’ll be welcome because I treated the staff well and left a reasonable tip.
If I owned a restaurant and had a repeat customer tip like shit to a known good worker, I’d loudly berate that customer in front of everybody and then ban them.
Or – and this is just a thought – you could save the self-entitled screeching and just fucking PAY YOUR SERVERS A LIVING WAGE.
I know this is mind-blowing, but if you own a restaurant, you don’t have to wait for any law to change. You could just do what’s right today.
If you need a law to force you into paying workers a living wage, the non-tipping customer isn’t the wrongdoer you should be screaming at.
The only thing worse than shitty, entitled customers shitting on retail workers is spineless managers bending over for whatever the shitty customers demand.
They’re just embittered and fighting over the scraps you left them, not realizing they are both victims of you not paying your servers a living wage in a society that routinely authorizes the same behaviors.
It’s not realistic to be able to compete in an already ruthless, tight margin industry like that while also handicapping yourself in that way if nobody else is. How can you get customers to choose your business when your prices are so much higher on the menu to account for paying 10x higher wages? How do you attract good staff to work for you if their pay is capped like that? How do you stop people from calling out on busy nights like Fridays and Saturdays because they’d be making a Tuesday wage for the extra work or double that if they work somewhere else? People are generally speaking pretty dumb, so they’ll see that my burger is $18 across the street from an identical $15 burger, not understand that tipping 20% raises that $15 cost to $18, and call me a cheap bastard for charging so much more for nothing.
New small business restaurants are already notorious for shutting down within a year or two of opening. The only ways to achieve this are with a massive starting capital to be able to withstand operating at a loss for years while proving reputation to both customers and workers, or bigger established brands doing it first to normalize it, or by raising tipped minimum wages higher legally so that every company is moving in that direction together. Or (my preference) by banning the tipped minimum wage from being separate from minimum wage in the first place.
The whole function of a business in this system is to make money. It’s not sensible to intentionally choose to make less money. So long as we latch onto capitalism as a system, companies will largely only do the bare minimum as required by regulations in order to keep costs as low as possible while maintaining competitive pricing. The only companies that can afford to do things differently are privately owned companies that have already established themselves as major successes and can afford to buy some extra good will at the cost of growth or even a little financial loss. I don’t like it any more than you do, but this is what we’ve got until the people demand more or a different system entirely. Maybe when the boomers all fuck off and die. Who knows.
WhY dOnT yOu JuSt ChArGe ThE cOrReCt PrIcE?!
Says cave dweller who can’t comprehend that human psychology drives the herd and that means: yes non tipping sit down restaurants will fail and yes, i have to raise prices just to run a sale to make money because people are fucking dumb as shit.
I averaged $35 an hour at my restaurant in tips alone (they paid me $13 an hour to run the whole place including serving back in 2001). They could not afford me. A good server will never work that job again if they got your deal. Then you’d bitch moan and complain about bad service.
So fuck everyone who serves at a Denny’s or a Waffle House. You can only say that because you personally were working at an establishment where you could average $35 an hour.
Your comment is an argument for all other servers everywhere to work at subsistence levels because you personally are in a situation where you can do well on $2.13 an hour plus tips. You’d keep everyone else at less than half that so you personally prosper, and you applaud the tipping system, born of racism and slavery, that supports it.
This is so “Fuck you I got mine” energy when someone else making a living wage doesn’t need to hurt you at all. Just because someone else makes a living wage doing the same job does not, in itself, outlaw tipping. Nor does it bind your employer to paying the lowest living wage: your employer can still pay you above the lowest level. They don’t need a law for that.
And I would remind you, it’s NOT my deal. It’s the owner’s deal. If they can’t afford you, work somewhere else, just as you said.
For myself, I do not ever moan about bad service, nor have I ever left a shitty tip: if service is that bad I assume it’s because bad or absent management doesn’t know how to run a restaurant. I don’t complain, I just don’t return.
The current kleptocrats in charge are murdering the global economy and the neoliberals before them fucked it.
The headline is clearly framed to put the blame on something else, even in a joking manner. That makes the journalist or editor a collaborator.
The article itself is written in that disgusting cutesy style: Your New Lunch Habit Is Hurting the Economy - WSJ https://archive.ph/iwYHZ
Late-stage capitalism ready to collapse on itself. When your production lines are perfectly efficient, no one make money but the top.
Then at some point, consumption will come to a halt. Robots will produce goods that nearly no one can afford, small service business will be bankrupted. And government will be powerless as billionaires don’t pay taxes but they’re the last class on Earth actually making money.
This is just an early sign. The whole system is ready to crash.
It’s insane to write about “spending habits” when people have trouble just getting by.
Any article about such topics should blame those who are really responsible: the increasing gap between the rich and the middle class/poor, as well as the politicians who push this even further.
Reporters who blame the people who rely on debt just to get by are lacking empathy and decency.
