Return to office might have some reverse effect but online remote employees can be one of the biggest generators of this problem.

And who feels that pressure the most? Service workers, who had jobs in the cities, sure, but didn't reap any of the economic benefits of all that urban wealth concentration. They're overrepresented in the population who fled, which means their jobs are now underserved.

Long term, this will probably just be viewed as a correction to a few overpopulated urban cores. We'll find equilibrium again, though not at the same state as before.

But regardless, the fix here is the same: pay more for the jobs and you'll find people willing to do them.

They are. It takes time but they are. I work in a business that is having a hard time hiring entry level healthcare workers because Walmart and Amazon warehoueses is now paying $15-20/hr when it was only $12 pre-covid. Walmart and Amazon would only raise wages if they truly had a labor supply issue, which they do, we all do.

Kroger decided to close a store because it didn't want to pay a covid front line temporary increase of $4/hr.

I don't see a big increase in wages, and I work a lot of lousy jobs.

If job conditions were a bit better, a lot of employees will stay at a low paying job because they actually like their fellow employees, and sometimes the job.

I don't know why being nice/respectful is so out of fashion in corporate america?

I grocery shop at Safeway, and The Nugget markets. Safeway employees hate their job. They even have a hard time retaining new immigrants. When I shop at Safeway, I sometimes need to move to another line if I feel the checker is having a bad day. (I overheard an employee state a manager wanted him at a store 70 miles away at 5 am the next day, and he told that manager he didn't have transportation other than the bus. I wanted to grab the phone and lay into that "Manager".)

As opposed to The Nugget, which is notated as one of the best 100 places to work. It's like going back to the fifties. The employees are nice. It might be they hire people whom will have better jobs one day?

Anyways, it's not just about wage. I have had lousy low paid jobs I liked, and well paid union jobs I despise.

If you're talking about Seattle, Kroger closed that store because it was underperforming for years, not because of a temporary wage increase that affected every grocery store in the city. Weeks later, they started advertising open positions with wage increases for nearby stores they didn't close...

When it comes to political decisions, firms lie all the time about their motivations. I don't understand how anyone can take what they say at face value, without any means to verify their claims.

The reality is that nobody closes their grocery business because labour costs went up for them and their competitors. Customers still need groceries to live, and you and your competitors just pass the costs directly to them, without any change to profit margins or market share. Closing your grocery over this is as nonsensical as closing your grocery because the spot price of milk went up to $15/gallon.

It gets argued again and again that the profit incentive is necessary for cutting inefficiencies, and looking at it from Kroger's perspective, this appears to be another such example. Yet this is only the case for Kroger - when considered in its full context, as a supplier of necessities for working class folks, it's the total opposite. It's the composition fallacy at work: just because companies with a profit motive evolve to cut inefficiencies wherever possible (such as by externalizing costs) does not mean that society as a whole reaps the same benefits.

Of course they're not going to say "we're closing because we don't want to pay our employees a decent wage", that would be bad optics. You can be pretty sure that if you ask employees at the store, they'll say that whatever the stated reason, the intended message from the parent company is "we ain't gonna pay you more".

> Salary and Years of Experience

> Based on the May 2017 salary information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), orderlies make a median wage of $13.07 an hour or $27,180 a year. Half of orderlies receive more, and half make less. The lowest-paid 10 percent make less than $9.73 an hour or $20,240 a year, while the highest-earning 10 percent get over $19.52 an hour or $40,610 a year. Orderlies employed in psychiatric and substance abuse hospitals are paid the highest average wage of $17.21 an hour or $35,800 a year. Nursing care facilities pay one of the lowest average wages of $12.00 an hour or $24,950 a year.

> Wages often start out low for entry-level orderlies and grow with experience. Some orderlies complete additional training and state requirements to advance to higher paid nursing assistant or registered nursing roles. In July 2018, PayScale.com showed this hourly pay progression by experience for nurse aides, orderlies and attendants:

> 0 to 5 years: $8.19 - $15.24

> 5 to 10 years: $8.28 - $15.83

> 10 to 20 years: $8.84 - $17.16

> 20 or more years: $8.73 - $20.00

Often working 24, 36 or even 48 hour shifts.

Often for $15/hr or less (many places will pay EMTs literally minimum wage, and tell their employees, "you can have as much OT as you want").

Part of it is supply and demand. Private EMS is often an in-road or holding pattern to a more "cushy" unionized fire department EMS position (where firefighter paramedics can make into the six digits). So private EMS has little motivation to be competitive - "there's a line of 21 year olds who will happily take your job".

With their huge efficiencies of scale and deep cash reserves, they are better able to offer higher wages than competitors. During the pandemic, both Walmart and Amazon have seen huge growth. They can continue this growth post-pandemic by squeezing their competitors on wages, and eventually emerging with less competitors.

Sounds like they're in a no win situation.

If they don't raise wages: "boo they're paying their workers slave wages!"

If they do raise wages: "boo they're using their huge scale to further crush their competitors!"

Nothing, good point.

> That is what they are doing now, right?

I haven't seen that near where I live (in the US) though I wouldn't doubt there are a number of locations experiencing that.

No soup for you.

the problem is the restaurants are seeing fewer customers due to the pandemic so they can't raise wages, while the upper 1/4 or so of the population hasn't been financially impacted by the pandemic and housing and rents have continued to climb. restaurants can't raise prices in this situation and they can't raise wage, which squeezes the workers who are now not putting up with it any more.

return to work means continued increase in housing prices and if restaurants fully open they're going to have to pay more and that means that those wage and rent increases for the businesses will have to get passed on as rising prices.

if there's a switch to remote work then that will make cities more livable again at current wage costs and menu pricing. you lose some disposable income from the seriously high wage earners that have left the city, but they'll mostly take the distortion of the housing market with them while the bulk of the population that makes less than $150k will have more left out of salaries to eat out at the restaurants.

short term the effect of popping housing bubbles would be recessionary, of course, but it'd act more like Volker's popping of the 70s stagflation bubble, give it 5 years and the "new normal" of consistent housing prices would take over.

Restaurants have a lot of legal exceptions because you need people to work on sunday, vacations, weird schedules, etc.

So compared to other situations in the same country, it's not a good deal.

Actually a lot of industries have this problem.

I was a smartphone tech. I repaired phones. You know when a majority of our business was done? On weekends and holidays. Whenever my GF had a national holiday, I had to work because it meant the people who put off fixing their phones will take that day and come it for a repair because it was way more convenient than during or after their working hours.

I also had to work until 7pm every night for the same reason. My owner was banking on people coming home from work and stopping, so we stayed open an extra two hours. Some days I had five people in my office. Other days? Maybe one or two. But those two hours generated a lot more revenue than you probably think over the course of a month.

If this industry literally cannot afford to pay people a living wage, if no one wants to work for them and they can't remain profitable by making working conditions better, then they just shouldn't even exist.

If your average American working a full-time job can't afford to eat out at high enough prices to keep restaurants afloat while paying decent wages, that sounds like a systemic problem—and we already know that one of those exists here.

This isn't really true. Restaurants exist to fill a bunch of different needs; experience, novelty, convenience etc. And expense isn't a particularly good predictor of quality.

I do agree that once you can cook well you're much less likely to be happy at an overpriced generic version of something... which is right where fast casual and big chain casual is aimed. But sometimes you go for the company and not the food, etc.

This cuts both ways, some types of pain are easier to take on at home. During service, time and focus are at a premium - which is way almost every place cuts corners on e.g., risotto.

Once you can cook well you learn that cheap is typically bad food. Expensive food can be good or bad, the good is worth it for those other reasons you state.

Not really. I had a great tacos the other day from a food truck, and great Ethiopian dinner on the weekend. Both cheap and not something I could reproduce easily or at all.

On the other hand, what you say usually applies to the ragu at a fast-casual.

So it depends.

A couple of decent summaries:

* https://www.thedailymeal.com/eat/why-home-cooked-food-never-...

* https://old.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1f1vr6/e...

Yet sometimes I crave a fried chicken sandwich and to hell if we're going to spend the time doing that ourselves. Life's too short and that's way too much work.

People always need to eat.

It’s not fiscally viable closed system. Restaurants operate on tiny margins and come and go as frequently as software startups.

We keep trying to hitch biological necessity to ridiculous memes of social capital accumulation, inventing more abstract and Byzantine math as if literal reality will implode if the rich can’t earn a profit.

Like healthcare, the routine is eating is obviously necessary. Is the industrialization?

If you are a KFC/Burger King/McDonalds franchisee then it seems to work but I have lost count the number of establishments that open/closes in that one spot of our local mall.

Pub/Indian/Pizza/Chinese/Fish & Chips/ - they come and go.

McD is more strategic: They want a good business plan, location, etc. and are very picky at the cost of some false negatives.

That's an odd way of looking at it. Surely what happened first isn't that the expectations of fast food jobs changed out of the blue. Could it instead be that other jobs which adults worked to support their families went away?

Wrong.

"From the beginning, the minimum wage was meant to be a living wage—meaning families could live off of the pay comfortably, rather than struggling paycheck-to-paycheck" https://www.lendio.com/blog/minimum-wage-livable/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carriesheffield/2014/04/29/on-t...

2) Have you actually looked back and compared that salary to the cost of living back then? I think you might be surprised how many people could, and were, supporting a family on a job that “anyone with a pulse” could do.

And who worked the day shift?

There are a lot of people who like having a job, but don't really need the money. Those that need the money move up to management if they can.

These people exist, I do not believe that any of them work at fast food restaurants. That’s an incredible amount of stress to put yourself through to “get out of the house” and meet new people.

> Those that need the money move up to management if they can.

I think you’re overestimating the size of management by quite a bit.

Most people decide fast food management isn't for them, and move elsewhere. The ones who remain dropped out and need the free training.

> Most people decide fast food management isn't for them, and move elsewhere.

Perhaps it was too stressful? Just a thought.

Management is more stressful. That is a different from the line worker who has been working the same position for the last 5 years, with no interest in advancing. I saw several people refuse advancements because they didn't want the stress: they knew how to do their job and it wasn't stressful at all anymore. (they learned to shut off the customer who yells at them while the cook is behind on orders - this coping is an important skill)

Then your experience is atypical.

> Management is more stressful.

But you said it wasn't stressful. Which is it?

> they learned to shut off the customer who yells at them while the cook is behind on orders - this coping is an important skill

Uhhh, this is not a good thing. You're describing someone shutting down in the face of excessive stress.

I'd also point out that claiming that it's "not stressful" and being shouted at by customers are mutually exclusive. Being shouted at is a stressful experience, definitionally.

Deskilling, derisking, outsourcing. Companies used to run their own email, which required a competent mailadmin, nowadays you outsource it to Google or Microsoft.

Most companies didn't hire a competent mail admin, their IT guy would run Exchange on the company fileserver as a part of his other duties.

Most of the large companies that used to hire a competent mail admin to run their mail servers still run their own mail servers.

Any sane economist that has to solve for the constraint "everyone has to provide for themselves" aka the mythical republican "responsibility" would first start by creating enough jobs to reach full employment. When you leave everything up to responsibility you also have the duty to provide everyone with the ability to live up to their responsibility.

Society as a whole doesn't benefit from exploitation or unsustainable businesses.

In a pandemic with vast spending deficits, the government is giving out mortgage holidays, 95% mortgage scheme, stamp duty holiday etc.

listening to Changelog while riding my bike at night after getting out of the factory

A lot of jurisdictions showed them this when they paid almost the the same as their FT take-home pay during Covid. I don't think they've left for something better; I think they're mostly not doing anything.

Exactly, so restaurant owners should raise wages to compensate. There's not a shortage of workers, there's a shortage of owners willing to pay the current market wage.