South Boston restaurant blames lazy handout-taking lardasses for its staffing shortages, not its own pay rates

Exactly, that's what Little Dipper refused to do.

Welfare is ok if you are wealthy and white. It’s especially ok if you inherited money from your daddy. Money please, daddy!

Typical Trumpers. They are always guilty of doing things they themselves are doing.

Says it all.

But in the United States, fresh out of the Civil War, formerly enslaved people were able to find most work in food service or as railroad porters, jobs that relied on tips. Many employers who wanted to hire the formerly enslaved also wanted to keep them at a low wage.

[url=https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020... check: Tipping began amid slavery, then helped keep former Black slaves' wages low[/url]

… have higher status and get more respect. They don’t have to suck up to obnoxious customers and bite their tongues or risk getting stiffed for a major chunk of their income. They are protected by better labor laws as well.

If the servers who are left are getting tipped OK they might prefer to just cover more tables.

But anyway, even if the pay was OK they sound like horrible people to work for.

I remember John McCain addressing some union group, and asserting that the reason almost all seasonal farm workers were foreigners is that "Americans wouldn't do that work for $50 an hour," as though migrant workers were being paid anything remotely like that, or that most workers were, for that matter. The Greedy Old People party has no idea what the reality of working for a living is. It's discouraging that so many people who do work for a living continue to support the GOP.

A ton of states cut the benefits already. If these people who say that people are only not working because of this were correct you would have seen a significant change in unemployment rates as those people were forced to return to work. Guess what? It hasn't happened. That's how you can tell that this is an empty political talking point not actually backed by facts.

Here are the states that ended the $300 federal unemployment benefit early:

Alaska June 12
Missouri June 12
Mississippi June 12
Iowa June 12
Alabama June 19
Idaho June 19
Indiana June 19
Nebraska June 19
New Hampshire June 19
North Dakota June 19
West Virginia June 19
Wyoming June 19
Arkansas June 26
Florida June 26
Georgia June 26
Montana June 26
Ohio June 26
Oklahoma June 26
South Carolina June 26
South Dakota June 26
Texas June 26
Utah June 26
Maryland July 3
Tennessee July 3
Arizona July 10
Louisiana August 3

Full service restaurants have been on the decline for a long time now. The pandemic only accelerated it. The fact is not enough people are willing to pay enough to cover the staffing needed to run a full service restaurant if everyone is making $15+/hour.

Take-out and delivery will continue to rise and there is going to be niche for fine dining. Things change, life goes on. I've enjoyed many afternoons and evening in restaurants with friends but I've been weening myself off for years -- just not worth the money.

Say what you will about wages but being a server was a reasonable entry-level and/or flexible hour job for a lot of people.

I rarely eat out. I’m usually dragged into them by others. Having worked in the restaurant industry in the past, it’s still kind of a busman’s holiday for me. The tipping thing is a turn off for me because I know of all the nastiness behind the practice. It’s not just customers lording it over servers, it’s servers cheating bussers and bartenders and it’s also management illegally skimming from tips. Then there is the kitchen and dish washers who do so much to make a restaurant successful but are rarely included in the division of tips. There are overtime abuses, mandated break abuses and side work abuses. Abuse of power and harassment flourish in workplaces where income is tied to tips and favoritism. Then there are the things that sometimes happen to your food back of the house that I’ll not go into in case someone is reading this and eating too.

When I do go out and get to chose, I’m willing to pay more for a restaurant that pays its staff a living wage. I’d rather have fewer meals out in more expensive restaurants where the food may be pricey but delicious than more frequent meals out in mediocre noisy places that just give you indigestion anyway.