by jasondc on 6/25/18, 6:30 PM with 238 comments
by Androider on 6/25/18, 8:31 PM
It's like the difference between an old-style Taxi and an Uber, with the latter you just get up and go when you're done. The whole dance of flagging down the server to request the bill, get the bill, oops the server disappeared before you could pull out your card, wait for 10 minutes while they are off exploring Narnia in the kitchen cupboards. Finally they come to take the card and disappear again, what should have taken 30 seconds is now at 15 min+, hope you're not missing your show... ah, finally they're back! Now try to figure out the tip line, with the air of one who is trying to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade in your head while your house is burning down.
Waitstaff-less high-end restaurants expand the audience and frequency of visits of people who can now enjoy these better-than-Chipotle dining experiences. Much like Uber, which doesn't only cannibalize existing providers but actually creates a whole new category of short rides that you would never have previously considered using a Taxi for.
by grellas on 6/25/18, 7:54 PM
If a local government dictates that your base wage rate for a labor-intensive industry has to increase by 40% within less than a 5-year period and, on top of that, further dictates that you as an employer must provide those same employees with above-average health benefits together with paid leave of varying types above and beyond what market norms have been, well, at the end of that process, you are obviously having to pay a hell of a lot more for those employees than you did just a few years back, perhaps as much as 50% more.
Real wage increases tie to rising productivity. I well remember representing highly-talented UNIX engineers during the early 1990s who were earning around $60K per year (adjusting for inflation alone, that number would still not be in the six-figure range today). Today, engineers of that caliber easily command six-figure salaries plus great perks. The best of them easily command $250k+ salaries. For employers trying to find such engineers, they have to open their wallets big time and, yet, they do. Why? Because, if you are a Google or a Facebook or a Twitter or an Apple, or any other preeminent company needing the services of such engineers, you are not trying to eliminate those positions simply because they cost a lot more today than they did in the early 1990s. You are desperately trying to add such people to your payroll because of what they can do for you. The changing tech world has magnified the productivity and value of what such engineers can do and therefore the salaries and perks they can command are far higher. But this is market-based and justified because the profits you can earn as an employer are also much higher owing to their work. The engineers of the early 1990s were just as talented as those today but their value was relatively less to employers than is the value of their counterparts today. Their productivity has vastly increased. Hence, so has their compensation.
Compare that to what the city officials in San Francisco are doing with waiters and similar restaurant staff. Essentially, they have decreed (in the name of worker protection) that the cost to the employer of such employees shall increase by 50% or more over a short period when nothing whatever has occurred to increase their productivity. I went years working my way through school doing such work and it is very hard work indeed. The people doing it earn every penny. Yet those who did it 5 years ago at considerably less cost to the employer than those who do it today worked just as hard as their counterparts today. If those doing such work today are doing the same work, and their productivity has not materially increased, yet they are getting paid 50% more, something has to give.
This article basically dances around the obvious by tying the discussion to the considerable expense of living in SF and to collateral issues affecting the city's living environment. In doing so, it does not discuss the obvious: when supply and demand dictates what people will do, and you arbitrarily raise the cost of something, it will affect demand by lessening it.
That is why SF restaurants are moving to less labor-dependent models of doing business. Not all will do so but the laws of supply and demand have given them an incentive to do so and it should surprise no one that a good number of them are adapting.
Perhaps this is all worth it because those who are now working as waitstaff in SF restaurants are doing much better financially and this is worth the trade off. But no one should pretend that this does not come at a price, perhaps a very high one, for those whose jobs have vanished along with the new business models. (By "new" here, I mean not that no one has had self-serve models before, which they obviously have, but "new" in the sense that restaurants that would before have never considered such models are now adopting them).
by ademup on 6/25/18, 8:01 PM
by SurrealSoul on 6/25/18, 7:21 PM
I have never seen an article hype up the McDonald experience so much.
[Side tangent, I hate the concept of waiters. If I am having a romantic dinner with my wife, I would much rather get her a cup of water than have someone butt into our conversation]
by ulfw on 6/26/18, 3:46 AM
So if I buy a $20 meal, I pay the waiter $3 to take my order, go to the kitchen, tell the chefs, go pick up the order, put it on my table and later take my credit card when I flag him down to pay. This should be included in the price. But hey. Whatever. $3. Fine.
Now when I go to a fancier restaurant and order the same amount of food, where the waiter does the exact same job of taking an order, putting it on the table and comes back later to take my credit card I suddenly have to pay him say $20? Why? How on earth has his job changed in any way shape or form to earn so much more money than the previous restaurant's waiter for the exact same amount of work?
I really do not get it.
If anything, the Chefs and Sous Chefs should be tipped and should earn more at fancier restaurants because food preparation there often takes longer, is a more intricate affair and often needs more skills and experience. Not the waiting staff.
by SilasX on 6/25/18, 7:22 PM
This is kind of to-be-expected as the wage/cost-of-living ratio dips too low so that lower-labor models are preferred. [1].
My peeve about these kinds of models is the ambiguity of the tipping situation; it's obviously not full service, but it's not zero either. And places like Super Duper are zero service (you stand in line, fetch your order, and bus your table) but still guilt you into tipping. I don't know the amount for "this satisfies the standard expectation".
[1] If you automatically say "lol pay them more", it's not that simple: higher prices and you'll scare off too many customers -- into fast casual and home cooking -- to cover overhead. Take lower profits and it may not pay enough to be worth the investment.
[2] Edit: original version was something like “... putting diners to work”.
by cm2012 on 6/25/18, 10:11 PM
by Scramblejams on 6/26/18, 12:56 AM
Who are all these people in this thread who don’t value a server’s knowledge and flexibility? It’s as if they’ve never been infuriated by an IVR system and cannot imagine that kind of horror landing in their restaurant booth when all they’re looking to do is enjoy themselves.
Sometimes you want recommendations that come with more details than what the web guy baked into the hero piece. Sometimes you want something prepared a certain way, and the UI isn’t going to be up to it. Good luck getting that through an abused table tablet.
So some servers underachieve. Fine. I still want one.
by CompelTechnic on 6/25/18, 7:33 PM
Take everything you read with a grain of salt, and stick to first-hand data as much as possible.
Here is a good, minimally biased (although by a libertarian-leaning economist) synopsis of the initial results: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/06/se...
by Simulacra on 6/25/18, 8:54 PM
by kennon42 on 6/25/18, 7:44 PM
by ctdonath on 6/25/18, 10:26 PM
And some jobs just don't entail that much productivity.
by cbhl on 6/25/18, 11:21 PM
If we pay everyone enough to make a living wage, then it should cost the same for me to grab my own menu, utensils and water bottles as it would for a server to do so.
Honestly, the high cost of renting in SF has already made the "move to California and bus tables to get by while auditioning for movie / working on startup" dream impossible. This is just a side effect of the bureaucracy and housing policies here.
by shah_s on 6/25/18, 7:17 PM
by thiscatis on 6/25/18, 9:42 PM
by vertexFarm on 6/25/18, 7:24 PM
I guess people are supposed to look at less glamorous cities, but if everyone affected by this did that then they would probably run out of opportunities, fill up, and have housing prices shoot up as well. Something's gotta give here. There's a real disconnect between the prices and the ability to pay. Who is paying for these things? People with lots of generational wealth? People with upper-middle class jobs yet no savings and razor-thin margins due to living expenses? That's so shitty.
by gnicholas on 6/25/18, 7:58 PM
https://www.almanacnews.com/news/2017/06/14/menlo-park-resta...
by rhc2104 on 6/25/18, 7:33 PM
by adityapurwa on 6/26/18, 5:55 PM
by thisrod on 6/25/18, 10:31 PM
Old joke: some Australians take a taxi from LAX to their hotel. As they get out, the driver asks, "Your tip?" "Our tip is, live somewhere with a minimum wage, mate!"
by chobytes on 6/25/18, 10:44 PM
by orionblastar on 6/26/18, 7:47 AM
First it was pizza places and now it is McDonalds and others.
Wife and I went to a Wendys and nobody answered the drive through system. We only wanted small frosties so we went home without them. Other cars got mad that they were not taking drove through orders.
These jobs are not 15 dollars an hour, but a lot of workers don't deserve that and will be replaced with competent workers or computers or kiosks or an app.
by kevin_b_er on 6/25/18, 10:02 PM
Except because everyone is too price sensitive with a race to the bottom on pricing, customer service is no longer valued. So we do away with customer service to keep the pricing the same rather than raise prices.
by ksec on 6/26/18, 5:23 AM
Well not really housing but property market. Don't know why they "discover" it now. Well it has been going on in some places for well over a decade.
by logfromblammo on 6/25/18, 10:12 PM
by TipVFL on 6/25/18, 7:35 PM
I feel like so much of this could be fixed if we had a highly regulated housing market, with a goal of affordable housing for everyone. It's hard to imagine that this housing bubble can last much longer, it's distorting everything to such an extreme already.
The cost of housing doesn't have to keep increasing, just look at Germany: https://www.forbes.com/sites/eamonnfingleton/2014/02/02/in-w...
by Simulacra on 6/25/18, 8:52 PM
by vidanay on 6/26/18, 2:03 PM
by RickJWagner on 6/26/18, 11:46 AM
We need 'small jobs'. They're an important part of the ecosystem.
by baby on 6/25/18, 11:17 PM
by codewritinfool on 6/25/18, 7:43 PM
by emilfihlman on 6/25/18, 7:44 PM
by bwbw223 on 6/26/18, 7:50 PM
by sonnyblarney on 6/25/18, 7:28 PM
Uhhhh. No - that is really the wrong way to say it. There's a supply/demand mismatch obviously.
Clearly the wealthy residents of SF simply don't want to pay ... for some reason.
I think there is something sneaky going on - when I lived in SF, restaurant prices were disturbingly cheap. As a Canadian, I'm used to not very good prices. But in SF, I couldn't grasp it. I know that they employ a lot of undocumented labour, and I suggest this might have something to do with it - i.e. - a resto starts employing undocumented workers in the back simply to 'stay alive' - but then it forces other restaurants into the same competitive bind. And then they start moving into other jobs - forcing those layers of the value chain to have 'real wages' that are under minimum wage.
This is effectively what has happened in farming - and the same thing could be hitting restaurants - it's one of the more pernicious aspects of irregular immigration and employment.
by abritinthebay on 6/25/18, 7:23 PM
This is not a general problem in SF.
by pandasun on 6/25/18, 7:16 PM
by crankylinuxuser on 6/25/18, 7:22 PM
Try, "Nobody wants or can afford to do the work for such a pittance, so nobody does." I hope those businesses that do this die. Then again, won't really need hope. New restaurants easily die within 1 year. Good riddance.