I feel for this guy having to make a living with the meager pay of a barista, but setting the minimum wage to a livable level and pegging it to inflation is a much better solution. Hell, throw in some single-payer, universal healthcare, and take that item off everyone’s personal budget while we’re at it.
> throw in some single-payer, universal healthcare
When you do that, don’t forget to include coverage for the stuff around your head: dental care, eyeglasses and mental health. Many countries forgot to include coverage for these things and it is a shitshow.
I think I’ll add The Archive Undying by Emma Mieko Candon to my stack of to-be-read books. I think it was Michael Silverblatt (Host of Bookworm on NPR until 2022) who said,“There are so many great books. What is more rare is great readers.” I used to consider myself a great reader. Or at least good. I received a BA in English Lit from a top tier University and loved reading and analyzing heavy, dense, beautiful prose and stories. It seems the past half decade or so, I only want to read lighter stuff for pure entertainment and escape. Not Marvel movie levels of vapidness, but still. I’m not sure how I feel about this state of being.
I can relate to that. I’m pretty firmly in the “read what you want” camp, and I mostly try to adhere to that for myself. I try to strike a balance between escapist, light books, and books that are more challenging (and I enjoy both!). But it’s hard to shake that feeling of “I ought to be reading XYZ book instead of this,” no matter what I’m reading.
Recognizing that the act of asking for an unsolicited tip as a requisite part of buying a coffee is making both customers and himself uncomfortable, acknowledging that his take home pay is so abysmally low that he depends on tips to make a living, and then after all of that, blaming the customer as the primary problem for not being willing to tip in the current economy/environment, is like making a 95 yard run and then tripping over your own shoelaces at the endzone.
Sometimes you need to burn some clock before getting the TD. I understand what you’re getting at with your analogy, but felt like being slightly ornery for my own amusement. 😏
I like the way Europe handles tipping. A lot of the restaurants generally add a fixed service charge (most often it’s about €3 per person), and that’s kinda it. It’s common to leave a couple of euros extra, but nothing too drastic. Huge tips are not expected, and like half of the machines don’t even support the tipping function (more common in France/Italy, for example, while countries like Greece are more likely to have tipping enabled).
There might be a bit more pressure to tip in more touristy city center places, but you’re better off avoiding those in general anyway. Smaller local restaurants are way better.
Furthermore, tipping isn’t expected outside of restaurants/deliveries at all. The amount of jobs that seem to require tipping in the US is insane. Like guys, just put it in the bill and tell me the price.
I’ve worked minimum wage customer service jobs for a decade. I haven’t worked in jobs that rely on tips (though I have worked in a bar where tipping exists, but is way more normalized) but there’s no way in hell the customer is the answer to paying employees a livable wage—that’s just insane. The burden here shouldn’t be on the customer to subsidize the employer, this “economist” has it ass backwards. This is a situation that has to get worse before it gets better, I am not going to tip more to help the greedy owner undercut their employees
I’ve dropped my average tip percentage back down to 15% (20% for good waiters / waitresses I see often). Complying with larger tip percentage is exactly what the business owners want us to do, and to think that it’s going to stop at 25%? 30%? Their default tip range will just keep climbing.
Ha! He's probably going to write off the Visa giftcards as an operational expense on his taxes too. However... maybe it's also worth $1 to me to get anyone else from the GOP involved that isn't Trump or DeSantis. This is my first time hearing of this guy, that's kinda unique for the GOP. Usually their mantra is something more similar to "loud and crazy to the front!" Do they have anyone left?
There are so many from the GOP this time I've barely heard of. Useful resource to track them and their campaign positions. Though none of them are any competition to DeSantis in the opinion polls. Neither is DeSantis to Trump. Never imagined I'd say that's a good thing but oh my god Ron
He’s not buying votes per say. He just needs a certain number of donations. This definitely violates straw donor rules, in ways that look really bad for GOP. “You had to buy your way here” is never a good look.
Especially because I’m sure we’ll find they’re all doing something like it
He’s not buying votes per se. He just needs a certain number of donations. This definitely violates straw donor rules, in ways that look really bad for GOP. “You had to buy your way here” is never a good look.
Especially because I’m sure we’ll find they’re all doing something like it
Did you read the article? The economist interviewed specifically said it isn’t because of price gouging, but because they anticipated future costs will be higher than they actually were.
Normally, Andrew says, profits contribute less than a third to inflation. He found that in 2021, corporate profits could account for about double that, nearly 60% of inflation, meaning it was not costs driving inflation. It was corporate profits. Now, some economists hear this and think this is proof that companies were just using inflation as an excuse to gouge customers. Andrew does not think this. He thinks companies likely raised prices not because their costs went up in 2021 - because they did not, really - but because they were anticipating that their costs would go up a lot in 2022. And by the way, costs did end up going up in 2022, although companies still made record profits.
npr.org
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