The Sunday before last, I got a rough experience in “the new normal.”
I work evening shift (covering after-hours) for a call center, starting at 5:30 pm. I got in my car at 4:15 pm thinking I could get some fast food from a drive-thru, and then swing back home in time to finish my food before my work-at-home shift started. I forgot that “fast food” is one of those obsolete terms like “theatrical release” or “free and fair elections.”
The McDonald’s nearest my house had at least ten cars rolled around the building and that line didn’t look to be moving any time soon. At 4:30 I flipped around to the Jack In The Box where there was only one car at the drive-thru but had to wait several minutes overhearing the customer and the intercom cashier having some conversation that sounded even more stoned than usual for a Jack In The Box customer and/or employee. So when the girl finally pulled forward I wanted to order just two things and the cashier said, “I’m sorry, but the order ahead of you is literally 250 dollars, and the kitchen is going to be occupied. Can you wait 20 minutes?”
“No.”
(Actually, I wanted to say ‘Fuck You gently with a chainsaw’, but that would have taken too much time.)
If I have to spend more time at a drive-thru waiting for food than I would in a sit-down restaurant, doesn’t that defeat the whole concept of DRIVE-THRU FAST FOOD?!?
By this time it was just about 5, the Mexican drive-thru joint in the neighborhood is closed Sundays, so is the sushi joint, and the only other thing I could think of was this place on East Desert Inn that used to be a Del Taco and is now a fried chicken-soul food joint called Golden Bird Chicken. I was reluctant to do so because they had at best ‘eh’ food and their service was as slow as an arthritic tree on the handful of occasions I had tried them. I went inside because (this is another omen) they didn’t even HAVE drive-thru service the first couple times I went there, that’s how fucking slow they were, they put a garbage can in the drive-thru lane because they knew they couldn’t work that fast. I had to wait behind one guy in line and I ordered two barbeque chicken sandwiches cause I figure all they would need to do is take some chop-parts, sauce them and put them on a bun. There was only the one manager on duty, I didn’t see anybody at the grill for several minutes and it was about 5:15 when I asked if they were getting to my order and the manager asked his one employee on staff if they had the makings for BBQ chicken sandwiches and the guy said “no.” Gee, it would have been nice to know that BEFORE taking my debit card. So I waited a little longer for a transaction cancellation but the manager apparently couldn’t coordinate between the previous customer and the one guy who braved the drive-thru long enough to him to cancel the Goddamn transaction for the food I was NOT getting, and he was making me late for work.
So I said, “Congratulations, I just paid you 8 dollars for nothing” and walked out. I barely had time to get to work and I ended up having to order something delivered from a pizza joint, which of course had to be eaten on the side cause I was at work.
By the way, to anybody who lives in Las Vegas: FUCK Golden Bird Chicken. I am NOT going back there, and if you’re thinking about trying them, DON’T.
But if you look at social media, you might have seen a few other complaints about this issue, but most of them are from the managers of chain restaurants themselves. Several people now have to live on the government’s Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation (FPUC), a feature of the CARES Act signed by President Biden, where they get $300 a month. Several Republican Senators are asking Biden to reduce or end the benefits even as some states are reviewing their own unemployment benefits.
Apparently in the Chamber of Commerce’s own analysis, “the $300 benefit results in approximately one in four recipients taking home more in unemployment than they earned working.” Divide 300 by 40 hours a week. That’s 7.5 dollars an hour. Gross pay. Just slightly more than the Federal minimum wage, which hasn’t increased since 2009.
If business in this country can’t compete with THAT level of pay, then maybe this Trump economy wasn’t as gangbusters as we all thought.
As I’ve said: All minimum wage means is that if it were legal for the company to pay you less than that, then they would. And that’s because your job, relative to the cost of hiring your replacement, is only worth that much to the company or less. If it was worth more, they would pay more.
As flawed and hypocritical as the Left can be, they have hit on a key hypocrisy of the Right: They don’t want a laissez-faire economy any more than the Left does.
Yeah, maybe a lot of these fast-food places are actually run by franchisees, and maybe the manager at Golden Bird Chicken is running with the money in his till and that’s it, but a lot of the joints that plead poverty are still associated with major chains, and their collective resources are being used to put themselves at priority ahead of the smaller operators. Like, if you wonder why the food at your favorite bar got so expensive all of a sudden, it’s because the shift to delivery and crash in sit-down eating thanks to Trump Virus (TM) meant that the chains with more buying power than the local bar needed more chicken and other meat and were able to snap up the food supply.
Much like how Walmart used its collective resources to drink every local store’s milkshake and make them uncompetitive and now everyone wonders why Walmart is the only store in town and no one can afford to shop anywhere besides Walmart.
What certain business owners are really complaining about is that The Law of Supply and Demand is real, and now it’s finally starting to work both ways. The Left doesn’t like that aspect of capitalism (or capitalism in general) because the worker usually gets the wrong end of the deal, but certain economic principles are called “laws” because they apply and have been proven to exist regardless of culture and place. It used to be that workers had to put up with shit conditions and wages because there were always more workers than jobs, but apparently that’s no longer the case. So of course wages are going up. Not as much as some people would like, but they are. I mean the Speedee Mart gas station near my place is posting for jobs starting at $12 an hour. I never thought I’d see wages like that at a convenience store. That’s close to what I started at with my current job when I joined a few years ago and I’ve had raises since then.
As I said in one of my first posts:
“(C)onservatives and libertarians mostly think that we shouldn’t make the welfare system too “cushy” because that will de-incentivize work since at some level you could get a better standard of living without working. But that policy has two issues: One, given the “Puritan work ethic” of this country, it’s very unlikely that we ever will have a comprehensive welfare state on the level of an EU country, at least not with our current political class. And two, given that fact, the gradual desertion of the workforce is not so much because the benefits of welfare are so great, but because the benefits of work are so meager. Put another way, if you’re going to be just scraping by whether you have a job or not, you might as well be just scraping by with plenty of free time on the government dole as opposed to just scraping by while busting your ass over 40 hours a week. “
This country didn’t suddenly get socialist. On the whole, you’ve still got the same Ayn Rand-meets-Puritanism approach to welfare in America, and the government’s current level of unemployment benefits is actually more stingy than what businesses had been paying, just as our “socialist” minimum wage was already less than what the market would bear even before Trump Virus, when most fast-food joints had to pay at least a dollar over the Federal minimum to hire people. But now that the country has created a situation where many people weren’t allowed to work, the dynamic has tipped.
And just think, this change happened all because of Donald Trump, our most freeist market, capitalest president EVAR!
I mean maybe this isn’t capitalism in the libertarian, laissez-faire sense, but in the sense of “the economy works because actions have consequences”, maybe it is.
All this gets into how the Left can be philosophically wrong yet be on the right side of the political debate. Like how they say “healthcare is a human right,” which is bullshit. Not that we don’t NEED healthcare, I mean that it’s the wrong argument. You have people running certain parts of government who don’t think we HAVE rights, such as the right not to get killed by a cop for a non-capital crime, or the right to vote if it’s not for a Republican, so don’t try to persuade those people with rights you made up. Nobody, even on the Left, thinks that an interstate highway system is a “human right”, but we paid for it – at least we used to – because everyone saw it as a common benefit. That’s how you need to phrase this.
You don’t pay people 300 bucks a week (which is conditional in any case) because you want to encourage mooching. You do it because it would take the economy that much longer to recover if we had that many more able-bodied and gainfully employed people made homeless in less than a year because The Greatest President The Business Community Ever Had decided that coronavirus wasn’t real and therefore we didn’t need to account for face-to-face services having to shut down across the country.
But hey, at least you got that Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, huh? How’s that working out now?
If even $300 a week is more than 25 percent of unemployment recipients got from working, by the CoC’s own estimate, then that shows how much they got from working. As a right-winger, I can conditionally tolerate unemployment supports until we get this country and economy back to normal. The fact that the business community thinks that $300 a week is spoiling people means that the status quo pre-COVID really wasn’t normal.
And as with a lot of other things, the solution is not to go back to normal, but to find something better than normal, because ‘normal’ was how everything got fucked in the first place.