Something you should know about pizza delivery

[Cutlass]

But that's not all that's changed. There are other reasons why a certain unskilled job doesn't pay enough to support a family other than employers just wanting to screw people over.

No, there actually isn't. Employers just want to get the most while paying the least.

But that isn't really the problem. The problem is that they can do it.

 

[Takhisis]

This thread makes me happy that the state I live in is one of the most labor-friendly in America and has a $9.19 (soon to be $9.32) minimum wage.

You are happy that the state is intervening to prevent men from kaing a profit? You're a Socialist. Probably not even born in the US either.

No, there actually isn't. Employers just want to get the most while paying the least.

But that isn't really the problem. The problem is that they can do it.

Well, they own the government, in practice.

 

[Tee Kay]

What if you don't tip? I never tip.

Australian.

 

[Drewcifer]

This is the root of the problem:

Spoiler :

In the US, we have been conditioned as a people to think that people with "low class" jobs deserve to be poor. As a result that has made it morally acceptable to condemn large swathes of our society to declining living standards because they haven't "earned it", or because certain jobs are "only for teenagers or college students", etc. I think most people in the upper middle class have no idea that a lot of those jobs that they think are only for teenagers are actually held by adults who are trying to support themselves and often families. This was true before the recession but it is even more true now. Beyond that, these low paying service jobs used to pay enough for people to support themselves but now they do not. The trend line in the chart I posted suggests that there is plenty of room to raise wages for low paid service work, it would mean the professional classes would have to pay more for things like haircuts and meals in restaurants, but it also means the working class would have a lot more money in its' pocket.

One can make the argument that the person who is working the low wage job should try to better themselves so they can make more money but that ignores the fact that even if they do, somebody else will take the poverty trap job they left and the net change in society will be zero. There will always be a large number of unskilled and semi-skilled service jobs so somebody will be working them. The narrow mindset looks at the situation on the individual level and sees poverty as the fault of the poor. But with a more honest analysis you can only come to the conclusion that circumstances in our society have mandated that certain people must be gripped in poverty so that low wage industries can pursue their business strategies.

The problem is that the pool of working poor and formerly middle class is growing. Two things come from that: 1) Larger and larger groups of people realize that they are being hosed by the powers that be and decide that they need to do something about it, and 2) In a consumer driven economy, an economy wide strategy of low wages eventually leads to a collapse of demand.

We live in interesting times.

 

[Drewcifer]

Drewcifer is back!!! Even if it's a flyby, hello!

Basically in 1991 it looks like you're earning the same wages back when expenses were what, 1/6 what they are today?

BTW it's not even the interests of Wall St, or at least potential Wall St. I still have my eye on finance but unless we have another financial crisis very soon we're going to see earnings-inequality pass all milestones since the IRS has existed to keep track.*

It's been so long since I've posted here that I almost forgot about this place, but I checked it out on a whim yesterday and thought I might have a few things to add.

It may not be in Wall Street's interest to impoverish the middle class, but it is in the individual companies' interest to pay their own workers as little as possible. So when they become really good at that the end result is that they collectively kill prosperity without intending to.

 

[KmDubya]

I'm sorry dude but your rhethoric is way off. The guy's just asking for a salary that is sufficient for basic sustenance. Something that is perfectly accomplishable while having a healthy economy. See Scandinavia. The only somewhat functional argument you have is an idealist construction of laissez-faire morals. That's perfectly fine but applying morals with little care about context or consequence in the real world is a bad thing. So yeah, it's really not perfectly fine. That you were told stupid stuff when you were young should not legitimize your blindness towards institutional poverty as an adult. That doesn't show your toughness and awesomeness for making it through, it just shows you don't actually live in the real world, the rhethoric's claims aside; it shows that you learned nothing.

And no, that you had crappy jobs, even if you have one now; it does not suffice. For you still twist a perfectly valid problem about a too low salary into other people being spoiled. I don't see that as any kind of enlightenment. It just reads like you want to prove that you're tough yourself.

Also I don't like that you twist technological development into being a perfectly fine premise for "good" human suffering.

Like Dralix said not all jobs are equal nor should they be.

Do I think that minimum wage laws should apply to waitresses? YES Tipping is a bonus for a good job, it should not be automatic or considered as part of the person's wages in order to reduce their base pay.

Do I think that tips should be taxable income? NO

A company is profitable when it earns more than it has expenses. If the cost of labor is increased the product that is being provided now costs more. The customer will then buy less product which then drives the company out of business. If labor produces less value than it costs, the company will use less labor. Higher mandatory wages will reduce employment. The workers who keep their jobs will have more but the ones laid off will have nothing.

Scandinavia is a comparatively small country with a small influx of immigrants and large oil reserves that can pay for the whole party. What works there would not work in the US.

In my opinion delivering pizza is a pretty easy job. You take pizza from the store and drive to someone's address and carry it to their door. It doesn't pay well because anyone who can drive and find an address can do it. It is a job that someone who lives in their parents basement can smoke dope, play large amounts of online MMRPG, generally avoid reality and can prosper while doing so. it is not a job for an adult who wants to provide for a family.

Look into a job in building trades or general construction, what people would term a "dirty job". Those jobs are a lot harder, they use manual labor and often you are outside in the elements all day. They also pay more than minimum wage.

When I was running projects back in the US if someone without skills but a willingness to work came to me and said he was in a bad way trying to support a family I hired him as a general laborer. Sometimes it worked out well, they showed up worked hard and got paid. When they found a better job they moved on, it was good for both of us. Sometimes it did not work out that well, they showed up late or skipped work, they complained or shirked their duties. These people got fired in a day or so, there is no room for lazy. Some people are born smarter or stronger but lazy is a choice. Everybody can choose not to be lazy.

I never have had a crappy job other than a short stint at a McDonalds. It was during wrestling season and the smell of the greasy food combined with cutting weight was a bad combination. I started as a construction laborer, from that I learned carpentry, rod busting and concrete finishing*. These skills funded college and led to engineering. A stronger work ethic will serve you better than being smarter.

Having a good life is hard work, nobody owes you anything.


*All of this work was performed in "Right to Work" States. Union rules would have prevented this type of upward mobility and since I had no family members in the Union getting in would have been very difficult.

 

[Formaldehyde]

It may not be in Wall Street's interest to impoverish the middle class, but it is in the individual companies' interest to pay their own workers as little as possible. So when they become really good at that the end result is that they collectively kill prosperity without intending to.

Given a choice between becoming even far richer and making the average person more prosperous, they seem to have deliberately made just the opposite decision.

This seems to correlate fairly closely with the productivity chart you posted above. They appear to have been using the difference between wages and productivity increase to become absurdly rich over the past 3 decades.

 

[Takhisis]

This is the root of the problem:

Spoiler :

¡Santas plusvalías, Batman!

In the US, we have been conditioned as a people to think that people with "low class" jobs deserve to be poor. As a result that has made it morally acceptable to condemn large swathes of our society to declining living standards because they haven't "earned it", or because certain jobs are "only for teenagers or college students", etc.

Well, yes. Millionaires are said to be 'worth' whatever the monetary value of their assets is. By that logic, hobos have negative value and the poor are worthless.

We live in interesting times.

Zweiblumen would say as much.

A company is profitable when it earns more than it has expenses. If the cost of labor is increased the product that is being provided now costs more. The customer will then buy less product which then drives the company out of business. If labor produces less value than it costs, the company will use less labor. Higher mandatory wages will reduce employment.

Scandinavia is a comparatively small country with a small influx of immigrants and large oil reserves that can pay for the whole party. What works there would not work in the US.

In my opinion delivering pizza is a pretty easy job. You take pizza from the store and drive to someone's address and carry it to their door. It doesn't pay well because anyone who can drive and find an address can do it. It is a job that someone who lives in their parents basement can smoke dope, play large amounts of online MMRPG, generally avoid reality and can prosper while doing so. it is not a job for an adult who wants to provide for a family.

Thankfully, facts contradict such an opinion.

 

[Bugfatty300]

In my opinion delivering pizza is a pretty easy job.

I never have had a crappy job other than a short stint at a McDonalds.

Then your opinion isn't worth a handful of spit. Delivering pizzas was one the most difficult and stressful jobs I've ever had.

Scandinavia is a comparatively small country

 

[choxorn]

Oh, like, come on, Bugfatty, like, I'm sure he just means, like, Scandinavia is, like, a small country compared to like, Africa, or, like, Texas.

 

[Gucumatz]

Link to video.

 

[AdamCrock]

I can eat a pizza right about now ....

 

[KmDubya]

Let me correct my post above with the following - Scandinavia is not a country but a group of countries. All of which are quite small and have large oil reserves that can pay the freight on their socialist utopia. Everyone happy now? It is not as if someone did not understand the point I was trying to convey.

The embellishments concerning the dope smoking and basement dwelling were added by myself for humor. They might or not be true. Whenever I think of an adult delivering pizza for a living it makes me think of Talladega Nights when Ricky Bobby is riding the bus delivering pizza.

I still do not see the salt mine style slavery that is endured by pizza delivery. As I said in an earlier post it sounds like it is not worth the pay. In that case you should go somewhere else.


So dissenting opinions are deemed to be worthless? I did not realize that this was a free speech zone on a college campus

 

[choxorn]

Let me correct my post above with the following - Scandinavia is not a country but a group of countries. All of which are quite small and have large oil reserves that can pay the freight on their socialist utopia. Everyone happy now? It is not as if someone did not understand the point I was trying to convey.

I didn't know that Denmark, Sweden, and Finland had vast oil reserves! We should invade them for keeping this secret from us for so long.

 

[Gucumatz]

A company is profitable when it earns more than it has expenses. If the cost of labor is increased the product that is being provided now costs more. The customer will then buy less product which then drives the company out of business. If labor produces less value than it costs, the company will use less labor. Higher mandatory wages will reduce employment.

Look I don''t think people disagree higher mandatory real wages would reduce theoretical employment. But emphasis is on the real and nearly every economist values efficiency as a crucial part of the free market regulating wages on its own. Increases in wages are supposed to match increases in paradigmatic efficiency [On relative step] in a free market. Workers are supposed to be able to choose according to their relative worth what their value is, whether it is above or below the min wage. Part of whats wrong with Neo-Keynesian models however is that efficiency =/= properly correlate with real wages because firms have the ability to manipulate sticky wages to leverage efficiency above proper compensation.

The question becomes not the cost of business in cases like this, but maximizing ROI's on investment even at the expense of distorting the free market, which is what firms like the OP's pizza company does.

 

[Grendeldef]

Scandinavia is a comparatively small country with a small influx of immigrants and large oil reserves that can pay for the whole party. What works there would not work in the US.

Let me correct my post above with the following - Scandinavia is not a country but a group of countries. All of which are quite small and have large oil reserves that can pay the freight on their socialist utopia. Everyone happy now? It is not as if someone did not understand the point I was trying to convey.

I still doubt they all have large oil reserves and in general it's easier to say what one means instead of saying something while expecting other people to interpret that to what was actually meant. For clarification what do you mean by 'socialist utopia' as I'm pretty sure that the literal meaning is as accurate as the country of Scandinavia.

I didn't know that Denmark, Sweden, and Finland had vast oil reserves! We should invade them for keeping this secret from us for so long.

I'm almost certain that we don't have vast oil reserves but then again Finland isn't really part of Scandinavia but of Fennoscandia though I admit that the concepts are confusing.

 

[Camikaze]

Because minimum wage laws allow businesses to incorporate expected tips into worker compensation. It's why gratuity-based professions such as pizza delivery and waiter/ress get so consistently shafted and waiter/resses get so chippy about their tips. Possible government solutions: prohibit businesses from incorporating expected tips into their payroll. Require a fixed gratuity to be automatically incorporated into a customer's bill, as it is in most of the rest of the world.

Do you mean that the cost of an adequate wage is internalised into restaurant/fast food prices in the rest of the world, or that there's a line on the bill saying 'expected gratuity' or something similar? I've seen the latter about once, and I think most people consider it really rude and presumptuous, given the former. I'll deliberately not tip if it's made out to be almost mandatory in a place where it really isn't.

 

[Yeekim]

I didn't know that Denmark, Sweden, and Finland had vast oil reserves! We should invade them for keeping this secret from us for so long.

Denmark does have significant part of North Sea oil reserves.

Denmark is still one of Europe's biggest oil and gas producers. Figures from 2012 show that a proven 870 million barrels of oil equivalent (BOE) lurk under the extremely tight chalk of the Danish Continental Shelf (DCS). This means a supply of black energy for roughly the next 10 years at current rates of consumption. While Denmark's reserves may not be the largest, the country nonetheless is producing 0.3% of the world's oil. That's good news for government, too, as just last year the industry generated $5.2 billion in tax revenues.

Sweden and Finland have zero, however.

EDIT: As regards the OP - your posts show that you are remarkably intelligent and well-spoken guy.
Why the hell have you been delivering pizzas for 10 years?
For a company that is literally robbing you blind?

I realize this doesn't address the larger picture at all, but still?

 

[Angst]

EDITEDIT: I have just noticed other people have replied to you! I'm sorry man, I'm going to read up on it. I'm going to leave my replies still, of course.

Like Dralix said not all jobs are equal nor should they be.

Did I claim this?

Do I think that minimum wage laws should apply to waitresses? YES Tipping is a bonus for a good job, it should not be automatic or considered as part of the person's wages in order to reduce their base pay.

Do I think that tips should be taxable income? NO

I don't like tipping as an integral part of salary. It makes no sense to me. It should not be necessary to tip in order to pay workers.

We agree here.

A company is profitable when it earns more than it has expenses. If the cost of labor is increased the product that is being provided now costs more. The customer will then buy less product which then drives the company out of business. If labor produces less value than it costs, the company will use less labor. Higher mandatory wages will reduce employment. The workers who keep their jobs will have more but the ones laid off will have nothing.

Look at Drewcifer's graph.

Scandinavia is a comparatively small country with a small influx of immigrants and large oil reserves that can pay for the whole party. What works there would not work in the US.

Scandinavia is not a country, and the oil reserve deal really only applies to Norway. Oil helps, but stating we're enjoying a party based on it is a gross oversimplification. Comparably, the US has a buttload of natural resources; Sweden and Norway can be argued to have raw materials, but Denmark really doesn't enjoy that luxury, we've got poor to mediocre farmland and even there we have to rely on highly skilled labor in order to make that worth our while.

EDIT: To clarify this: Denmark and Norway has oil reserves, but Danish oil can not be the sole explanation to Danish wealth, just as it can not be the sole explanation to Swedish wealth.
(The only reason I'm not including Finland is not due to Scandipolitiks, but because I really have no idea how it's going over there beyond their awesome educational system)

In my opinion delivering pizza is a pretty easy job. You take pizza from the store and drive to someone's address and carry it to their door. It doesn't pay well because anyone who can drive and find an address can do it. It is a job that someone who lives in their parents basement can smoke dope, play large amounts of online MMRPG, generally avoid reality and can prosper while doing so. it is not a job for an adult who wants to provide for a family.

Look into a job in building trades or general construction, what people would term a "dirty job". Those jobs are a lot harder, they use manual labor and often you are outside in the elements all day. They also pay more than minimum wage.

There is not room for everyone to get out of the pitiful trap of being a target for your responsibility/reality claims.

When I was running projects back in the US if someone without skills but a willingness to work came to me and said he was in a bad way trying to support a family I hired him as a general laborer. Sometimes it worked out well, they showed up worked hard and got paid. When they found a better job they moved on, it was good for both of us. Sometimes it did not work out that well, they showed up late or skipped work, they complained or shirked their duties. These people got fired in a day or so, there is no room for lazy. Some people are born smarter or stronger but lazy is a choice. Everybody can choose not to be lazy.

Not really true that laziness is a choice. As the roughest of examples, depression causes "laziness". Many things are attributed to laziness; the US discourse of mocking or blaming the poor for being poor; attributing poverty to laziness; that forces me to either denounce the argument or reinvestigate what "laziness" actually incorporates as a concept. Because suddently laziness can't possibly be a fault of choice when it empirically isn't a fundamental reason for poverty. Incidentally; if so many people apparently are lazy, it does not help to muck around convinced of an individualist ideal of the hard, inventive, self-sufficient worker. It's you that claim that this pizza deliverer should just wake up and connect to the real world and not be lazy. Well, apparently laziness is part of the real world, mr. individualist. Wake up and find an institutional way to work around it. If humanity is fallacious, perhaps you shouldn't punish it for it; especially as it's perfectly possible to work around it while being wealthy.

That said, good for you to anecdotically show you're both tough and humanitarian, but I assure you I do not recognize it as an institutional element in the US business world. rather it seems to be the exception to the rule and it seems to be symptomatic of the apologetic attitude towards he horrible working culture in the US right now. Like how some people (not you) claim the glory of individualism celebrated through charity. They provide anecdotical evidence of one really heartwarming act of charity while ignoring the poverty still very institutionalized and present in the US - the poverty which could be solved with "immorally" relying on governmental redistritibution of wealth.

Your argument still seems to be mostly about you and not about the poor. I'm happy for what you did, but it does not provide as a solution.

I never have had a crappy job other than a short stint at a McDonalds. It was during wrestling season and the smell of the greasy food combined with cutting weight was a bad combination. I started as a construction laborer, from that I learned carpentry, rod busting and concrete finishing*. These skills funded college and led to engineering. A stronger work ethic will serve you better than being smarter.

This quote is still all about your hard labour making it to somewhere stable. Your argument is about yourself. It showcases how good you are by denoting the weakness of others.

edit: I understand I went slightly ad hominem myself to begin with, but it was not to force you to explain your position. I'm sorry. I did so because it is symptomatic of succesful hard-workers to indirectly brag and blame about poverty or lack thereof in order to legitimize their own rugged individualism; forgetting that unsuccesful hard-workers do not usually have the resources to call the system out on it; and if they do, they're often ignored.

(Also, huh? How can your construction labor not require proper education to begin with?)

Having a good life is hard work, nobody owes you anything.

Some adults will evidently be trapped in pizza delivery. And it's poor for you and for your economy. Saying they can just buckle up and move on is not a solution. It has never worked. And it will come back and bite the righteous in their asses because the righeous clung to their morals; "We deserve this" does not matter to the starving; especially if they're unrightfully doing so.

EDIT: My point disappeared in editing; it's not only arguably morally wrong only to truly reserve resources for the succesful; it's also economically ineffecient, will lead to poverty, and if history has taught us anything, empoverishing a population is not a recipe for stability...

If we are to talk righteousness and morals. No matter how glorious and pure and individualistic and morally sound your actions have been, it would not matter in a societal context which did not allow institutional protection of your assets; this institutional protection provided by the very people you are demonizing now. And through that protection, less gold to the pizza delivery man means more to you, no matter how infinitesemal the returns are, as you are part of the same economy. The world is not a Randian place. You are guaranteed education and safety which have served you way more than your rugged individualism will ever do.

NOW OFFICIALLY DONE EDITING

I'M SORRY FOR GOING SO PERSONAL OF COURSE. For don't get me wrong. I really sympathize your anecdote about your work ethics. I'd like more people like you; you do convince me that you're a great example. The problem is really only that most aren't as great, so it's not so good a base to build a society upon.

 

[Hygro]

Higher mandatory wages will reduce employment.

Fortunately the opposite is true.