The main cost of just about everything is labor. It may be hidden. It may be indirect. But in nearly every case, the greater part of the price of what you’re paying for is labor.
My father, who worked in provisioning restaurants and hotels, educated me about this long ago. He taught me to think about the many people involved in getting my purchase to me. Grocery shopping, he said, is about paying the wholesalers, the truckers, the stock boys, the cashiers, and the owner of the store. Dinner out is about paying the cooks, the waiters, the busboys, and the owner of the restaurant. Your money goes to people above all; the material goods are cheap by comparison.
It’s when labor gets more expensive that significant price increases occur. These days, with prices rising all around us, what those increases are funding is the regiment of workers who take part in conveying retail goods to us. When workers want to live better than they do, they press for wage increases. When their employers agree to such increases, he passes the cost increment along to the purchaser.
Just now, there’s an ongoing contretemps about tipping restaurant workers, particularly the waiters and waitresses who convey prepared food from the kitchen to the customer’s table. Waiters want larger tips than ever before in the history of restaurant dining. They’re getting strident about it, too. They’ve mounted public campaigns for tips of 30% to 50% of the “menu price” of the meal to become the norm. Those campaigns have drawn a great deal of attention – and no small amount of resentment.
By and large, waiters aren’t doing better for it. Persons who might have dined out happily a year or two ago are rethinking their choices to do so, in part out of discomfort about the tipping issue. So average tip amounts have not risen significantly, while total restaurant patronage has declined somewhat. That suggests that the campaign has backfired.
But that desire for more compensation has interesting ways of making itself felt:
Brian Powell, 45, told Fox News Digital that he and his wife were waiting to catch a flight out of Salt Lake City when she purchased three milkshakes from the airport's Shake Shack location.
"My wife came to me after buying some shakes and said, 'They charged me more after I didn't tip,'" Powell told Fox News Digital during a Zoom interview from London, where he was vacationing with his wife. "And I thought it was a little interesting."
Powell said he had visited the location several times before and had never noticed anything similar. Admitting that he was "a bit skeptical," Powell said he returned to the kiosk with his wife and recreated the order while recording the process on his phone.
"We basically went up and duplicated our order, and the same thing happened," Powell said.
The video shows two of the three shakes initially listed at $5.99 each. After "no tip" is selected, the kiosk displays a notice saying there has been a pricing update before the shakes appear at $6.49 each — an increase of 50 cents per drink.
Shake Shack told Fox News Digital the price change was caused by a technology error and that charging customers more for declining to tip is not company policy.
I know nothing about Shake Shack. I do know that the scriptwriters for Pulp Fiction must be a little disturbed that the price of a shake has risen to $5.99. Yes, the movie was made 32 years ago, but still!
However, I can’t accept the claim that the price increases were due to a tech glitch. Today, with “pooling” on the rise, more people than ever before are reaching for a piece of the tip pot. Shake Shack may not want to be open about it, but the probabilities favor the “no tip” price increases being a deliberate move. What does it say that customers who did agree to tip didn’t face such increases?
Just one more of those “May you live in interesting times” phenomena!
2 comments:
In 1963 I got a job in a leather factory. I worked in shipping, we boxed up leather sides into very large cardboard boxes and brought them to a load dock. We also moved large wheeled tables to the storage area and unloaded the sides onto pallets awaiting shipping. If I remember correctly I made $2.90 an hour, a good income in those days. It was union of course. Sometimes we, the shippers, would be used to fill in for missing people in other areas. The union wouldn't allow the higher paid people to fill in they could sit and do nothing if their work area was slow but they could not be used to facilitate production elsewhere in the factory. But we lowly shippers could but only temporarily. One day my coworker and I were filling in measuring the sides. You feed a side of leather into the machine and it calculates sq/ft and take it out the other end and mark the size on the leather with chalk. Easy job! So we are humming along getting the work done and one of the older workers there comes over and tells us to slow down we are making them look bad and if we go too fast the company will be able to bargain with the union to change the variable wage. Sometimes in shipping a truck would back up to the dock at 3:00 PM and need to be loaded before 5:00 pm quitting time. But the union had rules on how fast you could do this. So basically the shippers would work hard, get it loaded and gone by 5:00 and then we would sit in the break room for two hours on overtime pay and play cards... to comply with the union rules. Well within 5 years that company and all leather companies in a town that was built on leather, was gone. All leather is tanned and finished overseas. The union put themselves out of business.
The name of that town was Peabody Mass. The name of the company was A.C. Lawrence Leather. I was barely 20 YO. We got an hour for lunch and the breakroom was always in argument mode with union workers arguing and threatening each other about how much they got paid. So one day I walked out the back of our fairly large building towards some old buildings out back. Entered one building and I couldn't even see the end of it inside. I walked and walked through it. Junk on the floor, boards, pieces of metal, debris from when they removed all the equipment. Some feral cats, birds in the rafters and lots of dust. This was huge and it was just one of half a dozen buildings where they used to make and prepare leather. The date is significant because probably 5 to 10 years earlier all of this huge facility employed probably 1000 or more people. When I was younger, 6-12 YO and wandered around the city there were big brick buildings, leather factories. In the Summer open windows you could watch men in stained T shirts and rubber aprons doing dirty jobs because making leather out of raw hides is dirty. But my point is this was a bustling business employing thousands of workers. The city I lived in, Lynn, Ma., had huge 6 story brick buildings where shoes were made. Again I have walked past them as a 10 YO open windows rows of men and women working on small machines making shoes. This was all gone by the time I was 20 YO.
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