[nepeckman]

It's a shame that the comments here are laser focused on the tipping parts of the article, and not the bigger picture items. The author outlines the struggles of getting service jobs filled in high CoL areas, the vicious cycle of turnover in these jobs, and all the commenters here want to discuss is the 2 paragraphs on tipping.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Is it the only aspect of the article that most on this site can relate with? I take it most have not worked service industry or it was a very long time ago.

I'm interested in what seems to be the growing incivility toward other people.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/us/apt-cape-cod-restauran...

> The verbal abuse from rude customers got so bad, the owners of one farm-to-table restaurant on Cape Cod said, that some of their employees cried.

[dollarsuck]

An outcome of little to no consequences for actions.

Come visit my local grocery store. Few replace carts at the store or in the stalls, there will be 2-6 vehicle using the clearly-marked "Fire Lane - No Parking" lane as their personal parking spots plainly blocking the doors of the foyer (and this is not drop-off, not pick-up, not having their spouse load up in a rain storm). Have "About 12 Items or Fewer" - well have fun, there's two carts loaded for bear ready to use the checkout lane.

The manager will watch it all and dare not life a finger nor raise a voice.

The restaurant at which my S/O works, it's in the nice part of town. The nicest part of town you could possibly not afford. For the lunch crowd, there will be a dozen or so regular folks filtering in with absurd, demanding, bespoke requests (I want the meat of sandwich A, the bread off sandwich B, the condiments from an item on the Sunday Brunch menu). The owner will not let them refuse a request. Ever. Regardless of the problems it will cause for everyone around. Regardless of how long it will waste table space. That $18 lunch order must be fulfilled.

The local pizza joint, my go-to spot for two NY slices and a PBR for a cool $7 - they're not allowed to refuse service to rude patrons regardless of how awful. I once had the barkeep slip me a note asking that I (a large, eternally angry looking man) please wait at the bar for another patron to leave and that my drinks would be comped. Why? The belligerent customer refusing to leave, who entered the facility screaming at (we assume) "incompetent cunt" of a secretary.

It's a bit fascinating and frustrating. One makes an off-color joke on Twitter[0], or an elected official makes a frustrated comment about double-standards[1] and a lynch mob forms to harangue a corporation into punishing the textual predator. Some of those same companies (See: [1]) will not oust a belligerent man attempting to start a fight in the produce section over a road rage incident.

It's all appearance over substance.

[0] - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/anheuser-busch-cuts-ties-w...

[1] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/costco-pulls-palmetto-cheese-fo...

[thatjoeoverthr]

Regarding growing incivility. I moved from the US to Poland around ‘05. Not long ago I went to the US, Bay Area, for the first time in ten years, on a business trip for my employer. I didn’t expect such a culture shock but the incivility was striking. Every day I would run into absolutely savage behavior while just commuting or getting food. I wasn’t sure what to make of it and this here is the first time I’ve seen Americans discussing civility.

[ajmurmann]

I think this Reddit comment from a use called TheMagecite on parenting during the pandemic might get to some of it: "No.

So lets take my example I have two children one has autism.

What my son desperately needs is social interaction, how do you teach social interaction well without peers? He can't see other children and right now he has such limited exposure to other children he is about to start school and it is a nightmare.

While my son is brilliant in some ways and could read and write at age 3 however his social skills and general understanding are just so far behind. Due to the pandemic normally there would be spots in a special class but so many kids who would have normally progressed just have gone backwards has meant there are zero spots for my child. It also has meant all of the therapies which make the world of difference (and earlier intervention the better) have either been canceled or moved to remote which is no where near as good.

I used to take my son out every weekend and get exposure to kids or take him to water parks and just have fun with them. Now we are sheltered at home with very little to do and we crack out board games but the ipad has probably been his main entertainer. I have work and we have other children but we do make sure it is educational stuff but we still feel tremendous guilt.

I work, we have other children and well while everyone says we have managed to do an amazing job during the pandemic as my son has still progressed which is different from what most other children in his situation have done. My partner and I feel horrible and honestly we are just completely burnt out. We could have done more, we should have done more but I think depression and being burnt out has just fucked us.

I fucking hate myself for this and I probably will feel guilty the rest of my days. I am sick of being told we have done an amazing job considering. Considering Covid doesn't help my child.

This just SUCKS.

Also my child's experience with Autism is probably better than most. I feel horrible for the vast majority which have it worse than me and I can't imagine what they are going through." https://www.reddit.com/r/Coronavirus/comments/s8wpsz/covid_p...

Edit: added more context to the comment.

[mcv]

The tipping situation is absolutely stupid, but hardly the only problem. And shitty entitled customers contribute to both issues here: they treat employees poorly, and they tip poorly. Businesses should probably just kick those customers out. If you can't behave like a decent person, the business shouldn't have to accept you as a customer.

Ultimately, of course, the market will correct itself. If these service jobs are terrible enough, nobody will do them anymore, and those customers will just have to cook their own food, or accept shitty overpriced service from the few companies willing to serve them, and willing to pay employees enough to deal with that shit.

But it will be a loss to all decent people who treat people with respect and want to pay well for good service. If you want to keep those, your only option is to kick the entitled assholes out. Or you'll have no employees left.

[MattGaiser]

> I'm interested in what seems to be the growing incivility toward other people.

Is it growing, or is it just unpleasant/impolite to state that a large segment of the population consists of jerks so we keep forgetting?

[brodouevencode]

I've long been a fan of being able to fire your customers. This can be done in very civil, very respectful ways.

[spaetzleesser]

“I'm interested in what seems to be the growing incivility toward other people.”

I think that’s a natural consequence of a society that measures everything by money.

[uoaei]

Some people forgot what it's like to be punched in the mouth

[oramit]

I've noticed growing incivility as well and it's a slow moving culture change that I think we're all going to really regret. I don't think it's caused by just one thing and it has been brewing for a while but Covid just pushed it over the edge like so many other trends. Some ideas on the causes:

- The fish rots from the head. Trump was elected in 2016 and he's an asshole. His whole schtick is to mock his opponents and never admit he was wrong. Hell, him being an asshole was a huge selling point to his base. If you elect that guy to the most powerful office in the land then it signals that being an asshole is acceptable. That sort of thing filters down into the culture at large. Politics isn't the only place you see this though, sociopathic behavior seems to be almost a requirement in big business. Where are people being rewarded for kindness and compassion?

- Pandemic burnout. There are a lot of threads on HN about guarding your attention like a currency and I think other emotions work similarly. After more than 2 years of this I know my well of empathy is nearly bone dry. Most issues like some particular thing being out of stock, or slow service because of staffing don't bother me but every once in a while I get really angry at an inconvenience I would normally shrug off. Multiply this across society.

- Being an asshole kind of works? This echoes my first idea but in a different way. All real decision making has been taken away from the people who actually interact with the public. Executives and managers who have the power to change things (like increase wages to bring more employees in) are insulated from the public. There are so many layers of indirection within corporate America that even if you have a legitimate grievance it can be an enormous pain to get it resolved and you have to be kind of a dick sometimes to fix things. So you end up with this situation where powerless employees are being yelled at by a powerless public.

There are certainly more threads here but those are some ideas i've been toying with.

[fallingfrog]

Yeah, I once got screamed at by a red-faced old man driving a mercedes because he had to wait 4 and a half minutes for a McChicken sandwich. Old rich people are just the most sociopathic people.

[ajmurmann]

What's always disappointing to me is how for many the first instinct is "lazy young people" while often times the exact same people espouse "the free market". It seems to me that often times the same people really only care about low taxes for themselves and making away with regulations that annoy them, rather than truly embracing the mechanism and tradeoffs that come with a free market and for sure don't understand the circumstances needed to make the market effective to work towards a given goal.

[thrill]

Not as disappointing as those who denigrate free markets when there isn't one.

[glup]

Besides the author’s v points about the poor working conditions, I was struck by the points about transit costs. I am curious how much of the current labor situation in the US can be explained by the combination of 1) geographic wealth segregation —- richer consumers clustering together while generally poorer service workers have to live far away —- and 2) high gas prices / underdeveloped public transit. At some point as both of these factors increase, there should be a big drop off in available workers. Is this consistent with the pattern we are seeing?

[gravypod]

It's not even just lower class workers. Taking public transit to my FAANG job each day would be ~$20 total and be ~2hrs of commuting each day. That comes out to ~5k/year in commuting costs and about 65 workdays in hours wasted on trains and subways.

I can eat this cost but I'd feel extremely bad for someone who doesn't get paid as much as I do who had to do this kind of commuting (which MANY people do daily).

[SuoDuanDao]

There's a saying I like, "A rich country isn't one where the poor can afford cars. It's one where the rich take public transportation"

[kfarr]

Basically cars are a huge relative cost for the working class. With our land use and transportation policies we have created a world where the costs of getting around are so high that it can trap you in poverty for life. Sorry for the paywall but this was the quickest article I could find on the topic: https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-seven-year-auto-loan-americ...

If you calculate the total cost of owning car(s) during your lifetime and consider alternative use such as interest bearing savings account some estimates have shown it costs you approx $1M during your life.

[whoknew1122]

Public transit in Austin is terrible, and nonexistent in the suburbs. And there is a lot of wealth (and racial) housing segregation in Austin. I'd say you hit the nail on the head for Austin, at least. Speaking as someone who grew up in Austin poor without a car, and lived there until adulthood. Now work at a FAANG in a city much lower cost of living.

[CPLX]

Indeed. The part about getting your income on an ATM card with mandatory fees no matter what you do seems like the best anecdotal example of how fucked things are for the little guy these days.

[mynameishere]

For many low-wage employees the alternative to this is check cashing fees which is even worse. The issue of why so many people are unbanked is a separate discussion.

[hotpotamus]

Keep in mind that the majority of money these days goes through credit card processors that take a percentage off the top. Not saying they don't provide a service for the money, but it doesn't seem that different.

[ashtonkem]

Personally it took me a second to get past "Death threats drove him from town and to Austin". That is quite the fact to cover in a single sentence.

[sjostrom7]

There's a link further down but tldr, he ran a department that struggled to disperse unemployment benefits to the people of New Mexico during 2021. Hard to say if anyone else would have done better in his place, but his address and family info were getting shared online and a car got blown up at his place of work.

[chiefalchemist]

Welcome to HN. An early comment goes off target and too many others follow. But we're all intelligence free-thinkers, yes?

But then make an unpopular observation on the aryicle / topic and you get down-voted.

Humans are "complicated", to put it kindly.

p.s. Yes, I senses the irony.

[PaulDavisThe1st]

> But then make an unpopular observation on the aryicle / topic and you get down-voted.

Isn't that tautological?

Anyway, it's also not true as a general rule. The comments I see net-downvoted on HN are ones that either contain falsehoods and/or are poorly (often "rantily") written. I've seen many comments about a topic generally downvoted because they fit that pattern, but comments that express the same POV but avoid falsehoods and are reasonably written end up without a net negative.

If you're going to have votes, some things will get net-downvoted. There's no way around that - people have different opinions and scoring systems, and some comments will do poorly with some people.