The Deleted Scenes - Thoughts on the Meaning of Restaurants
I’ve written about restaurants from time to time here, and I’m working on a longer piece about the purpose of restaurants in light of the pandemic, and the tension between restaurants as very challenging businesses (for operators), versus places to relax and be served (for customers.) In one of these conversations, a fellow mentioned his son, who took a part-time job as a waiter at some point in high school. He worked hard and attended to his tables better than anyone, and made a killing in tips. Every waiter and waitress should be like that, right? I guess maybe there’s a little bit of a socialist in me, which is not something I would have thought when I did my first in-person office internship, back in grad school. The place was unionized, and they required employees to take an hour for lunch. They didn’t exactly enforce it, but the idea was that you were supposed to work a certain number of hours and not more. Back then I thought that was silly. Why throttle the hardest workers? To make the lazy workers feel better about themselves? I couldn’t really think of any other reason. But now I understand the deeper logic. Nobody will really get a lunch hour at all if it isn’t encouraged/required. It’s a way of limiting how much competition will be allowed to erode quality of life. Look at Silicon Valley, where people drink Soylent in order to monetize their lunch hour. Look at the erosion of all the little perks of office life. Maybe permitting people to work hard is a kind of unfreedom, because it comes the only option, yet it only works for some people. Maybe real freedom is having a place to be average, mediocre, and good enough. So when I hear of a waiter hustling and working extra hard for tips, there’s something about it that almost bothers me. Why should one superhuman be allowed to ruin it for everyone else? Why should the intense, borderline workaholic mindset make the vast majority of ordinary workers look like slackers? How can we prevent business from operating according to the expectation of the superhuman workers unless we limit their right to work abnormally hard? Making sure there’s room for ordinary people, shielding them from too much efficiency, is one of the purposes of public policy. That’s what unions do. It’s what protectionism does. It’s not efficient, but that’s the point. Now, do I really mean this? Should that hustling waiter get a reprimand from his boss? Of course not. I mean this all more conceptually, in the sense that we should admire work ethic without allowing a minority of the hardest workers—and more importantly, managers—to set the tone and expectations. Staying on topic with restaurants, I wrote about this back in 2020, when tens of thousands of restaurants permanently or temporarily closed:
I still think that. What do you think? Related Reading: Thoughts on Restaurants and “Service” “Give Me a House,” Says Almost No One Getting Good at Doing Things Wrong Thank you for reading! Please consider upgrading to a paid subscription to help support this newsletter. You’ll get a weekly subscribers-only post, plus full access to the archive: over 400 posts and growing. And you’ll help ensure more material like this! You're currently a free subscriber to The Deleted Scenes. For the full experience, upgrade your subscription. |
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