re: Barstool is down with the Georgia Waffle House strike and so am I

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Honest question, why does the amount someone makes dictate whether you tip or not?

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Is this a serious question? The social contract between restaurants and customers is that restaurants pay less than living wage to their servers and customers contribute the majority of the server's wages through gratuity. If the restaurant owner breaks that social contract and pays their workers a decent hourly wage, then it is no longer on me to tip because the server's wages are included in my now higher food and drink prices.

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This will be an interesting one to watch play out. One of my buddies has been an exec for them for a long time. They run on super tight margins so this would get passed right back in price increases and from what he’s told me the regular audience is insanely price sensitive.

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It is not possible to raise prices because you experience an increase in production costs...if it were minding production costs would be an meaningless endeavor, you would just pass it on to customers.

If the margins in a business are such that the business must rely on taxpayer subsidies to meet part of its production costs the business is not viable to begin with. Woe poor old Waffle House...they have relied on low wages and government subsidies of housing, transportation, healthcare and other life costs for their workforce for close to 100 years...now that it is beginning to look like maybe they ought to have been footing those bills themselves having a store on 4 corners of an interstate exchange all of a sudden looks like a bad business decision. frick them and ALL low wage employers....

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frick them and ALL low wage employees....

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You go on a rant to destroy Waffle House’s business model, but you end it with this? Honestly, I don’t get it.

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There is absolutely no place in between corporate bootlicker and raging communist, right?

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How one can make the leap from free market capitalism and the laws of supply and demand to "raging communism" is an indictment of the educational system in this nation.

When supply is inadequate to meet demand prices will increase without intervention. The supply of people willing to work in low wage jobs is falling while demand for their services in low wage jobs is steady or on the rise. Without some sort of intervention outside of free market forces (currently found in the form of subsidized living expenses paid to the working poor taken from the pockets of taxpayers) the costs of such labor will increase until supply and demand reach equilibrium. What is going on at Waffle House and other low wage jobs is a natural function of an unfettered free market. When demand remains steady or increases and supply drops prices will increase.

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I believe that has much more to do with a government that will subsidize their livings for them than free market dynamics.

“Oh, nobody will do those jobs. We have to have illegal immigrants or our economy is doomed.” Pretty easy to figure out why.

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Almost ALL forms of such taxpayer subsidies to low wage employees require said employee having some income. We hand out very little in the form of subsidies to poor people in this country who do not have any income...most of those subsidies NOT tied to employment are subsidies that go to the disabled and minors too young to be employed.

It used to be that poor people had no such subsidies and made do on whatever they could beg, borrow or steal. When this was true it was common for poor people to live 8-10 people in a tiny apartment in a neighborhood that had no water and no sewage. Many times the employer provided said housing as part of the employees wages...mill towns are a prime example of this. At some point in time we, collectively, decided that sewage and running water and even electricity were pretty damn neat things to have and mandated that anyone living in a structure anywhere had them or they had to get the frick out. Low wage employers never paid for these niceties, they relied on the rest of us to foot the bill. In modern America you also must have some form of transportation - ain't nobody in a decent neighborhood going to stand for, say a Waffle House, in reasonable walking distance from a neighborhood where the residents could afford to work at said Waffle House.

It was also very common in the US up until the 1970s for children to be looked after by older siblings or left to their own devices while their parents went out and made a living. Poor people in inner cities were highly likely to live this way. It was also common for siblings to share not just bedrooms but to share beds, regardless of their sex. All of that is illegal today...try renting a 2 BR apartment in most of the US with a son and a daughter. Again, nice things cost money...ain't no free lunches. Someone has to pay...it would be far better if everyone paid through their earnings BUT we allow low wage employers to rely on these kinds of subsidies.

Like how they aren't mentioning in article that they are demanding $25/ hour.

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More to the point if you are perfectly willing to accept the fact that low wages means more social spending and you are OK with your tax dollars subsidizing the production costs at places like Waffle House and your tax dollars subsidizing the costs of a meal at Waffle House for Waffle House patrons then you are the worst sort of capitalist that ever shat between a pair of brogans.

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I’m not. I want little to no social spending on things like rent, food stamps, and income. I want less taxes on all things, not more.

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How many employees are actually striking? It's hard to find googling. The waffle houses around me in metro atlanta aren't striking, no pickets, still open for business. I have a feeling it's like 14 actual employees and maybe a hundred union shills who don't actually work there.

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I went to an ATL metro waffle house this morning, service was swift, food cooked perfectly, no picket lines.