What happened to Amazon man…. They consistently fuck up deliveries. I ordered two expensive monitors a month ago and they clearly delivered it somewhere on my street but I didn’t get it. So they sent another set and this time I was watching. The morons were going to deliver it to my next door neighbor. I walked out and said are you delivering monitors? The goof was like “oh this isn’t the right house!” We ordered a car seat and they delivered it to the same neighbor. Do they even look at the fucking address? I’m really disappointed. Only seems to happen with the really expensive shit too.
They are like pretty much every business out there, thanks to the pandemic. They struggle to find and retain qualified employees like so many other businesses. Our local Cafe Yumm is advertising a starting wage of $18.54/hour and they still can’t get enough people. Service sucks (or isn’t particularly good) at so many places. I guess there are a lot of people (besides the S2 squad) who don’t mind living in Mom’s basement indefinitely rather than working……
They pay shit, and treat their employees like shit so they get a lot of shitty employees. Not all of their employees are shitty, but they have to take some shitty ones because there are better options out there for good employees. And after a while, even the good ones stop caring as much. Human nature.
Some of them went home. A big secret in the food & service industries is many use illegal immigrants in the kitchen. While the front of house has nice safe white people, in the kitchen cooking your food some are illegals. And while we did a great job during the pandemic lockdown of taking care of citizens and legal immigrants by paying them unemployment, the one group that wasn't taken care of were illegals. No unemployment. No rent assistance. And in many places no vaccines or medical care if they were to get sick. Now I'm not saying we should have given illegals unemployment or rent help. Just saying that part of our economy is based on needing an exploitable workforce. And since they are exploitable they're free to go home. Our southern border does allow people to go home even easier than it allows them to come here. Foodservice, hotel cleaning staff, roofing, painting, building and landscape maintenance, many of the industries that traditionally hire illegals are the same ones struggling to fill jobs. This is a real-world example that illegals aren't coming here to take our jobs, they are coming here to do jobs that we don't want.
Part of me wonders if maybe the 15-19 per hour for entry jobs has given a weird sense of entitlement to younger people doing jobs. I have a nephew who doesn't want to work certain jobs at 18 per hour, because it's a "lame job". Part of it also is that they're young and stupid and don't want to work hard for their $ (and this kind of gives them that option...don't like working here? just go somewhere else and get the same pay, etc). What's kind of frustrating is that the increase in pay hasn't necessarily upped the pay for others who were making what is now min-wage (i.e., if your job used to pay 20 per hour, and the Mcdonalds paid 9, and now Mcdonalds pays 20, your job should also increase, and the lag in that hasn't worked itself out yet). The fact that a high school graduate can make almost 40K a year *at McDonalds* doesn't seem to register with them that that's a nice wage to make flipping burgers.
Yep. But the real reason that isn't a "nice" wage is because houses cost so god damn much now, that if you make less than 50K a year, you qualify for a meth den (at least in Portland proper).
Still going strong in LA. City actually paid a bunch of people's back rent so they are chillin. Tons of unemployment fraud too and some decided to become criminals since they won't get prosecuted anymore. Many made more on UE, so probably raised their standards of living.
I just got a part time job at the local hardware store and am loving it so far. They snapped me right up because no one else wants to work for $15/hour. I get that it’s not a “living wage”, but I still can’t quite believe I am getting paid that just for being “helpful”. And it beats sitting in Mom’s basement waiting to die. It’s like too many people these days think that their “pride” is going to pay the bills….or get them that “dream job” that likely doesn’t exist. And I get that it’s often easier for a retired person to accept the lower wages. But I also get (based on my own personal experiences) that sometimes two jobs are necessary to make ends meet, especially when young. It’s a cold, hard world, and we do what we have to do…..or that’s the way it used to work until we started allowing excuses as currency…….and made it easier for people not to work. I’m still leafing through the pages of recent history, trying to find the chapter where Americans were given the expectation that the world owed them a living. And I’m still looking. It’s past the point of blaming the pandemic for people not wanting to work. It’s time for them to hold themselves accountable and quit blaming everything and everyone else for their own shortcomings. We have become a society of victims. And America just keeps getting greater and greater……..
Except it didn't used to be that way. The numbers back that up. Wages haven't kept up with production or inflation since we embraced trickle down economics. It has nothing to do with victims and everything to do with bad economic policy. The only way we've been able to offset it has been insane prices of real estate and then insanely low interest rates which many have been able to use as ATMs to keep up. Those without real estate can't keep up and live desperate lives. Then we wonder why we have problems with drugs, homelessness, violent crime and murder... The whole system is set up to keep poor people poor, and push the middle class into poverty.
Oh I get all that and then some. But to be quite honest, we heard a fair amount of that when I was a much younger man. I got out of the navy in the mid ‘70’s, when America was in a horrible recession. All I heard was that I’d be lucky to find a job. And I heard correctly. So I took whatever I could find to keep afloat, be it as my own painting contractor, digging drainage ditches or working under the table at various enterprises. I didn’t have a choice, really. Sometimes we make our own beds and use circumstances to rationalize those choices. The first “real job” I was offered barely paid over minimum wage, but it came with health insurance so I took it (while either working a part time job or going to school on the GI Bill to make ends meet). My point was that too many people aren’t even trying. And that can’t be rationalized into a nice neat package. People DO have choices, whether they like them or not. As far as real estate ownership goes……I concede that I have been personally lucky. I bought when prices were low, I bought from my mother in law (for market value) who did not require a huge down payment. And I benefitted from the increases in value. I am proud to say I own my own home. But that doesn’t define me or my values. And to be honest, sometimes I’m not sure property ownership isn’t overblown. We’re really only “renting” in the existential context. If I sell, I have to buy something else with the money. In addition to taxes and insurance there is a shit ton of other costs for maintenance and upkeep. Some days I wish we’d sell the house, rent somewhere, and let someone else sweat the small shit while we live our lives in more productive and enjoyable ways. Over the past 30 years or so I feel like we’ve made property ownership into a false god. But then, that that’s easy to say when you own property. But I just can’t quite wrap myself around the correlation between property ownership and desperate lives…..
Ive always told my wife that a home is like a tent, you should be able to pitch it wherever you want. When it comes to property, if it's a home you live in, vacation home, or rental for us it's always looked at as long term investment much like any financial investment. Financial advisors dont like that way of thinking, wonder why. Our properties have been a great return on investment.
