For most of my life, restaurants were quite expensive. Couples went out to eat, but parents almost never took their families — it cost too much. As a child, my family ate out together perhaps once or twice a year, usually on some very special occasion.
Sometime around the 1990s, that all changed. Eating out became relatively cheap. Families started routinely eating out together. What changed? Restaurants stopped paying their employees a living wage. $2.13 A hour, plus tips. Those cheap meals you were eating were possible only because the people serving them were underpaid and overworked.
Now, that’s changed again. People refuse less than a living wage when there are better options, They’ve gone to jobs that pay better. And restaurants are still adjusting. Strange fees are one of the ways.
But this isn’t something new. The high cost of eating in a restaurant was the way the world worked before the 1990s. It’s back, and it’s a better way, with waiters and waitresses able to afford real lives.
For most of my life, restaurants were quite expensive. Couples went out to eat, but parents almost never took their families — it cost too much. As a child, my family ate out together perhaps once or twice a year, usually on some very special occasion.
Sometime around the 1990s, that all changed. Eating out became relatively cheap. Families started routinely eating out together. What changed? Restaurants stopped paying their employees a living wage. $2.13 A hour, plus tips. Those cheap meals you were eating were possible only because the people serving them were underpaid and overworked.
Now, that’s changed again. People refuse less than a living wage when there are better options, They’ve gone to jobs that pay better. And restaurants are still adjusting. Strange fees are one of the ways.
But this isn’t something new. The high cost of eating in a restaurant was the way the world worked before the 1990s. It’s back, and it’s a better way, with waiters and waitresses able to afford real lives.