I was at a neighborhood bar last night and, my God, I overheard a conversation that made me feel like the r/Antiwork Players were putting on a special performance just for my benefit. This older couple, maybe mid-to-late 40s, comes up next to me at the counter to order drinks, and they begin chatting up the bartender. The guy especially is extremely obnoxious, flirting with the server in front of his own wife/girlfriend and loudly self-satisfied with his drink order (“Milagro, NEAT, baby! You know it’s gonna be a good night when you’re sipping on a Milagro neat,” etc.). Pretty soon he begins to brag about his business, again, in the style of clumsy exposition in a bad movie. Turns out he owns a restaurant that employs 41 people, 40 of which, he says, are “children.” He also, apparently, owns and operates an apartment complex, where he seems to put up some of his workers as (part of?) their compensation. Wife/gf chimes in at this point with a knowing chuckle: this arrangement seems to cause Small Business Owner/Landlord more than a few headaches!
It is at this point that a secondary villain emerges in the drama: the bartender, encouraged by some of the guy’s comments, observes, “People have a really different attitude these days.” By way of illustration, she then launches into a story about back when she worked in a restaurant. She would come in for her scheduled shifts NO MATTER WHAT, even one time when she had the flu and was actively “vomiting buckets” (!) in the back between serving each table. The thought of someone so ill handling food is truly foul, especially when that same person had just been pouring the drink I was then sipping on. But like I was taking crazy pills, the couple then starts singing the bartender’s praises and wishing their own staff were so virtuous! The wife/gf points up the moral: “Kids these days just don’t have that growth mindset.”
There were other weird and objectionable interchanges, like the bartender dunking on her 18-year-old daughter for not knowing how to apply to college (gee, if only she had guidance from some sort of parental figure in her life?), but the vomit-waitress story really blew me away. Where I work, I rarely encounter this sort of sigma grindset hustle culture rhetoric in the wild, but this confirmed for me that the asshole managers and crabs-in-a-bucket workers this sub complains about really do exist, and really are assholes! I only wish the guy had name-dropped his particular establishment so I can be sure to boycott it in the future.