Went to my local Applebee’s yesterday.
It was a hot Sunday afternoon, 2 pm. We arrive just after an older married couple, I would put them at about 65. Bit of a wait at the front, hostess apologizes as they are a bit short staffed.
Boomer man wasn’t shy about voicing his opinion, very loudly. “It’s awful isn’t it? Nobody wants to work anymore since those damn stimulus checks. They spent it all on weed anyway! I don’t know what’s wrong with this generation… why won’t they work?”
Anyway he was greeted with complete silence, which was nice, as most people just looked the other way. He just kept ranting while he was waiting.
Then he looks at me (I’m 42 and was probably the closest to his age in line) and he asks me: “what do you think of the young people these days? Isn’t it awful that they don’t work?
I basically said to him: “New Hampshire unemployment rate is currently 2%, and it doesn’t get much lower than that historically – people are working, but they are leaving jobs that pay less than minimum wage for better paying opportunities. That just means they are leaving the service industry in droves. This is compounded by the fact that many of these companies/owners are refusing to pay their people more, and asking the remaining employees to do more with less, so I can’t blame them for leaving. All this while many of these companies continue to slash the number of hours worked in their stores, so service continues to drop – it will stay like this until wages improve.”
He looked at me flabbergasted, said something on the affect of “if we pay them more then prices go up”. After I countered that with “corporate profits are at an all time high”, Then he said, “yeah – no one wants to work anymore”, and went to his table.
Some folks have lost all sense of reason and completely ignore facts and logic. So frustrating!