On the cooking one, I also recommend cooking double portions when you can. If you can cook twice as much with minimal effort, that’s half the cleaning you have to do afterwards and half the meal planning you have to do. You get up in the morning and know that you have leftovers from dinner ready to go for lunch in the fridge. Also, rice. Rice is cheap, good for you, and incredibly flexible in what you can do with it. A rice cooker is also a great appliance to have in general. Not only is it an easy set and forget for a pot of rice, but you can do all sorts of meals in it from steaming meats and vegetables to cooking soups and even baking desserts. An air fryer is similarly flexible and great for making meals for one person. You don’t have to preheat it or anything and it doesn’t cost all the energy that a full size oven does.
Just because somebody has it worse doesn’t mean that it’s okay. If you stub your toe, should you not be able to complain because I broke a bone in my forearm when I was 6 and the doctor had to snap the other one with no sedation/painkillers so it would heal correctly?
Plus, cost of living is a thing. They may have been richer than 80% of the population, but I bet their cost of living was higher than most of them as well. Minimum wage in my state is $15 USD, twice the federal minimum, and somewhere around 80% of the workforce in the state capital has at least a bachelor’s degree (the highest percentage of workforce by city in the country). Despite this, the vast majority commute from outside the city every day for work, because the cost of living inside the city is so high most people can’t afford to rent an apartment. I made more money in 2022 than the bottom 51% of Americans, and I can’t afford to move there.
Despite never really having any problem customers in my 14 or so years of working in food service, I’m right there with you. Between the stress of dealing with people day in and day out, working every holiday with no overtime or holiday pay, and being expected to do the work of 2 people and not take any vacation time because “the company can’t afford to hire more people,” I will never work retail/service again. People talk about dreaming that they’re back in high school, I dream that I’m back working there. Even 3 years after I left the industry.
I think it’s part of what I’ve seen called the “temporarily embarrassed millionaire” effect. There’s a certain group of poor folk who have been convinced that, any day now, they’re going to come into wealth (through some nebulous means and no real action of their own), and so act like they are already part of the wealthy class. Even going so far as voting for benefits for the wealthy and against their own interests, including voting for the destruction of the very social programs that support them.
Just an assumption on my part, but I think you would find a correlation between political affiliation and treatment of service industry staff when it comes to lower income people.
You are, but the original comment specifically said Americans eating out on Thanksgiving. Naturally, they assumed you were talking about overtime laws in the Netherlands in relation to the lack of holiday pay in the American food service industry, but apparently you weren’t.
So, I guess the question is, did you see the part where we were talking about the US?