Extra! Extra! Eating Out is Now a Privilege to be Enjoyed by Rich People Only!

 That’s it, it’s official, eating at a restaurant is now a privilege to be enjoyed exclusively by the rich. Since my last meal out at a pub style restaurant cost more than seventy-five dollars for dreary, mediocre food, I have nixed the habit of going out to eat from my standard routine. Goodbye, going out to eat.

It’s a shame for at least two reasons. First, I tip well and never complain, so the restaurant industry will miss my patronage. Second, I’m a terrible cook, and I regard cooking as a chore. Maybe it means I’m spoiled rotten, but I enjoyed the occasional break.

It is important to note that restaurants are not raising prices to absurd levels because they must, they are doing it because they can. Though I’m not an economist (because if I were I’d be able to afford eating-out still), the record profits of the industry seem to support this point.  If restaurants are merely raising prices because of “food and labor costs”, why the increase in profits? It can’t be entirely due to industry growth. It seems to me that a large chunk of my seventy-five-dollar meal went into the pockets of wealthy people. Call me greedy, but I’m not fond of giving hand-outs to the rich.   

This record increase in profits has been lauded as a good thing, since it so generously created working-class jobs. However, these reports say nothing about quality of life. What about all the working-class people who enjoyed going out to eat occasionally and can no longer?  Furthermore, restaurant employees are now servants to the aristocracy. That seems un-American to me.

The record profits also say something else: either there are so many rich people around that this is enough to prop up the restaurant industry, or people are suckers. If the former is the case, then I guess a good portion of America, despite the claims of some, is doing great. If the latter is the case, then the wide-spread passivity seems disappointing. Aren’t Americans rugged individualists who don’t get taken advantage of?  Of course it could be a bit of both, but either way our willingness to participate in this blatant price-gouging is simply enabling bad behavior. A little tough love might do the trick!

Meanwhile, back at the homestead, this citizen will be pulling up the proverbial bootstraps. For example, on nights when I used to go out, I’ll just refuse to cook. Instead, I’ll eat a can of beans. Or perhaps I’ll find a nice stone, put it in a pot, and invite my neighbors to bring a vegetable. We’ll make stone soup.

A Silly Rhyme

Create your own signs. 
Don't listen to silly rhymes
Commit your own crimes. 

Three Snarky Poems

 

People have become corporations.
We must have a brand, a clever name, a logo
a mug, a pen, a polo.  
I made a sign for earth day.
All the words were crooked.
“People have become corporations,” it read
But no one understood it.

The Last Frontier
A pretty actress must play the ugly role,
Some baggy clothes and glasses and, naturally, she’s droll.
It’s quite okay for ugly girls to get harassed by men.
Everyone is so impressed when they deign to flirt with them.
Later in the movie the ugly girl will win.
And we all learn that beauty only goes as deep as skin.
But, brace yourself for the surprise, it turns out all along,
All she needed was some contacts, a smile and a thong.

Too Many Signs
The radical environmentalists talked reciprocity
Post positive they were
On contemplative ecology.
Meanwhile, out on the sidewalk, the temperature is jumping
All is fried with pesticide and the oil wells keep pumping,
Bill Nye still wears his bow tie and he tells us what’s in store
We shake our heads this way or that, then go off to do our chores.
They’re building a new gas station down the street, I saw.
They’ll have to move the lot two feet, to comply with the wetland law.
It’s mid-June, the flowers bloom, but nothing much stops by, 
The Mosquito Squad is cited, for putting up too many signs. 

Christmas 2022

Instead of a poem last year, I wrote a song. 

Careful What You Ask For

 Yesterday, I was asked to sign a petition to eliminate the Massachusetts subminimum wage.  Since I am a New Hampshire resident, I did not sign, but as similar efforts are sweeping the country, it is just a matter of time before the movement comes here. My reaction? The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

My arguments come from experience. In the 1980’s, I was a low-skilled high school dropout living alone. Serving was the best opportunity I could find. It was instant cash and, typically, at least one free meal. I did not always make good money, but the overall result skewed towards a livable income. My paycheck? I never opened the envelope.

In the 1990s, I went to college. Pell-grants paid for my tuition and waiting tables paid for everything else. It was perfect. I had time to study while still covering my expenses. In addition, it was flexible. During finals week I worked less, during the summers I worked more.

For ten years after I graduated, no matter what I was doing, I had a serving job, too. It provided instant income. I did not have to wait two weeks or, increasingly, a whole month for a paycheck. Speaking of paychecks, I was still throwing the one from the restaurant away.       

Just last year, when my income was not meeting my expenses, I applied for several server positions. As it turned out I did not need to return, but it was nice to know I could.  

Over the span of thirty years, I worked in many kinds of restaurants, from greasy spoons to exclusive culinary destinations, from casual chains to mom and pops. I met people who were serving for all sorts of reasons. Some were “moonlighting”, some were transients, and some were professionals. Some were high-school students working their first job, and some were recent immigrants navigating their way in a new culture. Some were single parents, and some were bored empty nesters. There was not one demographic that neatly described the population, but we all had one thing in common: we loved the cash and ignored our paychecks. Our grumpier bosses told us the only reason we had jobs was because of the subminimum wage. It seemed like a win-win.  

Enter the well-meaning to save the day, and away we go, down the road to hell.

The first stop?  The eccentric road-side diner. Since the restaurant industry runs on small margins and it takes years to become profitable, the tipped wage is a major factor making entry plausible for the independent operator. Eliminating it, I fear, will be a tremendous barrier for these types of businesses. The big chains, however, will be just fine.

That brings us to the second stop on the road to hell.  Big chains are already responding to systemic change by exacting more control over the servers’ income. In addition, I am sure there will be plenty of loopholes and workarounds to take advantage of, and, ultimately, the server will be worse off.  But the simplest way around paying a person a higher wage? Automation.

Every step of the serving process, except maybe bringing the food, can be easily automated. For an establishment with the resources, all that is required is an incentive, like increased labor costs, and there you have it: an obedient machine that doesn’t need a wage. Server Unit 345 also comes with added benefits. It will not sneak off for cigarettes, require breaks, wear inappropriate attire, call in sick, bicker or complain.  I know we expect restaurant owners to be enlightened and employ people for the greater good, but most are practical. They will ride this trend directly to automation. Server jobs will still exist, but they will be much harder to find.     

Last stop on our road to hell is the dead, downtown pub.  Dining out is already becoming the purview of the wealthy. If labor costs increase, employers will pass those costs onto customers. The individual server may be getting paid more, but what of all the working-class would be diners? We’ll be stuck at home eating beans out of a can.

I support efforts to help working people, like unionization and the living wage. I also think labor, overall, should be valued more in society.  However, instead of focusing on a system that is not really broken, let’s promote ideas that might result in real benefits, like the Basic Minimum Income.  Now there is an exit ramp I can get on.

 

The Killing of Cats

The heatwave surged
As predicted.
But the people didn’t wake
They complained:
“Give us more oil!”
Like the killing of cats
In the plague.

Silent Spring: The Sequel

A few years back I was finally able to purchase a small piece of property in New Hampshire with the intention of devoting it to my favorite group of wild animals: the arthropods. I don’t mow or rake, removed most of the outdoor lighting, built a pond habitat and planted native flowers. It took a few years to get it going, but this summer it is in full bloom, and it is a beautiful mess: my very own nature sanctuary, alive with buzzing, flying, ticking and stridulating, an organic orgy of offensiveness to the human desire to control and contain.  But hold on. Wait a minute. Where the heck is everybody? I stare at the bewildered blossoms in anguish. There is simply nobody there.

Okay, I’ll admit it, I’m exaggerating.  A few bugs, bumblebees, or thread-waisted wasps stumble by occasionally and a handful of frantic moths flitter up my kitchen window at night. However, the overall reaction to my humble effort to support the most maligned and misunderstood group of animals in the world? It can only be described as pathetic, and I’ve been on the planet long enough to know that it isn’t normal.

You see, I was a born arthropod enthusiast. As a child I would spend most of my swimming time, in the face of great ridicule, heroically rescuing drowning insects.  On road trips, when my father pulled over cursing to cleanse the windshield of sticky green hemolymph, I would wander off to the streetlights in search of Luna moths and Dobsonflies. They were everywhere. At night, in the suburbs, our lighted windows were just teeming with segmented critters of all shapes and sizes. They were prolific, incredibly diverse and seemingly invincible.

Later, I went to school for entomology. Even then, in the 1990s, insects were so easy to find that I was able to assemble a passable collection a week before it was due. Now? I would probably earn a D-.

But don’t take my word for it. This is not just local, temporary or anecdotal. Insects are in dire straits all over the world and the consensus is in: three major culprits are climate change, habitat destruction and pesticides. As our population inevitably expands, we take more land for ourselves and leave less of it for the rest of the species that share our planet.

This is not something that is going to happen, it is happening now. It is happening everywhere. People, this is the sixth major extinction event, and it is human caused: Silent Spring, the sequel.

Climate change is a crisis and biodiversity loss is a connected, but essentially separate one. We cannot, in our important efforts to transition to a green economy, ignore our impact on biodiversity. We cannot continue to rip apart forests and pave everything over while erecting solar and wind farms or destroy habitat mining metals for electric cars.

There are many selfish and practical reasons to be concerned about this problem, but I’m only going to present one: as go the arthropods, so goes the rest of nature. I imagine there are people out there who would say: “So what? Humans will survive. Who needs nature? We’ll live in a barren, desolate landscape and eat cockroaches for lunch. They’ll still be around.”

However, if you’ve ever been struck by a bird, dragonfly, frog or snake; If you’ve ever watched the itsy-bitsy spider climb up the waterspout; if you’ve ever caught a glimpse of a tiger beetle and just been dumbfounded by its beauty. Even if you’ve ever gotten a butterfly tattoo: you have some connection to nature, and you have some reason to care.  

The good news is that nature is resilient. Together, we may be able to pull it back from the brink, but it is going to first require an immediate and massive adjustment in the way most of us think. A shift from a mindset of destruction and control to one of creation and relinquishment needs to occur. We need to take radical action, but, more importantly, radical inaction.  At every level:  industry, government, and in our everyday lives, we need to find value in nature, embrace it,  and then, after that, we need to leave it alone.