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"Peak Bartenders" - After A Record 42 Consecutive Months, Waiters Suffer First Monthly Job Decline
The last time employees in the "Food Services and Drinking Places" category experienced a monthly job decline was February 2010. Since then, for 42 consecutive months, the US eating and drinking industry went on an epic hiring spree without a single month of net layoffs, adding over 1 million workers and hitting an all time high 10.334 million workers, even as actual restaurant retail sales have recently tumbled as a result of the middle-class US household once again running on fumes as a result of the Fed's disastrous wealth-transferring policies. Well, as the chart below shows, after 42 months of relentless hiring of bartenders and waitresses, we may have just hit "peak bartenders."
What this means for the future of the US workforce we don't know, but whatever it is, it can't be good for several million Los Angeles-based "actors."
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A guy at staples said the put everyone but the managers on part-time....to avoid the OBAMACARE. So I bet they hired a couple more....must be awesome to have to have 2-3 jobs instead of that old fashion one person one job thing. I think you need to divide those "bartenders" by 3 as they are the same people working multiple jobs.
Since most bartenders and waitresses don't get medical/bennies, anyway, the only thing we can conclude is that the public has become too poor to even afford a shit sandwich.
"we may have just hit "peak bartenders."
God....I need a drink !
It's my fault cause I started drinking at home more the past few months cause I got so mad about paying $10 a drink for what costs $30 a bottle!
I even told the owner of my favorite drinking hole of my displeasure with his pricing and he just ignored it.
I hate to see my long time bar tenders lose out cause their boss is such a greedy bastard but so be it when I can sit at home
watching what I want on TV while I'm having a few, or more if need be.
Bartenders and waitresses are paid less than minimum wage in most places.
They are supposed to make up the difference by tips.
I don't blame owner/operators because there is more than a 80% chance the business won't last more than 5 years.
Unless service is extraordinarily poor 20% is my minimum.
Good cooks don't necessaily make for good operators. Inventory control and food standardization are generally lacking.
Bartenders and waitresses are paid less than minimum wage in most places.
They are supposed to make up the difference by tips.
The fuck? Either they're paid minimum wage or they aren't...
I don't blame you at all for avoiding the $10 drinks but don't blame the owners. I own a small business that grosses $500k and employs 5 people. I make ZERO and am just one decent sized bill away from filing bankruptcy. The other day I calculated the direct taxes I pay - property taxes, employment taxes, tax charges on utilities and phone bills, etc, etc
It came to $40,000 per year. Before I make a dime I pay $40,000 in taxes. So my tax rates as a small business owner are 100% on the first $40,000 in income and 60% after.
I would be surprised if 20% of these taxes existed 40-50 years ago
Not sure why 90% of small businesses operate - hope, pride, lack of other options - don't know
I'm fortunate and went out and got a full-time job
Oh great, now they can't pay for my healthcare...
If I'm under a bridge with a bottle of Popov, I don't need a bartender.
They do however get all the booze they can steal, plus coke from the waiters and usually a roll in the hay with an aspiring actress/model/waitress after closing.
Disclosure - I was a bartender in my university days.
They also get to deal with demanding, impatient assholes, folks that like to tell them how to do their job, think your business is the world's business, fights, drunks, idiots, drunk idiots that swing at/punch you if you cut them off, vandalize your vehicle if you refuse to serve them, pervs, creeps, and generally condescending fuckwits that treat you as their slave.
Yeah, bartending. It's all glamour and skittles and unicorns for sure.
"All-I-Can-Drink" is my 401k.
Peak bartenders has always been an under the counter signal of a market top.
Unfortunately we have to contend with Peak Ben.....and then Peak Janet.
We're so fucked. I mean, really, self serve buffets and bus your own tables? Wow. Immigration reform will fix this, no?
Tables!? it's gonna be more like feeding troughs for us prolls! And they'll be filled with Soylent Green. (is PEOPLE!)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9IKVj4l5GU4
just like everything else...just btfd
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States intoduces the iDildo... soon to be distributed to all citizens.
"I calls mines the Reggie!"
But what colors does it come in...we can talk for hours about it on CNBC....its Apple..Americas Company..anything they do is worth 50 hours of coverage..
...and yet the pesants still do not revolt.
which makes the peasants that much more revolting.
peasants need the new iDildo.
Gee! What colors it come in?
"The public sucks !"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CFDND9SRJbs
"Sire, Sire, the people are revolting!"
The King drops his head, nodding, "Yes, I know".
Each bartender gets to serve one drink, then they swap out to the next-in-line bartender. You can't hire any more than that.
the bartender bubble has burst? Tiny bubbles make me happy....
Luckily, there is no such thing as Peak Strippers.
Yeah...but it will cost more TO peek.....
Dont ask, dont tell.
I used to be in the biz. Saturation has become th issue. With the ACA, employers have started to do what all others have and cut down to 25 hours per. Add the fact that folks don't tip the way they used to and you have yet another industry eating a shit sandwich. I now do auto finance. I see it as helping to kick start the collapse. Yo quiero sub prime.
Re: I now do auto finance
So, you might be a leading-indicator. Keep us informed as to how auto-loans are holding up.
The dumbasses can only finance so much student loans and automotive bling (in theory, anyway).
I'm in the screwing young people with private student-loans scam. We're still going strong best I can tell.
We do a rating system and most people are in the "C" range. I will see some As and Bs, but D+ to C+ is most prevalent. They will come in after a charged off vehicle, bankrupcy that is pending with no money to place to a vehicle and then get aggravated that we cannot "put them into something". Umm...yeah....you can place 3500 down and we may be able to get you into something with at least a year of solid employment(salary, not a 9 dollar an hour Chik-Fil-A cashier job), but these people cannot even get 100 bucks together for insurance. Most of these fools have 1000 dollars or more in over-draft and only make 18-22K. It's been eye opening. When this shit hits, hold onto your hats.....
Do you actually keep skin in the game or do you sell your loans up the chain?
Next business plan I present to investors. I plan on opening 3 bars in the same strip mall under different LLC. just rotate part time bartenders and waiters every nite..... Saves them on gas and tolls, etc and me on health insurance. Loopholes BITCHEZ !!... WINNING !!!!
I'm financially repressed...have been for years now. I haven't been able to afford to eat out for a long, long time...
What are you doing about it?
I have done what I can for the economy. I drink any more, my liver is going to burst through my chest like a slimy Sci-Fi horror creature. The bartenders will just have to suck it up!
"Excuse me, I asked for two olives and a job application."
O.M.G. Peak Bartenders dropping from a Hindenburg Omen.
SELL EVERYTHING AND RUN FOR THE HILLS!!!
Most all of the full time waiting and tending jobs were reduced to part-time creating new jobs for the government to count. As the number of full time reaches its minimum, the real decline in the hours of total paid employment in those jobs will become apparent.
If they want still more jobs waiting and tending to be created, they'll have to lower the exempt hours to 20 and then 15. Creative statistics solves problems.
I am now of the age where my family and friends all have their kids just finishing college and entering the work force. So much talk centers on their job searches and their employment records. I can say, without doubt, that food and drink are a MAJOR employer of college grads. Most every family member and friend has kids who have worked or do work in the bar and restaurant industry. Serving food and drinks and a few actually back in the kitchens. Only the lucky few have escaped this American growth industry. Those who have gotten on the bottom rung of corporate America have gotten there through family or friend's connections. This is a fact!
I can think of a dozen recent college grads who serve food at Brew Pubs and Bars. This bar and pub scene seems to not only make up the major work place for these young folks, but it is also the center of their social lives. They both work and hang out in the bars and pubs. It is a whole lifestyle. The funny part is, I have never, ever heard anyone, parent or kid speak of wages and benefits. I suspect this is on account of shame. To be a college grad with top grades and now be making $10 an hour tops! I can tell wages are low, because all these young people I know of first hand are sharing Apartments and rental houses. As their lives begin to include boy and girl friends, they must shuffle their living arrangements. So you always hear about who has moved in with who. A typical arrangement is a niece of mine. She has gotten on the bottom rung at a corporate retailer's main office. Wages are unknown, but I suspect they do not top $12 an hour starting. She is living in a house with two other coworkers from the same work team. One is late 20's just divorced and owner of their marriage home now. So the other two rent from her and the three together share expenses. This is very typical. Three bottom rung corporate workers share one house. This shows me that wages are not all that high for them. But, as I said, nobody EVER talks wages!
The bar and pub workers are usually three to an apartment. They always talk about grad schools, like they are 25-27 years old, waiting tables with a college degree and they keep their hopes up by always talking about the grad schools they are headed to, or the new degree they plan on taking. As if this is going to get them into the high paying corporate world! It's sad, because I know of only one kid who actually has gone to grad school. And she has rich parents, who are paying, and she is going for an advanced ART degree! Really she is just moved to a new school to kill time, as she can't find any real job. Only family fortune allows her to do this.
My big question is "What do these kids think is gonna happen when they pass 30, and the employers already look at them as over the hill?" They will have a college degree and 5 years of bar tending or food service on their records. I can see employers firing these kids as they age, and the employer looks for younger more hip workers to feed the social scene at their bars and pubs. Age in America is a curse. It used to be people my age who had to worry. WHere are these kids gonna be when they hit 40? What career are they gonna have? Millions of better looking, younger hipper kids get out of school every year, hungry to take the jobs away from the aging generation that is now serving food. I see a fucking bleak future, because life does not end in your 20's, as I know from hard experience, you gotta plug away at work from 17 to 70! And at least I had a real career, and a job paying well over $20 an hour for most of the last 25 years. Our kids generation has little chance to advance because the economy creates the jobs overseas. Not here. All of them might try and learn to write computer code, but I hear that China, India and Russia are flush with people who can write top level code and do it for 1/4 the wages an American would demand. Screwed! These kids are screwed. When they are 40 they are gonna be aging and broke, few will have a home or a family. When an economy is all about consumption and money printing, and not about saving and production? Well, war seems to be America's option. Just as old Marc Faber keeps saying.
Hey, what about all those poor estate agents in the UK, when the housing bubble bursts?
"What do these kids think is gonna happen when they pass 30, and the employers already look at them as over the hill?"
These kids will one day wake up and take on the only future and career path available to them, "guillotine operator."
"When an economy is all about consumption and money printing, and not about saving and production? Well, war seems to be America's option. Just as old Marc Faber keeps saying."
When hasn't America been at war? I was born durng the Korean War, which was during the Cold War, following World War 2. I grew up during the Vietnam War. Then came short term excursions like Grenada and Beiruit and Panama, with proxie wars in Afghanistan and Nicaragua on the side. Hardly was the ink dry on the Cold War, when it was time for Gulf War 1.
The problem with production now is that it is becoming largely robotic. A recent headline noted manufacturing returning to the U.S., jobs are not. it is becoming a moot point as to whether the economy is consumption or producton oriented. Robots don't bar hop.
Looks like Occupy is gonna have a whole new wave of recruits.
When the discounted value of the future equals zero suicide is pure rationality.
Ground into the earth for worthless paper and metalic tokens, what a useless and futile game.
No, not war. Too expensive to hire people to fight, just like it is too expensive to hire them to make stuff - war is being robotized, too!!
Not war, but slavery. Per Richard Pipes (Harvard historian): "Historical experience suggests that in the case of economies based on slave labor the decisive factor may often be the supply rather than the demand: i.e. that slave economies can come into being because of the availablity of a massive supply of slaves for whom work must be found."
(Russia Under the old Regime, pg. 43)(he specifies that the slave economies of the Americas were not an instance of this).
BTW thank you for a very depressing post. Agh. Reminds me of O. Henry's short stories; perhaps they will enjoy a revival.
buy liquor stores ! go long very long!
Peak Bartenders, to me, means that disposable income has peaked.
The anti smoking ordanences just killed the bar scene. Also killed their liquor sales on which most establishments actually make their money.
Old saying in the resturant biz. Food pays the overhead, bar makes the profit.
Well, let's see.........
1/5 Basel Hayden; check
1/5 Woodford Reserve; check
1/4 bottle Knob Creek; check
1/2 Fifth Jameson 12 year Reserve; check
1/5 Myer's Dark; check
Yup, I'm good to go. No need to go out anywhere.
This would be a funny movie scene: A restaurant is jammed packed and busy. Our procrastinator waves his hand and yells waitor. Suddenly everyone in the room jumps out of their seat looking at him attentively...ready to serve.
Why spend $6 on a pint of microbrew? Can anyone please answer this? The bars around here are full and the $6 pints are making way for the soon-to-be $7 pints. Are people really this stupid?