Mini-pitting: Marco Rubio

The BBQ Pit
1

I got five minutes before work, so I’ll just be brief:

He talks about how raising the minimum wage will eliminate jobs, jobs he notes will be eliminated anyway by technology.

So he’s already undermined his own argument. Then, he slaps minimum wage workers in the face. Says you’ll order by a touch screen, and when you get there, your order will be right.

No it won’t, you prick.

I work as a manager of a top 3 pizza chain, who does orders via website. I’ve seen what happens when people place their orders, over the phone, to a person, who repeats the order back to you, and what happens when people place their orders over the internet or via a mobile app.

Now, people paying by card get their payments declined constantly, and won’t pick up the phone when we call them back to try to process it again. They put their phone number in wrong. They order pizzas half and half when they wanted full toppings. They get their own address wrong. But they send the order in anyway.

We donate dozens of pizzas per day that we weren’t before, because the average person is not a professional order taker, and constantly screws up their own order. No one is confirming the order.

So why not pay a minimum wage worker to call them back and confirm the order?

Doesn’t that undermine the whole “you just saved money cutting out the minimum wage job” argument, numbnut?

It costs our business hundreds of dollars per day, that we could be paying our staff double what we pay them.

Because the order isn’t right, because people are too fucking lazy to proofread.

And people who live in poverty could use that money that fuckheads like you would deny them because you think you’re saving money through automation. Now, every single fucking time their order is wrong, and it happens more five times more often, a person who is NOT making the minimum wage has to handle the problem, and the customer is unhappy, and the business loses money and profits. And you haven’t cut out the minimum wage worker, who has to be there anyway to assist me.

Ass.

2

Republican.

3

I wager that pizza chains would not continue to offer online ordering if it did not actually save them money.

Your anecdotes are reflective of poor communication on the part of the customer. I wager that poor communication is still a problem even with old-fashioned telephone ordering.

Finally, I wager that you just don’t like Marco Rubio. What he said about automation killing off minimum wage service-based jobs is entirely accurate. It’s already been happening for decades.

Now I want pizza…

4

I never thought about it before, but I’m really glad my pizza career ended before online ordering came about.

Yes. Idiots are idiots in any medium.

5

The hell you say.

6

Well, if you fuck up your pizza order, you takes what you ordered. If you don’t like it, take your business to another online ordering place and fuck up your order there, and take that.

7

Whatever shall we do with all these useless people?

8

Someone has to polish the robots’ boots.

9

There’s an app for that.

10

I see no particular reason to Pit Rubio for his opposition to a minimum wage; that’s standard for Republicans. Rubio is an asshole for his supposition that if the U.S. only continues to oppose Cuba, that the Batista cronies grandchildren will get all their grandparants ill-gotten gains back.

11

So what’s Rubio’s overall position here? That it doesn’t matter whether or not we raise the minimum wage because people are going to lose their jobs anyway?

Is he just saying we should learn to accept increased unemployment or does he have a solution?

12

I watched the Rubio show tonight and I gotta say, he comes off like a confused mess of a person.

13

A lot of people who are against raising the minimum wage are people that were born into wealth or were lucky enough to be entrepreneurs or got good jobs right out of school because their uncle knew someone who knew someone and never forced to flip burgers all day long for a living just to support their families. Fuck them.

14

Didn’t used to be that way.

Listen, I’m not a very old person. I’m 31 now. I can still remember when Republicans weren’t batshit crazy. George H.W. Bush and his properly-led and executed war, and tax increases that he sought to avoid, but needed to do eventually. Clinton and the Republican congress getting things done. Bob Dole shaking his head at the crazy wingnut faction his party has become.

There used to be Republicans that made sense. Where the fuck did they go?

I’m aware I’m a liberal and vote Democrat, but for the love of pete… when there’s a local election and I see R or D next to the name, and the guy is running for Sheriff, I got exactly one question: How are the police handling crime around here? That’s my one question. And if the answer is “okay” then I vote to re-elect. It’s not that hard. I recently voted for a Republican Sheriff.

But I can’t remember the last the time Republicans ran a congressman, senator, or presidential candidate I could have voted for. Oh yeah, I do remember: John McCain, when he still held his moderate positions, before he sold out to the far right to run his campaign against Obama, about halfway through his campaign. He had my support until that moment, because he had a moderate and bipartisan record. There would be bills that passed that said McCain- and next would be a Democrat’s name. And the bills would largely make sense.

Not anymore. And I wish I could tell you the difference between a John Boehner and the tea party wackadoodles which oppose him. I can’t see a shred of it.

#Longwindedlamentations_notappropriateforthisthread

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It doesn’t actually save money, what it does do is encourage **more **people to order.

That’s why they do it. Also the necessity of competitiveness, if competitors offer website ordering, we have to, to compete.

Then there’s who gets served-

Some people hate talking on the phone. Some people want to take their time and browse the menu, and figure out what they want to order and it takes them 20 minutes to order, which you can’t really do on the phone, because the live person is too busy to read you the entire menu and prices.

Don’t get me wrong, the website offers advantages- but saving money on labor isn’t one of them, because I could have my dinner shift covered phone-wise for 8 bucks an hour times five hours.

40 dollars plus whatever payroll taxes and yadda yadda means nothing when we lose 300 a day at my location on cancellations, mistakes, credit card declines, and so forth. Some days, the number we lose on stuff like that literally does rival what we spend on staff. That’s insane.

Also just in case, people who are scratching their heads going “well do something about it” may be under the impression that anyone who works at the store’s location is high enough in the management food chain to do squat about bigger picture problems like the ones I’m describing. I have all the ability to give you 5 bucks off your next order, that’s what I’m bringing to the table for solutions, since that’s all I’m allowed to do.

Yes it is, but most of those mistakes get corrected when the phone taker goes “Is this your phone number XXX-XXX-XXXX, your address is XXX Blankityblank street, and you ordered two pepperoni pizzas and a cheese pizza and 8 wings” and then they go “No, I ordered two cheese pizzas and a pepperoni pizza and 8 wings” and then we go “okay”.

A) Correct, but

B) It undermines his argument that we shouldn’t raise the minimum wage. If all the jobs being eliminated by higher minimum wages would be eliminated by automation soon anyway, then we’re not saving people’s jobs by letting wages stagnate. It is a red herring excuse for not raising the minimum wage.

I know *why *they don’t want to raise the minimum wage- It’s because the wealthy enjoy having a massive wealth gap, and they also enjoy the fact that the poor are too tired and beat from working two jobs to put up much of a fight with them come election time. No money to donate and no time to volunteer means less of the democratic process is coming from the bottom 50%.

16

LOL I wish, unfortunately the calls are recorded and I gets to be super polite and apologetic about *their *fuck-ups. And try to make it right by throwing money at the problem.

Genius stuff, but hey… the business wants to retain the customers that lose money for them for some reason. It’s their call, they’re the ones that insist we correct problems we didn’t create at a loss of profit, and if they want to run the business that way, I’m obligated to do so or just not work there.

17

The Republicans have demonstrated a zillion times that they don’t care about how many jobs there are out there, or the wages at those jobs. What Republicans care about is that employees desperately hold on to their jobs at the lowest wage possible. Republicans want labor as cheaply as possible as government policy because it is convenient for their sponsors, management. I can’t really fault Rubio for staying bought by the people who paid for his candidacy despite the fact that his arguments fall to pieces by the end of every paragraph.

18

What sucks is the hard working people who allow these ultra-rich to earn profits without actually being present, have the numbers, and have the better, more honest argument.

And if they were to win elections, the ultra-rich would continue to be ultra-rich. Little would change in their world.

But the party with the terrible, irrational argument that appeals to fear, not reason, wins elections.

The minimum wage has increased many many times before, without economic catastrophe.

In fact, economic catastrophe happened during a period when the minimum wage, and wages in general, stagnated, while the upper 1% continued to soar ever higher. That’s when the economic disaster happened.

Duh, because no one had any money and the people who caused the problem had enough money to not be affected by it, or they had contracts which said “In the event of catastrophic fuck-up, I shall be paid no less than one million dollars in severance and also, get to cash in all my stocks before the price takes a nosedive. Also, screw the pensions of the workers, fuck those guys, I want my severance package”.

It literally said those exact words, I shit you not. :stuck_out_tongue:

19

Wait, hang on, you can get free pizzas by being a moronic asshole to the people making your food? :smiley:

20

You bring up this stuff in an election season and out come the cries of “economic warfare” and all the boo-hooing about the magnificence of the American Jerbs Creator.

These people who own businesses Create Jerbs.

No they don’t. Demand does. When demand goes down, those businesses** Destroy Jerbs**.

Because no businessman anywhere ever gave one single solitary shit about the virtues of Jerb Creation.

The businessman vaguely, vaguely begins to care when I’ve got 20 pizzas to deliver in an hour and two drivers to do it, and the overflow pizzas get so late that people want a refund.

A refund is a dirty word. Refund means hire someone or fire someone. That’s the true definition of the word “refund”.

In no other circumstance does the businessman care about the worker or their need for jobs.

They only care if they lose more money by not hiring someone than hiring someone. That’s when they care.

And demand creates that effect, not the businessman.

And you know who is a massive, massive number of consumers? Who spend almost every single cent they have in every marketplace but the gold plated one?

Hermergherd, minimum wage workers, or workers in general. They spend just about everything they make.

If their wages rose, so would the amount they spend of frivolous shit like delivered pizza.

I work at a pizza place. You know how much of my *own *money I spend at my own place of employment on food?

Where do Wal-Mart workers shop? At friggen Wal-Mart. Give them a raise and watch shit fly off the shelves at your store and every single pizza place in town.

It’s economics. It’s not that difficult. People with a little bit of money spend-a the money. People with no money no spend-a the no money. And people with a shit-ton of money invest it and try to make sure no one else has any.