No Staff, No Service, No Shame

It appears that in our haste to travel back in time to the glory days of 2017, we’ve all agreed to pretend that a global pandemic never happened. The masks are gone, the hand sanitizer stations are empty, and if you bring up “those unprecedented times,” people look at you like you just asked if Blockbuster is still open. It’s as if we all collectively decided that millions of people didn’t die, the vaccine was just a group placebo, and nothing at all was actually happening—except, of course, for the glaring fact that prices are sky high, customer service is completely dead, and nobody is around to take out the trash anymore.

If I have to swipe a crumpled napkin across another sticky restaurant table myself, I’m starting a support group. We’ll meet in the parking lot of your nearest understaffed eatery, where I’ll distribute hand sanitizer and rage.

I don’t know when it became acceptable for a restaurant to look like the aftermath of a toddler’s birthday party, but here we are. First, it was “Sorry, we’re short-staffed because of COVID.” Then it was, “Nobody wants to work anymore.” Now, five years later, the only thing working is my gag reflex when I see the ketchup crusted to the table.

Case in point: I recently visited a restaurant that had solved the trash problem by simply removing all the trash cans. Genius! The tables weren’t clean either, mind you, but when we finished our meal, there was nowhere to put our trash. I looked around for a sign—maybe a scavenger hunt clue? Was I supposed to take my tray out back and toss it in the dumpster? Flush it down the toilet? Or perhaps, in a bold new twist, just leave it on the table as a gift for the next customer, like a reverse tip? Somewhere after the pandemic-that-shall-not-be-brought-up we went from sanitizing everything to just being filthy and being fine with it.

As if that weren’t bad enough, not only do the restaurants want us to clean our own tables and take our trash to our cars, they want us to tip more for the self-service. I’m all for rewarding good service, but if you’re working behind a counter and your only interaction with me is handing over a muffin, I’m not sure that warrants a 25% gratuity. The other day, I bought a bottle of water and the screen asked if I wanted to tip. For what? The privilege of not having to break into the cooler myself? What exactly are the workers being paid to do? And I won’t even mention the ever-declining health scores at restaurants — that’s another column for another time.

It’s not just restaurants that have changed since the pandemic we’re all forgetting. Try calling a business these days. You’ll get a voicemail that says, “Your call is very important to us,” which is corporate-speak for, “We will never return this call. Please hang up and try screaming into the void.” I left a message for my doctor’s office last week and I’m pretty sure it’s now being used as a training tool for new AI robots learning how to ignore humans. 

A similar post-pandemic business trend is having just one employee in the entire building? I walked into a store recently and found a single, frazzled worker running the register, stocking shelves, and possibly performing minor dental work in the back. My wife went to get some bloodwork done and found that the lab had closed 30 minutes early because the lone worker there needed 30 minutes to close up shop since she was by herself. If you’re going to have a brick-and-mortar business, you need more than one warm body. At a minimum you need one person to do the work and another to answer the phone or handle the customer-facing tasks. And that is the bare minimum.

Look, I get it. Hiring people costs money. But if you can’t pay your employees enough to keep them around, maybe the problem isn’t “nobody wants to work”—maybe it’s “nobody wants to work for you.” Either way, two things are true. If you can’t hire workers, you and your family members need to be at the shop doing the jobs. Your customers shouldn’t have to suffer because you’re trying to run a business on the same budget as a lemonade stand and failing miserably.

Last, but certainly not least, if we’re going to insist that there was absolutely nothing at all bad that happened five years ago, can we please stop jacking up prices every time the wind changes direction? If we’re going to pretend there never was a pandemic, let’s stop using it as an excuse for “greedflation.” 

If you are a  business owner and you can’t keep your prices reasonable and pay your employees, you don’t deserve to have a business. That’s not just me ranting, by the way. Back when this country had integrity and values and was just recovering from a time of unchecked greed, Franklin Roosevelt said the following to business owners, “No business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country.” (He also probably would have insisted on a clean table, but history is silent on that point.)

So here’s my plea: If we’re going to act like the pandemic never happened, that’s fine, but we also need to get back to functioning like we did before the pandemic. Clean the tables, answer the phones, and hire enough staff to keep the trash from piling up. Customers are getting tired of feeding greed, getting less in return, and literally being left holding the bag — of trash.