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All this minimum wage discussion is reminding me that the big chain restaurant system is deeply fucked and based on wild exploitation.
A thread. 1/?
A thread. 1/?
I worked at a Tim Horton's on and off for 8 years and hated it. The whole environment sucks. Everyone hates their job, are put under impossible pressures to perform at a speed which is outside their control and then as few people are put on shift as possible to keep it afloat.
This has a few consequences. First, your order takes longer to get cuz the staff all are forced to juggle several jobs at once, not to mention that it increases the odds of corner-cutting for expediency (eg, not stirring your coffee) or simple mistakes (especially in drive thru).
Secondly, you might have one or two people who give a shit there, total. Like I said, corner-cutting is everywhere because of this and it affects everyone. I had one person who'd "forget" to return change to bring home like $20 in tips by the end of the night.
Turnover is enormous because no one wants to work at a place that doesn't give a shit about you. Again, I worked at this place for 8 years and on my last day I had 1 person say anything to me. Everyone else just didn't give a fuuuuck and wanted to escape. I don't blame 'em.
Again, this all results in lots of newbies who don't know or care about the job. If all you care about is yourself, you now have slower, lower quality, shittier service to look forward to.
Compensation is utter trash. I got a $0.25/hour raise in my whole time there and even that got eliminated when the minimum wage went up. Breaks are unpaid and they don't even let you take food to eat, just coffee, a donut, or a buttered bagel. Naturally, I stole a lot of food.
The problem is that the whole business is designed to be this shitty. Franchisees have to buy everything from the company and it can take years to break even but eventually they make a decent profit, especially when they exploit the shit out of their employees.
The owners of our Tim Horton's owned 2 of them in our town. They were members of our church and only ever dropped in to give people shit. I remember hearing them come in and talk about the vacations they were planning and thinking "lol, like we could afford that shit."
So the franchise fucks the employees and, to a lesser degree, the company fucks the franchisees as much as possible. They cut every possible corner as well, compromising products until they're disgusting parodies of food, but those bastards get paid big for it.
When it comes down to it, an actual, liveable minimum wage still doesn't solve the fact that the business model is made to funnel money upwards off the back of exploited workers, exponentially degraded food quality and no benefits or pension to speak of.
That said, it's a start.
That said, it's a start.
