this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Choosing Beggars
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Stories of people who are being way too picky when it comes to who they beg for a relationship or any other matter.
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Maybe we all should stop going to restaurants. Seriously, do we really need it? We can cook at home or buy refrigerated meals in the supermarket if someone really can't cook... Just until the industry collapses. Maybe what rises from its ashes will value the workers more...
But probably won't.
We did, for a while. Lockdown didn't kill restaurants, nothing will.
The idea that we should all just get our food from the grocery store and cook at home is entirely unrealistic anyway.
Lockdown did kill a lot of restaurants; the ones that survived perfected takeout. It also produced a ton of ghost kitchens serving exclusively takeout.
Governments at every level opened their wallets literally to keep restaurants open.
I cook almost every meal at home myself and I get along just fine. This is a skill issue.
Lol, it's not a skill issue, and this is an incredibly short-sighted take. My wife and I are not only capable, but quite enjoy cooking, and we still go out to eat frequently. There are a number of reasons to.
For one, restaurants are social. At least once a week we are getting out of the house to meet up with friends for happy hour. No one wants to host that at their house. The whole purpose is to go out. And no one on a first date is going to go to someone's house for a dinner date.
For another, if we don't want to put in the effort for a good dinner, the pre-made stuff from the supermarket is rarely a good substitute, especially as a regular meal. So much is just processed ingredients or allergens my wife can't have. If we want a good, fresh meal, a local restaurant is gonna be better, and for something like an anniversary or even just a date night it's definitely gonna be better than what we can make at home.
And that's not because we're not skilled. It's because good food takes effort. I can and have made beef wellington, or sushi, or duck confit, but I'm not cooking at that level regularly so I'm just simply not going to be doing as good of a job as a professional cook. It's fucking work and sometimes I don't feel like spending 2 hours making an incredible meal after getting home from 8 hours at work.
Restaurants just have more resources and capabilities to make foods we simply cannot make at home. I do not have the time or tools to do 16 hour smoked pork. I can't source fresh squid. I don't have the equipment for Korean BBQ. Should people just be deprived of other cuisines simply because they can't make it at home?
Restaurants also fill a critical need for people travelling, whether for pleasure or for work (but especially for work). Most hotels don't have kitchenettes, let alone kitchens, so forcing the millions of people who travel for work annually in the US alone to either eat fast food, eat only cold food that doesn't need to be cooked, or go hungry is unreasonable. And food is such a fundamental aspect of culture that denying the culinary experience to foreign tourists is depriving people of a valuable cultural experience.
From the other side, bars and restaurants serve a valuable role in providing (potentially) livable-wage jobs that require little formal schooling or training and are resistant to automation. For many people they can be a lifelong career.
There are more to restaurants than just shitty chains like Applebee's, and more reasons to go out to eat than an inability to cook. The industry certainly has problems and could be improved in many ways, but the idea of abolishing it in its entirety is both short-sighted and problematic for a multitude of reasons.
Exactly.. I go to restaurants only on my holiday and I tip only if I find the service worthy. For example I was in Greece and we tried 4 restaurants there and ended up going only to one cause you could really feel the difference. And even there we tipped not percentagely but as a final sum. 4 people, spent around 100£ and we tipped 10£. And the waitresses were so nice and happy, always smiling, they even hold "our" table for us later on. In other restaurants they looked at us like idiots as: really only 5£ tip..
I cant imagine paying 30£ for spending 100£ as a tip, that's crazy.
Lol $30 on $100 is taxes not a tip!
To explain the joke: That'd be 30%, income tax is ~30% of your income, but "a good tip" is only expected to be 20% of the bill.
To explain my feelings on the situation: Idk Greece but for America where tipping is like, a thing, this just means you got the server to work for free since the dickheads you're supporting with your business barely pay them. The business however got their money and couldn't care less about the server. The only way to fix it would be for people to stop eating out and collapse the entire industry, otherwise they'll just keep rotating kids out or finally take the jump to automation. Once the industry collapses and rebuilds maybe, but until then, not tipping only hurts the "little guy," the individual server (or servers if they split tips), and is frankly scummy as shit.
Again, because if I don't say it a good 300 times, I'm talking about America where the tipping culture is already pervasive, you Europeans have a different set up over there and that's great, "we ain't talkin' 'bout you."
We make the decision every day not to elect people who eliminate the tipped wage. It's on us.
The government doesn't have to solve all your problems for you. It's still on us, but culturally rather than politically. Honestly, especially with American deadlocked politics, it's probably easier to change people's perceptions yourself than to beg the government to force people to do what you want.
For instance, if one person says "know what? He's right. I'mma learn to cook. Fuck restaraunts" to what I've said, I've made more of a difference than "pleeeeeeeeease pelosi do something, save us!"
Agreed. Cooking is a basic life skill.
You may be a Michelin Star chef, but I'm not.
If places to eat food made by people that know what they're doing and have all the right equipment to do it went away, I'd never experience 99% of what's possible in the wide span of our planet's amazing cuisines.
If you think average home cooking or microwave meals can compare in any way, you've been going to the wrong restaurants.
Honestly, it just sounds like more lower class suppression. The higher classes would be able to afford their own chefs, but the rest of us would be cut off from the wide world of amazing food, and told that microwave meals are good enough. No.
Tear down those class walls, don't build more of them.
I've been to Michelin Starred restaurants. I'm not a chef and I cook delicious food at home just fine.
This isn't class war, it's a skill issue.