Bike Tour Of Paris, Asian Food, Underoos, and Economics -- Marginally Coherent NaNoWriMo Sludge

 

So, it’s been two days since I’ve even looked at a computer, and damned little got done even then. My targets are now up to around 2000 words per day to finish. Crap.

My own fault of course. It’s what comes of having virtually no self-discipline. And, also, The Beneficiary wanted to go out with me on a ride, and for that I’ll always drop whatever else I’m doing. We went to Paris, TX, her first multi-hundred miler, and she did really well.

Thinking about it, I don’t know why I bother to specify “TX”, since it seems pretty obvious that “Paris” isn’t the one in France. She’s not ready for a ride THAT long, and I have zero desire to set foot on the European continent in any event.

 I’ve wondered about that — why it is that going overseas has never been even a remote priority for me. I toured a pretty good part of the Pacific Rim on Uncle Sam’s dime back in the day, but have no interest in leaving the North American continent again. I’ve been told it’s because I’m a culture-centered semi-racist or some version of that, but I don't think that's it. I just don’t have much interest in “culture” or “seeing how others live”. 

Do I have any interest in hanging out with a bunch of Euros? Not especially. And that’s the point. It wouldn’t BOTHER me, I just don’t CARE. I have about the same interest in hanging out with a bunch of Americans, or even Texans, or Bikers, or pick-a-group-you-love-or-hate. People in general just don’t interest me much beyond how they interact with me somehow.

Don’t get me wrong. I love going to new places and, at least in the low-key, introvert, “well, that’s interesting” way that I have, meeting new people. I like hanging out with the very few friends I’ve bothered to accumulate. I like seeing new things. But the fact is that I’m WAY up in my 60s, and I’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s in the US, much less trying to cop a thrill from watching a bunch of yurt-dwellers making reindeer cheese out on the tundra or standing in the same spot that 100 bazillion other people have stood to stare at some 19th Century ironwork in the middle of Paris (the one in France). 

I mean I can get views of that thing that I’d never get in person, right down to the original plans and the current rust spots with a few keyboard strokes and about 5 minutes, and it will cost me less than the coffee I’m drinking while I do it, and I can take the money I’ve saved and go camp on the rim of Horseshoe Canyon out in the Red Desert of Wyoming, or ride through some utterly fucking gorgeous forest and mountains to Hot Springs Arkansas with The Beneficiary, or hang out for a couple of near-off-season days in Glacier National Park and Waterton Park (Canada). 

There are (probably literally) a million places in the US — certainly North America — that I’ve never been and would like to see, and I’ve lately been trying to hit more of them. When I get retired, there’s theoretically going to be a helluva lot more. And in doing it, I don’t have to learn the local language well enough to comment on a bunch of bony cows wandering the streets while stepping over people starving to death. Or having to decide whether buying them a couple of gross of “Vegetarian For Life!” t-shirts for them to wear for the camera crews and tourists would be yet another annoy-everyone example of my less-than-conformist sense of humor.

If I were to go anywhere off-shore, it would be probably be Pacific-Rim Asia in general and Southeast Asia in particular. As I said, I’ve been there before, and these days it’s vastly less likely that I’d be stepping on home-made explosives as I tour the area.

Neither the heat nor jungle bother me and I do like the food, although much of it would hardly be recognized as food in US culture. I knew a woman once who claimed she had no gag reflex — the context of that conversation is immaterial, and no, I’m not getting into it — but I’d bet some safe money that wouldn’t apply when hanging out with a family in some unnamed dirt-road jungle vil eating what they eat for a couple of days. Not only didn’t it bother me a lick, as I say, I quite liked it.

I’ve never been able to get more than sorta close to the food in the States with the exception of a hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese joint I found in a major city in Texas, and which I visit every time I get a chance. The owner/operators and their staff barely speak enough English to this day to get an order from customers, and what they serve up ain’t on any US menus anywhere, or at least not in those versions. 

I’ve been known to sit there at their rickety 2nd-hand kitchen tables on a garage-sale chair being casually watched by their street-tough sons and grandsons who hang out in small knots of Vietnamese braggadocio displaying their best bored gangster poses while I eat bowls and plates of exotica till I can hardly move.

Apparently they’ve taken me for one of the old-school GIs who often frequent the place with their Vietnamese wives. I guess I’m not the only one who misses home cooking. Heh.

Timing’s got to be right, though. You hit right on lunch hour, you’ll be battling it out with impenetrable infestations of suit-wearing businessmen on lunch break who come all the way from downtown to pack into the miniature store-front. At least partially since I speak an embarrassingly bare fragment of the language, which always amuses them considerably, but mostly because I’m culture-polite and obviously like whatever they bring me, they seem generally well-disposed toward me.

Shit. I’m getting hungry writing this. I’m gonna have to hit the place sometime soon — been awhile.

I’d make do with the pasteurized and westernized US version of Asian food, but the local Panda Express has gone tits-up. The pandemic punched a hole in the profit margin, and when it let up, they were having a tough time finding anyone to come to work. They got to where they were closing the “dine-in” part and doing only drive-though, and posting big signs everywhere offering “competitive” wages and benefits for whoever showed up with a completed job application. 

I guess no takers. They’re done, and haven’t opened their doors in about a month. Too bad. It wasn’t terrible, which in terms of white-boy versions of Asian food, a high complement. But there you have it.

I had an ol’ girl (about a third my age) on Tumblr ragging along about how it is that “The Workers” are going to take over the economy, and the trouble outfits are having finding workers is going to continue until they start coughing up wages and benefits to suit the workers instead of maximizing the profits for the evil capitalists that run the place.

“So, let me get this straight,” I said. “Lower tier workers won’t go to work unless they’re paid more and/or get better benefits, right?”

“Damned right!” she replied, “And no one’s going to work for unlivable wages anymore! WE’RE going to set the agenda!”

“Wow, that’s cool. Let me make sure I understand this. The workers have something employers want, right? A skill that’s needed for business to function, right? And they’ll only sell that skill if someone pays them enough for it, right?”

“You got it!”

“Welcome to capitalism, babe. Couldn’t have defined it better myself. C’mon in out of the cold.”

NOW she won’t talk to me at all. Fucking lefties have no sense of humor. I presume she moved on elsewhere to wave her bumper-sticker economic theories and never-read copy of Das Kapital at some reactionary Republicans who'll bother to argue with her. Golly, I thought we were making some headway toward kumbaya and all.

Anyhow, back to Panda Express — the fact is that they failed because they hadn’t sorted out that simple principle. Or more likely because they have, and their business calculus can read how a bleak future is going to work out.

Y’see, under-educated, under-skilled, under-talented, under-motivated, under-everything people who used to glut the labor market have found other sources of income, including major buffers which were provided in pandemic and unemployment relief by the government. And the current labor market has to match or exceed those benefits or people, including my frothing lefty Tumblr babe, won’t work for them. It could not be a simpler supply/demand curve.

So Panda Express has two choices — increase pay/benefits to an acceptable level which allows them to compete with other chains who ARE paying it, or lock the doors. If you stay in business with the new wage/benefit structure, your small-to-vanishing profit margin will go in the shitter unless you raise prices to the consumer enough to cover it. Raising prices will drive off some percentage of the customers. 

So, business calculus guy, here are your choices: Will acceding to employee demands cost you so many customers that you cannot sustain the loss (i.e., go bankrupt over the long term) and if so, is it cheaper to just pull the plug right now? Apparently THAT decision’s been made.

They may be even smarter than that, though. It’s long been my prediction that about six months of near-zero income with pandemic and unemployment benefits running out practically everywhere, there’s going to be a shift in the labor market. 

The pool of underoos (as I call the under-everything crowd) is constantly increasing and the number of even shit jobs to work are decreasing (see Panda Express DOA above). And the employers who in fact have increased wages and benefits did so with the understanding that they were going to have people working for them who want the check, and are willing to work for it. This gives them more power to control the individual workers as the underoo population will increase to the point that plugging in a replacement for someone who isn’t toeing the line is vastly simpler.

At that point, the only thing underoo workers who are now working better-compensated jobs have to offer is experience and competence, which immediately makes them no longer underoos. Those are the key skills which will become the competitive point for retail employers, who now not only need workers, but workers who are competent and useful enough to attract customers who have discovered they don’t have to put up with some snotty shitbag clerk who wants to be somewhere else to buy stuff. 

Brick and mortar will die if they don’t have anything to offer that can’t be had cheaper and with less aggravation online. Brick and mortar stores that survive will either be on the minimum fringes paying in turnips and spare change or will become essentially more upper-class — the customer is paying a mark-up premium for the experience of shopping there as much or more than for whatever it is they’re shopping for. It’s why I go to stores that cost half again what stuff in Walmart does — I’m paying to NOT be in Walmart. And those are the employers who are going to survive.

The underoos who have been just sitting on their asses waiting for things to get better are going to be where they’ve always been. Their peers who were lucky or skillful enough to maneuver into a reasonable-paying job during the labor upheaval and acquired a relatively long-term competence at doing it are going to wind up a lot closer to where they hoped to be.

The rest, as always, from now till the end of time (cf: Matthew 26:11), will be competing with minimum skills for minimum wage. But, perhaps the staffing shortage is going to continue (update: it isn’t — employment rates at the bottom tier are already up considerably, along with a pretty fair batch of pay increases and — big surprise -- inflation) Maybe once the underoos find the joys of hanging out in a dumpster tent down in the Tenderloin district they’ll just drop out of the market altogether. More power to ‘em, that’s my vote.

(NOTE: ZERO EDITING except for update in the last paragraph - Straight dump - sorry about that.)