when you are served by human, it just brings certain je ne sais quoi.
i’m baffled both by the angle of attack and choice of an image (is this retweet of musk?)
when you are served by human, it just brings certain je ne sais quoi.
i’m baffled both by the angle of attack and choice of an image (is this retweet of musk?)
Yeah I agree. I finding having to deal with a waiter annoying. If I want another beer or extra mustard I gotta flag down this person who’s running helping other people. I’d rather just order at a counter and then pick it up myself, or get one of those little number thingies.
Bartenders make more sense cuz you’re usually not 100% how many drinks you’re gonna at when you sit down but I don’t get the need for waiters.
Yeah I mean automate McDonald’s by all means. I’m talking more about proper restaurants.
Even in proper restaurants, I don’t see why you can’t order at a counter, even if you don’t want to carry the food to the table yourself just give people those number things
There’s so much more to the job than carrying things and putting them on tables though. What if you have questions about the food? What if you want them to give your steak another touch on the grill? The system you’re describing is fast food, which is fundamentally something else (while it certainly has its place).
Read the menu? Or ask the person taking your order at the counter?
Tell that to the order taker?
Sorry but I work retail and I find it so inherently degrading I don’t think it should exist at all. It’s breed a class of completely impatient, helpless people who refuse to do any basic problem solving and so torment minimum wage servants cuz they can’t get their treats. Learn to read a fucking menu!
I’ve worked multiple jobs in the service sector and I can absolutely tell you that waiters are still needed. The circumstances you are describing are essentially fast food/ small business pop and mum shops as Andrzej3K described.
However, it doesn’t account for very specialized service jobs that exist in places like fine dining, luxury hotels, airlines, and other specific workplaces.
As someone who has worked in those fields you don’t have any counters, and menus often don’t tell you everything (for example: if the food contains something a guest is allergic to). I don’t know what country you’re from but in my country, we have something called RSA standards (Responsible Service of Alcohol) that is a legal requirement and must be enforced in the service sector, and last time I checked robots can’t actively assess whether someone is too intoxicated to buy more drinks, you need human servers for that.
Finally, you need customer-service workers to organize and set-up the spaces that guests will be in, and cooks and bartenders can’t do that because they’ll always be back-of-house doing their own prep. Hell even in cheap dining places, you still need people to set-up the tables because robots aren’t good enough for that.
I do however, agree that waitstaff have created a breed of guests who are incredibly entitled, self-centred, and incapable of doing work themselves, but the vast majority of them were already like that because of their class position (you think these capitalists don’t treat their subordinates in their own workplaces the same?). That doesn’t mean waiters shouldn’t exist at all. Both can be true.
If we’re automating the waiter out of existence, how on earth do we still have an ‘order taker’? Surely you can just order on the app, or better yet reheat your own slop at home.
There isn’t a job that can’t/won’t be made degrading by wage slavery. I mentioned this elsewhere, but teachers are treated like shit in most places, especially outside of the public sector. It doesn’t make the work itself inherently degrading.
The thing about jobs is that they stand between us and our work. They keep us from being useful to each other until we convince ourselves that in an ideal world we’d all be watching TV and writing fan fiction. But we need work imho — just not as defined by capitalism
Writing fan fiction is work and I have the patreon subscriptions to prove it!
No, it’s a job, and I’m sorry to say that all jobs will be abolished post-revolution 🤷
The commies will take away your omegaverse with their totalitarian regime
Oh shit how’s your NSFW Dragon Ball series going?
Well ya’ know how things are with payment processing these days, Things were just about to ball in dragon ball.
We’ll still have cooks, food prep, bartenders, baristas.
I’m just saying I don’t see the point in having someone ferry all your food from the kitchen to your table and tell you the soup of the day. I think it just exists to make people feel like waited on royals, or to create jobs small business kulaks don’t have to actually pay proper wages for.
I don’t think we’re going to get over our fundamental disagreement about what a waiter is
Writers are workers though, similar to artist they are just artisanal occupied. Its called fan fiction and is deemed by capitalistic hegemony as lesser due to copyright and “non-profit” motive behind those works.
I’m not denying that. But compare serving someone a meal to writing a story no-one will ever read. One of these acts is profoundly alienating. People should have the freedom to write just for themselves tbc, but I wouldn’t consider that ‘work’ in the same way.
And I write btw lol
The “sit-down service” of proper restaurants is 80% generating the feeling of being waited on like a noble. Without that subservient dynamic, you’d have maybe a quarter of the wait staff, maybe less.
The restaurant, the waiter, and the menu, as we know them, are fundamentally institutions of capitalism. If preparing and serving food was oriented toward everyone’s harmonious well-being, the setup and the socially necessary labor would be completely different.
I came to this realization from working in restaurants for a few years after becoming a socialist. At every turn I was thinking “wow, this is so inefficient and bourgeois”.
I don’t think I disagree with any of that, or that any of that disagrees with anything I’ve said. I guess the only thing I’d add is that it is nice to be looked after, outside of sheer sadistic pleasure in dominating someone else. It’s nice to just relax and let someone else facilitate things, and it’s nice to provide this service to other people outside of a wage-slave context, as anyone who’s hosted dinners for family etc knows
All the best weeks of my life were on trips where market and money relations were either an afterthought, or had been outright bypassed- before age 20 these were church or scouting events, and after age 23 these were anarchist communes.
We would cook 2 to 4 things in bulk per meal, done either on a rotation or by whoever was the most motivated to, everybody would serve themselves, and it was super cheap. Dishes were also done based on motivation. On the anarchist communes we would even pull off all kinds of gourmet specialties.
Cooking labor was much more efficient than piecewise-to-order restaurant model, cleaning labor was optimized, and waitstaff simply did not exist. Everybody already looked after each other. Maybe if someone was disabled we would bring a plate to them. Maybe 1 person would serve as “host” role per 100 people dining.
I have worked all up and down the chain of production as a server, a cook, a wholesale purchaser/inventory manager, a vegetable farmer, and a grocery retail employee. Of all of these, being a server is the only one I would not choose to do again if it were purely out of my own volition.
I feel like there are some things where efficiency isn’t paramount though, right? You wouldn’t go into an art gallery and lambast them for not fitting more paintings on the walls. Nothing against the ‘one massive pot’ model tbc — I myself have enjoyed those set ups immensely. But I still think there is a place for something restaurant-like outside of capitalism. Maybe a much smaller place, sure. But service is an art, and some people get really into it at the top end of the market