I’ve always considered myself to be an old-school, proud liberal. I checked all the boxes: The son of immigrants, raised in a mostly minority area during the Civil Rights era, dad was a staunch union man.
A good (nonliberal) friend of mine told me 30 years ago that I would change, quoting the line from Winston Churchill that goes, “Any man under 30 who is not a liberal has no heart, any man over 30 who is not a conservative has no brains.” I’m still waiting for the brains (plural).
While I consider myself to be quite liberal to this day, there are things that come up from time to time to which my reaction is “There’s no damn way!”
I was in Los Angeles a couple years ago and was going into — big surprise — a fast-food restaurant. I’ve been a fan of fast food my entire life. You can probably tell that by looking. And I try to be nice to the people who work at those places. First of all, you never want to anger someone who is handling your food. And most of them are doing their best at a semi-crappy job.
I even tip fast-food workers. Many of them are pleasantly surprised. A couple weeks ago, I went to the bank to cash a check and I asked for 100 $1 bills. Seeing as how I look like someone who has voted for Donald Trump multiple times, I felt compelled to explain that it was for my fast-food homies. I don’t think they believed me. They probably figured it would end up with someone named Chantel.
Anyway, there was a guy there, kind of scraggly; he looked like a tech billionaire. He had a clipboard and he asked me if I wanted to sign a petition to get something on the ballot. I told him that I was from Arizona and couldn’t sign, but then I asked him what the proposal was.
He said that it was an attempt to put a measure on the ballot that, if passed, would mandate a minimum wage of $20/hour for fast-food workers. I said, “Seriously?”
At that moment, I realized two things. First, while I had enjoyed my childhood and teenage years in California, there was a reason why, after coming to Arizona on a basketball scholarship, I never went back. I’ve written things for TV, but I’ve never once considered going back there to live permanently. Politically, I’m glad the place is a Democratic stronghold, but I realized at that moment that, despite my liberal bona fides, I’ll never be that California Democratic.
Twenty dollars an hour for a fast-food worker?! That’s insane. No one should make $20 an hour just because they say so.
In the logical educational hierarchy, there is math, followed by physics, chemistry, some biology, and then 50 meters of dark matter and cow dung, then astrology, witchcraft, mood rings, and then, finally, economics. In this world, I hate racism, sexism, poverty, and the fact that there is a Nobel Prize in economics.
But even though much of economics is utter nonsense, there is enough of a grain of it to point out that artificially raising the wage for a job in which the work done and/or the service provided does not justify the higher wage is going to screw things up.
It has done exactly that. To the surprise of absolutely no one, fast-food restaurants in California have reacted in the ways that even an eighth grader could have predicted. They have cut back on people’s hours and/or the hours of operation, meaning that the guy who needed to feed his kids may be making even less money than he had been before. They’re having the people who are working take on more responsibilities, using the argument that “you’re making 33% more money so you should do 33% more work.”
Some are trying to use technology to cut down on the number of human hours needed to run a franchise. McDonald’s has been using computerized kiosks to speed up its in-store ordering. I have great difficulty convincing it that I want no onions.
Making things exponentially worse is that some companies are going the AI route. They’re using AI on their drive-thru speakers and some claim 85% efficiency. The machines can’t understand some accents, which is hilarious, because, when that happens, they connect you with “William” in Mumbai who also takes your order for Papa John’s Pizza with a fake British accent.
They have one of those things at the Carl’s Jr. on Oracle near Prince. I hate talking to machines, mostly because they’re not people. But I don’t want to be too rude to them because they might know SkyNet. The other day, I ordered fried zucchini there, one order of which counts as my monthly allowance of fruits and/or vegetables. Just for fun, I did it in the vato loco voice of the Cheech and Chong character, Pedro de Pacas.
Weird fact: Pacas is a slang term for the Pacoima neighborhood in which I grew up. So, besides being home to a bunch of great athletes (and me), it was also home to Cheech Marin and Ritchie Valens.
I’ll never do that again. I don’t know what they gave me, but it damn sure wasn’t zucchini.
