May 1, 2012

There were 2 posts published on May 1, 2012 (this is page 1 of 1).

Where I’ve worked: Applebee’s


A thread on Reddit about a restaurant customer leaving two pennies and a nasty note for bad service got me thinking I needed to blog about my time working for Applebee’s. Working as a server was the hardest job I’ve ever had and likely will have.

As I traveled the world in my previous jobs I was fascinated by the different ways different cultures pay their restaurant staff. In Australia there is no tipping as restaurant workers there get paid a full salary. Do you know what restaurant workers here in America get paid? Try $2.13 an hour. Yes, you can’t even buy a gallon of gas for that, but that’s a server’s base pay. The really sad thing is that that rate hasn’t changed since I waited tables at Applebee’s twenty years ago.
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Why Young Americans Are Driving So Much Less Than Their Parents

More about the shift away from driving.

“Unfortunately for car companies,” Jordan Weissmann noted at TheAtlantic.com a couple weeks back, “today’s teens and twenty-somethings don’t seem all that interested in buying a set of wheels. They’re not even particularly keen on driving.”

Now a major new report from Benjamin Davis and Tony Dutzik at the Frontier Group and Phineas Baxandall, at the U.S. PIRG Education Fund, documents this unprecedented trend across a wide variety of indicators.

Their two big findings about young people and driving:

The average annual number of vehicle miles traveled by young people (16 to 34-year-olds) in the U.S. decreased by 23 percent between 2001 and 2009, falling from 10,300 miles per capita to just 7,900 miles per capita in 2009.

The share of 14 to 34-year-olds without a driver’s license increased by 5 percentage points, rising from 21 percent in 2000 to 26 percent in 2010, according to the Federal Highway Administration.

via Why Young Americans Are Driving So Much Less Than Their Parents – Commute – The Atlantic Cities.