Unpopular opinions go here

[Velderan]

All fair points. Ive worked fast food and yes you make mistakes here and there. I assume if I'm going to a fast-food eatery that the food is subpar at best, but I'm willing to deal with that for the speed. When Im in a drive thru for 20 mins theres a problem

From what I remember of working in fast food as a teenager, 3 things typically caused that situation.
1. Someone called in sick, so service naturally took a hit. I had a situation where we were supposed to have 4 people working, 2 called in sick and we couldn't get someone to replace them since we were too busy trying to keep things going to go look up people's phone numbers and ask them to come in.
2. The restaurant I worked in had 6 fryer baskets, so if we got flooded with fried food items it just kept making the problem worse and worse since some items took 3 minutes to cook.
3. A surprise rush of customers. The whole point of fast food's quick service is to prepare things you typically sell and have them ready to go. During lunch time, you can usually just keep a basket of french fries going because you know they'll sell. But if a bunch of people come in at 8:30pm when you're not expecting many people it's going to take awhile to prepare their food when you have nothing ready. This is made worse when 1 and 2 are also involved.

 

[Velderan]

Hi!

I've worked in the service industry for over 30+ years, from Chili's to fine dining to sit-down dinners in billionaire homes.

From what i have experienced and from what I have heard from media economic reports, restaurants are struggling to find employees like never before. Low-end jobs like that suck to start with and now it's probably even crappier. i don't think it's going to get better.

People can be pretty awful lately.

I went to go get my hair cut a few weeks ago, noticed the barber shop had a lot of people waiting when they opened at 9am and since I didn't want to wait the estimated 90 minute wait they had, I went back the next morning at 8:45 to get in line. They open the doors at 9am, took everyone's name in the order they were in line and the last person had a roughly 2 hour wait (which they were fine with because they could just go do the rest of their errands while they waited). Some lady walks in with her kid at 9:10, sees the estimated 2 hour wait and proceeds to throw a fit about how is the line so long they just opened. She started yelling at the woman at the counter because her son needed his hair cut for back to school photos and they couldn't wait 2 hours because his appointment was in an hour. She finally stormed out after realizing her outburst wasn't getting her anything. The person who cut my hair said it's more common than you'd think that someone makes a scene like that over the emergency haircut they absolutely needed.

Other than the employee who didn't deserve that, I felt bad for the kid because you could tell he was extremely embarrassed about how his mom was acting. Guessing it wasn't the first time he's seen that type of scene.

 

[not-so-newguy]

People can be pretty awful lately.

I went to go get my hair cut a few weeks ago, noticed the barber shop had a lot of people waiting when they opened at 9am and since I didn't want to wait the estimated 90 minute wait they had, I went back the next morning at 8:45 to get in line. They open the doors at 9am, took everyone's name in the order they were in line and the last person had a roughly 2 hour wait (which they were fine with because they could just go do the rest of their errands while they waited). Some lady walks in with her kid at 9:10, sees the estimated 2 hour wait and proceeds to throw a fit about how is the line so long they just opened. She started yelling at the woman at the counter because her son needed his hair cut for back to school photos and they couldn't wait 2 hours because his appointment was in an hour. She finally stormed out after realizing her outburst wasn't getting her anything. The person who cut my hair said it's more common than you'd think that someone makes a scene like that over the emergency haircut they absolutely needed.

Other than the employee who didn't deserve that, I felt bad for the kid because you could tell he was extremely embarrassed about how his mom was acting. Guessing it wasn't the first time he's seen that type of scene.

It seems like it's been getting worse to me.
Otoh, this could just be signalling my old age ("people were respectful back in my day... and we liked it!)

 

[Guest 7042500]

Unpopular opinion:

Endless agonizing online over every scrap of minutia in a rules set does not improve the game in the slightest.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Here's an unpopular opinion: Maybe if D&D isn't what you want you should play some other game instead of trying to change D&D?

Of course that always runs into the problem of fighting with other people who are sure D&D is the all purpose power tool. And like it or not, a lot of people have to deal with those folks.

(This is not me disagreeing with you, but just noting some people are between a rock and a hard place here).

 

[Thomas Shey]

It seems like it's been getting worse to me.
Otoh, this could just be signalling my old age ("people were respectful back in my day... and we liked it!)

Its always been a case where some percentage of people thought it was okay to abuse those who were at the service end of things, but I definitely think its getting worse; there's a reason there are a couple of common names for people that do that that were only invented in the last few years.

 

[deganawida]

It seems like it's been getting worse to me.
Otoh, this could just be signalling my old age ("people were respectful back in my day... and we liked it!)

“The centre cannot hold.”

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

It seems like it's been getting worse to me.
Otoh, this could just be signalling my old age ("people were respectful back in my day... and we liked it!)

It's not (just) old age.

I think that there is a confluence of factors that has made things worse recently. The two most notable are pretty obvious-

1. Employment issues. While these can vary from place to place, the simple problem that we've had recently is that a lot of employers in low-margin industries (such as service industries which are customer-facing) have struggled to attract workers. It's a combination of all sorts of factors, from low pay to people not wanting to work those types of schedules (which can be erratic).

Apply basic econ 101 to that- high demand for workers, low supply, means that a lot of places are understaffed; moreover, many businesses will hire people, and retain people, that they might not have hired or retained previously.

2. COVID. Without putting too fine a point on it, COVID wrecked the ability of a lot of people to interact with each other in groups. From airplane rage to throwing things at concerts, you're just seeing more anti-social behavior. That should subside.

That said, don't discount old age as well. We have too few lawns, and too many people on them.

 

[R_J_K75]

From what I remember of working in fast food as a teenager, 3 things typically caused that situation.

From my experiences working fast food as a teenager, I 100% agree. In my post above about KFC I was so pissed I emailed them a complaint requesting a refund (while eating chicken, hey I was hungry) because I paid for but didn't get what I ordered. To their credit I just got the refund two days ago. When I went to their website to contact them, I had to type in the store info and there was want ads for Regional, Store and Shift managers so that says a lot.

People can be pretty awful lately.

Some lady walks in with her kid at 9:10, sees the estimated 2 hour wait and proceeds to throw a fit

It seems like it's been getting worse to me.
Otoh, this could just be signalling my old age ("people were respectful back in my day... and we liked it!)

Yeah its getting bad, and at least in the States it seems there is a very strong sense of entitlement, ME. ME. ME, I WANT...etc, etc. Some lady yelling over a haircut for her son because she thinks he's special (he's not) and shouldn't have to wait is just sad.

 

[R_J_K75]

That said, don't discount old age as well. We have too few lawns, and too many people on them.

You sir have just won the inte4rnet for the day!!