Tag: Asia

Trouble With Reservations: How the Biden administration created a national labor crises

This was a hectic Holiday season for me, with many more social engagements than usual.  It’s usually pretty busy, but something happened this year that I have never seen before, and that is I had much trouble booking reservations for dinner engagements, which was very strange.   Because I am usually busy with this kind of thing during November and December, I have a base to say that this year differs from other years.  And that the occurrences were higher than usual indicates that statistically, we’re not dealing with an accident here, but statistical certainty.  But out of the 20 dinners I was involved in over the Holiday season, I had trouble with reservations on 18 of them.  This means that, on the first attempt, the restaurant I was trying to book for a holiday party for social engagements would not accept the reservation due to competing holiday celebrations.  I would have to make a few calls, and in all the cases, I could get a hold of somebody to overcome the apprehension.  But with that process, I also received an explanation that ticked me off.  It’s a trend toward the negative that I have been pointing out to everyone over these last few years, coming out of all the dumb COVID protocols.  That globalist poison attacked our American workforce, and now, under four years of Joe Biden, the impact on the average American worker has destroyed them to such a degree that it was showing up in restaurants and how they staff and handle their employees regarding pressure.  In all 18 cases I mentioned, the general managers explained that they were having difficulty staffing their businesses, especially their kitchens, and were very concerned about overloading them because they were afraid they might quit. 

My idea of a great restaurant is Gordan Ramsey’s signature restaurant in Chelsea, England, just to the south of London along the river.  There are a few great places in the world that I also think about regarding top-tier food.  A steakhouse in Kobe, Japan that specializes in Kobe steak, which is fantastic on every bar you measure.  But that 3 Michelin Star Chef Ramsey place in London is, I think, about as good as it gets.  They know how to prepare food and treat a customer.  And it is hard to make a reservation there.  They purposely have a tiny dining room because they are concerned about the high food quality.  It is an excellent experience if you ever get a chance to go, and it’s costly but well worth the money.  When I was there, they toured me through the kitchen, and I could see how things work behind the scenes, and it was all top-notch.  The workforce was clean, engaged, organized, and efficient.  I can say that I’ve seen the best in the world and understand what it takes to be that way.  That was why I could call shenanigans to many of these local managers in the Cincinnati area when they tried to tell me that they were hesitant to book reservations for fear that their staff might be overworked and start delivering poor food quality.  That was the case in one particularly dumb explanation: a very nice restaurant on the Ohio River overlooking downtown Cincinnati was almost empty on the night that I wanted to entertain guests, yet they were concerned about booking my reservation for more than 20 because they had during that same hour a party of 15 and a party of 10.   

After further probing, I got to the heart of the matter: many people who work in restaurant kitchens doing fine food have become very sensitive to pressure under the Biden administration and the COVID protocols that never disappeared.  While high-quality restaurants were able to hire those kinds of people, their ability to handle stress is much lower than they were just a few years ago, and if pressured in an environment where the demands were intense, these employees were prone to walk off the job rather than fight through the pressure.  So managers of nice restaurants were doing their best to keep that pressure off their kitchens in a rock, paper, scissors game of at least keeping the food quality high, even if it meant a loss of sales at the door.  Cincinnati and areas around the city, especially up in West Chester and Liberty Township, have restaurants that are as good as anywhere in the world, so I understand wanting to keep those high food quality standards by taking the pressure off the kitchen staff.  But the kitchen staff shouldn’t be such crybabies, either.  This was a big problem in my eyes because it’s not just restaurants; this is a major domestic service problem that is the direct result of bad government management by introducing minimum wage increases that were not market-driven and creating workforce shortages with government talk of universal wages and work from home policies of virus management introduced by socialist health departments.  It had taken a few years to get there, but the Biden administration policies had shown up in the reservation systems of high-quality restaurants. The artificial constraint of employees had impacted their businesses to the point where they couldn’t plan to maximize their dining room seating to maximum effect because their staff had become soft and unable to manage high amounts of stress. 

Knowing all this and keeping the managers happy with their dilemma, my approach was to let everyone take two or three hours for dinner so that the kitchens didn’t get stressed out too much and to allow the food quality to be reduced.  My logic to the managers is that they’ll make more money letting their guests wait for the food and buying appetizers and drinks than in trying to pace everything to the artificial constraint of the kitchen staff that was trying to figure out if they’d work that night or call off to play Call of Duty.  If employees are getting paid anyway, why would they work harder?  That is what happens when you take away incentives from the American worker to do more and to do it faster.  Most of these restaurants in Cincinnati are built for speed and large crowds.  This is not like Chef Ramsey’s restaurant in England, which had a purposely small dining room.  The places I was going to were meant to fill every seat, and if they could fit in a reservation, they could book it and keep their dining rooms full.  They needed to push their kitchens to perform.  However, “push” became a bad name under the Biden administration.  Employees have become radicalized and are “pushing back” by saying that they need an emotional safety animal to manage stress so they don’t cry when the pressure becomes too great for them.  The way I think, this is a national security issue.  You don’t see this from workforces when I travel around Asia.  They work hard. In the West, workers don’t work hard anymore, a change from just a few years ago.  Like I said, I do this kind of thing every year.  This year was the first time that I had reservations turned down on nights when the dining rooms were mostly empty, but the managers were purposefully trying to keep the pressure off their kitchens because their employees had become emotionally soft after four years of the Biden administration, and globalism employment practices in general.  And it’s certainly something we need to address as a nation.

Rich Hoffman

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Progressives Think Destroying Anglo Saxons will Save the World: They are of course wrong, dumb, and out of their minds

Anglo Saxons are Not The Answer

I suppose the positive thing about the chaos of 2021 where an extended planned communist plot infiltrated into the American government, unleashed all their schemes in an all-out revolution against capitalism is that we can now discuss the matter without a banner of conspiracy theory.  Being able to talk openly about these things is incredibly liberating.  I always have, but now the fundamental definitions for something are more evident to others who previously weren’t inclined.  And I can say this with certainty: the communists’ plan for America will fail because they don’t understand what they are doing or why they are doing it.  Academia is simply using the playbook of several communist insurgents from the past. Still, they never dealt with the root cause of communism and capitalism or understood why people did what they did with them.  Instead, historically, communism was created to break up the class system of Europe, which had been mired in royalty and church politics for centuries.  Communism was meant to bring those institutions down from the poor and lazy mind of Karl Marx.  Meanwhile, while Marx was selling his communist ideas to the sorry lots of people in Europe who never in their lives had ever tasted a hint of freedom from government and religion, in America, the gunfighters were paving the way West in an expansion effort that gave birth to a new nation.  And it was there that capitalism showed its true potential away from the jealous minds of the tyrannical dictators of the world’s economies. 

The fatal flaw of all communists and socialists, which was revealed in a 2015 Joe Biden discussion about open border policies which he is now pushing as planned, is that the world intends to drown out the Anglo Saxon in the world, especially in America because it is believed that capitalism is their creation and that by destroying the Anglo, that capitalism will die.  So the purpose of open borders wherever they occur is to shift people from communist countries and socialist places into areas controlled by traditional Anglo Saxons and smother capitalism wherever it was born and practiced.  And that, in essence, is what all the progressive insurgents think they are doing in America with open borders.  What is amazing about this belief is that highly educated people with double Masters’ and even Doctorates will swear by this strategy.  I mean, who could blame them, they were taught all their lives that these are the value systems of society, so of course, that was the key to the future.   Well, I’m here to say that everyone who thinks such things, which is millions and millions and millions of people, are all wrong.  The Anglo Saxon is just a consumer of capitalism.  Capitalism exists whether or not Anglo Saxons exist.  In truth, if there were no “white” people in America, America would still live, and capitalism would still be the dominant means of building economies.  Communism will never last or flourish, even if they achieve their goal of only having communism as a choice. Here’s why.

In my book The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business, I tell the story of freedom starting with Egypt and the Indus Valley in India and evolving to the plains of the Wild West, where shootouts with bad guys led to the greatest nation the world has ever known.  And along that story comes a critical juncture where the real Pirates of the Caribbean created the first democracies ever made.  On a pirate ship, English people fought with freed slaves and Spanish adventurers.  They had Frenchmen on their vessels, they empowered women, they all worked together for the first time toward the common goal of robbing shipping vessels of institutional countries, and it was there that a government of freedom was born.  Without pirates, there never would have been a Revolution for America, nor would America have ever become a country.  Being Anglo Saxon had nothing to do with it; instead, it took rebels from Anglo Saxon culture to recognize the world’s problems and offer their solution, empowering all individuals of all colors and sexes. 

I know this topic well; I associate with many hundreds of people every week from all over the world.  And you know what, many of them are more American than the people I know from Appalachian culture.  Every time I hear a liberal yacking on about racism, and white power, they indicate that they have no idea what makes America Great or what fuels capitalism in general.  They are simply reciting what they were taught in their liberal colleges and never question whether or not those things were correct.  Well, I can say that every bit of what they learned was wrong, and they often spend the rest of their lives trying to justify their ignorance by ignoring the facts.  People will not go back into the authoritarian bottle that we all escaped from in Europe and Asia.  People fled to America to get away from where they were, and for a reason.  And I would propose that the great conflict of ideas that we see today is that collision happening simply because the world has shrunk to the point where the inevitable conflict was bound to occur.  From my experience, I would say that many immigrants coming from other places to America want what America has. If they must adopt capitalism to get there, they’ll assume it in a second.  Capitalism was invented to allow individuals, not governments or races of people, to thrive.  That may have been Karl Marx’s belief that capitalism in Europe only separated class structure.  But in America, the class was not a consideration.  If you could make money, you could have anything, and that freedom fueled the power of the greatest country ever to evolve out of a human mind. 

That is why the communists and socialists will lose this current fight because everything they are doing is rooted in ignorance from a failed philosophy rooted in Old World politics.  What made pirates invent democracy on their ships was a trajectory of human invention that was bound to discover eventually.  Power grabbers, just as the Blue State governors in America did over Covid, held tight their reigns of power for centuries in Egypt, Rome, England, the Roman Catholic Church, the Dynasties of China, everywhere because they feared that people might figure out that they didn’t need them.  The modern liberal wants more than anything to return to those times, but that is not the mind of humanity.  Humanity wants to be left alone and to make a life for themselves without such intrusions.  And it is that which the progressive insurgents are fighting.  They aren’t fighting some ancient concept of race relations, but the inclination of all humankind, the need to be free to live, love, and be productive for their desires.  Not the wishes of a centralized government.  Now that the Biden administration has shown its intentions, people will rebel.  Many were willing to give him an honest chance even though people like me were warning against it.  But now they can see for themselves, and they won’t be fooled again.  The old tactics are not effective ultimately because the driver of capitalism is not genetics. It’s a desire from everyone from everywhere to live free of a boss and enjoy existence for all the opportunities it can provide.   

Rich Hoffman

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