A Worker’s Worth: The impact of minimum wage on the East community

Looking at the blank space at the bottom of the restaurant bill, reasons not to tip may pop into a customer’s head: the service wasn’t above and beyond, they don’t have an extra dollar to spend on top of a $20 meal or they assume the employee doesn’t need more money in addition to their wage. But as the customer scribbles down an amount that accounts for less than 10% of their meal, they don’t realize that the tip was crucial to their waiter’s paycheck.

It may be difficult to accurately quantify a server’s worth in the moment with an expectant waiter watching and an already-hefty restaurant bill, but keep in mind that their bosses have already decided the exact value of their labor — and it’s usually a generous underestimate.

In Kansas, the minimum cash wage for tipped employees is $2.13 an hour, assuming the employee makes at least $30 a month in tips, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. While it’s required that the employer raises the wages if the combination of tips and cash wage isn’t enough to reach minimum wage, this bare minimum takes advantage of workers. Unless the minimum wage is raised to meet the actual cost of pay bills and expenses — around $15.41 an hour according to CNBC — the burden of tipping is forced on the customer.

Waiters aren’t even paid minimum wage by their employers, and the tips make up the rest of their salary. Tips don’t exclusively become extra money for the workers — they go toward reaching the cost of surviving. This ultimately leaves the responsibility to the customer to tip employees, since it helps close the gap between minimum wage and how much a person actually needs to live.

Even working full time, employees simply won’t have enough to pay for rent, bills, gas, groceries and other expenses with only minimum wage. In Kansas City, Kan., the average cost of rent for an apartment is $887 a month according to RENTCafé. The average Kansan pays around $261 for groceries and over $420 on gas every month, according to 13 WIBW. The combined cost of these basic expenses is already more than a person’s monthly income on minimum wage — around $1,160 before tax deductions for employees working 40 hours a week. 

That’s not just living paycheck to paycheck — it’s needing to work another job to even scrape by. If everyone tipped in the customary 15-20% range, workers may have the extra money they need above their minimum wage to cover basic needs and expenses.

Low wages and tips are the number one reason for restaurant workers to consider leaving the industry, according to a survey conducted by TIME Magazine.

So instead of getting annoyed and uncomfortable the next time you feel an employee’s eyes on you as you write their tip, realize they may be desperate — and for good reason. Behind those eyes could be the worry of having a dry faucet  in the morning or the thought of an eviction notice taped on their door as they arrive home. Their forehead creases may be from the stress of working the long night shift for an insufficient wage. And we all know what happens after tax deductions, which also affect tips that count as part of the worker’s salary.

So do your part when visiting restaurants by tipping the workers and help these people make a living — your $5 tip might end up paying for their dinner later that night or a go towards a bus ticket in order to get home.

There are many reasons people don’t tip — greed, a tight budget of their own or possibly a stubbornness to only tip workers for extraordinary service. Workers have only so much time to make an impression on each table of customers they’re serving, so this expectation isn’t fair to warrant a tip.

It’s not that tips need to go overboard. You shouldn’t feel obligated to tip $20 to a worker who simply handed you a coffee or a 50% tip on a single meal. But acknowledge that their job has forced them to depend on strangers’ generosity for tips and show the workers the common decency of tipping for their service.

Don’t feel guilty for not being able to give hefty tips — especially if you’re a student who hardly makes money yourself. But remember empathy. Often when we go out to eat, we’re caught up in our personal lives and just want our food, so it’s easy to forget that the staff are people, not servants. 

Every friday after school, workers at the Prairie Village shops have to deal with the mass of middle schoolers clustering into their businesses for food — which may flood the kitchens’ orders and disrupt the restaurant through childish behavior, only to leave only to leave with $1.12 in the tip jar.

Next time you’re heading to a restaurant with friends, remember to bring extra money to support these employees. A tip isn’t about rewarding personalized, over-the-top service, it’s about doing your part as a human being.

It was Mother’s Day.  Then-sophomore Sasha Malik was four hours into a seven-hour shift during her first job at Caffetteria in Prairie Village. The system for receiving orders was delayed, which meant long wait times and switch-ups with several meals. Malik was used to customers yelling at her, but today was especially bad. Serving four tables at once, Malik heard insults from four families in a row about how she ruined their Mother’s Day or how she was bad at her job. She walked into the back and immediately broke down in tears. Malik couldn’t take it anymore — she was only 15. 

The onslaught of insults continued all day as customers blamed Malik for errors with their meals or demanded a refund. The worst part about it? After the eight-hour shift, written at the bottom of her paycheck was a two-digit number: $64.

She placed her two-week notice the next day. Her sanity wasn’t worth $64.

“I was so upset because when multiple people tell you that you’re responsible for everything that’s going wrong in their life, you start to believe it,” Malik said. “It’s emotionally distressing. And I was barely being paid, so it just didn’t make sense.” 

Malik isn’t alone in feeling like she isn’t paid enough. Currently, the Kansas minimum wage stands at $7.25 — the same as the federal minimum wage — and hasn’t changed since 2009. In a Instagram poll of 267 students, 63% said they had worked or are working a minimum wage job. And in another Instagram poll of 270 students, 58% stated that they think minimum wage isn’t sustainable for students’ day-to-day expenses. Along with Malik, numerous students at East struggle to pay basic expenses with their jobs and agree the minimum wage should be raised because it’s not sufficient enough to cover their necessary costs. 

According to University of Kansas economics professor Donna Ginter, the problem with the minimum wage rate is that it doesn’t increase with inflation. When the minimum wage of $7.25 was created over 10 years ago, it was consistent with how much money was needed to pay for basic expenses. However, the prices of goods have seen small rises in inflation each year, and a 5% rise in inflation from 2020 to 2021 — with a 27.9% increase in prices since 2009 — which Ginter believes is due to the decreased supply and increased demand of goods. 

“Inflation prices have gone up, but the wage hasn’t,” Ginter said. “So if you’re earning the minimum wage, it doesn’t buy much anymore. That $7.25 doesn’t go very far.”

With the increase in prices, a new type of wage has risen in economics: a living wage, according to University of Missouri-Kansas City economics professor Erik Olsen, who agrees that the minimum wage no longer matches inflation levels. Right now, the “living wage” — how much a person needs to pay their bills and expenses — is around $15.41 an hour, according to CNBC, which is almost double the minimum wage. 

Junior Samantha Robinson’s problem with — and reason for quitting — her minimum wage job at Chill in the Village was her meager paycheck. Robinson worked around 4-5 times a week for a total of 12 hours, with paychecks of only $200 every two weeks. Responsible for refilling her $40 gas tank, paying for $80-a-month workout classes and other daily expenses, she was left with less than $40 for her savings.

“The money I was making just wasn’t sustainable,” Robinson said. “It felt like I couldn’t do anything. It was school and work. I didn’t have time to hang out with people, and if I did, it was always somewhat money-involved. The money I was making wasn’t enough for everything I needed to pay for, and I’m not sure how it would be enough for anyone working a minimum wage job.” 

Facing the same issue of low pay while working at Chick-fil-A 25 hours a week as a training coordinator, junior Gianna Sorce didn’t feel she received enough compensation for her labor. With less than half the normal staff, Sorce said she essentially does double the work and isn’t allowed to look at her phone or even sit down. Since her store averages 2,100 customers a day, Sorce feels they should pay their workers more because of the exhausting shifts they work, serving countless customers each hour and even risking injuries such as burns from frying the food. 

Sorce has recently had several conversations with her manager about raising the rate of pay for employees, trainers and managers, arguing that people earn more at the Target across the parking lot, and that Chick-Fil-A’s work environment is more high stress than others. She believes that raising the starting worker wage is the best solution, as their paychecks aren’t enough for students like herself who pay for their car, gas and various other expenses.

“The job is hard,” Sorce said. “But our biggest thing that we’ve tried to realize is that we can complain about it all day long and say all the things that are wrong, but we also have to think about how we would fix it. That’s what we’re doing now.”

Another problem with the minimum wage for both Robinson and Sorce is that it didn’t provide them with enough money to save for college. Both being in school, they feel it’s hard to work enough hours to earn adequate money to save for higher education.

East counselor Susan Barr thinks that with the standing high price of tuition, room and board for universities, it’s nearly impossible for a student to save enough money to cover the full cost while working for minimum wage. It’s hard to balance working that many hours with being successful in high school or college, so Barr encourages students to utilize their summer and winter breaks to work, but still doesn’t feel the money earned is enough to cover college tuition. 

“There are probably not any students at all who can attend college full-time and work to fund that,” Barr said. “In general, even if students are making even a little more than the minimum wage, it doesn’t really go very far to cover the price of basic expenses, and especially not that of a college or university.” 

Ginter agrees that the minimum should be raised, but not all at once. She thinks the best solution to raising the minimum wage is raising it incrementally until it’s closer to a living wage, to prevent harsh economic impacts. 

However, these impacts could still be inevitable with a wage change, according to Olsen. When minimum wage is raised in a state, the economic theory is that unemployment rates will rise, or people in surrounding areas will flood to that state for work. Even with these risks, Olsen believes the minimum wage now isn’t sustainable, and taking action would help low-wage workers be able to pay for expenses. 

“[Minimum wage] is a pretty complicated question,” Olsen said. “The cons are that business owners will see higher wages, which means they’ll be less profitable. But it would improve the incomes of low-wage workers and low-income workers, and that has a beneficial impact on people’s lives.”

Nine lunch service employees feeding students for five different lunch periods. Three custodians taking care of five different floors. Buses transporting six sporting teams. While students ease back into a mostly normal school year, our staff still suffers the repercussions of the pandemic.

With the sudden labor shortage, the Shawnee Mission School District’s applicant pool has shrunk tremendously. As of Oct. 11, the district reported 54 paraprofessional vacancies, 26 food service job opportunities and about 50 custodian vacancies throughout SMSD schools — which is almost two thirds more than the vacancy count in 2019.

Associate principals Dr. Susan Leonard and Jeff Storey are hoping for applicants on SMSD’s hiring site, Applitrack. In previous years, Storey was used to sorting through 10 applicants for the recent paraprofessional vacancy. Now, he feels lucky to even have a single applicant.

Along with businesses across the nation, SMSD is struggling to find employees for nearly every field. However, the hardest to find are classified employees, who work jobs that don’t require a professional education for the role such as paraprofessionals, custodians, lunch service employees, substitute teachers and bus drivers.

Though filling these vacancies has never been an extreme challenge for SMSD, the supply just isn’t matching the demand according to Jarius Jones, Director of Classified Human Resources for SMSD. 

“We want our employees to know they are valued because they work so hard every single day,” Jones said. “We want to make sure that our scholars have all of the resources they need to flourish. We as a district recognize our staff and students and want to provide for them and are working towards staying competitive in this realm.”

With the understaffing at SMSD, the current employees are having to do double the work, leaving them with little room for flexibility, according to Leonard. Custodians work every day with two less sets of hands than normal, lunch staff has to work four separate jobs in the kitchen just to get the food out in time, bus drivers are called in 15 minutes before an assignment and students are often left wondering why their teacher’s gone and where the substitute is five minutes after the bell rings. 

One way the East administration is considering dealing with these changes is having “working detentions” for students. Instead of having traditional detentions, Leonard has started the conversation of giving students “working detentions” — detentions spent helping out with approved tasks around school. Recent actions for these detentions that have been approved include emptying trash cans, mopping and wiping down the lunch room.

“I like restorative justice practices because it makes you feel better after making a mistake to do something good,” Leonard said. “But also this is the time, especially for our custodians who are working two men down. Why not have students help out instead of sitting through a detention?”

Even with COVID-19, it’s still a mystery as to why the staffing shortage is so apparent this year, according to Jones. 

“We simply don’t know,” Jones said. “That right there is the million-dollar question. And every business is trying to give this a million-dollar answer but we just don’t know. It’s coincided with COVID-19, but slowly people are getting back to work and still there are openings.”

A large amount of frustrations have arised as these classified employees work the job of two or three people for a single salary, according to Jones.

But these conditions may be changing.

The school board has released public statements about potentially raising the minimum pay for classified workers, arguing that businesses, neighboring school districts and local businesses have to raise their pay at or above $15 to keep their doors open. 

With the conversation rolling, Jones estimates the board will propose an increase in the minimum pay of classified workers as early as this spring.

Until then, SMSD has searched for employees in almost every field. The district hosted a job fair on Aug. 4 in hopes of filling some of the vacancies, specifically in the classified positions. Although potential employees were found and later hired, it didn’t come close to filling all of the vacancies for this school year, according to Jones.

After this semi-success, the district continues to attend other job fairs, promote vacancies on social media and encourage building leaders to announce job opportunities to parents who might help out or work in the field in their weekly newsletter.

East parent Bob Blacketer took on the position as a substitute teacher last winter after hearing about the lack of substitutes due to the pandemic — a possibility made by the flexibility his full-time job provides. He trained for eight hours total with both the Teacher Education of Kansas and Kelly Services, SMSD’s contact for substitutes. During the 2020-21 school year, Blacketer filled in whenever needed. 

“Because I wasn’t traveling for work, I decided to be active and to volunteer or help the community,” Blacketer said. “And to also be a good example for my kids on how to support your community.”

At the end of the year, Blacketer donated all of his earnings from substitute teaching to the East Fund. But not stopping there, Blacketer is currently undergoing training to become a “bus sub” for DS Bus Lines — East’s outsourced bussing.

The district is providing maximum effort, including hiring applicants any time they can, according to Jones. But part of the problem is out of their control. No one knows the answer to this national “million-dollar question.”

“I want everyone to know that we are still hiring,” Jones says.

The U.S. is battling a labor shortage in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has challenged businesses in finding new employees, but has also opened up more internship opportunities for students at the Center for Academic Achievement.

With a staffing shortage, businesses struggle to maintain their pre-pandemic operations from when they had bigger staffs. But because of the increase in job openings, more companies are reaching out to high school interns and workers, according to SMSD Coordinator of Career and Technical Education Ryan Flurry, who now receives phone calls every day from companies looking for student workers.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ monthly report for August, released on Oct. 12, states that the number of job openings sits at around 10.4 million — 4.2 million more openings than in March 2020 at the start of the pandemic.

The labor shortage emerged from the pandemic for several reasons; some “have retired early, are skeptical about going back to work in the face of lingering health concerns, or are having difficulty securing reliable child care,” according to CNN.

“I think it’s part of the general aging demographics as people are aging out of the workforce,” Flurry said. “We can’t fill those spots quick enough with new workers, new employees.”

With labor shortages, businesses have to accommodate for a smaller staff. For restaurant Strang Hall, they’ve accommodated by cross-training employees so they can work different jobs, according to Assistant General Manager and 2017 East alum Nora Engelken.

“Some of [the employees] are old enough that we’ve cross-trained them to be also at the bar,” Engelken said. “If they know how to bartend, then it’s not necessarily the end of the world if we run short one day because then I’ll just throw my busser who knows how to bartend on the bar.”

Along with accommodating for a smaller staff, businesses have also raised starting salaries from the minimum wage previously set, according to CNN. Strang Hall has set their starting rate anywhere from $12-15 an hour as motivation for high school employees to stay.

However, even with the incentives, a new challenge has arised: getting high school employees to actually show up.

“We can book 10 interviews, but maybe one person shows up,” Engelken said. “And if that person has a better job offer, then the chances that they stay with us is maybe 10%.”

Minsky’s Pizza in the Prairie Village Shops faces the same problem. They schedule interviews but many don’t come. According to Minsky’s General Manager Jake Stricker, he has a folder with around 75 applications belonging to people who never came to the interview.

“I can make my assumptions and, I don’t know if I’m exactly right, but I will tell you, this is a completely different environment than I was used to pre-COVID,” Stricker said. “It was much easier to get applicants that were ready to work and wanted to go and be there, and now it’s just different.”

Stricker and Engelken have their guesses as to why so many applicants are all of a sudden absent to interviews, but they don’t know the full reason. While reasons can vary, for sophomore Neva Hudson, she forgot about her interview at The Learning Tree because she was feeling sick and had other things going on.

“I just feel like it’s hard when there’s so much on your mind, like I was not even thinking about [the interview],” Hudson said. “It was right after school and I was home so it was just not on my mind.”

Hudson believes, for some students, the anxiety and stress of interviewing and working can turn them away. She thinks after the pandemic, working doesn’t sound appealing anymore and students don’t feel the need to get a job like they used to.

But the lack of applicants isn’t the only setback, the labor shortage has also caused businesses to abbreviate their menus according to The Washington Post. With a smaller staff, Stricker has had to limit the menu since there aren’t enough people to make all the food without overworking the staff. And because many employees can’t pick up extra shifts outside their set schedule, Stricker and his assistant managers fill in where needed. 

“My whole thing has always been, throughout my career, provide a place that people enjoy coming to,” Stricker said. “If you enjoy coming to work then, most likely, you’re going to talk to your friends about where you work.”

Minsky’s employee and junior Ava Cooper has experienced setbacks from the lack of employees through having to stay late and denying customers certain items during nights where they offer a limited menu. Hoping to get more employees, Cooper convinced some of her friends to apply, referring three people who now work there. Cooper received $300 for two of her three referrals after they stayed for a month — another incentive to increase employment.

But it’s not just Minsky’s. According to The New York Times, more businesses, especially retail, are offering referral bonuses to attract employees, especially with the holidays approaching.

While the labor shortage has hurt businesses, it’s benefited some students as he’s been in contact with more companies with jobs available for students, according to Flurry. He helps students find internships and jobs during or after high school.

“Across areas it was more difficult to get kids into workplace learning opportunities, internships, job shadows, planned projects…because the employers weren’t really seeing as big of a need to connect with the high school kids,” Flurry said. “But I think what they’ve learned is if you don’t connect with the kid when they’re in high school, by the time they graduate, and or go off to a two- or four-year program, you’ve lost them.” 

Because of this, Flurry has had more local employers try to connect with high school kids to start building that relationship and be employed later on. According to Flurry, before the pandemic, they’d get internships for about 10-15 students. So far this year, they’ve found internships for over 100 students.

Senior Lucy Harrison, who’s in her second year of engineering at the CAA, has noticed more internship opportunities this year than last. 

“If there was only 10 people that were getting jobs or internships, they’re gonna be the best of the best,” Harrison said. “But this way, even if you’re good and you’re dedicated, you have the opportunity to do internships, you don’t have to be the very, very best at anything.”

The application process for jobs and internships has been a lot easier, according to Harrison. Her teachers introduced them to a separate Canvas page with resources on how to put together a portfolio and resume for internships. She’s working on finishing her application and hopes to get an internship to be certain architecture is what she wants to pursue.

“I would encourage students to really look at all the opportunities that are out there to get engaged in real-world learning,” Flurry said. “[It can] help them explore what their future could look like before they’re out of high school.”

As East alum Robert Martin clocked in for his dinner shift at Waid’s in 2010, he made his evening rounds — greeting his co-workers, waiting tables, washing dishes in the back and striking up conversation with the regulars while filling up coffee cups. 

Though mundane at times, Martin says he learned a lot from this job as well as his job at José Peppers, which was then in the Village — from how to work in teams to interpersonal communication skills. Plus, he got to know his community and the people in it, which he believes is a perk of working at a local business as opposed to a chain.

“Those jobs were very formative for me,” Martin said. “Every high school kid who can should work and have a job. I would also like really advocate for working at a restaurant because it is pretty hard at times but it toughens you up.”

The catch? Both restaurants, along with a multitude of other local businesses, have went out of business in the last ten years and been replaced with chains. In fact, the former Waid’s building now houses three storefronts, two of which are Fortune 500 franchises.

With the lower price and added convenience of chain restaurants and big box stores, many local and small business owners are finding it harder and harder to maintain their customer base. 

Jon Rojjanasriat, owner of Thai Orchid, notes that within the last few years, it’s been increasingly harder to keep the restaurant operating. In order to compete with larger chain franchises, Rojjanasriat says that he has to make intentional efforts to go above and beyond — if he can’t set Thai Orchid apart from the fast food chains just down the street from his restaurant, he’ll lose long-time valued customers.

“If there’s a delivery mistake by a third party — GrubHub, Uber Eats,” Rojjanasriat said. “I just tell the kitchen to make a new order, and then I’ll go drop it off myself. Even though it’s not our fault, it’s an opportunity for me to show the customer that we care. We just go and say, ‘Alright, we’ll be there in 20 minutes. Sorry for the hiccups,’ and then actually deliver, which is a lot of times not what people expect.”

Though one large competitor of small and locally-owned businesses are chain stores and restaurants, a rapidly-growing percentage of competition is online commerce sites like Amazon. Amazon, originally a digital book retailer itself, struggled to make any margin of profit in the first few years it was running. The retail service now has an operating income of $155 billion, according to spglobal.com. 

Mary McBride, a bookseller at Rainy Day Books since 2010, notes that in the recent years especially, a majority of book sales are being made through services like Amazon rather than businesses like Rainy Day Books — an alarming and suddenly approaching problem. 

“I would say our major competition is Amazon,” McBride said. “People have become so used to instant gratification. [Now,] we do a lot of special orders that are usually there within three to four days, so we can get pretty much get anything people can get on Amazon. People need to know that when they put money back into a local business that it stays in their community. The money goes back into keeping the neighborhoods [operating]. And paying for police, fire, all those things that people really don’t think about.”

The closure and reduction of small businesses has led to understaffing, low wages, poor working conditions and overall decline in service.

Many current issues relating to labor, wages and staffing that are prevalent today are a result of the cultural shift, according to Martin.

“Some of the problems you’ve seen now posed by the late [stages of the] pandemic where these restaurants can’t find staff just weren’t happening back then,” Martin said. “It was like a totally different world before. I mean, a lot of people were looking for jobs — I don’t think they were having any problems hiring or staffing.

Jill Myers, owner of Moxie Catering, the Golden Ox, and Voltaire, emphasizes the significance of change, and how entrepreneurs and their employees must adapt.

“Labor of course goes up all the time,” Myers said. “But the restaurants and the catering business trends change. Color Palettes change. People go from wanting small, intimate weddings to ones that cost more money. [Despite change,] we just kind of get to do what we want to do. And it works.”

Even though local businesses face challenges like these every day, and probably will continue to in the future, Rojjanasriat and the others remain hopeful — after all, change is inevitable. 

Many are unsure about the next ten years, but a strong community is what has held local businesses together for the last ten years.

“The customers know that it’s not just [a chain like] Taco Bell — It’s Jon and his family,” Rojjanasriat said. “It’s Thai Orchid and all the staff that are real people in this Mission community — regular folks that have their families, their own lives, stress, ups and downs. And people can relate to that.”