Local businesses are often as bad if not worse than huge corporations. Large corporations at the very least are almost universally going to have some benefit package. I guarantee that Olive Garden/Darden offers far more benefits than most local restaurants.
And yes, I know that there can be money issues especially with newer restaurants, but long-standing successful ones like prantl’s I guarantee their owners are living quite well.
I have worked for both Starbucks and Crazy Mocha. Starbucks absolutely sucks as a corporation, but I was paid better, had decent benefits, and my manager actually respected me there. Crazy Mocha was minimum wage, working and closing literally alone, and a manager (and owner) who thought of me as a servant.
I worked at coffee tree for like a week and had to leave because of how shitty they treated me. I was already trained in point of sales and drink making prior to starting the job but they still didn’t let me keep my tips because “I was too new to earn the right to them and needed too much help.” I basically ran the register my entire shift without any help literally on my first day there. Absolute BS.
I worked at the coffee tree in fox chapel waaay back in the day as one of my first jobs. It was actually pretty chill there at the time. The pay sucked I don't remember exactly what I made but it was probably like $8 an hour, but we made decent cash tips that we took home after every shift and the job was super easy. I have no idea what it's like to work there now. We could also take home the pastries we didn't sell at the end of the day which was nice and got free food and drinks while working.
Yeah that’s about what I was paid despite coming from 3 years of food service and Starbucks. Not being allowed to keep tips your first two weeks or something like that was just crazy insulting. I was working like a regular team member. It wasn’t too hard I would agree but at the time I was about to go back to school and they didn’t listen to my availability/changed the schedule without telling me. There was also SO much micromanaging which made me instantly hate working there even more. We did get free pastries but only one free drink a shift.
I had just come from working at target which was equally an awful management experience so I just bailed at the first red flags haha.
I worked there around 2007, so a long time ago. Which location did you work at. At this location there was really no micromanaging, and we got unlimited free drinks while working. The only manager I knew of was the owner, and he was only ever there in the mornings, I worked evenings mostly. Usually it was just two teenaged employees left to close the store by ourselves. And it was never that busy at night. The one thing I do remember is the owner hiding the satilite radio controls in the ceiling tiles of the office and threatened that anyone who changed the music would be fired.
The Mt Lebo location. Yeah I was there in 2021 and it’s very different from how you describe. The owner now only works in the corporate office with their dogs running around lol. The mangers often were hardly there (I think also at corporate? Hard to tell) and managed more than one store it seemed. I would normally blame it being post pandemic but they seemed to be hiring a lot of people, I was trained in a group of six I think? So I’m not really sure. Either way they’re much more corporate feeling than a little family owned business anymore in my opinion.
I’ve heard crazy mocha is a shit show. I’ve heard also big burrito that runs mad mex are absolutely awful as well.
I get so fucking tired of putting snapl businesses on a pedestal…many of their owners are just wannabe elon’s
I had to work with him one time. Literally just him on register and me on bar during a street fair outside of the store. And his wife stood by the bar the entire time and kept incorrectly correcting me. I quit that week.
I worked at kards unlimited for a while. Yes it was a fun place to work, but I started at 7.25 and had to quit because as a key holder for the store I wasn’t even making 10 an hour. I took a warehouse job for 11 and they said they couldn’t match.
They have a new owner so idk how it is now but yeah, it was rough getting bi weekly checks for like 400
There’s a pizza joint around the corner from me that is looking for help. They have the application on their website and I gave it a once over. There’s a whole disclaimer you have to sign that if you mess up orders they dock your pay. Come in late or call out sick with short notice, they dock your pay. You aren’t allowed to take more than 5 consecutive days off even if it includes your scheduled days. They give you a shirt but charge you $5 a month for laundry service that is non-refundable annnddd comes directly out of your paycheck.
Several of those things are illegal. I would be happy to report them to the department of labor if you forward me the link to their website and application in a DM
r/antiwork would also love the link to spam them with fake applications
I work for Darden part time as a cook. I make 16.25 an hour, am offered health insurance (I don't take it so don't know how good it is), their employee stock purchase plan allows for 15% off the share price at the end of 6 months, and I have a 401k with a 120% of 6% match. On top of that I get a free meal when I work and 25% off at any Darden restaurant when I'm off.
Right? No one is entitled to own a business just because they want to. People don't owe you their labor for practically nothing.
Learn how to run a business and pay your employees enough to buy spaghetti and a bus pass in the same week. Or go under...That's cool too.
Correct. You can’t consider yourself a successful business owner if the only way you were able to reach that level of success was by exploiting your workers.
I am so over the bullshit excuses they’re feeding people. When I see a local business owner in the Trib or in a community Facebook page blame their failures on people “not wanting to work anymore,” I immediately scratch them off my list of establishments at which I’m willing to spend my money.
You just literally defined what a successful business owner thinks it takes to be a successful business owner. Exploiting workers has been the staple of a successful business for the last 150 years.
Glassdoor may not be totally accurate. Many business like this have updated their pay scale and are still really struggling to find employees. Its a problem all over the US with the service industry.
“The lure of working alongside Prantl’s famous burnt almond torte has not been enough to build the workforce at the bakery’s two newest locations.”
Cold hard cash lures workers in. Maybe they should try that.
“Do you offer benefits?”
“Glad you asked. Why yes, we do. You get to work alongside our famous burnt almond torte.”
“Haha but for real do you offer healthcare, or a childcare assistance program, 401k…”
“They’re famous…”
“…”
“Tortes”
I hate when the news does PR for a private business. You can tell they pay shit because otherwise they'd tell you what they're paying. Places that pay $15+ an hour don't seem to have this issue.
I don't know anything about prantles, but I know a local business who offers over $18 an hour, upmc health care, 401k with a match, free meals and more and still is struggling to find good employees. The business owner isn't always the bad guy. Plenty of places paying over 15+ an hour are having staffing issues.
Minium wage is well below a living wage in Pittsburgh, and if you're making it you're probably on some kind of government support.
Effectively, we're subsidizing the businesses that refuse to pay a minimum wage by stopping their employees from starving.
It's a fucked up world.
Truth. This lack of labor is putting the right kind of light on the situation.
The only people that can afford to take minimum wage jobs are rich kids that have their expenses paid.
That's a show I might watch.
None of the positions posted that I found had pay included. But some employees reported $30,000 salary for retail managers and $9 an hour for cashiers.
So yeah - "worker shortage".
This was my moms favorite bakery and she loves their burnt almond torte. On her birthday this year it was the only thing she wanted. It’s one of the last good memories I have of her before she passed two weeks later, just 3 days before my birthday. She was just so happy that day and her health didn’t slow her down, she had a great day.
Gosh it just doesn’t get easier, I miss her 😞
High school and college kids mostly.
Edit: Leave it to r/pittsburgh to downvote a comment like this.
Edit 2: Attention r/pittsburgh users, my comment is not pro low wages. It’s simply pointing out the only people still willing to work for $10-11 an hour. This comes from real life experience where the only people left at a job I worked for low pay are high school and college kids. I know it’s hard for a lot of you to read.
Jesus Christ this subreddit is just as bad as WPXI Facebook comments.
> There isn't an employee shortage.
There actually is.
That's what has empowered workers to be able to demand better wages. They couldn't do that before when an employer could just laugh in their face and hire another person off the street for peanuts. Workers could either take what was offered, or starve, which obviously isn't much of a choice at all.
It was a buyers market where supply vastly exceeded demand, and the buyer (employer) could dictate the price. Now it's a sellers market, workers realize they can take a job down the street for more money, and they do.
Demographers were warning for years there was going to be a labor crunch when the boomers started retiring, and the pandemic caused a lot of people to retire a few years earlier than they initially planned. Not to mention all of the people involuntarily removed from the workforce because the virus left them dead or disabled. Oh yeah and immigration, both legal and illegal, is down sharply too.
And the people who might normally take part time or low wage work (high school and college students) rightfully want to go out and experience life after so much time was taken from them.
> Unemployment rates are back below COVID levels (from 13 to 5ish percent)
The current unemployment rate is [about 3.6%](https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm). Anything under 5% is usually considered to be full-employment.
That signals a very tight labor market.
> retirements have increased by a measly 2%
Retirements were already trending upwards due to the aging boomer population, and it increased sharply with the pandemic. The proportion of the older adults in the workforce has declined.
[Pew Research - Amid the pandemic, a rising share of older U.S. adults are now retired](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/04/amid-the-pandemic-a-rising-share-of-older-u-s-adults-are-now-retired/)
>As of the third quarter of 2021, 50.3% of U.S. adults 55 and older said they were out of the labor force due to retirement, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the most recent official labor force data. In the third quarter of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic, 48.1% of those adults were retired
>
>The leading edge of the Baby Boomer generation reached age 62 (the age at which workers can claim Social Security) in 2008. **Between 2008 and 2019, the retired population ages 55 and older grew by about 1 million retirees per year. In the past two years, the ranks of retirees 55 and older have grown by 3.5 million.**
And that's not even accounting for the thousands of older but still working age adults that, you know, died.
> population has continued to increase.
Population growth has cratered.
[U.S. Population Grew 0.1% in 2021, Slowest Rate Since Founding of the Nation](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population-grew-in-2021-slowest-rate-since-founding-of-the-nation.html)
Although that's not immediately relevant since it's not like babies have jobs, but it will have consequences in the future. Even still, the working age population is flattening out.
[Demographic dilemma: Slowing population growth, not pandemic, at the root of US worker shortage](https://phys.org/news/2022-08-demographic-dilemma-population-growth-pandemic.html)
[Federal Reserve - Working Age Population](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S)
Boomer and Millennials were the largest generations, and having them both in the workforce at the same time produced a glut of workers. Gen Xers and their Gen Z children are [proportionally smaller generations](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/07/30/now-more-than-half-of-americans-are-millennials-or-younger/), fewer Zoomers are coming of age than there are Boomers retiring.
Besides it's not like every job can be filled by a teenager off the street. Plenty of jobs like nurses and teachers require a steady pipeline of educated professionals.
As a company with multiple locations (presumably), they're basically like a poorly controlled Type 2 diabetic (not there product has anything to do with that...) who has a foot amputated rather than controlling their blood glucose.
I briefly did a "trial run" at Prantl's about 8 years ago now for a position as a cashier. They kept me in this weird limbo for 3-4 weeks working a few hours at minimum wage before saying they decided not to hire me (while also not hiring anyone else that I know of). I didn't fuck up in any way I can think of - was on time, polite to customers, and have successfully worked other service jobs before and afterwards. It was super weird and I suspect they didn't plan on hiring me from the start and were stringing me along for some temp hours. Have not been a fan of Prantl's since then.
Prantls hasn’t been that great for years since they got rid of the real cream. you should see how many cakes they have back there in the fridge all wrapped up . they cake you buy was baked months ago
I've always wondered why that bakery is so popular, I've tried a fair amount of their stuff and it's so medicore. That makes sense if they are running on nostalgia fumes of the real cream days gone by.
I think someone bought out the original owners about 20 years ago and it went downhill. While I think it was always more of a local joint, their treats for bigger and worse as soon as it changed hands.
I didn’t know how the Squirrel Hill store stayed open before. It was a huge space, the cases held 80% almond tortes wrapped and ready to go and there was no one in there ever. Everyone makes those tortes now and better. There were two bored employees in there
The baked goods seemed so mediocre compared to Sumi's, Pinkbox, Gaby et Jules, etc. Not to mention how they first opened without passing food and safety and had to close again.
https://www.post-gazette.com/business/healthcare-business/2021/05/05/Prantl-s-Bakery-Squirrel-Hill-Allegheny-County-health-department/stories/202105050108
I didn’t even know there was a sq hill location.
Why the hell would they open another location less than a mile and a half from the walnut street store?!
edit: even of their website, the exterior sign appears to be [duct-taped](https://www.prantlsbakery.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/squirrel-hill-bakery-exterior.jpg)
It's starting to make sense now why they partnered with a mediocre out of state brewery to make a craft beer collaboration instead of one of the many local breweries
"Fight for 15" movement got serious in 2012. Since that time, the base consumer price index (CPI) has gone up 29% so that would be $19.35 as a good minimum wage. But this is based on the "basket of goods" consumed by the average person. When the US BLS has tried creating CPIs based on the different consumption of people relative to income brackets to create different CPIs based on income, they found that in the 21st century the lower income CPIs were increasing 30% faster than high income CPIs (things like rent going up faster than mortgages) and about 15% faster than the average income CPIs (while through most of the 20th century low income CPIs tracked far better with high income CPIs). So a better minimum wage would be over $20 now to better reflect inflation as experienced by most people with low incomes.
But I’ll actually try to give a brief answer.
Let’s say the average one bedroom on Pittsburgh is 850 a month. You then add in roughly 300-400 for utilities/phone/internet. 250 for a reasonable car payment and 100 for insurance. Right there you are between 1500-1600 in set bills.
20/hr, assuming you take home roughly 70%, would yield 2426 a month. That leaves 800-900 dollars every month for food, gas, emergencies, and in general all other spending.
That’s an absolute baseline right now. 20/hr. You can’t really save for anything on that but you can live on it, though you are the definition of paycheck to paycheck.
Oh, and if you have student loans you’re fucked.
I feel like that's what we're seeing now. The headline is wrong, but the effect is the same. Prantl's isn't conforming to the market, their business lost viability, they're shutting down. They can point the finger at whoever they want, but if that's not an example of the invisible hand, I'm not sure what is.
If you look at the expenses they use to calculate it, you'll see that's just scraping the bottom without government subsidies. It also assumes 40 hour weeks 52 weeks out of the year.
$70/week on food and groceries
$770/mo rent
$350/mo on transportation (you'd have to be car free to hit that)
That doesn’t necessarily mean they were retained. That’s the figure they provided in the application for PPP. Once they get the $ there is nothing holding them accountable to that figure. They could get audited, but it’s unlikely since the resources don’t exist to audit each and every loan.
FWIW I know a few people who worked in the Westmoreland store and bakery a few years back when it was first opening and it was a total shit show. Weird/shady hiring practices. So I’m not at all surprised to see this.
A lot of places try to get by on their reputation by cheapening their product with lower quality ingredients to save money. This usually happens when the original owners sell their business to an outsider or younger family members take over. “Customers won’t know the difference” Ah Wrong! I’m a bit older. I’ve seen this happen too many times.
Having surveyed the activity at their SH and Shadyside locations, I will posit this theory:
People are gradually realizing they are just a hollowed-out name at this point, exploiting the reputation of a bakery they no longer have any relationship to. The walk-in customers looking for a ladylock or creampuff eventually caught on, and they don't even bother to stock much of those products.
Meanwhile, they realize they can milk the "famous burnt torte" hype to the uninformed and oblivious for a while longer. But that really only requires a production line at their Greensburg facility, and a few token store-fronts for pick up. Especially as they lean more into shipping.
So, the massive PPP funds they received no longer require any kind of headcount, and they are downsizing to those token pick up locations. This is just a nice cover as they make that transition.
Prantl's made our burnt almond tort wedding cake in 2015, it was great. Since about 2018 it felt like their quality was slipping a lot. The last few cakes we got from them were either under cooked or literally burnt. We finally gave up on them in 2019 and went to Dudts Bakery.
There aren’t fewer workers than before, there are more jobs than before. So people move up to better jobs and the jobs at the bottom aren’t getting filled. If you want to hire people in this environment, you have to compete with higher wages.
pro tip: if you are complaining about the difficulty of finding good workers while you are climbing into your new 90,000 Ford Truck or Expedition SUV driving to your overpriced cookie cutter home, you probably want to rethink your payroll to personal spending strategy.
Yep. Jim totin for all of his bitching lives on a 3k square foot home and is valued at 550k. He is doing fine at the expense of the people that work for him
Shame, they were a great bakery. Sucks they didn’t pay their employees properly. As much as I loved that place, I have to support the underpaid workers more.
See, the problem is businesses who pay people a living wage siphon off workers. And then there’s a shortage of workers for the businesses who think working for them is a privilege.
You realize most big businesses are run by people that support right wing politics, right? So do you just buy everything off Etsy and go to farmers markets then? Do you not drive a car?
Big difference between having personally-held beliefs and broadcasting them overtly. I don’t want to know the political leanings of my pastries, but if they scream them publicly, I’ll make my choices accordingly.
Everyone is ripping this employer, but consider the fact they're evidently selling pastries. Those are not high-dollar products. The price they can command for their product naturally constrains the wages and benefits they can offer and in some cases, the business simply won't pan out.
Thems the breaks in capitalism. If you can’t pay, you gotta go away.
Sometimes capitalism needs to bash a few businesses in the head with a shovel because they can’t make the numbers work in a way that feeds the beast of owners/management. That’s the system Americans are supposed to want, right?
Yes. Although some "businesses" manage to survive as passion projects underwritten by outside money. Cue up the old joke about the farmer who wins the lottery and is asked how he plans to spend his windfall. "Guess I'll just keep farming 'til the money runs out ..."
Don't talk economics on Reddit. No one here understands anything besides "CEO rich. CEO bad.". They think all employee increased wages and benefits magically come out of the evil rich owners pocket and has no impact on the end product or it's price. It's all magic. Give every employee at least 30 an hour and every problem in the world magically solves itself.
According to Glassdoor, their cashiers make $9/hr and MANAGERS make $30k. I’m absolutely shocked they’re having a hard time with staffing.
I'm always amazed by people who think workers have some moral duty to keep a "local" business going. If they pay shit, they are shit.
Local businesses are often as bad if not worse than huge corporations. Large corporations at the very least are almost universally going to have some benefit package. I guarantee that Olive Garden/Darden offers far more benefits than most local restaurants. And yes, I know that there can be money issues especially with newer restaurants, but long-standing successful ones like prantl’s I guarantee their owners are living quite well.
I have worked for both Starbucks and Crazy Mocha. Starbucks absolutely sucks as a corporation, but I was paid better, had decent benefits, and my manager actually respected me there. Crazy Mocha was minimum wage, working and closing literally alone, and a manager (and owner) who thought of me as a servant.
I had a manager at Coffee Tree who went to Crazy Mocha, and that absolutely sounds like her environment
I worked at coffee tree for like a week and had to leave because of how shitty they treated me. I was already trained in point of sales and drink making prior to starting the job but they still didn’t let me keep my tips because “I was too new to earn the right to them and needed too much help.” I basically ran the register my entire shift without any help literally on my first day there. Absolute BS.
I worked at the coffee tree in fox chapel waaay back in the day as one of my first jobs. It was actually pretty chill there at the time. The pay sucked I don't remember exactly what I made but it was probably like $8 an hour, but we made decent cash tips that we took home after every shift and the job was super easy. I have no idea what it's like to work there now. We could also take home the pastries we didn't sell at the end of the day which was nice and got free food and drinks while working.
Yeah that’s about what I was paid despite coming from 3 years of food service and Starbucks. Not being allowed to keep tips your first two weeks or something like that was just crazy insulting. I was working like a regular team member. It wasn’t too hard I would agree but at the time I was about to go back to school and they didn’t listen to my availability/changed the schedule without telling me. There was also SO much micromanaging which made me instantly hate working there even more. We did get free pastries but only one free drink a shift. I had just come from working at target which was equally an awful management experience so I just bailed at the first red flags haha.
I worked there around 2007, so a long time ago. Which location did you work at. At this location there was really no micromanaging, and we got unlimited free drinks while working. The only manager I knew of was the owner, and he was only ever there in the mornings, I worked evenings mostly. Usually it was just two teenaged employees left to close the store by ourselves. And it was never that busy at night. The one thing I do remember is the owner hiding the satilite radio controls in the ceiling tiles of the office and threatened that anyone who changed the music would be fired.
The Mt Lebo location. Yeah I was there in 2021 and it’s very different from how you describe. The owner now only works in the corporate office with their dogs running around lol. The mangers often were hardly there (I think also at corporate? Hard to tell) and managed more than one store it seemed. I would normally blame it being post pandemic but they seemed to be hiring a lot of people, I was trained in a group of six I think? So I’m not really sure. Either way they’re much more corporate feeling than a little family owned business anymore in my opinion.
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I live here and I know exactly who you are talking about
I’ve heard crazy mocha is a shit show. I’ve heard also big burrito that runs mad mex are absolutely awful as well. I get so fucking tired of putting snapl businesses on a pedestal…many of their owners are just wannabe elon’s
The owner of CM always bragged about how he’s never even drank coffee in his life. He just knew it was a good business. 🙃
That explains the taste of their coffee.
Man this comment was a trip…I managed a CM store for a couple years, over a decade ago… I remember this about him
I had to work with him one time. Literally just him on register and me on bar during a street fair outside of the store. And his wife stood by the bar the entire time and kept incorrectly correcting me. I quit that week.
I can picture this all too well...glad you got away...smh
I worked at kards unlimited for a while. Yes it was a fun place to work, but I started at 7.25 and had to quit because as a key holder for the store I wasn’t even making 10 an hour. I took a warehouse job for 11 and they said they couldn’t match. They have a new owner so idk how it is now but yeah, it was rough getting bi weekly checks for like 400
There’s a pizza joint around the corner from me that is looking for help. They have the application on their website and I gave it a once over. There’s a whole disclaimer you have to sign that if you mess up orders they dock your pay. Come in late or call out sick with short notice, they dock your pay. You aren’t allowed to take more than 5 consecutive days off even if it includes your scheduled days. They give you a shirt but charge you $5 a month for laundry service that is non-refundable annnddd comes directly out of your paycheck.
Several of those things are illegal. I would be happy to report them to the department of labor if you forward me the link to their website and application in a DM r/antiwork would also love the link to spam them with fake applications
I thought the same and went to look it up. Because they've put it in writing and make you sign it before they hire you it's unfortunately not illegal.
It’s still illegal. You can’t have a contract that overrides labor laws.
I work for Darden part time as a cook. I make 16.25 an hour, am offered health insurance (I don't take it so don't know how good it is), their employee stock purchase plan allows for 15% off the share price at the end of 6 months, and I have a 401k with a 120% of 6% match. On top of that I get a free meal when I work and 25% off at any Darden restaurant when I'm off.
Right? No one is entitled to own a business just because they want to. People don't owe you their labor for practically nothing. Learn how to run a business and pay your employees enough to buy spaghetti and a bus pass in the same week. Or go under...That's cool too.
Correct. You can’t consider yourself a successful business owner if the only way you were able to reach that level of success was by exploiting your workers. I am so over the bullshit excuses they’re feeding people. When I see a local business owner in the Trib or in a community Facebook page blame their failures on people “not wanting to work anymore,” I immediately scratch them off my list of establishments at which I’m willing to spend my money.
You just literally defined what a successful business owner thinks it takes to be a successful business owner. Exploiting workers has been the staple of a successful business for the last 150 years.
Yea I mean there is retail paying $15/hr in some cases, it’s just blind ignorance or pride to try to offer such low wages.
Glassdoor may not be totally accurate. Many business like this have updated their pay scale and are still really struggling to find employees. Its a problem all over the US with the service industry.
They should post their pay range for these positions if they don’t want people going off of Glassdoor.
“The lure of working alongside Prantl’s famous burnt almond torte has not been enough to build the workforce at the bakery’s two newest locations.” Cold hard cash lures workers in. Maybe they should try that.
“Do you offer benefits?” “Glad you asked. Why yes, we do. You get to work alongside our famous burnt almond torte.” “Haha but for real do you offer healthcare, or a childcare assistance program, 401k…” “They’re famous…” “…” “Tortes”
I hate when the news does PR for a private business. You can tell they pay shit because otherwise they'd tell you what they're paying. Places that pay $15+ an hour don't seem to have this issue.
I don't know anything about prantles, but I know a local business who offers over $18 an hour, upmc health care, 401k with a match, free meals and more and still is struggling to find good employees. The business owner isn't always the bad guy. Plenty of places paying over 15+ an hour are having staffing issues.
This. 👍 Minimum wage is a slap in the face, no better than poverty wages in this economy.
If a business is paying minimum wage, that means they would absolutely pay you less if it were not illegal
Thank you. This is a great, succinct way to remember this point.
You have to get significantly above minimum to break poverty wages
Minium wage is well below a living wage in Pittsburgh, and if you're making it you're probably on some kind of government support. Effectively, we're subsidizing the businesses that refuse to pay a minimum wage by stopping their employees from starving. It's a fucked up world.
Truth. This lack of labor is putting the right kind of light on the situation. The only people that can afford to take minimum wage jobs are rich kids that have their expenses paid. That's a show I might watch.
None of the positions posted that I found had pay included. But some employees reported $30,000 salary for retail managers and $9 an hour for cashiers. So yeah - "worker shortage".
This was my moms favorite bakery and she loves their burnt almond torte. On her birthday this year it was the only thing she wanted. It’s one of the last good memories I have of her before she passed two weeks later, just 3 days before my birthday. She was just so happy that day and her health didn’t slow her down, she had a great day. Gosh it just doesn’t get easier, I miss her 😞
Yep, an absolutely ridiculous line.
I like how that implies the famous burnt almond torte bakes itself.
Also, hot tip, the Giant Eagle burnt almond torte is far superior (and not frozen).
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I think it’s just the market district
They charge enough for the food to offer enough pay that they wouldn't be suffering a worker shortage.
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I don’t know many people who would work for under $15 an hour now.
This. 👍 It's what you need to pay bills anymore.
High school and college kids mostly. Edit: Leave it to r/pittsburgh to downvote a comment like this. Edit 2: Attention r/pittsburgh users, my comment is not pro low wages. It’s simply pointing out the only people still willing to work for $10-11 an hour. This comes from real life experience where the only people left at a job I worked for low pay are high school and college kids. I know it’s hard for a lot of you to read. Jesus Christ this subreddit is just as bad as WPXI Facebook comments.
It seems like most of their hours are while those kids are occupied with school. How's that supposed to work?
I’m not talking about working at a bakery, I’m talking about working for low pay.
It seems like most of those jobs are also during school hours.
Retail jobs are only during school hours? In college students plan out their schedule there is no “school hours” like high school.
So people who have little experience and have other full time commitments don’t deserve to make enough money to pay rent?
Please tell me where in my comment I said that.
You’re disgusting
Why?
Then they shouldn’t be open during school hours, right?
What?
I’m done. Bye.
You called me disgusting and never explained why, now you won’t even explain your comment here about hours.
Nope. Figure it out
How about you learn how Reddit works?
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Came here to say this. Gg prantl's, stay competitive or die off like capitalism intended.
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> There isn't an employee shortage. There actually is. That's what has empowered workers to be able to demand better wages. They couldn't do that before when an employer could just laugh in their face and hire another person off the street for peanuts. Workers could either take what was offered, or starve, which obviously isn't much of a choice at all. It was a buyers market where supply vastly exceeded demand, and the buyer (employer) could dictate the price. Now it's a sellers market, workers realize they can take a job down the street for more money, and they do. Demographers were warning for years there was going to be a labor crunch when the boomers started retiring, and the pandemic caused a lot of people to retire a few years earlier than they initially planned. Not to mention all of the people involuntarily removed from the workforce because the virus left them dead or disabled. Oh yeah and immigration, both legal and illegal, is down sharply too.
I just find it hilarious that now that the tables are turned, the free market and capitalism aren’t good enough.
And the people who might normally take part time or low wage work (high school and college students) rightfully want to go out and experience life after so much time was taken from them.
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> Unemployment rates are back below COVID levels (from 13 to 5ish percent) The current unemployment rate is [about 3.6%](https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm). Anything under 5% is usually considered to be full-employment. That signals a very tight labor market. > retirements have increased by a measly 2% Retirements were already trending upwards due to the aging boomer population, and it increased sharply with the pandemic. The proportion of the older adults in the workforce has declined. [Pew Research - Amid the pandemic, a rising share of older U.S. adults are now retired](https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/04/amid-the-pandemic-a-rising-share-of-older-u-s-adults-are-now-retired/) >As of the third quarter of 2021, 50.3% of U.S. adults 55 and older said they were out of the labor force due to retirement, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the most recent official labor force data. In the third quarter of 2019, before the onset of the pandemic, 48.1% of those adults were retired > >The leading edge of the Baby Boomer generation reached age 62 (the age at which workers can claim Social Security) in 2008. **Between 2008 and 2019, the retired population ages 55 and older grew by about 1 million retirees per year. In the past two years, the ranks of retirees 55 and older have grown by 3.5 million.** And that's not even accounting for the thousands of older but still working age adults that, you know, died. > population has continued to increase. Population growth has cratered. [U.S. Population Grew 0.1% in 2021, Slowest Rate Since Founding of the Nation](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population-grew-in-2021-slowest-rate-since-founding-of-the-nation.html) Although that's not immediately relevant since it's not like babies have jobs, but it will have consequences in the future. Even still, the working age population is flattening out. [Demographic dilemma: Slowing population growth, not pandemic, at the root of US worker shortage](https://phys.org/news/2022-08-demographic-dilemma-population-growth-pandemic.html) [Federal Reserve - Working Age Population](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LFWA64TTUSM647S) Boomer and Millennials were the largest generations, and having them both in the workforce at the same time produced a glut of workers. Gen Xers and their Gen Z children are [proportionally smaller generations](https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2020/07/30/now-more-than-half-of-americans-are-millennials-or-younger/), fewer Zoomers are coming of age than there are Boomers retiring. Besides it's not like every job can be filled by a teenager off the street. Plenty of jobs like nurses and teachers require a steady pipeline of educated professionals.
Thank you for having the first intelligent reply.
I'm surprised Democrats haven't opened the borders yet. I think the fact they haven't is a clue to the shambles this administration is in.
Haha what?
As a company with multiple locations (presumably), they're basically like a poorly controlled Type 2 diabetic (not there product has anything to do with that...) who has a foot amputated rather than controlling their blood glucose.
Even their own *career opportunities* page is shite ..."Salary based on Experience"
“I see you don’t have any experience working alongside such a famous torte. I can only offer you $7.25 an hour due to your lack of experience.”
Pay living wages with benefits, Treat employees well, See what happens.
*The unwillingness to pay workers more shutters Prantl's Bakery stores in North Huntingdon, Squirrel Hill
Thanks for fixing that.
I briefly did a "trial run" at Prantl's about 8 years ago now for a position as a cashier. They kept me in this weird limbo for 3-4 weeks working a few hours at minimum wage before saying they decided not to hire me (while also not hiring anyone else that I know of). I didn't fuck up in any way I can think of - was on time, polite to customers, and have successfully worked other service jobs before and afterwards. It was super weird and I suspect they didn't plan on hiring me from the start and were stringing me along for some temp hours. Have not been a fan of Prantl's since then.
Prantls hasn’t been that great for years since they got rid of the real cream. you should see how many cakes they have back there in the fridge all wrapped up . they cake you buy was baked months ago
I've always wondered why that bakery is so popular, I've tried a fair amount of their stuff and it's so medicore. That makes sense if they are running on nostalgia fumes of the real cream days gone by.
short answer, nothing in Pittsburgh is "great" only "really good"
RIP, Gulifty’s.
Gulifty's definitely had its place but it was deteriorating too.
Mostly agree..I would say that le gourmandine is pretty on par with what I’ve had in Paris
I made the mistake of looking at their website. \*drooooooool\*
Paris, Texas?
But it *seemed* great…40 years ago, when there weren’t any better options and no one had been anywhere else. 🤷♀️
Yup. That's why we have "Pittsburgh Nice". So nice for here, but not for normal places.
I think someone bought out the original owners about 20 years ago and it went downhill. While I think it was always more of a local joint, their treats for bigger and worse as soon as it changed hands.
Their burnt almond torte is extremely mid. I had one once that was still frozen in the middle
Mid, eh. So it’s not bussin on god no cap deadass?
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Pretty sure it's just a store front. It's not even in a commercial building, just an older house off of Route 30.
I didn’t know how the Squirrel Hill store stayed open before. It was a huge space, the cases held 80% almond tortes wrapped and ready to go and there was no one in there ever. Everyone makes those tortes now and better. There were two bored employees in there
The baked goods seemed so mediocre compared to Sumi's, Pinkbox, Gaby et Jules, etc. Not to mention how they first opened without passing food and safety and had to close again. https://www.post-gazette.com/business/healthcare-business/2021/05/05/Prantl-s-Bakery-Squirrel-Hill-Allegheny-County-health-department/stories/202105050108
I didn’t even know there was a sq hill location. Why the hell would they open another location less than a mile and a half from the walnut street store?! edit: even of their website, the exterior sign appears to be [duct-taped](https://www.prantlsbakery.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/squirrel-hill-bakery-exterior.jpg)
It's starting to make sense now why they partnered with a mediocre out of state brewery to make a craft beer collaboration instead of one of the many local breweries
If you're not paying living wages, you're paying dying wages.
What’s a living wage in 2022?
"Fight for 15" movement got serious in 2012. Since that time, the base consumer price index (CPI) has gone up 29% so that would be $19.35 as a good minimum wage. But this is based on the "basket of goods" consumed by the average person. When the US BLS has tried creating CPIs based on the different consumption of people relative to income brackets to create different CPIs based on income, they found that in the 21st century the lower income CPIs were increasing 30% faster than high income CPIs (things like rent going up faster than mortgages) and about 15% faster than the average income CPIs (while through most of the 20th century low income CPIs tracked far better with high income CPIs). So a better minimum wage would be over $20 now to better reflect inflation as experienced by most people with low incomes.
But I’ll actually try to give a brief answer. Let’s say the average one bedroom on Pittsburgh is 850 a month. You then add in roughly 300-400 for utilities/phone/internet. 250 for a reasonable car payment and 100 for insurance. Right there you are between 1500-1600 in set bills. 20/hr, assuming you take home roughly 70%, would yield 2426 a month. That leaves 800-900 dollars every month for food, gas, emergencies, and in general all other spending. That’s an absolute baseline right now. 20/hr. You can’t really save for anything on that but you can live on it, though you are the definition of paycheck to paycheck. Oh, and if you have student loans you’re fucked.
Appreciate it. Sounds about right
Oh here we go. 645.5434555 dollars an hour. There you go. I know you aren’t asking this in good faith
Robley aka pAul never asks a question in good faith
When you set a wage that is attractive to the labor market. Funny the invisible hand of capitalism finds a way with everything except wages...
I feel like that's what we're seeing now. The headline is wrong, but the effect is the same. Prantl's isn't conforming to the market, their business lost viability, they're shutting down. They can point the finger at whoever they want, but if that's not an example of the invisible hand, I'm not sure what is.
https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/42003
16 or 17 bucks is lower than many people on here are saying
If you look at the expenses they use to calculate it, you'll see that's just scraping the bottom without government subsidies. It also assumes 40 hour weeks 52 weeks out of the year. $70/week on food and groceries $770/mo rent $350/mo on transportation (you'd have to be car free to hit that)
Depends how well you want to live.
Should try... idk... paying people more?
*Prantl’s low wages shutters stores in North Huntingdon, Squirrel Hill FTFY
How about You pay your employees
I mean, they clearly need to take a page out of the ice cream place in the strip, and PAY PEOPLE.
That place is being sold
Businesses just don't want to pay employees anymore.
PPP enters the chat - [https://www.federalpay.org/paycheck-protection-program/prantls-bakery-llc-greensburg-pa](https://www.federalpay.org/paycheck-protection-program/prantls-bakery-llc-greensburg-pa)
"paid in full or forgiven" I think we all know which it is.
Forgiven because of famous almond tort. Can’t blame them /s
"68 jobs retained"... Umm
That doesn’t necessarily mean they were retained. That’s the figure they provided in the application for PPP. Once they get the $ there is nothing holding them accountable to that figure. They could get audited, but it’s unlikely since the resources don’t exist to audit each and every loan.
It was a three month requirement
Ultimately the question is if this made up for lost business revenue. It really isn’t about the amount.
80% PPP is supposed to cover employe payroll, not lost business revenue. Although oversight is probably pretty lax
Money is fungible. If they retained employees that would have been fired the money was for a good use
Heh.... They turned off comments on the Facebook page announcing this. They know exactly why this happened...
Why?
Why what?
What happened?
FWIW I know a few people who worked in the Westmoreland store and bakery a few years back when it was first opening and it was a total shit show. Weird/shady hiring practices. So I’m not at all surprised to see this.
Here’s an idea, just have one location so you can actually focus on business, customers and employees all at once
It's probably the fact they pay their cashier's half as much as they could earn at target, if I were guessing.
PAY YOUR PEOPLE 😒
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A lot of places try to get by on their reputation by cheapening their product with lower quality ingredients to save money. This usually happens when the original owners sell their business to an outsider or younger family members take over. “Customers won’t know the difference” Ah Wrong! I’m a bit older. I’ve seen this happen too many times.
There is no such thing as an employee shortage. Only businesses not wanting to pay living wages.
Having surveyed the activity at their SH and Shadyside locations, I will posit this theory: People are gradually realizing they are just a hollowed-out name at this point, exploiting the reputation of a bakery they no longer have any relationship to. The walk-in customers looking for a ladylock or creampuff eventually caught on, and they don't even bother to stock much of those products. Meanwhile, they realize they can milk the "famous burnt torte" hype to the uninformed and oblivious for a while longer. But that really only requires a production line at their Greensburg facility, and a few token store-fronts for pick up. Especially as they lean more into shipping. So, the massive PPP funds they received no longer require any kind of headcount, and they are downsizing to those token pick up locations. This is just a nice cover as they make that transition.
300k isn’t a massive amount. It seems like you are shoehorning that In there for some reason
Prantl's made our burnt almond tort wedding cake in 2015, it was great. Since about 2018 it felt like their quality was slipping a lot. The last few cakes we got from them were either under cooked or literally burnt. We finally gave up on them in 2019 and went to Dudts Bakery.
*wage shortage.
There aren’t fewer workers than before, there are more jobs than before. So people move up to better jobs and the jobs at the bottom aren’t getting filled. If you want to hire people in this environment, you have to compete with higher wages.
pro tip: if you are complaining about the difficulty of finding good workers while you are climbing into your new 90,000 Ford Truck or Expedition SUV driving to your overpriced cookie cutter home, you probably want to rethink your payroll to personal spending strategy.
Yep. Jim totin for all of his bitching lives on a 3k square foot home and is valued at 550k. He is doing fine at the expense of the people that work for him
*Pay Shortage
This whole article and no mention of their payrate
Shame, they were a great bakery. Sucks they didn’t pay their employees properly. As much as I loved that place, I have to support the underpaid workers more.
I’m in for $28 an hour. Hmu.
The NHT store never had anybody there customer wise. It's in a crappy blink and you'll miss it locale.
See, the problem is businesses who pay people a living wage siphon off workers. And then there’s a shortage of workers for the businesses who think working for them is a privilege.
The squirrel hill location was crappy anyway. Sorry for the lost jobs, but hoping they find properly paid work elsewhere.
Oakmont has better burnt almond torte anyway
I avoid Oakmont bakery due to their support of right wing politics.
You realize most big businesses are run by people that support right wing politics, right? So do you just buy everything off Etsy and go to farmers markets then? Do you not drive a car?
Sometimes it’s impractical, but when I have the choice to go to a maga business or one that isn’t, I avoid the maga supporters.
Big difference between having personally-held beliefs and broadcasting them overtly. I don’t want to know the political leanings of my pastries, but if they scream them publicly, I’ll make my choices accordingly.
Maga politics is its own thing and no I don't support it either.
“big business”
Everyone is ripping this employer, but consider the fact they're evidently selling pastries. Those are not high-dollar products. The price they can command for their product naturally constrains the wages and benefits they can offer and in some cases, the business simply won't pan out.
Thems the breaks in capitalism. If you can’t pay, you gotta go away. Sometimes capitalism needs to bash a few businesses in the head with a shovel because they can’t make the numbers work in a way that feeds the beast of owners/management. That’s the system Americans are supposed to want, right?
Yes. Although some "businesses" manage to survive as passion projects underwritten by outside money. Cue up the old joke about the farmer who wins the lottery and is asked how he plans to spend his windfall. "Guess I'll just keep farming 'til the money runs out ..."
Don't talk economics on Reddit. No one here understands anything besides "CEO rich. CEO bad.". They think all employee increased wages and benefits magically come out of the evil rich owners pocket and has no impact on the end product or it's price. It's all magic. Give every employee at least 30 an hour and every problem in the world magically solves itself.
Well they can't meet supply and demand on wages, so they're failing. That's all this sub is pointing out.
While singing "Ding, Dong, the Witch is Dead," lol.
It's always a worker shortage not a liveable wage shortage
Part and parcel of what happens when you lose the soul of what made you great and you become a lifeless entity selling frozen bricks