Deli Draws Serious Backlash After Hiring Sign's Wage Offers Gain Viral Infamy

Updated September 8, 2021

While you're unlikely to find a year in which people didn't grumble about their jobs, it seems that the past year in particular has seen a significant rise in workers who have reached the breaking point in what they're willing to put up with.

The most obvious signs of this have been incidents where the entire staff at various fast food restaurants have quit en masse, but the enduring labor shortage that we're now seeing has extended beyond this arena into the service industry at large.

But while it's hard to sympathize with how this shift in employment trends has impacted multi-billion dollar corporations, the matter gets more complicated when it's observed in smaller establishments whose owners assume all the risk for operation.

But even with that in mind, one deli's hiring sign has still managed to leave a sour taste in the internet's mouths.

On August 15, Twitter user @HaitianDvorce uploaded a photo of a Florida deli's hiring sign that they said "didn't sit right" with them.

And it soon became clear that thousands of people would agree with them once they read that employees would have to do the work of two people to bring home $12 an hour.

For these people, it seemed especially galling that they'd have to care about the business to the extent that the owner does to make $14 per hour and even outperform them for any hope of earning over $15.

And once people translate that wage to this hypothetical perfect employee's annual earnings, many felt that it was an insultingly unrealistic expectation.

Walt Disney Studios via YouTube

As Bored Panda confirmed, that $15 an hour salary would translate to $31,000 a year, which few saw as a fair compensation for working harder than the deli's owner.

That said, there were some who had experience in owning small businesses who felt people were underrating just how hard an owner works.

And as one user pointed out, the thin profit margins common in the restaurant industry means they aren't always making nearly as much as their employees might assume.

Nonetheless, it's worth noting that while this second user may sympathize with the deli owner's position, they still considered the sign "disastrously worded."

Moreover, some users who have been on the other side of this kind of work culture warned that doing what this sign expects is often not worth it.

For them, putting as much of yourself into a restaurant as the owner is simply a recipe for being taken advantage of regardless of how close the owner is to your situation.

In any case, the sign certainly didn't make working at that deli seem attractive and its management has apparently come to realize this in the wake of the backlash.

As the deli's president and COO Ragan Edgerly told Bored Panda, the purpose of the sign was to show that those who work hard will have greater opportunities for advancement and other rewards.

But in his words, "The descriptions used do not accurately reflect Jason’s Deli’s hiring practices and the sign was immediately removed."

h/t: Bored Panda

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