The phrasing for the 2008 frame isn’t right. Should be “Are you too good to flip burgers?” Or “Is flipping burgers not good enough for you?”
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2025
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Or "you went to college? You're overqualified for flipping burgers"
I've heard that enough times. I only have some community college under my belt and have been deferred from jobs.
2021 seems off too since it's in the middle of COVID. I can't think of a better quote though.
I think it's accurate for late-2021
People used the pandemic to up-skill, or otherwise find a better job, so when things started re-opening in 2021, most retail and service industry places had a very hard time filling roles
Story time
In 2019, just before the pandemic, a friend of mine worked at a gas station for years as the assistant manager. He loved it. Some responsibility without having all the responsibility. Lots of overtime, enough money to live off in a LCOL area. He was making something like $14.75 an hour. The store manager bumped him up to $15.75/hour, since he was doing the work of two people, showed up on time and sober, and was generally a much better employee than a gas station has any right to have
After he had already gotten his raise, corporate went back to his manager and said no (a decision by the current head of the company). Corporate rolled back the pay increase. According to them, he was already the highest paid assistant manager in the chain (~20 stores in the midwest). They wouldn't approve the pay increase, even though employee pay is generally at the discretion of the store manager
He started looking for a new job the next day. COVID happened shortly after that and upended the job market. He got a job as the equivalent to an assistant manager at a warehouse making $27.00/hour, with much better hours (generally 8:30-5:00), and better benefits. The gas station had to hire 2 assistant managers to replace him. They also started at $16.00, even more than the raise that corporate had rolled back
This is a problem that trickled out of some other vocations. The general consensus in my line of work for the better part of 15 years has been if you want a raise find a new job. It’s been really weird that places don’t want to keep institutional knowledge or are apparently willing to pay more for fresh faces.
It's just another form of pinching pennies so hard the dollars slip through
Penny wise and pound foolish describes most of late stage capitalism
I'm feeling the well-deserved smug on behalf of that guy. I once quit a job that refused to pay me overtime after a year of working for them as the sole employee/manager of the shop. It took two employees and both owners being there full-time to replace me and they still went out of business. I didn't even do anything special when I worked there, just had genuine interactions with the customers so they came back, and made them feel confident in and happy with their purchases. Guess they couldn't do that.
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God, that warms my heart
Right? It's one of my favorite anecdotes to bring out whenever talking about out-of-touch boomers
It works on a few topics too. Valuing your employees, the cost of turnover, and how "unskilled" labor is mostly a myth. I didn't really mention it in the original comment, but the reason they had to hire 2 people to replace him was because there was so much to learn
The gas station had an attached car wash. My friend was able to run and fix any issues in either the store or the car wash. Being able to fix a fountain machine, ice machine, register issues, etc. are relatively easy on their own, but stack them up and it becomes quite a bit of training for a new assistant manager to learn on top of normal management duties like operating the safe, reviewing cameras, doing the books, etc.
The car wash was at least as much work since it constantly broke down. Have to basically become a mechanic to keep it running. You also have to learn a lot of risk management. Plenty of dumb people ignore the signs saying to turn your car in neutral, or they accidentally put it in reverse and back into the very expensive door that closed behind them
Hence they had to hire two different people
I heard my dad parrot every single one of those. Each one a perfect hit to enrage him and make him angry, each one contradicting the past, and all together show how it was always about wanting cheap labor.
It was all about forcing someone else to do it, to the point of enslaving citizens in a for profit prison that doubles as a forced job center. Whether is micky D's or the plantation that sources the produce they all force prisoners into labor camps. America has really aced concentration camps and applying it to everyone who is poor (not the elite billionaires)
Ditto, definitely had relatives literally saying the 2008 point for me after graduation.
It was never about freedom or prosperity. It was always about rich people's pockets and it will be until the last one suffocates on CO2 while clutching their pennies.
The rich won't suffocate in their climate-controlled mansions
I misread that as "clutching their penises". I was like, "Alright, don't make me like them right as they're dying."
don't die giving a billionaire a handy
edit: wait, one billionaire, clutching their (gender neutral) penises. i might like this billionaire too
Vagrancy banned. Workhouse reinstituted.
Buying some woodland in the Scottish highlands live alone under the trees? Also banned.
Hot take: The euphemsism "flipping burgers" is so dismissive of the physical and emotional labor of working at a fast-food place that anybody using it unironically needs a punch on the nose.
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Let's see Your fucking AI flip burgers.
Seems relatively easy? You don't even need a full ass robot, just a robot arm with sensors. No one gives a shit about fast food quality anyway.
Heck, this happened before the AI boom
But that arm and its maintenance costs more than a minimum wage
And it can't rapidly switch tasks and make adjustments on the fly. Or stock it's one grill or.....
True, but its not far off. I ran the math on minimum wage, the machine costs $2000 a month for maintance, whereas full time at minimum wage is 1200 a month. If the employee makes more than $12/h the machine would cost less for maintance. That is ignoring the upfront cost of $20,000-$30,000, but the nature of fast food with its low employee retention and high burnout rate means the upfront costs would likely be worthwhile for companies like mcdonalds. Not having to go through the hiring process would save a fair bit of money id imagine, though i have no clue how much.
Its also worth noting that these machines are way more expensive than they need to be, because they are kept artificially high because the payoff for buying one is so large. Companies REALLY want automation, and theyre willing to pay top dollar to get it because it means they dont need slaves anymore. Same with the maintance, there is about a zero percent chance it legitimately costs the maintance company anywhere in the astronomical ballpark of $2000 a month to maintain the machines.
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"flipping burgers" is a colloquialism for fast food work. It involves a lot more than rotating patties on a grill.
McDonald's doesn't even flip burgers. They use a two sided grill with a timer.
Wendy's does it like that, and Burger King has a little conveyor belt and the patty gets blasted with fire as it goes through.
That sounds like a more reasonable automation than a robot arm.
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its also a euphamism, and insult for people who had a degree who hasnt found a job in thier field too.
Is that robot about to flip a burger cheese-side down?
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There already are robots for flipping burgers. If you prepare the burgers for them and place them on GBE grill and then assemble the burger.
flipping burgers is often used an insult for college grads that cant find a job in thier field, due to gatekeeping in that field too.
My workplace had become super toxic and I'm desperate for another job, but the market is abysmal. I'm hoping for a miracle, because I want out of my current job asap
I'm much the same.
I can't leave my geographic area for very good reasons, and I will in IT support. I'm experienced enough to be a "senior" support tech. But the average going rate in my area for my job is about 60k/yr. That sounds great until I tell you that I'm in Canada and that's Canadian dollars, which is about 43k/yr USD.
The state of the market here is embarrassing and I can't find jobs hiring for remote workers, or anything local enough that I could feasibly commute, that pays enough for it to be worth it to even apply.
If I do find a posting that's close it's a 1.5hr commute away and pays about the same as my current work from home gig.... Despite the toxicity, why would I take a job I need to spend an additional 3+ hours in a car to do the same work, with potentially the same toxicity, for the same pay?
I fucking hate everything.
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I didn't understand last image so I tried look for article, then found this one : https://www.unicef.org/press-releases/despite-progress-child-labour-still-affects-138-million-children-globally-ilo-unicef
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Guess they should have chose option 3 joined the Military. Serve 20 years get a pay check and medical for life.
Bonus, you join army, army breaks you, tries to sweep it away but eventually your children get survivor benefits.
and fun fact, Some veterans can get free mental asylum and cremation. (My mom tells us when she's over the hill, hand her to the va, they'll stick her in a ward till she dies and then cremate her so we don't have to worry) (My dads running plan is to work till he dies at his desk, then the army will bury him for free too)
If you wanted to eat, why didn't you just sign up to murder brown kids. Service guarantees citizenship.
*some exceptions apply (sorry, Afghan translators, we did you so dirty in so many ways)
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This meme hits like a laser guided munition.
jobs on the job sites, some sketchy ones do use the bait and switch methods, the indeed forums were such a treasure trove of info on various industries, until indeed shuttered it.
AI powered automation:
Slave labor is not cheap enough.
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