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These days the lowest level of employment for anyone trying to start out in business is the service industry. People move from small Midwestern towns to the big cities in the Northeast only to find out that it's the same service industry jobs that you're starting out with just with different people making a different wage. If your service industry job was working at a WalMart for $6 an hour in one town you might make $12 or $15 in another town, adjusted for the cost of living there, or to remain competitive because there are either a lot more companies offering the same job, or just other opportunities available in general.

So the service industry jobs are that first rung on the corporate ladder. If companies can afford to pay people twice or three times as much to do that same job, say like answering phones as a receptionist or doing customer service or tech support, why then should it be any different for working in a restaurant? A waitress in New York City or Chicago can't afford to live anywhere without a second job or shacking up with like 10 other people, or staying at home with their parents, pay those people some money!

You mean to tell me that a fine restaurant where people are already paying $30 a plate can't afford to pay their help the federally mandated minimum wage for everyone else? I'm not talking about Denny's, or Waffle House, but a decent place. Sure you might make a few hundred in tips if you're good but if you're working hard dealing with very demanding customers that are rude and obnoxious you should be compensated for the work. I washed dishes in the back of a restaurant and was getting paid under the table and wasn't keeping track of what I was getting paid, knowing what I know now I probably still would have taken the job but I would have searched a lot harder for another one.

When I saw the menu and the clientle I was bit ticked, but kept my mouth shut about it because we got to eat some of the best food I'd ever tasted and I quickly forgot about my problems in souffls and caramelized pork chops and, but you get my point. Needless to say I moved on and got a "real" job that summer but I was still in the service industry and still on that bottom rung. I dropped out of school and are somewhat in the service industry now, just in a different capacity. Service industry jobs are rough and in this entire region, not just the town but an agglomeration of cities constituting a metropolitan area these are the jobs you get

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