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Pouring $18 Superbowl beers for $14.25 an hour: "I work three jobs and I still qualify for Medicaid"
(www.motherjones.com)
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2024
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I call bullshit. Event bartending is creepy and abusive and horrible for many reasons, but it is very profitable.
Source: Am bartender.
Have you never ordered a beer at a stadium? They aren't bartenders, they're just counter employees.
While those little stands aren't really bars, the people working there are generally bartenders doing some work on the side.
But no, I don't care anything for sports, so I've never been on the other side if the transaction.
So in the same comment you say you both have no idea what you're talking about, and that it's perfectly fine that those people need two jobs just to make ends meet because they might make tips at one.
Got it.
I go to sporting events as a worker, not a customer. I know work things, not how comfortable the chairs are or whatever.
And if you think that a job where you work a handful of days every year should pay enough to live on year round by itself...I really don't know what to tell you.
Weird, it's almost like you just noticed that people who do that need an extra source of income because their primary job doesn't pay them enough to make a living wage.
Congratulations, you've caught up to the entire point of the thread.
Not even close, and I know because I've worked those stands. The people that work those stands get one single 4 hour training at the beginning of the season to be "certified enough" to not get the stadium (or whoever owns the concession stands) sued. If you wanna pour or hand out beers, you take an extra 2 hour training on how to pour a nice big head on that Miller Lite and how to card everyone who looks under 60. If 2 hours of training makes me a bartender then I guess I'm incorrect, but I don't think that's the case.
That's not been my experience. I submitted my state liquor cert to the staffing company and got some rudimentary training, but I was a bartender at a local place downtown, and the people I worked with were either current or former bartenders. Many were people who had the skills but were between jobs.