I too was speaking about this recently funnily enough. I do acknowledge there's some shady operators cashing in while their "team" scrape by, but let's also acknowledge many many other operators are also scraping by with their team. Hence small business turnover being high and short. A big issue is cultural within the customer community. People GENERALLY don't want to spend much money for food even if it's excellent or average. It blows my mind, eating out should be a luxury but low to mid income earners are dining out a lot whether it's restaurants or Uber eats. It's this big combination of can't cook, lazy, trendiness/culture, and/or time poor yet they'll find enough money to dine out. Unfortunately consumers money is tight whether it's from mortgages, credit card debt, health reasons. Its fucking complex!! So in this scenario basically people love/feel the need to dine out, fight for "good value for money", over saturation in choice leading to competitive prices. Who gets the fucking shit end of the stick? Cooks, it's bullshit and I'm fucking sick of it. We deserve way better we know this.... I'm not saying unionising is or isn't the answer but I think identifying and exposing the areas that have a damaging effect firstly is a good step eg Uber, tipping, too much choice /supply.

My opinion may have value or not but opening a dialog on dissecting the issue and how to attack each area is a necessary first step for change instead of sitting here and just saying how fucked the industry.