u/PipeZestyclose2288

As the title says. The math is, I currently make about $150k a year in a HCOL area working as a software engineering manager. I used to mske a bit more but got caught in a big layoff several years ago and used the time to travel the world. I have about $200k liquid and $300k in 401k plus an $800k home paid off. I spend about $60-90k a year.

Single, no kids, 33F. Work about 60hrs a week consistently.

I found out the other day grabbing coffee at my favorite fancy coffee place that the people who work there start at $40/hr and have health insurance covered. Its a fancy family owned shop thats been in business for years. I asked around and after tips most of the baristas are clearing $60/hr and some upwards of $80.

I have a good relationship with the manager and was joking with her the other day that I should just quit my job and work there instead. They work hourly but have full 40hr work weeks, nothing more (and nothing less). With my home paid off and decent savings, I did the math and I think the small cut in pay would be mostly offset by not paying for health insurance anymore and I could ride my remaining savings till I was 60 or so.

What do you think? Is it worth the risk and giving up my career? I worry im just trading in one job for another. And I doubt any other coffee shops pay as well as this one. Id probably have to train for a bit too in order to realistically qualify.

Has anybody else done something like this before? Thanks.

That's all I have to say

​

I know I shouldn't feel this way and perhaps its the lack of sleep. But invariably the people who loudly complain about babies crying on public transport or in public are childless judgemental wasps with nothing better to do.

I swear, just because youre miserable and hate children doesn't mean you need to spread your attitude.

Does anyone else feel this way? Obviously I dont mean this universally, but some things you only understand once you've had kids. Yes or no?

I had medium to high expectations visiting Ann Arbor for the first time knowing U of Mich is here and hearing good things from people who went there.

I was a little bit let down however. Walking around the university it looked like there were homeless laying on the grass, people openly doing drugs, and around state street it was crowded with homeless. It was a really strange juxtaposition, tons of young college age students and aggressive (i was approached a few times) homeless on basically every corner.

Maybe its because its summer and the weather is nice. But I found it a little bizarre. Restaurants were nice but quite expensive for a college town and three was a lot of construction. I suppose the construction is normal given its summer time. Just really unsightly and difficult to navigate. Street closed without warning etc..

Will be giving the city another chance on our way back. Any recommendations for how to do it better or explanations for whats going on in this town are appreciated.

okay so hear me out

the chair in episode one is empty. not abandoned, not forgotten. empty because she already left. lauren (toms wife) was strapped into that chair and nobody told tom because nobody knew how to tell tom, and the reverend knew, which is why he apologized.. for what was done to his wife in that chair while he was out there thinking she was just gone.

and she is not gone.

When his wife is offering tea in the sea hag episode its the show telling us Lauren has returned. It is played like a hallucination or a dream but the entity that now consumes Lauren has escaped. Its the same entity that consumed the boogeyman way back when.

Thats the real curse of the island.

every horrible thing this season, the awakening island, the reverend's guilt, that's lauren escapee from her prison

and tom is going to find out in the worst possible way, probably the finale, probably right when he finally feels safe again....

Edit: Im sharing this theory here because nobody on the widows bay subreddit wants to hear me out. They're too busy posting obvious observations from the show and cant wrap their minds around real theories.

There are watch brands where the authorized dealer experience is an event. Hushed lighting. A man named Philippe who brings you water without asking. A velvet tray. Eye contact.

Where Marcus has been standing for seven hours, has answered "but does it come in blue" forty times today, and just watched you pick up a watch, scan it on your phone, and order it from the Swatch website while standing directly in front of him.

You could bring him a coffee. A large. Not a medium. Just walk in, hand it to him, say nothing, and leave. You do not deserve to browse after what happened last Saturday.

A large coffee, no receipt, leave immediately.

Swatch. The watch Marcus deserves. The treatment Marcus does not get.

As the title says. VSF will be shuttled down eventually. Then what?

Saw a similair post and figured id share my stats here. I've tracked every Red Lobster serving shift I've worked over the last ~11 months. I'm a full-time mortgage loan officer during the week, so this has mostly been a Fri/Sat/Sun side hustle with occasional doubles and occasional weekday pickups.

I usually work around 8–12 shifts per month and typically make somewhere between about $1,200–$2,900/month depending on season, schedule, and doubles picked up.

For context: my location is a decently busy restaurant, but probably on the lower end of the volume spectrum for our market compared to the busiest Red Lobsters nearby. And yes, Never Ending Shrimp season is its own special kind of hell, high table times, low per-person checks, and guests who treat it like a competitive eating event. I've seen a man eat 14 rounds. He tipped 10%...

I do upsell and ask for appetizers/drinks/desserts, but I don't hard push people. The Cheddar Bay Biscuits basically sell themselves, so I focus my energy on cocktails, lobster upgrades, and getting people to add the lobster tail to literally anything. Most weekends I'm usually aiming to sell around $450–$750 depending on whether I double or not.

OVERALL STATS

128 shifts

871 hours worked

Gross pay: $22,640

Actual take-home: ~$19,700

Total sales: ~$127,500

Average tip %: 19.11%

Tip out: ~3% of sales

Effective take-home tip rate: 16.11%

Average hourly: ~$25.99 gross

Average shift pay: ~$177

Average shift length: ~6.8 hrs

Best shift:

New Year's Eve

$488 in 8 hours

(Important note: I removed that New Year's Eve shift from Wednesday averages because it massively skewed the data. Table 14 ordered two full lobster feasts and a $90 bottle of wine. It was a statistical anomaly and a personal highlight.)

Worst stretch:

Ever since Never Ending Shrimp started, three consecutive Saturdays. My sales tanked, my tip percentage held okay, but the sheer table time meant fewer turns and noticeably lighter shifts. Never Ending Shrimp giveth the volume and taketh away the check averages.

PAY BY DAY OF WEEK

Monday

9 shifts | 46.0 hours | $19.87/hr | $96 avg shift

Slowest day by far. Mostly older couples and solo diners using rewards points. Cheddar Bay Biscuit consumption per table is somehow highest on Mondays.

Tuesday

7 shifts | 34.0 hours | $21.94/hr | $110 avg shift

Marginal improvement. Date night crowd starts trickling in. Cocktail sales noticeably better than Monday.

Wednesday* (New Year's Eve removed)

6 shifts | 30.5 hours | $23.41/hr | $122 avg shift

Mid-week hump. Surprisingly solid when we ran Wednesday specials. The lobster bisque upsell hits disproportionately well mid-week for some reason.

Thursday

20 shifts | 115.0 hours | $24.28/hr | $136 avg shift

The underrated shift. Feels like a warm-up Friday. Business dinners and early weekend crowd. Alcohol sales are good.

Friday

22 shifts | 152.0 hours | $27.19/hr | $192 avg shift

Peak performance. Anniversary dinners, birthday parties, people who saved up to treat themselves to the Admiral's Feast. Friday pays real good.

Saturday

30 shifts | 241.0 hours | $28.47/hr | $224 avg shift

Best day overall. Highest average shift pay by a decent margin. The Never Ending Shrimp crowd does show up on Saturdays but gets diluted by higher-check tables. Long shifts, worth it.

Sunday

34 shifts | 252.5 hours | $24.09/hr | $174 avg shift

More shifts than any other day but lower average pay. Post-church crowds are large parties with kids, which tanks tip percentage. Never Ending Shrimp orders spike again on Sundays, its hell.

SECTION SIZE COMPARISON

10-seat section (typically a 2-top + 4-top + 4-top)

$25.60/hr | 17.94% avg tip | $169 avg shift

The 2-top is usually a couple on a date who over-orders wine and tips 25%. Love.

12-seat section (typically a 2-top + 4-top + 6-top)

$25.22/hr | 15.61% avg tip | $160 avg shift

The 6-top is a wildcard. Great when it's a birthday party that orders appetizers and cocktails. A nightmare when it's a family of six splitting one Never Ending Shrimp order between two people and asking for extra biscuits every four minutes.

14-seat section (typically two 4-tops + one 6-top)

$28.14/hr | 16.38% avg tip | $204 avg shift

Best earning section by a solid margin. Replacing the 2-top with another 4-top increased average shift earnings by about $44 and hourly by roughly $3/hr. The two 4-tops turn faster and tend to order more deliberately than big parties.

The jump from the 12-seat to 14-seat section was surprisingly large and honestly changed how I think about section requests. I actively try to get the 14-seat whenever it's available.

Some more fun stats;

CHEDDAR BAY BISCUITS

I started tracking biscuit refill requests mid-way through the year mostly as a joke, and it stopped being funny i ran some stats. The overall average is 4.1 refill requests per table, but that number masks a pretty wild distribution. The single most important stat I've collected in eleven months of serving is this: biscuit refill requests and tip percentage are negatively correlated. I ran the numbers because I didn't want to believe it. Every additional biscuit refill request is associated with roughly a 0.6% drop in tip percentage. The all-time record holder was a 4-top on a Sunday they also got Never Ending Shrimp who submitted 9 refill requests, consumed an estimated 36 individual biscuits across the table, tipped 11%, and then asked for a to-go box of biscuits on the way out. Speaking of...

NEVER ENDING SHRIMP:

The shrimps are a structural inefficiency that I have now quantified across countless shifts and hundreds of documented shrimp rounds. The average table time is 71 minutes versus 43 minutes for a standard table, a 65% inflation in seat occupancy that, when modeled against my average turnover rate, costs me roughly 0.4 additional tables per hour during peak periods. Average check per person drops from $52 to $38, a 27% decrease, while tip percentage falls from 20.2% to 13.8%.

MARGINAL RETURNS:

The relationship between shifts worked per month and monthly take-home is not linear, and once I had enough data points to model it, the curve became the most useful thing I've tracked. Plotting monthly earnings against shifts worked produces a function that increases at a decreasing rate, the classic shape of diminishing marginal returns. My first 8 shifts per month yield roughly $23.40 per marginal hour. Shifts 9 through 11 yield approximately $26.80 per marginal hour, the peak of the curve, where I'm hitting prime weekend slots without accumulating fatigue that affects performance. Beyond 12 shifts per month, the marginal hourly rate drops to around $21.10, almost certainly because additional shifts pull from lower-volume weekday slots. Taking the derivative of the earnings curve with respect to shifts worked, the inflection point sits at 10.4 shifts per month, the exact point where marginal earnings stop accelerating and begin decelerating. That number is now my scheduling target.

Tip percentage as a function of hours worked peaks in the 5.5 to 6.5 hour window and declines measurably past hour 7, but the variable that explains most of that decline isn't fatigue directly. Tables seated in the final 90 minutes of my shift show an average close time of 19.4 minutes versus 11.2 minutes for mid-shift tables, an 8.2 minute difference that I can only partially attribute to party size. The optimal exit, modeled across all my shift data, is somewhere around 6 hours 40 minutes. Every minute past that point returns less than the minute before it.

Curious how this compares to other Red Lobster locations. And if anyone else has survived Never Ending Shrimp with their sanity intact... I might just quit because of it.

I know they arent exactly the same, but I bet in 100 years we will look back.on it as barbaric.

So I went down a rabbit hole trying to figure out how far behind I am on movies I "need" to watch. Turns out the math is kind of wild.

There are already somewhere around 1,000 to 1,500 films that most people would agree are genuinely culturally essential. Not just good, but the kind of movies where if you haven't seen them, you're lost in the conversations people have. Star Wars, the Godfather, Parasite, the whole MCU run, classic Kubrick, etc. The list adds up fast.

Global film production just hit an all-time high, around 9,500 movies made in 2023 alone. Obviously most of those don't matter culturally. But roughly 50 a year end up being the kind of thing people actually reference for decades.

Now here's where it gets interesting. The average person who actually likes movies watches maybe 150 a year. Over a lifetime of serious watching, say ages 10 to 75, that's about 9,750 films total. That sounds like a lot until you factor in that the essential catalog grows by 50 every single year with no end in sight.

At that pace, the total number of culturally essential films will exceed what an average person can watch in their entire lifetime sometime around the year 2136. So we've got roughly 110 years before it becomes literally mathematically impossible to "catch up," even if you started at birth.

For casual viewers watching maybe one or two movies a week, that point has basically already arrived. The backlog is growing faster than they can watch, and in the not so distant future, will reach a tipping point for all of us.

Its happening again....