AbacusA Reservoir Dogs ending for low paid jobs, as Mr Covid, Mr 9/11 and Mr Automation kill common sense

Name: How far will minimum wage get you in Hong Kong?
Uploaded: 2021-02-28T23:00:17.000Z
Duration: 36 s
Description: How far will minimum wage get you in Hong Kong?

Social distancing rules combined with rising wages are accelerating a trend in which businesses are replacing minimum wage staff with robots

The rise of touchless checkouts, contactless dining, artificial intelligence video surveillance and CT luggage scans means investors should look to tech

5-MIN READ5-MIN

Harvey Keitel and Tim Roth in Reservoir Dogs.

Neil Newman

Published: 7:00am, 1 Mar 2021Updated: 7:28am, 1 Mar 2021

MR PINK

Quentin Tarantino’s classic movie Reservoir Dogs opens with an entertaining exchange among a group of criminals about paying a tip to the waitress. Mr Pink, the tritagonist in the plot, protests that he doesn’t believe in paying tips unless the waitress had “really put forth the effort”, and that he thought she hadn’t the common sense to refill his coffee more often. Mr Blue and Nice Guy Eddie countered the point, saying that he was being mean since waitresses earn so little and rely on tips.

Put that in the context of 2021 and there wouldn’t be eight men sitting around a table to split the bill. Here, there would be groups of two or four, and the waitress would have lost the plot organising them so they could converse through plastic table dividers.

In Los Angeles, where the scene took place, the minimum wage a waitress is likely to receive has risen steadily from US$5.05/hr when Tarantino’s cameras rolled to US$14.25/hr currently, and it will be US$15 by the summer. In Hong Kong, the minimum wage is a stingy HK$37.50/hr, or US$4.80 – which doesn’t go far in one of the most expensive cities in the world and the government is, rightly, under pressure to increase it.

00:36

How far will minimum wage get you in Hong Kong?

CAN I GET ANYBODY MORE COFFEE?

Right now the service sector is as abundant with rules as it is with employees on low wages and as the inevitable rise in wages continues, employers will increasingly look to invest in automation rather than keep on workers.