Something Is Fundamentally Broken - Workers Reporting CONSTANT FINANCIAL STRESS

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:00]Today I'm walking down West 49th Street in Miami Beach and we are going to talk about some serious red flags that the job market is seeing right now. I came across this story talking about how 67% of restaurant workers who make an hourly wage report constant financial stress in their life. And ironically enough, a lot of these people who work in the restaurant industry and are around food all day are having a hard time affording food themselves. And this is just one industry, guys. There are plenty of other people who work in lowwage jobs that are in the same boat right now.

[00:00:39]It's just that this news story highlights this one particular group.

[00:00:43]But by no means is this a unique problem. And if you look at the bigger picture, 97% of restaurant workers say that they are experiencing some sort of financial distress to some degree in their life, but not constant. Right? So basically, everybody who works an hourly job at a restaurant is facing hard times with money right now. And when you have 61% of these people saying that they have skipped more than one meal in the past month because they couldn't afford to eat is a shame, guys. Like I have worked a couple of sort of restaurant jobs in the past like delivering pizzas, working as a food runner at a restaurant here in Miami. I also worked as a banquet waiter at a hotel. That was one of my jobs when I was a teenager. And in every single one of those food related jobs, one of the perks of the job was at least they would feed you. You know, you would get good food. At the banquet job, that was probably the best because every weekend we did weddings and you basically got to eat what all the guests were eating. You had your choice of gourmet fish or prime rib or some other very premium item that was on the menu.

[00:02:02]a nice chicken dish with some delicious sauce and that was all on the house. You got to eat that for free. At the pizza places, obviously, you get a lot of pizza for free. When they make pizza that's ready to eat, people come in for a slice and the pizza doesn't get sold, you get to get a lot of that for free.

[00:02:20]And then when I worked at the restaurant here in Miami, they would also feed you a free meal every night. So, if I'm working there five nights a week, I used to eat dinner for free five nights a week. And that's not a bad deal. I mean, okay, is that a huge part of the compensation package when you're looking at I need money to pay my bills? No. But in today's world, I would say it is because of how much food prices have gone up. You know, having one meal on the house is like making an extra 20 or $30 at your job, I would say, depending on the type of food you're eating. So, let's just say it's $20 extra. If you're making an extra 20 bucks five days a week, that's an extra $100 on your pay or an extra $400 a month that you didn't have to spend on food. And the fact that people who are working at these restaurants are feeling this sort of food insecurity is a big problem because to me it means these restaurants are not giving free food to their employees anymore. You guys let me know if you work at a restaurant right now or you did recently. Let me know in the comments below if they gave you free food as part of the perks of the job.

[00:03:32]Cuz that's one of the only perks of working at a restaurant as far as I'm concerned. And some of these restaurant workers are so hard up for cash that some people cannot afford the gas anymore to drive to work. So they end up having to walk or take the bus. They're also living off of ramen soup because it's very cheap and pretty filling. And this is just horrible that this is happening. And in a lot of ways, you know, lowerass Americans are becoming third world citizens right now. You know, you see a lot of these same poverty issues in developing third world countries where they have nothing. And the fact that this is an issue here is just unbelievable. A lot of these people are also not paying their utility bills.

[00:04:15]They're going without a lot of other necessities until payday. They don't have health insurance. They're selling personal belongings, using pawn shops, things like that just to be able to get by. Also, there's a pretty big divide between management in the restaurant industry versus the employees because 53% of workers said that the company leadership doesn't understand what it's like to live paycheck to paycheck and 35% said their employer genuinely doesn't care about their financial well-being. And I think that's probably true. I can say for 100% certainty that at my restaurant job I had here in Miami, they definitely didn't care about my financial well-being, guys. In fact, basically two weeks after I got my real estate license, they fired me without any good reason. I was still doing the job and I actually still needed that job because nobody gets their real estate license and two weeks later is making money in the industry. It is a learning curve and it takes time. So that was a major setback for me at the time. So that's something that definitely has not changed in the restaurant industry. You are 100% disposable and people don't care about you for the most part. And this is going to create some big problems for restaurants. You know, I've already talked about how the restaurant industry is getting hit extremely hard in this down economy right now because a lot of people simply cannot afford to eat out at today's prices. It's one of the first things that gets cut out of the budget when you're looking at saving money. And if people cannot afford to pay their bills working at these jobs, well, most people are not going to be working at these jobs anymore. And the more of a shortage of workers that there are in the food industry, then the more pay the restaurant owners are going to have to pay these people in order to take those jobs, which means that food prices at restaurants are going to go up even higher, which means their customer base is going to shrink even further.

[00:06:15]So, this is a very negative downward spiral for the restaurant business in general right now. Here's what a lot of employees would like to see happen who work at restaurants. About 85% of them said that they would like to see ondemand pay, which I'm assuming just means that you get paid the same day of your shift or you can request a payout against your future paycheck or something like that. And there already are some services out there that a lot of employers are utilizing. The problem is it comes with a fee. So that was another thing I actually liked about the restaurant industry is going home with money in your pocket every day. It felt very rewarding, you know, working as the food runner or the pizza delivery guy and you go home with more cash in your pocket at the end of every shift than you walked in with. And that made it not only motivating to show up to work, but it helped float your life much easier because you always had money rather than having to budget more and wait for a paycheck every two weeks like a lot of jobs. But 85% of restaurant workers say that ondemand pay would make a huge difference in their life because so many of them are living paycheck to paycheck.

[00:07:30]So basically everybody who's in this business is running on empty right now.

[00:07:33]Guys, I think this is just going to continue to spell disaster for restaurants in general. You're going to see more restaurants closing in the next few years because of this. And the ones that do survive, you're going to see higher prices than ever. You know, I was talking the other day in one of my videos complaining about how, you know, you want to get a decent steak here in Miami now. All these restaurants are charging minimum like $70 or more for a ribeye. And it's absolutely nuts. But in an expensive city like Miami, I would imagine a lot of them almost have to do that now just to be able to pay people enough so they're going to stick with the job. So you think a lot of this money is going in the pockets of these restaurant owners, but in reality, a lot of it's probably being used just to be able to retain their employees. And one thing I've heard a lot of noise about recently is how men don't want to work because there's been so many men dropping out of the workforce. And I'm going to give you guys an overview of what's going on with this because millions of working age men right now exited the workforce with about 7 million men between the age of 25 and 54 who are either not working or looking for work. So they're basically just checked out of the job market altogether at this point. 7 million working age men. That is a lot. So, we're going to get into some of the reasons why this is happening, and you guys can let me know if you think these are just excuses or legitimate reasons not to be in the workforce. I'll let you decide that. The first thing is the types of jobs that have been created. Because one thing we know, we're seeing more jobs being lost right now than the amount of jobs being created. But the type of jobs that are being created are very important when it comes to who gets those jobs. because over the past year we've seen about 656,000 social assistance and healthc care jobs being created. Without those jobs that were created, the private sector actually would have lost hundreds of thousands of jobs. So that's really the strongest part of our economy right now is health care and social assistance.

[00:09:46]Okay? And at the same time, we're seeing manufacturing jobs being wiped out.

[00:09:51]Transportation and warehousing jobs are being wiped out. And you're also seeing a lot of businesses that produce things getting wiped out right now, too, due to cheaper manufacturing, automation, and AI. So, why does that matter? Well, it's because who actually gets certain types of jobs, right? Manufacturing jobs, for example, employ twice as many men as women. And transportation and warehousing employ roughly three men for every one woman. And since 2024, the jobs that are held by women increased by about 421,000 jobs, while jobs held by men essentially went nowhere and actually saw jobs being lost. So, this is part of the story of why men don't want to work anymore because there's just not as much work available compared to females. If you think about the health care or social assistance fields, you're almost always dealing with a woman, guys. Not 100% of the time, but probably 90% of the time. How many male nurses do you see? How many males do you see working at the social security office or the mental health clinics, things like that? Also, a lot of men are the ones who have held a lot of these prestigious white collar jobs that have been wiped out over the past couple of years as well. So, that's another group of men that's been pushed out of the labor force and they're some of the highest earners in the country. And then you take a lot of people like me that never went to college and just graduated high school or maybe they just got a GED, something like that. They traditionally go into factory work, industrial jobs, logistics, warehousing, things like that. And a lot of this has either moved overseas or it's been heavily automated and just become much more unstable, especially as the demand for a lot of products and services continues to drop in this bad economy.

[00:11:48]And in that case, you know, you can't blame a lot of men for not pursuing a career in the nursing industry, for example. You know, a lot of men don't identify with these type of jobs culturally, and they also lack the educational background to even get one of these jobs to begin with. So, you're probably not going to see a whole lot of men jumping in to these types of jobs that are growing the fastest right now.

[00:12:12]And the reality is, our modern economy just doesn't reward the types of traditional work that men have always done compared to the jobs that are actually needed right now. Here's the perfect example. The yearly median pay for a dental hygienist is about $94,000 a year. Pretty good and substantially above what a lot of people make. But guess what? Only 5% of dental hygienists are men. I I don't think I've ever dealt with a male dental hygienist in my whole life. Not that I can remember. Sure, you see a lot of the dentists who are men, but as far as the dental hygienists, not really. And a lot of the men who are entering these industries only do it much later in life, basically after every other option has failed. And obviously, a lot of this hits young men the most, the ones who are graduating from college or going to be graduating from high school soon. And my advice remains the same for you young guys out there. You need to be looking at how to forge your own path in life, guys. And I say that from experience. That's what I did personally. I think your best bet in having any sort of success as a man in this world in 2026 is to start your own business. I can't tell you what type of business to start. That's going to be different for everybody. But I think that is probably your best shot at success and probably the most sustainable as long as you get into an industry that is growing and has a bright future and not a dying one. If you open up a business that can't just be easily replaced by AI, you're going to have a much better shot than opening up a business where automation is already heavily taking over. Like perfect example here is we just got a notice a couple days ago HSBC Bank who's based out of Europe who's saying that they are going to be cutting about 20,000 jobs worldwide. Guys, that's 10% of its entire workforce all because of AI. So, anything that can easily be done by AI right now is extremely vulnerable and you probably shouldn't get into it.

[00:14:20]They said that they're going to be replacing mostly middle management and support positions across different parts of the company, which is a guarantee that customer service at HSBC is about to get a lot worse. And like I said in a prior video, manager jobs are becoming extinct basically everywhere because of this. But, you know, here's something that's really awful. The CEO of HSBC said in this story that employees should embrace AIdriven changes rather than resist them while working together with the bank to adapt to emerging technologies. Well, that's easy for you to say as somebody who brings home the lion share of the pay it at the company and as somebody who's not losing their job, right? Like, yeah. Oh, don't worry.

[00:15:06]You know, this is a sacrifice for the greater good. you should be proud to be a part of it is essentially what I hear when people say this nonsense. And you know, speaking of AI and replacing jobs, China has been on the forefront of this just as much as the United States. In fact, that's one of the main excuses you hear all the tech company CEOs use as the reason for so aggressively pursuing and improving AI is because we have to win this AI race with China. Otherwise, we're going to be left behind, right?

[00:15:37]But guess what? It turns out even China's worried about how many jobs this is going to take away in China and they're kind of throttling things down on purpose right now. According to the vice premere in China, He Lefang, I don't know if that's how you say it, he just met with some of the country's largest employers last year, including tech companies, banks, automakers, and other major corporations to ask how AI would affect the job market in China.

[00:16:08]And some of the companies reported that the AI systems could eliminate as much as 30% or more of their existing positions. These are positions like customer service, coding, scheduling, payroll, analysis, document review, or any other administrative tasks. It's not just factory automation anymore. It's replacing a lot of the software related things, too. And this was such a scary thing for him to hear over there that they're wanting to slow things down now because they realize that 30% of people not having jobs, even in a communist country, isn't good for business. So the government over there is admitting right now that the rate that at which technology is replacing jobs is economically unsustainable. And you could argue we have the same problem over here right now. There is one particular American city that's already seeing a lion share of these problems right now and that is Phoenix, Arizona.

[00:17:06]Why? Well, Phoenix economy basically runs largely off of a lot of white collar jobs like payroll processing, customer service, and now many of these jobs are disappearing or being outsourced altogether because of AI. And if we've already gotten rid of our manufacturing jobs and retail jobs and a lot of the manual labor, all that stuff's been shipped overseas and then we outsource all of these white collar jobs. What's left? You know what kind of industry is going to be left in a city like Phoenix where the entire economy was built on this white collar job market? I don't know. I would say there's nothing left, guys. There's really is nothing left. It's going to have to run on small local businesses and relying on the locals to come in and patronize those small local businesses.

[00:17:54]So, you could see a big town, a big city like Phoenix get downgraded to small town status in terms of its economic output. And then and in turn you'll probably see home values collapse in a place like this because of it. But the most fascinating part of all of this to me is the fact that China seems to understand something that we don't understand here in the US which is that you know this big shift in technology can become socially destabilizing. You know, if you see more than a third of people in your country out of work, I mean, that's going to cause a major amount of backlash and probably riots in the streets and all kinds of problems that governments don't want to deal with. You know, you think things were bad back in 2008 when unemployment went up to 10% here in the United States.

[00:18:42]That is nothing compared to what could happen if they just keep moving full steam ahead with all of this with no regard of how it's going to affect people. I think a lot of these billionaires that preach this idea that we're going to need to have universal basic income and there's going to be no need for money and all of this nonsense are just kind of fooling themselves because it's easy to say that until you actually look at who's actually going to pay for all of this. And also saying all of that without even questioning is this the future we really want for our country? You know, after all, what good is it to be rich and be a multi-billionaire or even approaching a trillionaire if everywhere you go is in ruin? Guys, you can't visit any city in America without facing, you know, blight and crime everywhere because that's what everything has been boiled down to. You know, that doesn't sound like a world I would want to live in no matter how much money I had. So, I think these people who are being overly greedy about this race with AI are not really thinking things through about how things are going to look when you pretty much just have a small amount of people who have basically all of the money. It's not really going to be a good future for anyone, including them. You can have all the money in the world, but if there's no place safe or fun to spend it, who cares, right? Isn't the whole point of having a lot of money is to enjoy that money and uh live a lavish lifestyle?

[00:20:12]You're not going to be living too lavishly if everything else around you is burning to the ground, you know? I don't know. Just some interesting things to think about. It's really wild to see where things are at right now in 2026 with the state of the economy and the job market. You know, there's really nothing positive to say about it if you ask me. You know, we can talk some positive things about real estate and uh things like that, but when it comes to the outlook of where this economy is going and the future of jobs for people, it's not looking good. Share your thoughts on all this stuff down below as usual. And if you don't want to wait for my next video to come out, make sure you check out this one right over here. and I will see you in the next