Waiting at Indian restaurant

On Friday evening we ordered dinner from a local Indian restaurant. It was supposed to be ready in 20 minutes, so I got there at about that time, only to have to wait another 25 before my order was ready. There was a big guy with a beard there whose order was also rather late. He was already modeling toxic male behavior so I tried to keep myself down as I waited but I did kinda nudge them when the order was 15 minutes late.

This is the third instance of this in the last six months or so. Once at Twisted Noodles, the night we needed to get Natalie to the airport after Christmas, I think. Another time at Cava right near our house.

Friday night a large part of it could have been that it was Valentine's Day and there were more people dining in there than I've seen in the past. But restaraunteurs should be anticipating that.

I was initially thinking that this might be a Trump 2.0 post-ICE raids labor availability issue but as I think back to the Twisted Noodles incident six weeks ago I'm less sure. Certainly labor availability is an issue, but housing affordability nearby might be as much of a driver of labor shortage as anything else. More and cheaper housing (which will necessitate some regulatory easing) plus a less nasty immigration policy would certainly help things.

All of which reminds me of the really shitty lecture we had at the Durham Orange Estate Planning Counsel Tuesday from a retired econ professor from NC State. I had always skipped this guy's talk in years past. Turns out, for good reason. He talked at a level that would slighly expand the knowledge of the average NPR listener, but which was totally inappropriate for a group of people working in and around finance. I really wanted to ask the guy to explain how the NAIRU (not accelerating inflation rate of unemployment) had slipped from 5.5-6% down to around 4% over a couple of decades, and in particular what the role of grey market employment (i.e. off the books illegal immigrants) was in this change, but he kept rambling past 1 pm and I had to get back to my desk and work, so I walked out.