I was at a hotel with crappy service and asked about the problems with house keeping. The manager told me everyone in town (Traverse City MI) was trying to bring in foreigners to do housekeeping because they couldn't get local labor.

They said the standard is 30 minutes per room per day. I figure at a very generous $50 per hour (100k / year) it should run $25 to have my room taken care of. Now that doesnt cover the shared costs - doing laundry, cleaning the pool, front desk, etc... but my room was something like $150 per night. How the fuck can they not find people to clean rooms?

Answer: they're too cheap to pay a decent wage. But why? My suspicion is that all these places are actually leveraged far too much and paying rent/interest/dividends so much they can barely operate.

I suspect low interest rates and other incentives to "stimulate" economies are actually causing these problems.