Hotels turn to robots and room cleanings every 4 days to ease staffing shortages

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/las-vegas-shooting-hotels-revis...

Secondly hotels inside of casinos both outside of and including the strip will regularly clean rooms. They also have regular pest control services, as the rooms are high traffic and constantly occupied.

When you leave you just throw the key card into a box or feed it back into the machine.

No smartphone necessary.

Talking to someone about checking in for a hotel room, after waiting for 10 minutes in a check in line...is not what I would call a fulfilling experience. Communication does not make us human, plenty of other species communicate...there are far more intricate and unique things that make us what we are.

You're equating someone's wish to not have to wait at a check out counter to being anti-social...come on.

However it's nice to do things on your own sometimes. For example I love McDonalds self-checkout because it speaks my language everywhere on the planet, and gives me all the time I need to prepare my order.

I fly in. Click on the hotel address on the Hilton app that takes me to Apple Maps and get an Uber to the hotel through Maps. On the ride to the hotel, I do the digital check in, request my digital key and walk directly to the room.

I’m going to be talking to people all day the next day.

Really? That is your position?

Instead of comparing if your pay has gone up 25%, ask if you’d rather take one of those jobs than yours. Because apparently that’s an option if you want.

There are almost certainly miserable working conditions, bad hours, and still an overall low wage. If people are able to find better jobs, then hotels need to treat people better or pay more to offset that.

Are we seriously going to cry about megacorps not getting away with paying workers trash wages for miserable jobs? Boo hoo, pay more.

The article says up from $10. I don't know whether that's a decent wage in the US, but it sounds low and $16 is just barely above the proposed compromise new US minimum wage figure, so it sounds not-hellish but not "do it just for the money" level.

Also, I noticed they said "25%" but $10 to $16 is 60%, and if you're griping and can say "we raised by 60% and nobody bit!", then you say that instead of "we raised by over 25% and nobody bit!". So I'm skeptical of the figures - maybe that 60% is best-case or something, and most people are offered $12.50 or something.

Curious about where you live and where you grew up? I ask because none of these rings true for me. Many of my friends have bought homes and started families, along the way, they’ve created their own traditions, and are part of communities where they know their neighbors. And this isn’t in just in one place in the country.

What a strange statement. Could you give some evidence?

> It's not like people are going to starve to death if they don't work

Uh. They may not starve to death but most would certainly end up living in the street and die early in almost all developed country.

https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states/temporary...

These are temporary and are at most 3 years. There is similar "if you don't have a job, you leave."

Add in the 2016 through 2020 was less favorable to immigration.

While past years, we haven't hit the visa cap for H-2B (like we do for H-1B), in 2022, applicants hit the cap ( https://www.dhs.gov/news/2022/10/12/dhs-supplement-h-2b-cap-... https://www.marketplace.org/2022/12/14/the-u-s-is-nearly-dou... https://www.npr.org/2022/11/04/1134417921/could-foreign-work... )

This means that in the past it was possible to reliably get people to work on the H-2B visa, and now you can't. Additionally, those "out of work" meant that people had to leave and start over reducing the pool of H-2B visa workers.

1. https://www.wsj.com/articles/illegal-immigration-arrests-hit...

https://web.archive.org/web/20221215195859/https://www.washi...

However you feel about immigration there's no doubt that we need more people to do some jobs. We are not making enough people. If you don't like immigration, get busy and start making some kids.

This approach hasn't been good for anyone involved.

The employees typically seem quite miserable, as would be expected given their circumstances.

Economically, this approach also significantly increases demand for supply-constrained housing, health care, infrastructure, and goods. This in turn exacerbates Canada's current inflation problem, and it's made worse by these imported workers not offering any real (in the economic sense) productivity gains to help offset the increased demand.

The combination of these factors, plus cultural differences, seems to have resulted in a steep decline in the customer experience at such establishments over that period of time, too.

I now spend a small fraction of what I used to at such businesses because the experience is typically poor, at least relative to what it was in the past. I know others who have changed their spending habits, too, for the same reason.

As you mentioned, that's basically competition in both ways, for once : expecting more affordable hotel rooms and wage increase at the same time

Macroeconomicaly, that's basically automating casual and repetitive tasks to focus on value, with more skilled and demanding workers. I'm glad that automation is becoming more effective for these jobs ! I mean, robot vacuum cleaners have been a thing for over a decade. Why wouldn't hotels rely on them ?

When visiting countries with a lower GDP in other parts of the planet, I was shocked by the madness of this cheap workforce : they cost nothing, so a lot of workers were working in pretty unproductive jobs. Like ppl don't drive, you have a taxi or tricycle driver to carry you around. If you're middle class, you have caretakers all around. And there is no automation at all, it's cheaper to hire unskilled.

They were working much harder than were I'm from. But there wasn't any focus on value or production or anything.

That's why I politically hate whoever blames jobseekers for any issue, and point these jobs. If you want to rebuild a lower GDP economy, yeah, send everyone to unpaid jobs. If you want to move forward, just automate everything, and let workers have jobs where they add a lot of value.

(Disclaimer : I'm an industrial engineer who wanted to do robotics, but ended up doing DevSecOps/ IT only)

Sure they can - by drawing workers from other, non-hotel sectors; and other locations.

You think all those people delivering for uber eats and making 1-hour amazon deliveries couldn't learn to make a bed?

And if your hotel's in the expensive city centre and your workers have to travel from the outskirts of the city by public transport, the more you pay, the further people are willing to travel. There's a lot more cleaners within 90 minutes commute of Manhattan than there are within 30 minutes - if the job pays enough that a 90 minute commute is worthwhile.

No the customers (mainly businesses) do not want to pay enough.

Hotel prices go up, business travel goes down. Same with Vactations.

My company has a hard cap on per night hotel costs, and we have cancelled trips and destinations because the hotel costs at that time where over that limit.

> Maybe the issue is just that hotels don't want to pay enough.

doesn't get at the point of this:

>> Its not a shortage of workers, it's a shortage of underpayable workers.

For centuries, rich people have had servants. Somehow, there have always been enough people in bad enough situations that taking grueling and poorly paid servant jobs has been their best option. Somehow!

In the US, for a long time we "solved" that problem by having a social hierarchy of race. Legally backed in many places first by slavery and later by Jim Crow, or just socially backed through perfectly legal discrimination. That finally changed for the better with the civil rights acts of the 1960s plus 50 years of hard work eroding the discrimination. So yay, partial victory, good for us.

That changed the targets, but it didn't change the structures that create people who expect to have servants and a much larger number of people who are desperate enough that they have to be servants, putting up with the often-terrible working conditions.

But it's not steady. Literally millions of people have stopped working and looking for work since 2020.

It happened with the airlines too. When you're without a job for more than a year, people move onto new companies, new careers or just retire early.

Singapore airlines continued to pay their pilots to not fly during Covid, knowing it would be tough as hell to restaff once they opened up. Apparently they rotated them through what little flights were available (cargo predominated) to maintain their skills. Once flights were restarted, they had no problem with staff shortages.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1254488/us-share-of-tota...

The point OP is making us these people probably need ~$2000 a month to live at an absolute minimum. No luxury, no gadgets, just getting by.

How does one decide “working isn’t worth it” but still magically has these funds?

To your point specifically, we used to be one of those families. Once we had children it did not work out a benefit for my partner to work in the field that she wants to work in (healthcare) as it did not pay enough. The additional net income of a full time job worked out to be about $200/month, which just wasn't worth it.

This changed once we moved country, to one where getting people with children back into the workforce is supported by both the government and companies, with greater flexibility from work and better subsidised childcare.

Laborers get more of the profits of companies and in turn get wealthier. However, the costs of services in turn go up (due to rising cost of labor), so those laborers (society) cannot actually afford more services (provided by people). Workers can more easily purchase goods which benefit from increasing automation and technology.

So, these workers which are capturing more of the profit can afford to buy fancier kitchen appliances and cook themselves better meals. But, can they all then afford to go out to eat more -- when going out to eat is primarily an endeavor dependent on the labor of others (and thus it becomes more expensive)?

The past century has seen an explosion of wealth in the world, with many people coming out of extreme poverty, emergence of large middle class in the US, etc. So, the world has gotten a lot richer. But, what does it mean to be richer?

Some things seem relatively obvious -- people have bigger houses. They get to have things like fridges and vacuums. These are tangible goods, for which the cost has fallen in line with increasing specialization and automation.

I'm saying that I think it's interesting that while a richer world can purchase more goods, it can't necessarily purchase more services, since the cost of labor rises in a richer world. Basically, productivity has to increase for people to be able to purchase the services with the rising cost of labor.

I'm not really concerned with the things I mentioned going extinct -- it's not a huge deal if we don't have stonework on buildings in NYC, and indeed if we can build housing faster than before by way of automation, that's great. But many people have wondered "why can't we build beautiful buildings in NYC like they used to?" and I'm basically saying, I think rising cost of labor is the reason, and it's interesting that this goes hand in hand with becoming a richer society.

A lot probably also went into industry that pay comparatively the same but offer more flexibility in scheduling.

Normally you fix lack of employees with higher pay, but low pay is baked into the cake they can't pay more and stay in business (which is the step right before going out of business, BTW).

(I don’t care for intermediate cleanings when I stay, just at the beginning personally).

As the article pointed out, people are getting more educated and they're able to sniff out opportunity elsewhere. Jobs like housecleaning don't have a trajectory and possibly can't (though I'm open for refute).

I was in Vegas last month and they were advertising something like $12-13/hr for hotel cleaning jobs. In Vegas! Bonkers.

Of course that's just on paper. In reality one person pockets the profit and they eat dirt.

That sounds like a recipe for a literal shitstorm.

It is probably among the least desirable work. Volatile hours, busiest times are weekends and holidays, literally cleaning up anything from bodily fluids to garbage and dealing with smells.

No one outside of large unionized hotels in big cities is offering a decent salary with predictable schedule. The small franchise hotels have less than 50 employees, so they have no employer subsidized benefits either like access to 401k, public transit credits, or other tax advantaged accounts.

The number of places in the US that you can get a 2BR home, rental or owning, on minimum wage is basically non-existent.

We're on the verge of large swaths of the US population effectively becoming serfs. Housing is being snapped up by corporations, banks are jacking their fees and making more and more people "unbankable" forcing them into non-bank situations like payroll-company-run quasi-debit-cards where withdrawing their wages costs money.

Consider this: Elon Musk at peak of his wealth had more money than all the residents of Massachusetts (itself quite a wealthy state) combined, by a significant margin.

We're at a stage where we have what amounts to feudal lords in all but name, complete with their own private security forces going around roughing up people.

I mean if suddenly a competitor arrives in your industry selling the same product, with near zero marginal costs, and half the time they cannot price correctly and are happy to see "any" income there might be issues for your industry.

Edit: oh Ok - structural in the supply of labour. In the UK that is hugely labelled Brexit, but it is interesting to see a problem elsewhere - As others say Covid shock is most likely as people re-evaluate what they are willing to tolerate.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/inflation-hasnt-been-bad-f...

https://www.epi.org/blog/corporate-profits-have-contributed-...

etc

The Fed is hard-selling a lie that inflation is due to supposedly skyrocketing labor costs and low unemployment. It's not. It's the ultra-wealthy jacking prices, squeezing the shit out of their workforces, converting everyone they can to "gig" or "contract" workers, and cheapening their services and products like they're trying to get blood out of a stone. The pandemic caused a stunning jump in concentration of wealth.

That's why we have historic numbers of open job positions. The jobs are there, but people don't want them because a)the pay and benefits have been squeezed down to the barest minimums b)the conditions suck c)employers are exceedingly demanding in terms of qualifications.

A perfect example would be the status quo in IT and development. Everyone and their mother and cousin wants to hire a Senior DevOps engineer with three pages worth of skills and two decades of engineering or development skills. Forget "ground floor" opportunities, companies aren't even interested in offering 2nd or 3rd floor opportunities, like bringing in traditional IT infrastructure folks and training them in the transition to cloud-based stuff and devops methodologies.

Go pop open Indeed and surf a bunch of low-level support positions and look at the CVS-receipt-length list of required skills/technologies and the huge list of responsibilities for a position that probably pays $40k in a lower income rural area to $60k if you're lucky in one of the higher COL metropolitan markets.

Think about it, in the current environment, the choice becomes: 1. Invest in a low margin business or 2. just call it a day and buy Treasury bills at historically high interest rates and make a guaranteed state tax free return without having to work.

Did you have some weird experience that you’re extrapolating wildly?

I’m not trying to brag but I’ve been to all seven continents of this world and many places in Europe. Never once have I seen this.

Presumably, bed sheets are so basic that they aren't even listed in the star criteria. Even in youth hostels, you may have to put the sheets on yourself or they might cost extra, but you don't need to bring your own.

Its different for hostels tho

"During the past decade, hotel operators have increasingly competed on the basis of the level of luxury of their room offerings. This includes luxury bedding consisting of oversize mattresses and opulent bed linen, together with other upgraded room and bathroom amenities. One industry observer has aptly described the competition to introduce more luxurious beds and room amenities as the "bed-race." The trend started in the late nineties when Starwood Hotel Corporation introduced the "Heavenly Bed" at its Westin-branded properties. Other companies followed suit with their own luxury bedding programs: Hyatt the "Grand Bed," Marriott the "Marriott Bed," Radisson the "Sleep Number Bed," Hilton the "Serenity Collection," and others. Although first confined to upper-end hotels, the new bedding and room packages are now commonplace throughout the hotel industry. The new bedding packages are characterized by heavy, plush mattresses weighing in excess of 100 pounds. They typically feature a bulky "duvet" or quilted comforter, triple sheeting using flat (instead of a fitted) bottom sheet, up to six pillows on a bed, pillow cases that fit tightly over plump pillows, and other amenities such as decorative pillows and blankets. Major players in California's hotel and lodging industry have acknowledged the hazards that the new bedding packages pose to housekeepers..."

[1] https://www.dir.ca.gov/oshsb/documents/Hotel-Housekeeping-Mu...