“Suddenly all these workers that were low paid were considered essential.”

Walking through downtown Ann Arbor, I was seeing lots of openings for cooks and servers and they were, you know, I think the highest I saw was twenty-two an hour. Also saw sixteen and eighteen, I think, which is, you know, before the pandemic, that would be considered high right? But now, you know, I took two semesters of Econ. I’m not an expert, but that’s supply and demand, right? The, the supply of labor has decreased, so the price needs to go up for these companies to be competing for the same employees. Frankly, I mean, it’s painful in the short-term. I mean, I worry that — I mean, a lot of companies did go under. We already know that from the pandemic. But I guess I worry that we’re gonna see a lack of access to goods and services which, of course we already did see in the earlier pandemic. But just like further disruption to the supply chain, which would be bad. Yeah, I just really don’t have too much Insight on that. Like I said, I’m just seeing the couple job postings with the newly inflated wages. Seems good to me, frankly. Cause that was the thing back in the early pandemic. When suddenly all these workers that were low paid were considered essential, of which I was not one. So why am I earning so much more money than this person who’s an essential worker in a grocery store or in a hospital or, or whatever the case is? If they’re essential and I’m not, presumably, their wage should reflect that. And you know, maybe it’s, I think, you know again, I’m not an expert in Econ by any stretch, but I think it’s just because the skills are relatively in a broader supply so that means the wage for that person is lower. I mean in a like, sort of cold sense it’s because they can be replaced. But now, you know, eighteen-ish months after the pandemic started, suddenly these people can’t be replaced easily. So now the wages are going up. And that seems like good news to me. Those are hard jobs.