Buffalo Grill is located at the corner of Buffalo Speedway and Bissonet in Houston, Texas, an upscale area. It’s next to West University Place, a well-manicured, attractive area of well-to-do people that managed to incorporate their town and stay relatively independent from the city of Houston. Across the street from the Grill is a shopping center with several restaurants, a signature Kroger supermarket, and many little shops. I once visited the optician in that shopping center, where they wanted $270 (at the cheapest) to replace the lenses in my glasses; the next highest price I found at local opticians was $190 and I ended up getting them done for $70. This is the area of the Buffalo Grill.
When I was in Buffalo Grill with my roommates for a roommate breakfast, I made a quick trip to the bathroom. There I noticed the sign that hangs in all restaurant restrooms, reading something like “Los empleados tienen que lavarse las manos antes de trabajar.” Employees must wash their hands before returning to work. Only in this bathroom, the sign was not bilingual; it was written only in Spanish.
This made me think: are all the people that work here Hispanic? In some of my sociology classes we discuss “ethnic niches”; ethnic groups tend to cluster in a certain industry due to a variety of factors such as social networks. Usually, however, blacks tend to be in food service and Hispanics are in janitorial positions. At Buffalo Grill, I didn’t see a single black person in front of or behind the counter.
Perhaps all or even a majority of the employees of this particular restaurant are Hispanic. I cannot decide whether I like this or not. On one hand, it strikes me as the typical scene of the rich importing the less-well-off to serve them. The employees of the Buffalo Grill most certainly do not make enough money at their job to live in the area. Does anyone else feel uncomfortable when all the customers at a restaurant are white, and all the cooks and waiters are not? Or does everyone feel that way, but some people try to ignore it?
On the other hand, it strikes me as at least somewhat positive that these people have jobs. They are not part of the crowd of day laborers on Westpark every morning, hoping to land a job that will almost certainly pay less than minimum wage.
In the end, perhaps I am happy to see these people with jobs, but I am frustrated and angered by the larger picture of vast racial inequalities, leaving many more Hispanics poor and working at stoves and registers instead of in front of computers. And I am frustrated that rich people always want to employ relatively cheap labor without having to live near their employees or see the consequences of that “cheap” in the lives and families of those people. Would the Buffalo Grill still exist if the patrons had to meet and greet the families of the employees?
Whatever solutions I come up with to these problems always seem to have hidden consequences. So, the question I always end with: What can I do about this?
**Diclaimer: I don't know the facts about the economic situation of Buffalo Grill employees, and I could be totally off base. But I have a feeling if this isn't true of the Buffalo Grill, it's true of somewhere.
2 comments:
I can't speak to Buffalo Grill, but I know Jason's deli. I worked at 6 different locations with about 20-30 employees at each store. I may have worked with 5-10 black people total (half of these were management). Most of the employees were hispanic unless they had to speak to customers a lot and then there was a 50/50 chance of them being hispanic. In TX, the proportion of hispanics is higher than that of PA. I found that the hispanics were generally paid higher than the black or white employees. These are of course generalizations. While most of them did not live close to work, they lived off the bus line and could usually get to work quickly. Some employees did live close though. What struck me from talking with my hispanic employees about their financial situation is that many of them have a family support system to live with or share expenses with. Virtually all of them send an enormous percentage of their paycheck back to their family in whatever country they come from. It all depends on your standard of living and what you are comfortable with. No matter how little they are paid or how bad their living situation is, it is almost always better than where they came from. Their expectations are not as high as ours. The question is should we raise their expectations and standard of living, or should we lower ours? Do we even know how little it takes to survive?
Wow, sorry I took up so much space on your blog. I didn't even mean to. You just touched on a subject I have done a HUGE amount of thinking and personal research on.
Great post. Not much other to say than that... time to think.
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