Here we go again: Customers at a Pennsylvania restaurant turned to TikTok to raise more than $250,000 so an 81-year-old waitress can afford to retire and this is not a heart-warming story. Not one sweet f'ing bit.
Betty, the waitress, has just $910 a month in Social Security, so had been waitressing at an Eat'n Park restaurant in the Pittsburgh suburbs to make ends meet although, as Tamie Konzier, the customer who launched the fundraising drive, said in her TikTok, Betty "can hardly walk."
Konzier has said she's retained a lawyer to set up a trust to ensure that Betty doesn't lose any current benefits.
Great. I'm glad Betty can retire. It's horrifying that we live in a country in which 1) Betty was working at 81 to begin with and 2) she's far from the only person in that kind of situation. This one person now gets a comfortable retirement. It shouldn't take a viral social media campaign to make that happen.
No one should have to work into their 80s. This point may be lost on many in positions of power who intend to work until they die and who fail to grasp the difference between working rewarding (in financial and ego terms) jobs with few physical demands and working on your feet for hours at a stretch for low wages. But can we agree that 81-year-olds serving fried pickles and baked cod because the alternative is something like having to choose between rent and food represent a massive failure of policy? And that the answer is not to keep the minimum wage frozen at $7.25 an hour and cut all the government programs that help people get by, but rather to massively raise the minimum wage and expand all those programs?
Pennsylvania, by the way, is one of the 20 states that have not raised the minimum wage above the federal minimum, which has been stuck at $7.25 an hour since 2009. In case you haven't noticed, $7.25 is not worth what it was in 2009 β not that it was enough to live on then. A Pennsylvania state senator has introduced a bill to increase the state minimum wage to $15 per hour in 2026, and Gov. Josh Shapiro called for a $15 minimum wage in his February budget address.
Comments
We want Uncharted Blue to be a welcoming and progressive space.
Before commenting, make sure you've read our Community Guidelines.