Why Does Nobody Want to Work? Exploring the Shifting Job Market and Workforce Attitudes | Biz To Biz Podcast

You are now watching the Biz to Biz Podcast with Allen and Justin. Yo, what's up everybody? It's Justin live from B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, hosted by this guy, the Gandalf of payment processing himself, Allen Kopelman. What up, bro?

What happened to Bruce Willis?

I don't know. Gandalf just sounded better.

Gandalf. What, what show? What movie's that from?

Lord of the Rings.

Lord of the Rings.

He was the, like the old white wizard with the staff. He had the big hat.

Okay. I'm not a Lord of the Rings fan.

Ah, it's great. You should watch it.

It's good for you. It's good for you?

Yeah, it makes your creative brain.

How do you like this, this rainy weather we're having?

I like the rain.

It doesn't bother me. Okay.

I just don't like coming outside and—

Are you okay, Sean? You're like all bundled up over there.

It's freezing in the studio. It's literally like Antarctica back here.

Okay, keeps us awake.

Not for you, you yawn the whole time.

I'm good, I'm good. Okay, so here's, here, here's something funny that I read in the news, okay? Casey's is a— like, it's all this stuff about— get— all of a sudden, I don't know why, but gas station food is in the news. Like, what's going on at gas stations? And food at gas stations.

I don't know where I'm from in Milwaukee. Gas stations literally have some of like, like the hidden gems and shit. Like there's this spot on Titonia that has like, it's had fried chicken. Like it's just been, then there was, you know, in my, on my side of town, on the north side, there was another, it was an Arabic Muslim family that owned it and they cooked chicken and that shit. Oh my God, bro. Like they would sell out because they would only have— it'd be like a boat, it's like a boutique type deal, right? And there's a bunch of them down here.

Yeah, like that. Yeah, I get that. But now like the food, the big chains are getting into the food game.

So like Wawa.

Yeah, Wawa. There's this place Casey's that's in Iowa where Rebecca is from, and, uh, Casey's is like famous for their pizza apparently. Casey's Pizza. And they just Wawa stole the pizza— the guy who came up with the pizza at Casey's, they just offered the guy like big money to leave and come to Wawa to help them.

Because Wawa is opening a restaurant.

Yeah.

A standalone. It's not going to be a gas station.

Oh, it's not going to be in the gas station?

No, it's going to be just a Wawa. And it's going to be like whatever, you know, like that other half of Wawa.

Right.

It's going to be that. What? No gas?

Oh, no gas. Oh, that's interesting.

Just the restaurant in the, in like the coffee side, like a Dunkin' Donuts, I guess you could, or like a, it's like a Subway slash Dunkin' Donuts put together. That's why those Dunkin' Donuts and Subways do so well because they're both like, you get yourself a sandwich, you eat your lunch, and then you get a cup of coffee so you don't have the itis afterwards.

I guess.

I mean, it makes sense to me. I mean, I'm not a coffee drinker, but when I was, I loved a coffee, a cup of coffee in the afternoon.

I'm not thinking about like, I'm going to go to the gas station and get a pizza at the gas station.

Truckers are.

I guess. And then the other—

Yeah, I see those guys walk out of the damn gas station with like $50, $60 worth of food, man. Like they'll have 2 subs, some chili, macaroni and cheese, a pizza. Like, you know, I get it. When we go to the beach, we always stop at Wawa for sandwiches.

Yeah, they have good sand. Then there's this place, Buc-ee's. Have you ever been in Buc-ee's before?

Of course.

I mean, that's insane. Like, when I was in Daytona, I went to Buc-ee's because Jacob told me I had to go there and get brisket for him. And it's literally insane to have this huge station in the middle of the gas station in the middle of the place.

There's another gas station that I've been into that literally had like an all-you-can-eat buffet. I can't remember. It was in the middle of the country. It was probably in Tennessee somewhere.

Yeah.

I want to say it had to have been. I'm going to call my sensei, Allen, Uncle Woo, and see if he can remember that spot because there was— it was like, it was soul food too. It was so good. It was like, man, it was great. That was good. That was a good— That was like a hell of a stop. Like whatever, you know, like energy or divine intervention that put us into that gas station, shout out to that.

Yeah, everybody was like surrounding the thing and the guy was pulling out the brisket and then chopping it all up. And then they were making sandwiches and burritos and breakfast sandwiches and putting it on a biscuit. And then, you know, I ended up getting like a couple of pounds of it to bring home.

Oh, nice.

That'll like slide into the lady, had to go in the back to go get it. You know, they don't do it there. Oh. Over there. Yeah, and they're just like, as fast as they're making the sandwiches, people are picking 'em up and going to the register. Yeah. Yeah, it was crazy. And then they had a whole wall of food.

Buc-ee's, whoever's doing your marketing, shout out to y'all. Y'all snap, bro. Like I remember when Buc-ee's was in Indiana, like it wasn't a big deal. It's not a big thing. But then like, I don't know what the hell, whoever was doing y'all market, the Buc-ee's marketing team, man, y'all killed that shit because it turned into like this phenomenon. Like you have to stop like at Buc-ee's and I was seeing it everywhere and I'm, it was crazy, you know. Then they opened up in Illinois and now I get, is there Buc-ee's in Florida?

You said? There's one in Daytona and they're opening like some more. Oh, and then I read where Wawa is going to open up like the play— a couple places, and they're going to be as big as Buc-ee's. I mean, it's just crazy. Like, Buc-ee's has stuffed animals, clothing.

It's like Buc-ee's is like Walmart.

Yeah, it's crazy.

I mean, literally, they have TVs, DVDs. They have— it's— but it's smart because it's aimed for people traveling, taking road trips, and the truck drivers. It makes sense. Like, when you're in Indiana The gas stations, like a regular gas station where I was living during college, is just 10 times the size of the— of like every gas station because there's so many trucks that stop in them type of towns.

Oh yeah.

And so they gotta have the space and the room to turn around and get back on the interstate and all this other shit.

So, oh yeah, there was so many gas pumps and then they had a whole nother section for the trucks.

Exactly.

And that— they had electric charging stations everywhere. Like, I feel like crazy.

Every gas station in Indiana along the highway is like like literally every gas station except when you're in the middle of bum, you know, whatever.

And there's like in Buckhead too, I think you can go in there and get like a haircut and massage.

You could definitely— they got showers.

Yeah, they got like everything going on.

And I'm there, I think a couple of them may even have like those, like if you need an hour, they have those rooms where they lock. Yeah, you sleep. Yeah, I think they have those too.

Oh yeah. So yeah, because there's like two sides, the retail side, and then there's like the trucker area. If you're in the truck or you want to camp, you come up with your camper RVs. Yeah, then you need to clean it out and all that stuff. So here's, here's the thing, like with restaurants, right? You know, down here, you know, and I, and I compare, like, whatever, don't— down here, like, you go— I go on my news app or I'm scrolling through Facebook and it's constantly like dirty dining.

My wife and my daughter went to breakfast last weekend and she fucking— sorry, she unrolled the, the, the napkins and a roach ran out.

Oh, I would have laughed.

And she did. And it's so messed up because the weekend before, we actually— that's what you get when you find like a decent price place, you know? Like, you know, it was— the, the food was great. I had a— we had a good meal, but, you know, Then you go back the next weekend and that happens. It's like, wow. Like, you know, like you lose your appetite for that place.

Yeah.

And then they went to another place and ended up having even like another shitty experience just off of customer service because— but you, you know, going to breakfast down here on Saturday mornings, man, you're in for a treat.

Going to breakfast any day, you're in for a treat. No, but I'm just saying, like in California, And I remember going there years and years and years ago. When you go to California, on the door or next to the door, they have to have a big sign. It's 8.5 by 11 sheet of paper with an A, a B, a C, a D. I think they need to start doing that in Florida and they need to do it like nationwide. Yeah, they probably should. Because I think that's gonna put more pressure on restaurants to have better cleanliness.

You know, one thing about South Florida, you know, it's gotta be tough, right? Because I mean, like, I don't know where you live, but where I live there's lots of water.

Oh yeah.

So we tend to have like water bugs, which are giant, gigantic cockroaches. And you know, if you see one or two in your house, like that's kind of like a, it's like a South Florida thing. It's like having a, it's like the curly tail lizard that lives underneath here, you know, your dishwasher or your damn refrigerator that you can never get out of your house, and you only see him on like Friday the 13th and shit, you know what I mean? But yeah, so like I can only imagine how hard it is to maintain a cleanly, you know, restaurant, especially when the way that all the restaurants are built next to, you know, they're all in these like strip malls.

Yeah.

So like you're depending on your neighbors also to be clean.

Yeah. One of the things I owned a restaurant. So even when I had, when I worked in the hotel business, one of the things like we used to get rid of—

I don't even want to talk about hotels.

Well, I'm just saying we should get rid of all the boxes. So when I had my restaurant, we unpacked all the boxes outside. We did not bring boxes inside the restaurant. It was like a, I got all the employees back there and we just like unbox everything, all the produce, all everything, bring it in.

They like to live in those little nooks and crannies, man.

Yeah, you gotta get, you can't have boxes piled up. They get in the boxes.

It's just moisture.

Moisture. No, it's just bad. And then rain comes and the bugs come from the rain. But the thing is, you know, you gotta spray, you gotta treat. Even here, like we have, we're lucky. We had a pest control guy next door. We saw some ants in here. He put some gel there. Oh, he put some gel there.

It's getting better, but it's, they're like, I don't know if they, they're maneuvering around the gel at this point.

So the, no, but I'm just saying like, I just like, you know, I don't know.

It's like living in South Florida. I feel like it's par for the course.

Like, but do you think they should go out the news station and do dirty dining and report to people who have dirty dining? Hell yeah. They should close.

They shouldn't even report it.

They should close the damn health department, close it. And then the dirty dining guy from like Channel 10.

So announcing it sucks, right?

Yeah.

Like at the end of the day, but you know, that's something that the public should know. Like, you know what I mean? Especially if you know you ate a burrito from someplace yesterday and on Thursday morning you're waking up and you're puking and vomiting and every nostril Every orifice of your body is leaking bodily fluid and stuff, you know, like, you know, you should probably know that they're on dirty dining. And, you know, I don't know the compensation. That's never happened to me. You know, I've only gotten sick eating. I've literally had food poisoning twice in my life. One time when I was working here, I ate some damn sushi and I never have, I have not had sushi since. And another time when I was a little boy, I had, I don't even remember what it was. But talking, it's like snitching, right? I don't know. Like I'm from the no snitching era, stop snitching. But I think that the public definitely deserves it, right?

No, I see now they started posting like clean restaurants too. Like, oh, it's clean.

But yeah, you know, come to think of it, like I never even paid attention to that. But like in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, they have the same, it's not like the ABC rating that you see up north, but they have the state of Wisconsin sheet in their windows like, this is passed. Or, you know, like, I just think they should make people do that in Florida because in New York, you go to New York, they have— that's just like a— it's almost like a, a trophy, right? Like if you get an A, yeah, that's a big deal. Because I mean, just same like up in New York, I mean, same down like down here in South Florida, they're dealing with the same type of problems like with the rats, the roaches, the, right, the fleas, the bed bugs, you know what I'm saying? So they deal with a lot of the same issues.

No, I'm just saying, I think they should do it. Maybe it would put more pressure on the restaurant, the restaurant owner, the employees, you know, to keep places cleaner. I mean, you know, service is always a problem. I mean, man. But it needs to.

I get it too, man. Like, you know, some people, like, we go to this, my kids love Wendy's, right? And there's this woman, like, word is bond, like she must have like a cot in the back of the Wendy's because it's only her. And she is always so pissed off.

Uh-oh.

You know what I'm saying? Like, so it's like, also I get it, right? Like, you know, there's these businesses, they can't find good employees. They can't find people to like come to work every day. You know, people, the youth come when they want, they're whatever, you know what I'm saying? So, you know, it's tough, but at the same time, like, man, find something better. I saw, you know, we all have the opportunity to make changes in our lives. And I think that, you know, we get stuck and get very complacent with our lives. And then we feel like we can't, or this is all that I can do.

Well, I think you gotta sometimes step outside of your comfort zone.

I mean, it ain't all about being comfortable. Like, stepping outside of your comfort zone is one thing, but like, you have to believe in yourself first. Like, you know, someone quitting their job just because they want to step out of their comfort zone, that doesn't mean shit.

Well, I'm not saying quitting your job. I'm saying like, If you want to get ahead, you got to do things to get ahead.

Yeah, like rob banks.

Okay, well, let's not get into all that borrowing things from Home Depot and all that stuff.

Why not?

But that's just— it's not. So here's one.

I know the revolution will be televised, ladies and gentlemen.

I know you like talking about AI, right? So I came across something really cool. When I was scrolling through my news app, huh?

I mean, the only thing that I was going to mention was about AI related.

Oh, so let me tell you this AI thing that's going on. IBM has launched an AI Fundamentals program. It's available through their SkillBuild learning portal. So it's at skillsbuild.org. It's a 10-hour program of videos, and IBM wants to train 30 million people by 2030 through this 10-hour course.

I'm gonna do it this weekend.

And it's, um, they also had a cybersecurity class also that you can take, and it's all free. It's interesting. So I went in, I registered, and I looked, and there was little modules. I guess each one is 35 or 40 minutes, right?

Nice.

And then they teach you about AI, and at the end you get a certificate. Well, I'm just saying, but you know, we always talk about like, is AI going to replace humans?

Yeah, it is.

Yeah, but we also say that humans who know how to use AI are going to replace people who don't know how to use AI.

Well, that's facts. But yeah, the— so there's A video of, uh, one of the Google CEOs. I don't know, I can't remember exactly. It's, I don't know, it's a white guy, that's all I know. He's talking about AI. It's messed up. Coders, people who, it's not there yet. Like people who code and stuff like that and like Python and C++, but he said within the next year, bye-bye those jobs. I mean, I've seen like where like Go basically, I don't want to sound like doomsday scenario, but to me that's basically what I got out of it. If, if a, if a, the way he was explaining it is how it's going to work. Is say, say you like TikTok, right? And you're like, and you have, uh, LML, right?

LML, what do you mean?

Language model.

Okay, you know, a learning— what is it, learning?

LLM, whatever it is, it's one of those three letters, however you put them together.

I can't remember.

So, uh, the learning language model, LLM.

Okay, right. Yeah.

And you, and you say to you, prompted to, I want you to clone, like copy TikTok, right? And, and you put in all the parameters and you, and it does it for you.

Oh, I believe that's going to come, but that's crazy. But I don't know, how are they going to control?

They're not going to be able to control that.

Right. They're not. Well, you know, the person's still going to have to have money to advertise the product to get people to use it. That's— are you? Well, how?

I mean, you can, you can— I can tell AI to post 300 social media posts for the one every hour for the rest of the time that exists. Yeah. And I don't have to do anything.

Okay, but is everybody going to see that, or is social media going to remove it or push it down? I don't know.

How is it good enough?

I don't— I have no idea.

How will they ever know? You're never gonna know.

If you— they're never gonna know. But I mean, if you post too much on Facebook, you know, your stuff does get pushed out of the way.

That's, that's, that's an urban myth.

Well, I don't know.

The more content that you publish on social media.

Well, that's not what you guys tell me. You guys tell me, oh, only post like a couple of times a day.

Yes. Only a couple. It is about your brand and the type of business that you're in. Right. For us, we don't have the type of business to post content for 10 times a day.

Okay.

We would be posting the same shit over and over and over and over and over again. That's why we post at our peak times when people actually see what we are posting and not just posting the post. It's calculated, man.

Okay. It's calculated.

Data.

Now here, let me ask you what you think about this. So I was talking to this guy who has an interesting company. The service is free to restaurants. So restaurants that use Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub, which is pretty much the 3 main ways people get delivery.

I don't know, I don't use any.

Well, I'm just saying, neither do I. I don't get food delivered. I'm a cooker. So, uh, you know, restaurants lose a lot of money on using these services because people cancel orders that get prepared, or the drivers don't come pick them up because they don't want to make the trips. Or the food gets delivered and the person complains half the french fries were gone, they didn't get their garlic roll, the pizza, all the cheese slid off to the side.

I mean, you could go on. I can only imagine.

Right. A soda's missing, the baked potato's gone, right?

'Cause I mean, the Uber, the driver's not looking to see if whatever's supposed to be there is there.

Right.

I've never seen someone ask, Is the fries in here? Or I've been at, you know, like I've never been in line and asked them to check what's in the bag.

Or like I've seen video, I saw a video like on TikTok. Now who knows if it's real or it's fake. There's some fake videos like on, you know, on these social media apps. I think they're fake or they're just like acted out like on purpose. But you'll see these guys and they'll say like, I'm a DoorDash driver. This guy ordered this massive burrito from Uh, what's the burrito place? You know, you know what I'm talking about, the Chipotle. Okay. And the guy's got this massive burrito and there was no tip. He goes, so I'm not delivering it. I'm sitting there just munching down on the person. Yeah, I don't know. Do you think that would be real or not real?

I don't know. I'm sure it's real because the one lady I went I don't know why we were at IHOP that morning. I think my daughter asked for some pancakes and I didn't, for whatever reason. And you know, their breakfast is really cheap, like $10 or some shit for whatever. Anyway, we're in there and a woman comes in and she's complaining because she didn't get her order and that her driver told her that She was rude, so she ate her shit.

That's crazy.

I was like, yo, hey, you don't be mean to people that's got your food.

My friend ordered sushi a couple weeks ago and they told me the driver called them up, said, yeah, it's raining too much, I'm not going to deliver your sushi. In fact, I'm sitting in a parking lot eating it now.

Nice. And, uh, shout out to that guy.

That, I mean, that takes some balls. And then it go— then they ended up having to go to—

what are they going to do now?

Well, they called the restaurant and they ended up going up, going to the— walking over to the restaurant themselves, picking up the sushi and bringing it home.

What they should have done in the first place, right?

So I'm just saying, it's just crazy. So this company helps businesses recover they're like all this, you know, when they get chargebacks and this and that, they, they fight with the Uber, DoorDash, and Grubhub to get the restaurant's money back, and then they keep 35% of the whatever they recover. But it costs the restaurants no money. I think that's a pretty good deal for the restaurant. It's all run by hooking up the DoorDash, hooking up the services to their dashboard And then they can, they can automatically recover it. Mm-hmm. The chargebacks, because some of the chargebacks are, you know, I mean, some of them are probably super fraudulent, but I mean, well, it could be the fault of the driver eating half the French fries on the way to your house.

Or is it because they packaged it and it fell over?

Well, sometimes those don't— they don't win those. Like, you know, then, well, you know, that's one thing when restaurant—

how did they even win? How do they know?

How do—

what is the criteria? I have so many questions.

Let's say you get— so I was asking the guy, he goes, oh, so let's say somebody orders a steak and they go, oh, my steak is well done. Well, you're not going to win— the restaurant's not going to win that charge back.

But people are charged— that is mad crazy to me. Yeah, no, they're charging, man.

They're charging back deliveries. The guy was showing me the dashboard of restaurants.

Like if you go, you get your food and it's the wrong food, they're charging it back.

Yeah, that's some petty ass shit, but I, I guess they charge it back.

Or why don't you— yeah, see, this is, this is the exact reason why I don't do that type. I don't, I don't, I don't order food. I just don't.

Yeah, it's kind of crazy. I mean, it's just, you know, there's a lot of struggles in business. I would definitely say like Go check out this, you know, I'm going to look more at this skillsbuild.org. I think it's pretty interesting, you know. You know, I don't know if that's going to help you get a better job or something, but I was reading this thing and it was talking about one of the—

it might not help you get a better job, but you might be able to keep your job for a little bit longer.

Yeah, that's true. But this one thing that I was reading the other day was talking about what is the one of the biggest growth jobs in the United States right now. So it said people with cybersecurity training. I'm like, what? There's nothing. I don't think there's any way that— I don't think there's a way that you can protect your business, let's say, with some sort of cybersecurity service because there is, huh?

There is. Yes, bro. You, I mean, you have a lot of sensitive information, right? But for you, it's all stored in a separate, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, it's all in the cloud.

Right, right, right.

So, which means it's safer.

But you're not reliable for it.

No, I'm not liable for it.

Not liable for it.

Right, 'cause it's stored on somebody else's cloud.

Which is, you know, if their cloud got hacked, it got hacked.

But I mean, we're seeing more hacks than ever right now. Yeah, but what I'm saying is, is when you look at all the breaches and stuff like that where people got, you know, their, their business data got breached, it all comes down to the same thing. It's all this phishing stuff, right? People getting links that they shouldn't click on. You know, and stuff like that. I mean, that could be a whole discussion about cybersecurity.

Yeah. I mean, I think, I think businesses need to— moving forward in the future is going to be, you know, detrimental for businesses to have, like they have social media teams and digital marketing teams and advertising teams and sales teams. There's going to be a whole cybersecurity division because everything is going to be internet.

No, I think that you need to educate your employees about cybersecurity.

Your employees ain't— that ain't they job, bro.

No, but most of the breaches are happening from somebody getting a link and clicking on it.

Is that their fault or is that because your IT department isn't keeping these computers up to date?

Could be somebody that gets a link on their phone and then all of a sudden that invades your business.

That's not that person.

Problem. Well, people need to be educated on what not to— what links not to click on.

I think you're asking a lot.

I think if you go read about these breaches, that's where they find most of the stuff happening. Well, that's the pod. So we're all potted out. Rocky's napping because it's raining outside. Yep.

As—

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