“தெய்வத்தான் ஆகாது எனினும் முயற்சி தன் மெய்வருத்தக் கூலி தரும்.”
Even when the gods withhold, effort pays the wage of the body’s labour. Thiruvalluvar, Kural 619 (my rendering)
This post covers five things.
- What I saw at a takeaway counter in Blacktown, and what my wife said about it.
- What admiration of work means
- What the numbers say about how we rank and price this kind of work.
- Why the admiration is older than the salary, by a few hundred thousand years.
- Where my own admiration falls short of the standard I am about to set.
Before I argue, the concessions.
My wife was right. A grown man standing still in a crowded restaurant, smiling at a young woman he does not know, is a scene that reads one way, and she does not get access to my inner monologue to read it another. Optics are not a conspiracy against innocent men. They are the accumulated evidence of men who were not innocent.
Admiration is not advocacy. Nothing I felt that evening shortened her shift, raised her pay or lightened her load. Warm feelings are the cheapest currency in circulation.
I have never worked a service counter at pace. I am describing a craft from the audience, which is where the least qualified critics always sit.
And one busy evening in one restaurant is an anecdote, not a dataset. The data comes later, and it stands or falls on its own.
The counter
Last week we went to Radhe Chatpata in Blacktown. The place was heaving, so I ordered takeaway and stood to the side to wait.
Behind the counter was a girl running the whole front of house. Orders coming in over the counter and over the phone. Food arriving from the kitchen in no order that matched the queue. Bags to pack, dockets to match, payments to take, names to call. Every stream moving at once, none of them waiting for her convenience.
She dropped nothing. She matched docket to container to bag to customer at a pace I would struggle to narrate, let alone perform. There was a rhythm to it. Reach, check, fold, staple, call, tap, next. I stood there watching with a smile on my face.
My wife came over and said, “Don’t do it. She may mistake you.”
She was right, and I stopped. But the question stayed in the car with me all the way home. What exactly was I looking at?
Admiring
Here is the distinction the whole post rests on, because the two get blurred and the blur does damage in both directions.
Desire wants to possess the person. Admiration wants to witness the skill. Desire is about what she could be to me. Admiration is about what she is regardless of me. The first makes her an object. The second is one of the few ways one stranger honours another.
We have collapsed the two, and I concede men built the collapse. Enough men have used watching as the opening move of wanting that a woman behind a counter cannot afford to assume the difference. That is her rational caution, not her failure of imagination. But notice what the collapse costs. When every gaze is presumed to be appetite, there is no legal way left to stand in front of excellence and simply take it in. Run the symmetry test. If she had been a sixty year old man, my smile would have been read as warmth. Same smile, same skill, same distance. The reading changed because the identities changed, and that tells you the problem is in the reading.
What I was actually watching
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi spent decades paging people at random moments and asking what they were doing and how they felt. The pattern that kept emerging was a state he called flow, which appeared when three conditions lined up: a clear goal, immediate feedback, and a challenge sitting right at the edge of the person’s skill. His research found that flow occurred more often during work than during free time. Not on the beach. Not on the couch. At work.
The girl at the counter was inside all three conditions at once. The goal could not be clearer, right order to right customer, hot. The feedback is instant, a wrong bag announces itself in seconds. And the challenge sat exactly at the edge of her capacity, which is why it was worth watching at all. Nobody stands and smiles at a man watching television.
The product manager in me noticed something else. She was running a textbook operation. Batching the packing, sequencing by pickup rather than by order time, keeping her work in progress low so nothing sat half done. I have watched funded teams with dashboards and standups manage concurrent demand worse than one person at a chaat counter on a Saturday night. Nobody wrote her playbook down. She derived it under load.
Prestige against worth
Now the second blurred pair, because the first one was personal and this one is structural. Prestige is what a society says a job deserves. Worth is what the job actually demands and delivers. We treat them as synonyms. They are not even correlated in the direction we pretend.
Sociologists have measured occupational prestige since the 1940s, and the method gives the game away. The most influential scale, Duncan’s Socioeconomic Index, derived its prestige scores from weighted indices of education and income. Read that again. We did not discover that low paid work has low prestige. We defined prestige as a function of pay and then acted surprised when the counter girl ranked below the consultant. The circle is complete and it was drawn on purpose.
So what does the pay side of the circle look like in this country, for this work?
| Measure | Figure |
|---|---|
| National minimum wage from 1 July 2026 | $26.44 per hour |
| Minimum wage over a full time week of 38 hours | $1,004.72 |
| Average full time ordinary weekly earnings, late 2025 (ABS) | $2,051.10 |
| Minimum full time week as a share of the average | 49 percent |
The 2026 wage review lifted the national minimum wage to $26.44 an hour, and a Level 1 food and beverage attendant under the Hospitality Award starts at exactly that rate. Average full time ordinary earnings reached $2,051.10 a week in late 2025. The arithmetic is short. A full week of the work I stood admiring earns 49 percent of the average full time wage. Less than half, for a job I could not do at her standard, and I say that as someone paid well above the average to do things that produce considerably less visible value per minute.
I am a social democrat. My declared bias is that this gap is too wide, and I held that belief before I looked up a single number. The numbers survived the bias. They usually do on this topic, which is precisely why nobody in my income bracket likes looking them up.
Older than money
Here is the frame that stops this being a mood.
Coined money is roughly two and a half thousand years old. Hands portioning cooked food and passing it to another human are older than that by several hundred thousand years at minimum, older than our species if the cooking hypothesis holds. The skill came first. The wage is a recent annotation on it, a sticker on a museum piece. When we let the sticker stand in for the piece, we have the relationship exactly backwards.
I have always watched work this way, before I had the argument to defend it. I watch my daughter when she plays, fully absorbed, narrating a world with a logic only she audits. I watched a friend present once and stopped hearing the content because the delivery itself was the performance. I watch my wife paint, the specific hesitation before a brush touches canvas, and the absence of hesitation after. The same posture every time. Standing slightly outside someone’s concentration, taking in a thing money did not create and does not measure.
What was I looking at, at that counter? A human being at the exact edge of her capacity, holding it. That is one of the oldest sights our species produces. We used to gather around it. Now we check whether it pays well before deciding whether it deserves our respect.
Where I fall short
And now the part where I stop pointing outward.
I admired her, and then I paid the exact menu price and left. My admiration cost me nothing and paid her nothing. It did not even reach her, because my wife was right that it could not safely be delivered.
Worse. If my daughter comes to me at eighteen and says she wants to run a counter, I already know the first thing I will feel, and it will not be reverence for flow states. It will be the salary. The lens I have spent this post accusing society of holding is installed behind my own eyes, and one evening in Blacktown did not uninstall it. I can see the beauty of the work. I am not yet the man who would let someone I love be paid 49 percent of average for producing it. Until I can close that gap, this post is an observation, not a principle.
References
- Fair Work Ombudsman, minimum wages and Hospitality Industry (General) Award pay guides: https://www.fairwork.gov.au/pay-and-wages/minimum-wages
- Australian Bureau of Statistics, Average Weekly Earnings, Australia: https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/earnings-and-working-conditions/average-weekly-earnings-australia/latest-release
- Csikszentmihalyi, M., Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (1990). Overview of flow theory: https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/flow-theory
- NORC at the University of Chicago, Measuring Occupational Prestige on the 2012 General Social Survey: https://gss.norc.org/content/dam/gss/get-documentation/pdf/reports/methodological-reports/MR122%20Occupational%20Prestige.pdf
- Hughes, B. T. et al., “Occupational Prestige: The Status Component of Socioeconomic Status”, Collabra: Psychology (2024): https://online.ucpress.edu/collabra/article/10/1/92882/200020/Occupational-Prestige-The-Status-Component-of
- Thiruvalluvar, Thirukkural, Kural 619.
Demystifying a skeptic's world 