Is It Okay for Restaurants to Racially Profile Their Employees? (Rebroadcast)

We seem to have decided that ethnic food tastes better when it's served by people of that ethnicity (or at least something close). Does this make sense -- and is it legal?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:55Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, podcast listeners. This is Stephen Dubner. It's August, and we here at Freakonomics Radio get really busy this time of year.

• 2:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  And so we are bringing you an episode from our archives. It's called, "Is It OK for Restaurants to Racially Profile Their Employees?" Hope you enjoy it. We will be back next week with a brand new episode of Freakonomics Radio.

• 3:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hey, Levitt, pretend for a minute that you've decided to open up a restaurant. Can you imagine that?

• 3:21Speaker 01

  Sure. Easy, easy to imagine something like that.

• 3:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Would you enjoy it?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  No, I would hate it more than anything.

• 3:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  But you can imagine. You can at least imagine.

• 3:30Speaker 01

  I can imagine, yeah.

• 3:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  What kind of food would you serve?

• 3:33Speaker 01

  Probably fast food, because it's my favorite kind of food. I think that's what I would probably open.

• 3:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Could you imagine opening, like, something with an Asian cuisine?

• 3:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a really great Asian restaurant in the basement of LaGuardia Airport. I could open one of those. Do you know what I'm talking about?

• 3:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  Um.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  You've eaten there with me. I've made you eat there.

• 3:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, yeah, that's kind of fast food. Yeah, sure.

• 4:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Fast food Asian.

• 4:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  The sweet and sour chicken. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.

• 4:05Speaker 01

  Bourbon chicken. Bourbon chicken.

• 4:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bourbon chicken. That's what it is, the bourbon chicken. Okay. So you would open a, you would open an airport fast food Chinese restaurant would be your, your heart's desire. And let me ask you this. How do you think you would approach hiring the waitstaff of this Chinese fast food airport restaurant? Do you want them to match the food in some way?

• 4:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 4:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why is that?

• 4:36Speaker 01

  When it comes to ethnic food, I'm not sure why, but we've decided that it tastes better when it's served by people of that ethnicity.

• 4:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm guessing you may have noticed this too. We certainly have in my family. My son Solomon noticed it a few years ago when he was like 10. I have some friends, New Yorkers, who lived in Japan for several years, learned the language, and then moved back to New York. And for one of their first meals back, they went to an authentic Japanese restaurant, and they started talking to the waiter in Japanese, but he did not know a word of Japanese because he was Korean. The other waiters there were Vietnamese, Filipino, Chinese. What is going on here? That was a question put to us by one of our listeners.

• 5:28Speaker 02

  Hey, Freakonomics Radio. This is Bailey Hicken out of Solic City, Utah. And I have a question for you guys. I was at dinner last night having sushi, and I had this realization that every worker at every sushi restaurant that I've ever been to is Asian, or at least Asian-ish looking. So is it a prerequisite that you have to be Asian looking to work at a sushi restaurant? And if it is, can they do that?

• 5:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bailey explained a bit further in an email. She wrote, "If someone wanted to hire all white or American-looking people at, let's say, some very Americanized restaurant, then people would be pissed." Or all black, all women, all gay, whatever, really. "How do the Asians get away with it?" she wrote. "Let it be noted that my grandpa is Japanese, so I am a quarter, and I love the Asians."

• 6:18Speaker 02

  So maybe you guys could look into it for me. Maybe it could be a podcast one day. Who knows? A girl can dream, right?

• 6:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yes, Bailey, a girl can dream. And we will dream right along with you. We will try to figure out where this restaurant racial profiling comes from, if it makes sense, if it's legal. And of course, we should know it's not only Asian restaurants we're talking about here. We're talking about restaurants that make Indian food, served by people from Pakistan and Bangladesh, Italian food, served by Croatian or Serbian waitstaff, and Mexican food, too. Speaking of which, hey, what's your favorite Mexican dish?

• 6:58Speaker 03

  I love the chimichanga.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  From WNYC Studios, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 7:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Neither Steve Levitt nor I have ever run a restaurant. So to try to figure out the ethnic hiring patterns at restaurants, I thought we'd start with some people who actually do run a restaurant, or two. Okay, we're in the kitchen, seeing some charred red peppers.

• 7:50Speaker 05

  This is the enchilada station and the quesadilla station.

• 7:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Nat Milner, and this is his wife, Liz O. Milner.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  This kitchen smells amazing.

• 8:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Liz and Nat own and operate two restaurants in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side, pretty close to where I live, as it turns out. And as it turns out, my family and I really like both their restaurants. One is called Elizabeth's Neighborhood Table, named after Liz. It calls its cuisine thoughtful, American comfort food. And right next door is Gabriella's Restaurant and Tequila Bar. That's where we are now. You want to walk us through here to the kitchen quickly? Sure. Gabriella's, as you've probably figured out by now, is a Mexican restaurant.

• 8:31Speaker 05

  This is Rita. Rita's in charge of everything. She makes all the sauces, the mole.

• 8:35Speaker 06

  Bien.

• 8:37Speaker 05

  This is the homemade corn tortillas being made right here. It's a real old school metal press. You just put a ball of dough in there, flatten it out, and throw it on the hot griddle.

• 8:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nat Milner comes from a real New York restaurant family. His uncle, Arthur Cutler, was a pioneer, a Jewish guy on Long Island, who figured out that what New York really needed was a big, noisy, family-style Italian place called Carmine's and a Chinatown-style noodle shop with roast meats called Ali's and Virgil's, a southern-style barbecue joint in Times Square, back when Times Square was really Times Square. Arthur Cutler liked to zig when everybody else was zagging, as I learned from his nephew, Nat. So, OK, so let's go back to the beginning of Gabriella's. First of all, who was Gabriella, the person?

• 9:29Speaker 05

  Well, Gabriella worked for my uncle, and she would have been helping out with my cousin and cooking meals once in a while. And my uncle would come home and say, holy cow, this food is great. What is this? It was like the, you know, late 80s, early 90s, and everything was Tex-Mex. And Gabriella said, I don't know, this is just what I cook at home.

• 9:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  She's Mexican, Gabriella?

• 9:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, Gabriella Hernandez.

• 9:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  So it was kind of homestyle, fresh, Mexican? What part of Mexico is she from?

• 9:54Speaker 05

  Guadalajara.

• 9:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  OK. And so your uncle says, hey, we should open a restaurant featuring your food? That's the way it worked?

• 10:02Speaker 05

  That's, yeah, yeah, basically. She brought up, her whole family came into the business.

• 10:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  No kidding.

• 10:07Speaker 05

  And her uncle was the original chef. He came up with all the, Hector came up with all the recipes and designed the whole menu and put it all together.

• 10:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  So when we call Gabriella's a Mexican restaurant, it really is pretty Mexican. The mole's, the ceviche's, the chimichangas. Arthur Cutler, Nat's uncle, the restaurant pioneer, he died young in 1997. Nat was living in Alaska, where he'd gone to hang out, fish salmon. And that's where he met Liz. She's from Boston. She went to Alaska as a Jesuit volunteer. By now, they'd fallen in love, married, had a kid. And when Nat's uncle died and Nat heard the family could use some help in their restaurants back in New York, Nat and Liz moved back and Nat wound up running Gabriella's. The food today is pretty much the same as it was at the beginning. The recipes are authentic Mexican.

• 11:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  The vibe is Mexican-ish. The tequila is most definitely Mexican. Nat and Liz regularly go to Mexico to taste tequila from the barrels to decide which batch to bring back to Gabriella's. Should we be drinking some while we talk?

• 11:16Speaker 05

  We could. It's almost time. We have our own select barrels here. They'd be perfect breakfast tequila.

• 11:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you really? Is there breakfast tequila?

• 11:24Speaker 05

  We could, we could make something up.

• 11:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nat showed me a selection of blanco tequilas, that's clear, unaged tequila, and then some reposados. Those are the darker ones that have aged in barrels for less than a year, and some añejos, which have aged longer.

• 11:41Speaker 05

  So this is a 364-day reposado.

• 11:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  Tequila tasting, according to Nat Milner, is a lot like wine tasting. We wafted, we sniffed.

• 11:52Speaker 05

  You want to give it a little swirl, tip it on the side as well, way over the top of the glass.

• 11:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then, just before noon, we drank.

• 12:01Speaker 05

  Cheers.

• 12:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cheers. Mmm, delicious. So good.

• 12:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's kind of yummy, huh?

• 12:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Fantastic. So that's quite a bit of authenticity for a Mexican restaurant in New York. What about the people who work there? So in a, in a given, let's say, busy shift, I don't know, a Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, obviously get really busy. How many front of room workers do you have here?

• 12:25Speaker 05

  We'll have, on a real busy night in the summer, we'll have about ten servers on.

• 12:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ten servers, okay. Is that waitresses, waiters?

• 12:32Speaker 05

  No, waiters and waitresses.

• 12:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, and then...

• 12:35Speaker 05

  And then bussers, and runners, and bartenders, and barbacks, and all the kitchen staff.

• 12:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, all in front of the room, front of the house, on a Friday night, let's say, would be then twenty, twenty-five people?

• 12:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, that sounds about right.

• 12:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, how many of them are Mexican?

• 12:48Speaker 05

  Well, I don't really have the breakdown.

• 12:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  You don't have the papers in front of you?

• 12:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, but, no, I mean, I would say probably forty percent.

• 12:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, is that right?

• 12:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, but everyone's pretty much Latin. Everyone speaks Spanish. A lot of people from Colombia, Ecuador, Dominican Republic.

• 13:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  Does it matter that a server might be Dominican, serving Mexican food, in your view?

• 13:08Speaker 05

  I don't think that matters.

• 13:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, right. But, how many non-Latinos do you have, front of the house?

• 13:15Speaker 05

  Very few.

• 13:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  Why so few non-Latinos in a Mexican restaurant? Does this come from the supply side, the restaurant, or the demand side, the customers? As Nat talked me through it, he pointed out that he doesn't actually do the hiring, the general manager does, and he is from Mexico.

• 13:37Speaker 05

  You have a corporate culture, right? And you have a group of people, and you're trying to grow a team. And, you know, you put out ads, a lot of ads go in Spanish newspapers, especially for the back of the house. On the front of the house, we tend to always have a good selection of people who want to work. And, you know, we don't really advertise for jobs.

• 13:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  They kind of come to you through other people who are working here? Gotcha.

• 14:00Speaker 05

  And, you know, we have sisters, and brothers, and cousins, and extended families, working throughout the...

• 14:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  I assume they're mostly then speaking Spanish to each other on the job?

• 14:09Speaker 05

  Mostly, yeah.

• 14:09Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gotcha.

• 14:10Speaker 05

  Especially in the back.

• 14:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Especially in the back, right. So the back is all Latinos, well?

• 14:14Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 14:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gotcha. Okay, so what if I have, or I'm twenty-five years old, I just moved to New York from Pennsylvania, and I happen to be white? And I'm looking for a waiter job, or waitress job, and I come to you guys?

• 14:25Speaker 05

  We would hire you, for sure.

• 14:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  You would?

• 14:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, you want a job?

• 14:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  I do not, actually. At this moment, I do not. Although I could be your tequila taster, I think I'd be good at that.

• 14:33Speaker 05

  We honestly don't get a lot of people like that walking in.

• 14:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, so that's what I want to know, is how it works? So is it a kind of self-selection, in terms of the hiring and the applying?

• 14:41Speaker 05

  In that sense, yeah. I mean, like, back in the day, you could be sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old, looking for a job as a busboy.

• 14:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 14:47Speaker 05

  Now those jobs just aren't there, because you have adults who want those jobs.

• 14:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Like even paper boys are now adults.

• 14:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, you have people who, you know, why would I have a seventeen year old working here when I can have a

• 14:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 14:58Speaker 05

  Twenty-eight year old man with a, who has a baby and is trying to support his family.

• 15:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, let me ask you this, for the people who come here to eat, do you think they care that the front of the house is all Latino in terms of making it kind of the right experience, whether that's about authenticity or whatnot?

• 15:16Speaker 05

  Um, I, I think there's a little aspect of that, but, um, I don't, I don't give it much credence.

• 15:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:25Speaker 05

  I mean, it might be a little bit. I know that when you walk into Gabriella's, you don't want to see me.

• 15:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean. Why? I mean, I don't mind seeing you.

• 15:33Speaker 05

  I, I know, but you're looking to see Gabriella, you're right, you know? I have red curly hair and a red beard and, I, I mean, I think there is something to say about that. I mean, the people want to come to a Mexican restaurant and be surrounded by Spanish speaking people.

• 15:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 05

  With dark hair.

• 15:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right, yeah.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  For one, I feel like the pace, the way things move here, I know we've had some people come in who are not Latino, but they'll be here, but they don't stay long. I think it's just one of those things where it's moving fast, you're in the kitchen, you're speaking Spanish.

• 16:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's because of, so it's a language barrier.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  You understand the food, you're, you're excited about the food.

• 16:09Speaker 05

  If you come to work here and you don't speak Spanish and you don't fit in with the culture of the family meal and eating with people and laughing with people, you kind of feel like you're a little bit outside of it. I even feel that when I'm walking around, but I, I just muscle through.

• 16:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  But what about restaurants that serve Asian cuisine? Why would a Japanese-style sushi restaurant hire waitstaff who are Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino?

• 16:37Speaker 05

  Well, I think it goes back to the same thing about who walks in the door looking for these jobs. You know, if, if I'm Asian, I'm not going to go to a Mexican restaurant and say, you know, can I get a job here? I mean, you might, and, you know, we hire all kinds of people, but, you know, you might rather go to an Asian restaurant and feel a little more.

• 16:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 16:57Speaker 05

  You know, I, I don't have a good answer for that.

• 17:02Speaker 05

  But I think a lot of the people who are coming here are the first generation.

• 17:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 17:06Speaker 05

  They're just here, they're trying to work their butts off, they're trying to make something and, you know, there's some truth to that.

• 17:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, so that's interesting. So the work ethic of the immigrant, or maybe the first-generation American, coincides well with the needs of a restaurant that happens to be an ethnic restaurant, right? I mean, it's, um, so that might be one reason why the hiring kind of self-selects itself like that.

• 17:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, I would think. It's got something to do with it. You know, I will also say, like, you know, you're talking about the 25-year-old kid who's coming to New York City, and he's trying to make something, and he's trying to get a job. He's not coming to New York to be a waiter. He can do that in Omaha, right?

• 17:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 17:38Speaker 05

  So he's coming here to do something else, whatever that might be. It's like that TV show Taxi, right? None of them are really taxi drivers, except for Alex, right? Everyone was an actor, everyone was a boxer, everyone was a comedian, whatever. It's the same kind of thing. So if he's sitting here, and I have someone who's more of a, you know, sees the restaurant industry as a career.

• 17:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 17:59Speaker 05

  Um, you know, I would certainly think of them over someone who's, you know, maybe going to be here three months and then get a show on Broadway and disappear or whatever.

• 18:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah. And that is a problem that Nat and Liz have had at their other restaurant, Elizabeth's Neighborhood Table. From the street, the two restaurants are just next door, but from the back, through the kitchen at Gabriella's, you see they're actually attached.

• 18:20Speaker 05

  And we have a secret back door over here.

• 18:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  And just like that, you go from a kitchen producing guacamole and ceviche

• 18:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  to a kitchen with pancakes and eggs on the griddle. Elizabeth's does a big brunch business with the classics. They have a great corned beef, by the way. Lunch and dinner bring creative salads and comfort foods like turkey meatloaf and grass-fed burgers.

• 18:46Speaker 03

  We have wonderful soups. I'm not even sure what soups we have today.

• 18:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, that's my corned beef.

• 18:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, I'm excited to see a can of Pam in your kitchen because I need Pam once in a while. Do you use it regularly?

• 19:00Speaker 03

  I do, I mean, on our-

• 19:01Speaker 05

  On the waffle iron.

• 19:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  On the waffle iron, yeah. Mm-hmm, okay. And the kitchen here-

• 19:05Speaker 03

  I don't know if I'm excited that you saw our Pam.

• 19:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, I know. The kitchen staff at Elizabeth's, like at Gabriella's, is all Latino. Orders are called out in Spanish.

• 19:14Speaker 07

  Uh, Mauro, dame unos pancakes con blueberries, por favor.

• 19:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  But step through the kitchen door into the dining room and you get a very different vibe. Gabriella's has Day of the Dead figurines and Mexican decor with empty tequila barrels out front. Elizabeth's looks like a New England beach house. Wayne Scoting, Martha Stewart-y color palette, brass wall sconces. The waitstaff is much more of a mix than Gabriella's. Most definitely not all Latino. So I have to say, this transports me to a place, I don't mean to sound racist because it's against me, but this transports me to a place where there's a lot of white people. Which, and, look, some of my best friends are white people.

• 19:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  So was there a, did you feel at some point, any kind of, not pressure, but desire to make the waitstaff look more like East Hampton-y or Connecticut-y?

• 20:09Speaker 05

  We really want to reflect the neighborhood here. I mean, that's really what we wanted to do.

• 20:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, there's plenty of white people in the neighborhood. I live in the neighborhood. You live in the neighborhood.

• 20:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, we have plenty of white servers, too.

• 20:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The chef at Elizabeth's neighborhood table is Tomas Aranias. He's from Mexico. Over the past decade-plus, he's worked at a lot of restaurants in New York, and he says he's noticed a big shift in the demographics.

• 20:31Speaker 07

  Everywhere you go now, it's, you gotta find Mexicans, all Latinos. It's not like before. I remember before, it was like, if you go like Italian cuisine, you find all Italian people. Now it's not.

• 20:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  But there's usually a split, he says, between the kitchen and the front of the house.

• 20:48Speaker 07

  If you see a lot of different restaurants, if you see in front of the house, it's like more like- Because white people in the front, some Latinos, but not a lot. I think in the back of the house is like, most of the time Latinos.

• 21:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you look at restaurant and food industry jobs in the US by ethnicity, as compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, you'll see that 25% of those jobs are held by Latinos, while Latinos make up only 17% of the US population. So for whatever reason, or set of reasons, restaurant work has become a Latino stronghold, especially in the kitchen. But here's my question. Is the practice of hiring Latino servers at a Mexican restaurant, or white servers at an American-style restaurant, or for that matter, Asian servers at a Japanese or Thai restaurant, is this discrimination?

• 21:40Speaker 01

  I personally wouldn't call that discrimination, or at least not the kind of discrimination to get upset about.

• 21:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  That, again, is Steve Levitt, my Freakonomics friend and co-author, who could see himself opening a Chinese fast-food restaurant at an airport.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  The kind of discrimination we usually worry about is discrimination where employers make choices about who to hire based on criteria that are unrelated to performance on the job. So for instance, if it's answering a phone and it's men versus women, when there's no evidence that men are better at answering phones than women. And so I would say in a Chinese restaurant, looking Asian is an important part of fulfilling the task. Those people don't cost any more to hire than the Mexican staff at a Mexican restaurant, or the Indian staff at an Indian restaurant, but they enhance the experience of the people who are dining there.

• 22:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because you think that the customer has a happier experience if he or she thinks that the waitstaff is related to the country where the food is from? That's the reason why it's better or more optimal?

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 22:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because honestly, as you're describing what does constitute discrimination, I was thinking that this is it, not the opposite of it.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  No, I think if that Chinese restaurant had not a single Asian person ever in sight, I bet that you and I would talk about that a lot when we were in the restaurant. And that would be evidence to me that it matters to the customers, whether the server staff are Asian or not.

• 23:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, but that may be just, I'm just curious whether maybe this is just a custom and because it's been around for a long time, we accept it as either sensible or optimal or fair, but maybe in fact, it's none of those. Like, what if I say, you know what, most podcasts hosts are men, or most of the hosts of the biggest podcasts in the world are men, therefore, that's evidence that men are plainly better, and therefore, I do not want any women touching my podcast. Isn't that pretty similar to arguing that I do not want any non-Asian people serving me Asian food?

• 23:48Speaker 01

  I think that's a little different, because your question really intersects with how we think about markets. And in general, economists tend to think that when there are a lot of different options for workers to go out and find jobs in different places, the impact of the kind of discrimination, or at least differentiation, that you're describing at this Chinese restaurant, just turns out not to be very important. Now, if there were no jobs, if the only jobs in the economy were Chinese restaurants, then we would really worry a lot about who gets hired and doesn't at restaurants. But in a world where there are Japanese restaurants, and Mexican restaurants, and Indian restaurants, and fast food restaurants, I just can't get too excited about worrying

• 24:33Speaker 01

  about what I would call discrimination in terms of hiring, when I think you can make a good case, rightly or wrongly, that customers care who serves them. But if you think about it realistically, why should it matter what the ethnicity is of the server in a Chinese restaurant? You might very well worry about the cook, but you don't see the cook. But somehow, the server, you're right, is probably just decoration, right? It's not important to the quality of the food.

• 24:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, so Levitt, let's pretend that the restaurant that you decide to open, or maybe we'll open it together. You and I are going to open a restaurant together, let's say in New York, and let's say it's Swedish, okay? And we call it Schmorgasbord, okay? Does this mean that you want to hire only really Swedish-looking people?

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 25:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  You want to hire a bunch of tall, blonde, people with blue eyes, who are probably good skiers and yeah, that's what you want?

• 25:25Speaker 01

  For sure. If I have a Swedish restaurant, I want to fill it up not just with people who are tall and blonde, but who have nice Swedish accents as well, whether they're real or fake.

• 25:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  And so how do you advertise for those jobs in the paper?

• 25:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  That was the longest pause I've ever heard out of Steve Levitt. I've heard some long pauses out of Steve Levitt.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  Well, one thing I might do is advertise in Stockholm to really find some people who will come from Sweden and work at your restaurant. But I think I would start by saying the name of the restaurant and that we serve Swedish cuisine. Maybe I would advertise in Swedish if I really thought that I wanted to be super serious about that. Maybe I just advertise at modeling agencies, which will have lots of tall, blonde-haired, blue-eyed women.

• 26:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right. All right. But let's be honest. It's trickier to advertise, you know, I'm not going to say whites only or blondes only for a Swedish restaurant. Whereas if I open an Indian restaurant, I know that my customers in New York, the vast majority of them, may not know or care the difference between an Indian waiter, a Pakistani waiter, a Bangladeshi waiter, et cetera, right? So I can lump them together comfortably. I can't lump together like blondes whites, though, comfortably, can I? And if not, is that fair?

• 26:55Speaker 01

  I think you can lump them. Can you tell the difference between a Swede and a German and a Finn?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  I can't.

• 27:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  At first blush, I'd say absolutely not, right? But when I say lumped together, I mean, put out my net to attract them.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that is a different question. I wonder what would happen if you put a want ad in the paper that said, "Looking for Swedish-looking people to serve in my restaurant."

• 27:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm guessing you're sued within 24 hours. That's what I'm guessing.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  But if you're on Broadway, aren't you allowed to do that? On Broadway, they could say, we need a character who has these characteristics. And they would say that's because it's important to how, you know, the play can't be done.

• 27:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  A verisimilitude, right. So like, if I decide to open, let's say, a restaurant featuring, you know, Jewish deli food, right, and I want to hire only Jewish waitstaff, I can do that OK? According to your lights?

• 27:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, not only, of course, what we're saying isn't that you have to hire only Jews to work in your deli, you just have to people who look like they're Jews, who can pass for Jews. Now, you might actually have a harder time there because what you risk if you have a deli and people want to start speaking Hebrew or Yiddish, then you really want, you know, people who are Jewish there. And the same, what if people come into our smorgasbord restaurant and they start speaking Swedish to our poor, German waitresses who don't know anything about Swedish? We could be in trouble. And that's the sense in which I think it really is defensible to want to hire people who fit the part.

• 28:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  And I don't know anything about the legal background on it, but I would be fascinated to find out what the legal standing is of those kind of choices because I, my hunch is that you might be able to get away with that. Are you going to have some experts on? You should have a legal expert on, for sure.

• 28:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  OK, Levitt, after the break, we will have a legal expert on to talk about ethnic-based restaurant hiring.

• 28:55Speaker 08

  The statute is pretty clear, and if you're taking ethnicity into account, you are technically subject to an employment discrimination lawsuit.

• 29:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll also hear from someone at the federal agency that enforces discrimination law in the workplace.

• 29:12Speaker 09

  We don't condone hiring solely on the basis of ethnicity. That is illegal. You cannot decide, we're a Chinese restaurant, we only want Chinese, or we're a Mexican restaurant, we only want Latinos.

• 29:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  And? Because the world is interesting, we'll also talk to a white Irish-American comedian who got a job as a greeter at a Chinese restaurant in China and did not like how he was greeted.

• 29:36Speaker 10

  Hey, listen, buddy. If I was in New York and I walked into a restaurant and the welcome was like, oh, you're very welcome. And I went, oh, you're very welcome. Oh, welcome to our Westworld. You want a fine wine? Well, I'd be arrested.

• 30:10Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 30:55Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 31:13Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 31:56Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 32:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, PNC Bank did since its inception, proving time and again that the best banking strategy isn't the exciting type, but the steady, reliable, definitely-not-YOLO type. PNC Bank: brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.

• 33:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Des Bishop is a comedian, very popular in some parts of the world.

• 33:16Speaker 11

  So would you please welcome Mr. Des Bishop.

• 33:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's him appearing on a late-night talk show in Ireland.

• 33:24Speaker 10

  Oh, yeah. Thank you.

• 33:25Speaker 11

  You're so welcome, as always.

• 33:27Speaker 10

  This is cool, man.

• 33:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Bishop grew up in New York and moved to Ireland as a teenager. He has hosted shows on Irish TV that are part comedy, part reality series. One of them was about sending an American-Irish comic to China to see how he made out. So for the past two years, Bishop lived in China. He studied Mandarin. He lived with a Chinese family and immersed himself in the culture. And he performed his stand-up act in Mandarin. Okay, so can you give us like maybe the beginning or a favorite part of your Mandarin routine in Mandarin right now? And I'll see how it works on me.

• 34:05Speaker 10

  Okay, this is a quick one. So 我跟我的女朋友吵架，她说我很委屈 You're just laughing at my Chinese. That's different.

• 34:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  I love it. I love it. Yeah.

• 34:17Speaker 10

  I'll translate this in a minute.

• 34:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, later you can translate.

• 34:20Speaker 10

  她说我很委屈，你知道吗？我很委屈 然后我看我手机，然后她就跑了 我说你去哪儿？她说我们吵架，你看你手机 我说我不知道委屈是什么意思 That gets a great laugh. I actually did that on Chinese television. Got a great laugh.

• 34:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  You had me at Tashua.

• 34:37Speaker 10

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 34:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so tell me what you actually said.

• 34:40Speaker 10

  So basically, that's a joke about an argument I had with my girlfriend. It's kind of the whole routine. It comes from a routine about dating a Chinese girl.

• 34:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay.

• 34:49Speaker 10

  And so basically, we were having a massive argument. There's not one bit of this that's made up. It's 100% true.

• 34:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  I have to say, when I hear you talk in Mandarin, not understanding literally a single syllable, I am inclined to laugh just because you sound like a comic. Do you know what I mean? Like you're like the melodic, you know, the melody of it and the intensity of it and the way you pace things. So to me, your Mandarin sounds awesome. I have no idea. Is it pretty good or not really?

• 35:14Speaker 10

  Well, to my American and Irish friends, it's absolutely amazing. But for Chinese people, to be honest, for Chinese people, they find it amazing that I can get laughs with my very average, if not poor Mandarin. But I get away with it with, I guess, maybe the bit of New York confidence or something. So my Chinese is not bad. For the amount of time I've been studying, it's pretty good. But it's by no means eloquently fluent.

• 35:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  As part of the TV show that Des Bishop was making in China for Irish TV, he took a job as a greeter in a Chinese restaurant. Not a host, just a greeter.

• 35:52Speaker 10

  A host actually sits people. I literally just had to greet people.

• 35:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's all you did? Why would they hire someone to do that?

• 35:59Speaker 10

  That's a job.

• 36:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean.

• 36:01Speaker 10

  That's like a real job in China. A yin bing yuan is literally a welcomeer. That's their job.

• 36:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you would literally say hello to people as they came in and say goodbye when they left?

• 36:10Speaker 10

  Yes. Yeah, and you have to say it very loudly and kind of, it's a Chinese thing. When you're in China, you know, it's like you walk in and they're like, guan ying, guan liing, really loudly. And that, I guess, that people feel it gives them face or whatever.

• 36:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  The job was in Hugong, a city of about a million people, relatively small as Chinese cities go. Bishop lived with the other employees in staff housing. The restaurant fed him and paid him about $300 a month.

• 36:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  And just tell me a little bit, just because I have no idea, I'm curious to know,

• 36:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  is going out to eat in a restaurant like this, in a city like this, is it kind of a special deal? Or is it more like a once a week thing that families will do? Is it more for celebration? Is it more, you know, adults or families or even teenagers? Just tell me a little bit about that.

• 36:56Speaker 10

  Mostly adults and families. I mean, the speciality of this restaurant is it's all rooms. There's no actual, there was no actual, like, you know, like canteen part. It was all like private rooms. But, you know, eating out has become affordable in China. I mean, food prices are low and, you know, the economy is booming and people can go out to eat. So it was largely always busy. And it's just a, you know, middle level, just busy, busy restaurant with people just going out and having a nice time.

• 37:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's the name of the restaurant?

• 37:25Speaker 10

  I actually can't even remember. That's what's so embarrassing. To be honest, my Chinese was so bad at the time, I don't even think I ever really registered the name, the name of the restaurant.

• 37:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  You never learned the name.

• 37:34Speaker 10

  But I just knew how to get there. I knew how to point in the taxi.

• 37:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, you're a white guy. And I'm guessing in a city this size, there aren't a lot of white guys around?

• 37:44Speaker 10

  No, I'm the only white guy that's ever done this job, probably in the history of China, let alone the history of this small town. So every day, customers would arrive, and I wouldn't really become a welcomeer. I would become the guy that has the same conversation every day, all day. I would just like talk to customers and they'd be like, why are you here?

• 38:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  I see, all right. So tell me, okay, so pretend I walk in, greet me.

• 38:04Speaker 10

  Guan ying, guan liing.

• 38:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  And then I would say.

• 38:08Speaker 10

  You might say, uh, 我姓，我，我姓李，like my name is Li. And then I, I might just look at the book and say, uh, Ferrari. All the rooms were named after expensive cars. So I would say, oh, 你们在法拉利，which is Ferrari. And so then I would, I would, but to be honest, that so rarely happened because my Chinese was bad. So like, he would say, 我姓李. And like, it's easy for me to say it now. I can even see the character, but back then I couldn't, you know?

• 38:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gotcha.

• 38:35Speaker 10

  So really, I would say，欢迎光临. Sometimes I would get confident. I would say，哪个房间先生，like what room sir? And they wouldn't even acknowledge me. They would just turn to a Chinese person, assuming that there is no way in the world I could have got them to the right room.

• 38:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  And that, Des Bishop says, was the common response from restaurant customers in Hugong, China, seeing this American-Irish host in their Chinese restaurant.

• 39:00Speaker 10

  This is the number one sound I would hear every day. 哎？ It's just like that. What? Literally, because that's a sound Chinese people make, 哎？ And then so 50% of the time they would talk to me, 50% they would just ignore me. You know, Chinese people, it's funny because we're very politically correct here nowadays and we're kind of obsessed with it. And people here often think that the main issue that you would encounter is, uh, is like how to work around the sense that, you know, the sensitivities of race in China, but there are no sensitivities around race. They're all Chinese, right?

• 39:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  A few weeks into his greeter job, Bishop was starting to feel pretty comfortable. And then one night, he says, these three drunk guys came into the restaurant.

• 39:40Speaker 10

  Now, this town is in Dongbei. It's in the northeast of China, which has a reputation for the people being a bit rough around the edges, a bit gregarious, right? So these three guys come in, smoke in with their man bags. They all have man bags. And I did my best，欢迎光临. And then one of them really loudly in front of all the staff, like in front of all the girls. Because by the way, it's also a girl's job that I'm doing. I'm like the only guy that's ever done it. That's why I'm so high pitched when I say，欢迎光临，because I learned it all from these women that were surrounding me. And so I said，欢迎光临. And then one of them really loudly, like in front of everybody goes，欢迎光临. And does like an impersonation of my bad Chinese, you know, with like a really sort of like, you know, like a, like a voice of making fun of me. And I remember thinking like, you cannot

• 40:24Speaker 10

  huanying huanling me. This is not acceptable. I'm the only white guy in this town. That is definitely racist. Now, I know that people say there's no such thing as reverse racism, but I definitely felt for the first time in my life, just like more of an other than I'd ever felt before.

• 40:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did it bother you or did you?

• 40:39Speaker 10

  Of course it bothered me because it bothered me because I thought, hey, listen, buddy, if I was in New York and I walked into a restaurant and the real customer was like, oh, you're very welcome. And I went, oh, you're very welcome. Oh, welcome to our West One. You want a fine wine? Well, I'd be arrested. But I immediately, I mean, it was immediate. Sometimes you just have a moment of immediacy when it comes to material. I immediately said, thank you, a-hole, because that is definitely a routine. I cannot wait to tell that story in comedy clubs in the West because I just knew that it was like absolutely true, but an absolutely winning moment.

• 41:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  So if the American Irish Des Bishop was not authentic enough as a Mandarin speaking greeter in China, where all the customers were Chinese, would he be any more authentic as an English speaking host at maybe a Chinese restaurant in New York or California or Salt Lake City? Or, to ask the question we really want to answer, is the practice of hiring restaurant workers who match the cuisine fair?

• 41:44Speaker 08

  Yeah, there are a couple of different ways to answer that question.

• 41:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's the legal expert we promised you. John Donahue teaches at Stanford Law School. He's an economist as well as a lawyer, and he's an expert on employment discrimination.

• 41:58Speaker 08

  One is if fairness is defined by the employment discrimination laws, it probably isn't fair or legal to do this. And there are some caveats there, but as a general matter, hiring decisions are not supposed to be made on the basis of ethnicity with some caveats.

• 42:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  Donahue says this goes back to a certain piece of landmark American legislation.

• 42:26Speaker 08

  The 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was the federal law that prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, sex, gender, and so on and so forth, was one of the most important laws passed at the federal level in this country in the last century.

• 42:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Title VII of that law protects against employment discrimination. But one caveat, Donahue tells us, is firm size. At the federal level, only firms with 15 or more employees are subject to this law, although in some states the number is less. Another potential caveat, Donahue says, is the job itself.

• 43:03Speaker 08

  There could be a situation where the discrimination is permitted if it's a bona fide occupational characteristic.

• 43:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  Say that phrase again.

• 43:15Speaker 08

  A bona fide occupational qualification.

• 43:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  A bona fide occup-

• 43:20Speaker 08

  BFOQ.

• 43:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  OK.

• 43:21Speaker 08

  That is a narrowly tailored term of art. And the idea behind the BFOQ defense is that you needed to hire in this otherwise discriminatory way because it's sort of an essential trait of the job.

• 43:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ah, I see. That would explain Hooters, I guess, yes? That's why neither you nor I could get a job at Hooters.

• 43:45Speaker 08

  Exactly. So Hooters wins out on that rationale.

• 43:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  But the BFOQ defense is a tricky one. Hooters might argue that its customers don't want to see me or John Donahue in those bright orange short shorts and white tank tops, but how do they know? Maybe I could broaden their clientele and maximize their profits. Consider another industry that used to argue that being a certain kind of female was an essential part of the job.

• 44:19Speaker 08

  It goes back to the early days of the 1964 civil rights laws application, where, for example, a number of the airlines initially tried to defend their practice of hiring attractive, young women to be stewardesses on these airlines. And the reason they did that at the time, in the 60s, it was largely a male business clientele that they were trying to appeal to, and they thought that they would find the fact of being served by a young and often required-to-be unmarried woman would be appealing to the customers.

• 45:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  This began to change in the late 1960s with a lawsuit filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, or EEOC, that's the agency that enforces Title VII, and a man named Cilio Diaz Jr. He wanted to be a flight attendant, and he sued Pan American Airlines for discrimination.

• 45:20Speaker 08

  And they defended, they said, "Look, we're not doing anything discriminatory. We're just satisfying our customers' demands." And they brought in surveys that showed overwhelmingly their customers did want to be served by young unmarried and presumably attractive women, but the courts ruled that part of what the employment discrimination laws try to do is overcome discriminatory preferences and perhaps change those discriminatory preferences by opening up the job to everyone in a nondiscriminatory fashion.

• 45:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  But I wonder, you know, look, we just lived through a period where unemployment could be really crushing for a lot of people, and there were a lot of people who were willing to take a lot of jobs that they might not have been willing to take five years earlier, 10 years earlier in a different economy, and I could imagine that there would be some people out there, based on nothing more than what their face looks like, that said, "You know, I would have loved to have a job waiting tables in a sushi restaurant, or in a Mexican restaurant, or in an Italian restaurant, but because I don't look Asian, and I don't look Latino, and I don't look Italian, then those were off limits to me." So could you imagine a time in the perhaps not-too-distant future where this kind of hiring practice is looked at as unacceptable and perhaps even illegal?

• 46:39Speaker 08

  It certainly could could happen and the statute is pretty clear. And if if you're taking ethnicity into account without some of these other possible defenses being present, you are technically subject to an employment discrimination lawsuit.

• 46:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  I was wondering if we might care more if these were better paying jobs, right? I mean, if we were talking about software engineering or lawyering, for instance, where the stakes are financially higher, do you think we might have a different outlook on this kind of what seems to be just a, you know, kind of casual go along, get along racial profiling hiring practice in restaurants?

• 47:20Speaker 08

  Yeah, absolutely. The EEOC would care more, but even more to the point, Title VII gives a private right of action to anyone who's excluded and they're they're able to bring lawsuits and win attorney's fees. So it's very easy to get a lawyer to take a case where there's going to be a lot of money at stake. But, you know, interestingly, we haven't seen much in the way of litigation in in these small, you know, ethnic cuisine scenarios. Now, part of that could be, as we talked about, you know, the number of employees. You can also imagine, in a slightly different twist from the way we've been describing

• 48:00Speaker 08

  it, that, you know, let's say, a Japanese restaurant owner hires relatives, then you could say, well, we're not discriminating on the basis of ethnicity, we're discriminating on the basis of, you know, familial relationship, and that might be a way around. But that doesn't get to the core question that we've been discussing, where you're not just hiring within your ethnicity, but in a sense, doing a little bit of a bait and switch by hiring other ethnicities.

• 48:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  I asked Steve Levitt the same question, whether the kind of hiring that restaurants do might pass under the radar because these are relatively low-paying jobs. What if, for instance, I'm starting an e-commerce site meant to appeal to Chinese customers, and I decide I only want to hire Chinese programmers?

• 48:53Speaker 01

  It's a tough question because I believe a lot in the power of firm culture and in the view that intangible things can dramatically affect productivity at companies. But you've got to be super careful when you go down that path, that the end result isn't to support some sort of massive subtext of discrimination, saying, "Well, we really, we can't hire black people at this company because black people don't have the right culture for our company." I mean, that's the trade-off. But on the other hand, when I hire people, say, at the greatest good, I don't care at all about their gender or their ethnicity,

• 49:37Speaker 01

  but I care a whole lot about whether they're fun to be around and they smile a lot and they work hard. And I don't believe any of those characteristics are correlated with either gender or ethnicity. But on the other hand, well, I don't know. You know, if you start out by hiring a bunch of, you know, rich white people, maybe you end up wanting to hire a bunch more rich white people, and that can be a problem. It's tricky, really hard issues. Really, the issue of discrimination is one of the trickiest ones when it comes to the courts and when it comes to markets and thinking about it. Because how, even the right definition of what it means to be discriminatory is subtle, and it depends on the context.

• 50:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  How about the context of a retail clothing store? Maybe you caught this story recently about a discrimination case the EEOC won.

• 50:29Speaker 11

  Bit of breaking news now from the US Supreme Court. Earlier today, they ruled in favor of a Muslim woman who filed a lawsuit after she was denied a job at an Abercrombie and Fitch clothing store because she wore a headscarf for religious reasons. Eight to one vote this was.

• 50:43Speaker 09

  That lawsuit that just came down started when a 17-year-old teenager walked into one of our offices, or called one of our offices, and we took her case all the way through the lower court, the appeals court, and then to the Supreme Court.

• 50:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Justine Lisser. She's a lawyer who works as a spokesperson for the EEOC, and she says the agency has brought several suits against restaurants that hire along ethnic lines, as we've been talking about today.

• 51:12Speaker 09

  We sued a Houston restaurant, which was supposed to be an upscale Mexican restaurant, that fired already hired servers, one of whom was African-American, one of whom was Vietnamese, because they, quote, "didn't speak Spanish." But it had an extremely diverse group of patrons. It certainly didn't have only a Spanish-speaking group of patrons. And the reason of not speaking Spanish was, we were alleging, was a pretext to make sure that all of their servers were Hispanic, again, to sort of fit in with the theme. And this is not legal.

• 51:50Speaker 09

  I mean, for any restaurant or any employer to put in a requirement, like a language requirement, it has to be, and this is the legal phrase of art, job-related and consistent with business necessity. And in most instances, it is not job-related and consistent with business necessity.

• 52:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Lisser says one reason there haven't been more cases like this is that the EEOC is a charge-driven agency. In other words, a restaurant worker would have to come to them.

• 52:23Speaker 09

  We don't go out looking for discrimination. We don't have the resources, or our law doesn't really permit it. People come to us and file charges, and we sort of take those charges... And investigate them and in some instances, we file a lawsuit in federal court on them. And I want to make very clear that whether or not the EEOC has in fact sued anybody, we don't condone hiring solely on the basis of ethnicity. That is illegal. You cannot decide, we're a Chinese restaurant, we only want Chinese, or we're a Mexican restaurant, we only want Latinos.

• 53:05Speaker 09

  Maybe we need to step up our outreach to specific ethnic chambers of commerce, if they exist, or different organizations of restaurant owners, and let them know what is and is not against the law.

• 53:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Well, Bailey Hickon in Salt Lake City, Utah. Thanks for the question about restaurant hiring. As you can see, there are a lot of answers, most of them not fully satisfactory. Personally, I'm kind of torn by what we learned today. If there's a labor market that has customarily organized itself pretty well, maybe with some self-selection, and it seems to be working OK for the firms, the employees, and the customers, well, maybe we should just leave it alone. Who wants more lawyers involved? But on the other hand, if this custom, or whatever it is, is preventing people who need jobs from getting them based simply on the way they look, well, that's not cool.

• 54:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  And it goes against the grain of what a restaurant is supposed to be, a place you can go when you're hungry, maybe tired, and sit down, maybe with your family or a bunch of friends, maybe even alone, and pay some money for the privilege of being served right then and there, a nice warm meal. That's why I go to a place like Gabriella's, a nearby place you can walk to where you might run into other people you know. Here to take us home is Nat Milner.

• 54:41Speaker 05

  We want to be the place where the neighborhood comes to celebrate. You know, we're not trying to be the greatest restaurant in New York City. You only go to that restaurant on your birthday or anniversary. We want to be your favorite restaurant. We want to be the place you come home, take off your tie, kick off your high heels, come down, grab a margarita and some guacamole and relax. You know, whether you're celebrating Surviving Monday or some milestone event, you know, we want to be the place that the neighborhood comes to hang out. We have these little rooms here that you can just grab. You know, I don't know about your apartment, but we can entertain in ours. It's full of kids and stuff. So whenever we get together with people, you know, just like anyone else in the neighborhood, we grab a little room, have guests over and have some fun. Celebrate. Cheers to honesty. Cheers to honesty.

• 55:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up next week on Freakonomics Radio, some restaurants are so good that people wait in line for them.

• 55:44Speaker 12

  It's hot. I could keel over right now.

• 55:48Speaker 05

  How long ago did you get here?

• 55:49Speaker 09

  About, say, 40 minutes.

• 55:53Speaker 05

  You've been here for 45 minutes already?

• 55:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  What is a line, anyway, from an economic perspective? We use queues as a way to deal with short-term fluctuations in demand. Okay, fluctuate this. Standing in line stinks. So what's to be done about it?

• 56:12Speaker 05

  There are a lot of good ideas that people hate when you tell them about it.

• 56:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  You'll hate this idea, all right. That's next time on Freakonomics Radio.

• 56:30Stephen J. Dubner?

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Christopher Wirth and mixed by Rick Kwan with help from Merritt Jacob. Our staff also includes Irvan Gunja, Jay Cowitt, Greg Rosalsky, Kaitlin Pierce, Alison Hockenberry, Emma Morgenstern, and Jolenta Greenberg. Harry Huggins is our intern. You can Subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. And please come visit Freakonomics.com, where you'll find our entire podcast archive, as well as a complete transcript of every episode ever made, along with music credits and lots more. Thanks for listening.

• 57:26Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 57:57Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 58:36Speaker 13

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