how the hot waitress economic index works
lindgren wrote about finding what he considered to be more attractive people serving tables at a lower east side establishment in new york city in his 2009 piece at the onset of the great recession these servers were replacements for people who had been laid off the manager in charge reportedly surmised that good looking waitresses would drive more sales for the establishment the attractive server index hasn t been vetted by economists and it s not known if this strategy by the management of one establishment was successful a traditional economic theory contends that employment tends to be a lagging indicator for economic recovery but lindgren contended there was good reason to believe that his index was a leading indicator as a commodity that s fairly cheap historically effective as a marketing tool and available on a freelance basis hotness will likely be back in demand long before your average michigan autoworker is he wrote there is minimal research in support of this indicator scientists have found that attractive people tend to be considered more capable and they re more confident and this combines to get them better jobs and higher wages this is often called lookism or beauty bias 1 it could suggest that there s a lack of better jobs out there when attractive people are waiting tables a job that some consider requires lesser skill and or result in lower pay indicators and factors of the indexthe pay scale for servers varies considerably based on a restaurant s location clientele food quality and the competency of the servers themselves to assume that the service industry is low skill is to discount the highly competitive nature of the market yelp reviews calling out uneducated unskilled or poor servers can quickly get a server fired 2some economic indicators are well respected measures of the economy s health such as when economists talk about gdp or initial jobless claims but almost anything can be considered an economic indicator and thus any theory should be prodded for its validity before it can be trusted there can be a pop culture mythos around some economic indicators says erika rasure ph d assistant professor of business and financial services at maryville university and a member of the investopedia financial review board these can be very superstitious people try to make correlations between observable phenomena but it doesn t make it true in this case it is misogynistic and sexist rasure recommends doing your homework to judge the accuracy of an indicator how well has an indicator been studied don t do anything until you have the facts and don t believe everything you see and hear on tv or the internet hot waitress index vs other strange indicatorsthe accuracy and reliability of the attractive server index is questionable but it s far from alone in the finance realm of weird indicators that people have used if you can dream it up someone may have beat you to that theory some people think the full moon has an influence on the economy i think of these indicators as pop culture finance reads says rasure various insulting and suspect theories have surfaced over the years to tout the predictive power of marine advertisements sales of men s underwear and even lipstick sales the idea behind these ideas is similar you can expect to see tougher marine recruitment ads on tv in a difficult economy because they meet recruitment goals quickly in down economies they don t have to worry about scaring people away men s underwear sales will dip that pair might last a little longer and lipstick sales will go up because it s a relatively inexpensive personal luxury that no one needs in a masked pandemic 