Should I stay or should I go?

Locals weigh the pros and cons of trying to build a life in Mammoth.

As shoulder season approaches, two of my closest friends are packing it in and heading onto distant lands. Their story is a familiar one: came to Mammoth for a few years, stayed for five, and discovered that staying beyond that simply wasn’t viable. Yet Amy Ninh and Matt Barbour believe this problem could be solved, if employers ran their businesses—and treated their staff—differently.

Amy has worked as a line cook at the Westin, a pastry chef at Skadi, until Skadi  closed, at Charthouse, Parallax, and for the past two years, as the pastry chef at Campo. She said she’s been applying for jobs outside of the area on a whim for years. Several months ago she interviewed for a job as the pastry chef at the Waterfront Hilton in Huntington Beach, a 290-room hotel with four banquet facilities. She got the gig.

“It’s a really big job,” Amy said.

“It’s a huge step up,” said Matt.

Yet Matt added that when she received the job offer, “Amy went to the Mountain [MMSA owns Campo] and said, ‘We want to live here forever; help me out.’ They didn’t give a shit.”

“It doesn’t seem like many of the businesses in town want to look at why they can’t keep an employee,” he added. “But why hire a new person every nine months and retrain them, when you could invest in someone who wants to live here forever?”

When asked why exactly they were choosing this time to leave town, Amy cited the better job. But Matt argued that, “The reality is, we actually can’t afford to live here.”

“We could almost make it, if we worked 12 months a year,” said Amy. “But Campo is closed for six weeks, starting September 22 until opening day on the Mountain. What am I gonna do?”

As it is, Amy and Matt said they’ve “signed up for all the government assistance we can.”

“It’s kind of shameful to be on [food] stamps when you have three college degrees,” Amy said.

Amy has been working for years as “seasonal full time,” which also allows MMSA to dodge the bullet of offering her a healthcare plan. But Matt felt the Mountain, and other businesses in town, may be using a bad season in 2011/2012 as an excuse to continue denying employees benefits down the road.

“It seems like everybody is running off the fact we had that crappy year,” he said. “They’re saying, ‘It’s been so hard, we can’t give anyone a raise.’ How long is that going to go on?”

Some employers, in Amy and Matt’s opinion, continue to treat their employees well even in bad times, and are rewarded for their efforts with thriving businesses. The couple pointed to Robertos and Good Life Café as two examples.

“Good Life is a perfect example,” Matt said. “You can run a business and make it work year round, and you can have happy employees.”

Amy acknowledged that upward mobility in the service industry has always been challenging. “But I think you should reward those who are better at their jobs,” she said. “It’s the saddest thing to me, looking at [former Red Lantern Chef] Justin Rado and [former Jimmy’s Taverna Chef] Dympna Roman. They were working 60 hours a week. They couldn’t get a raise so they could survive and have kids.”

That couple also left the area.

“That owner [software billionaire Jim Demetriades] had to close the restaurants for six months, and probably lost thousands, when they just wanted a little more so they could think about having kids,” Matt said.

While Amy has struggled to find the right salary to stay in Mammoth, Matt has struggled with another challenge faced by prospective employees: over-experience.

Prior to moving to Mammoth, “I spent 15 years working in marketing for Under Armour and Red Bull, where I made $100,000, and worked with million dollar budgets,” he said.

“But they wouldn’t hire him to deliver food at the Westin,” Amy said.

So Matt, who, like Amy, holds a college degree, has worked as MMSA mascot Woolly, as a snowmaker, snowcat operator, and now works at Sierra Star golf course in the summer.

“I got that job [at Sierra Star, also owned by MMSA] completely separate,” Matt said. “The Mountain could have said, ‘Let’s see if we can find you a job in the summer,’ to help me stay year round. This is what’s just asinine. You’ve got a guy who’s good at his job in the winter; why not find him a job in the summer? That just burns me up.”

Matt said he thinks the Mountain and other Mammoth employers “think of us as liabilities instead of assets.”

“In bad years, get rid of the workers; in bad years, cut hours,” said Amy. “I feel like that’s the only way they control the budget.”

Matt did give MMSA credit for cutting hours top to bottom this season to keep as many employees on as possible. “I think that was the right way to do it, and I commend the Mountain for that,” he said.

But the couple agreed that Mammoth employers like MMSA operate in some ways like employers during the Great Depression; on the assumption that no matter how little they pay their employees, should those employees quit, there’s always someone waiting to fill that vacancy.

“There is somebody waiting right behind me,” Amy said. She noted that Campo has already hired a new pastry chef to take her place.

The funny thing is, “We moved to Mammoth because of the market crash of 2008,” Amy said. “We thought, ‘If I’m gonna be poor, I’d rather be poor in Mammoth.’ But the reality is, he’s 42, I’m 34, and we can’t live on $8 an hour anymore … I want retirement. I want a dental plan.”

Amy and Matt have been dating for 11 years this year. “People ask, ‘When are you going to have a family? When are you going to get married?’” Amy said. “We can’t afford that shit.”

Matt said there have been prior times when both of them contemplated leaving. “We were too poor to stay, too poor to leave. So you can get trapped in that,” he said.

“This job came at the most opportune time,” Amy said of the pastry chef position at the Waterfront Hilton. “We don’t have enough money to even pay our rent in September, because of how slow it is. Summer isn’t quite long enough to help me through the next shoulder season.”

But, like so many who leave Mammoth, both Amy and Matt said they would love to return someday. “That’s only if we can find good jobs,” Amy concluded.