Hm, the waitress produces the food on the table. The food in the kitchen would be not much use, unless the kitchen was big enough to accomodate the customers so that they could eat out of the pots (and the pots would clean themselves afterwards). So while she doesn't create "food", she produces "food on the table".
I am not sure what you are really driving at: that too many people are in the service industry? But what if there is more demand for services than for products? Like there might be enough food being grown on the fields, but what good is it to me if nobody cooks it and brings it to my table?
Imagine a society with 30 million waitresses and 5 farmers. Those extra waitresses are useless, and such a society cannot work. The other way round - 30 million farmers and 5 waitresses - people will serve themselves and there will be a lot of excess food to be exported.
Service industries that function as an add-on for a manufacturing industry needs to be specifically calibrated to the volume of the industry, otherwise the excess is wastage. The other way round does not hold.
You have to understand what fundamental value in a world economy is. A waitress is no value, a programmer is a lot of value, and a guy working in the financial industry is basically the same as a waitress. He's an add-on for other industries, and the volume has to be calibrated also.
If a country produces a car out of some metal in a mine, it created real value, irrelevant of if this car was exported or not. If a country produces a waitress who can be trained in 2 days and simply moves food from one place to another, the value it created is really minimal.
I'm not saying that the service industry in the U.S is too small or too large, I don't know enough about it to say. I'm just saying that the backbone of any stable and real economy lies in constantly creating real value.
You have completely failed to articulate a meaningful distinction between autoworkers and waitresses, or between "real value" and whatever its opposite is (illusory value?).
Imagine a society with 30 million waitresses and 5 farmers. Those extra waitresses are useless, and such a society cannot work. ... A waitress is no value, a programmer is a lot of value,...
Unless you have robots to plow and harvest (which is harder than it sounds) being constructed by other robots, a society with 30 million programmers and 5 farmers can't work either; neither can you have a society with 30 million iron-ore miners or 30 million autoworkers and 5 farmers.
I really think you are simplifying things too much. Yes, 30 million farmers might be able to feed themselves. But there would be no doctors, because they would be busy working their fields. A waitress enables a doctor to exist by freeing him from cooking and shopping for food.
Producing a car does NOT create value if nobody wants or needs that car. It might even create negative value, because it might be costly to have it removed and brought to the junkyard.
That a waitress doesn't need training is rather irrelevant. What has been created is a) a place for the waitress to work (building a restaurant takes time and money) and b) her work produces doctors and other things - even cars, if the car manufacturers go to dine in the waitress' restaurant.
It is true that other services/industries could not exist without food production. But that does not imply that those other industries are worthless. In some cases, food production could not exist without the other industries/services, either (sick farmers can not produce food, they need doctors and cars to work their fields).
I am not sure what you are really driving at: that too many people are in the service industry? But what if there is more demand for services than for products? Like there might be enough food being grown on the fields, but what good is it to me if nobody cooks it and brings it to my table?