Here's what fast food will cost with $17 an hour wages

A more appropriate Black Friday analogy vis-a-vis this minimum wage discussion would be:

Company X routinely sells goods below cost. X does that so that X's customers, who'll now have more income to spend elsewhere, will boost aggregate demand, ultimately leading to X enjoying greater profitability.

They covered this in gnome-underpants-onomics in my MBA program.

 

And, that's not what McDonald's is doing in regards to the minimum wage.

But companies sacrifice profit in one area hoping for a boost in another all the time.

If you want to argue that investing more in employees will never boost a bottom line, go ahead. But I'd guess there are plenty of examples to support the theory that it does. Costco being one, off the top of my head.

 

You go, X!

 

Costco doesn't "invest" more in employees. It pays premium wages. Those are not the same thing.

 

Those pushing for a $15/hour minimum wage aren't true believers until they lead the proletariat in a violent revolution against the bourgeois.

 

Walmart decided to raise the its minimum wage because it was losing business to people who didn't so much enjoy shopping at a store with less-than-enthusiastic employees.

 

One of the "bottom-line" decisions that get widely criticized in some parts.

 

It might pay relatively well for the retail industry. But people should be aware that it also starts virtually everyone as a part-timer. What's more, most people stay part-time for years, if not forever.

Trust me, I've looked into this, and asked around about it a lot, of both hourly employees like cashiers and stockers, as well as managers, because I've often figured I could probably parlay my Walmart experience into a job at Costco practically anytime I wanted to.

But, I'm full-time at Walmart, have been a department manager (although I'm doing inventory management now) and have been full-time for the past four years. (I will be there five years in November. Geez, time flies!). Conversely, I've spoken to cashiers and merchandise stockers at Costco who are still in the same positions they started in, who still hold part-time status after being there several years, and who have actually come out and said straight out, "If you're full-time and you're a department manager, I'd tell you to stay where you're at."

And so far I have, happily.

 

But Walmart's wages --- pre-boost --- were no worse (and in some departments were better) than those at Target, or QuikTrip, or Publix.

Why were Walmart employees "less than enthusiastic" whereas nary a peep is heard about Target, and Publix consistently is ranked among the Top 100 companies to work for?

 

I suspect for the same reason that people loathe Gannett and love McClatchy or the family owned paper they've worked at.

Since Wal-Mart employees so many more people and has so many more stores, you are much more likely to find unhappy employees because you have more employees and locations to choose from.

Also McDonald's and Chick-fil-A both pay around $9 an hour but competition for chicken slinging jobs is more intense because you have so many fewer stores.

McDonald's has something like 14,000 stores, while Chick-fil-A is around 1,800.

Franchisees of Chick-fil-A will have one and at the very most two stores they manage through an agreement with the corporate office while McDonald's owners can have dozens.

They are both fast food places, but that's about the only comparison when you take a look at their structure.

 

We've gone down the rabbit hole when chicken-slinging jobs are more prestigious than flipping burgers.

 

I guess the lesson learned on this thread is that if you're among the working poor trying to provide shelter, food and utilities, you should really consider the potential hardship of your business' owner and perhaps take a hard look at his/her profit margins before asking for that raise or hoping for a minimum wage increase. In practical terms, you're probably just accelerating the business' demise and keeping all of your poor friends from getting jobs, too.

That about sums it up, right?