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

How to Help U.S. Poor People: Enhance their Capabilities!

 

How nice, an extra $14.38 for groceries. Just think about how much that will save in food stamps.

 

There are so many points on this thread to be addressed (which makes it a great thread), but to this one, I'd say I don't think anyone has said they're against raising the minimum wage. Raising it so substantially, however, without cause, change in work or circumstances or anything else? Nobody's against any raise. But it comes back to realistic expectations of those involved and directly affected. Usually, just because I say so, demand it or want it is not a great reason for anything.

In an industry like, say, fast-food or retail, if you want major differences in pay, you need to put yourself in a position to go for and move up to the higher positions, or be willing to move around as required, and not simply feel entitled to higher pay despite your same position/work level just because.

JayFarrar made a great point of the fact that, even in "unskilled" labor, there are, indeed, skills, talents and attitudes that definitely make some employees better, and better at what they do, than others. There's not denying it, and often, it's easy to pick those people out.

I'd also contend that a sense of your work feeling productive and valued should, and even has to, come largely from within. And really, there's no reason that it can't. The work I do is hard, much more physical than probably most people on here might imagine of something they may think of as a nice little nothing job at Walmart. But I'd say, "No, it's a nice, big job." Really, the sheer size, volume and amount of work to do there is staggering, and it's that, I think, that people are shocked by and that they may really struggle with, even more than the wages. Because if they're honest, they know, or can find out, that the wages there are consistent with the industry standards, relatively low as those may be, and in some cases, they are higher.

There is a great amount of turnover that, of course, could potentially indicate employee dissatisfaction. But there is also a surprising amount of loyalty and very long-term service to the company by many, many others.

I also have found the work to feel productive, helpful, satisfying, and even, pretty interesting, when I keep in mind the business aspects of it or am doing the paperwork end of things where you can really stop shrink, actually find and retain money that might otherwise be lost in rollbacks and clearance sales or the sales of deleted items. It's eye-opening to know exactly how many items you carry in your department, and to follow sales trends, seeing them down on paper weekly in black and white, and to be able to look up the last sale and/or the weekly and yearly sales of any item in the store, and to see on any given day, how sales for that day compared to sales on that day a year ago for any department, or for the store overall. It's interesting to see the exact percentages of mark-ups on items and the exact loss, percentage-wise, on items that are marked down and if that difference isn't caught. And it's important to recognize what items can and should be featured or that should be merchandised in some way to help to move them, thus directly impacting sales.

It truly is big business, in its most basic, but also in the biggest and most successful sense in the world, and I definitely feel a part of that most of the time. So can any employee, if they treat the job and the work as valuable, and understand, themselves, that it is.

There's also no way that I can not see and understand that when I get off a shift and can go around the store and literally see what I've done, or what hasn't gotten done. It's surprisingly gratifying.

 

Some of you people aren't real. I'm convinced of it.

 

That would just about cover the property-tax hike in my mortgage payment. So, there's that.