I think it's garbage to argue that companies are obligated to pay enough for a single earner to support a family with full-time hours. It's an artifact of an economic slowdown that folks are turning to low-end jobs for full-time work. But it's nonsense to argue that these entry-level, low-skill jobs are meant to be a full-fledged career for a single earner.

If these fast food workers want to stage a walkout, I say more power to them. I genuinely hope they get their way. But if there are tons of folks in line for these very jobs, that sets the wage rate as much as anything else.


Quote Originally Posted by Illusions View Post
We can do this real quick I guess, using easy numbers. Say you have a retail store with 15 full time (hah!) employees making minimum wage. At 15 employees, for 8 hours each, and $7.25 per hour, thats $875 total for employee pay per day. Now lets pay them $10 per hour. That would be $1,200 per day, or a $325 increase. So lets say this hypothetical retail store makes $10,000 per day in sales (not profit). To cover the $325 increase in costs to pay the employees $10 per hour instead of $7.25, and keep the same profits, the store would have to increase the cost of an item by 3.25%. So for every dollar an item costs prior to the pay raise, your customers would be paying an extra 4 cents (I rounded up significantly from 3.25 cents) afterward. If someone wants to correct my math, please feel free to do so. This is just to illustrate that the higher costs aren't that significant towards the customers. However, something else this illustrates is that if a company wanted to charge an extra 4 cents on the dollar for a product and not increase employee pay, they'd be looking at an extra $118,625 per year, per store. They could then either roll that into an extra 16,362 hours of work paid at minimum wage for additional employees, or hire 7 additional full-time people at $15,080 per year ($7.25 per hour x 40 hours x 52 weeks), and still have money left over. What is more likely though is that extra money will just be kept by the company, since with larger retail chains, with thousands of stores, that extra money could be multiple hundreds of millions of dollars.
1) How convenient of you to just make up a revenue number.

2) Even using your totally made-up/bogus revenue number, you're suggesting that labor is ~10% of costs. What about the other costs? EG the cost of goods sold, the real estate costs, administrative costs, warehousing, utilities, taxes, etc. These things vary a LOT depending on what's being sold. It's nuts to deduce how much wages will impact prices without knowing those numbers.

3) Employing someone full time requires a lot more than paying their salary.

4) Making up a revenue number renders your math irrelevant, not wrong. Reiteration of #1. Sorry, but that's a really big deal.