Minimum Wage and McBudgets

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So our displays will look like crap (for higher end stores)or they are already are thus the employer has already cut production/presentation where she can...

The biggest area an employer can impact revenue has been payroll. Very little else is malleable at the point of sale level. And every thing else that has been has already been done if the people that do that are doing their jobs in the home office.

We are at the same argument again, companies are already absorbing higher costs (fuel for shipping for example). Again business is a marginal profit, and every thing has to be kept an eye on.

Or instead of having a frame with glass it could be a frame with plexiglass. Or instead of plexiglass, a thin sheet of acrylic. Then instead of two thin sheets of film to keep the acrylic from scratching, just one on the outside. Then none. Then instead of MDF for the backing board, a pine composite. Then cardboard. Then instead of flexible framing points, metal turnbuttons. You can then make these out of plastic instead. Also instead of making the frame out of solid plastic you can start using a plastic foam. Then instead of 3 rings to hang it from, just 2 sawtooth hangers. You can also change the printed design inside from cardstock/cardboard to thin paper. Also instead of packing them in double thick cardboard you go with single thick. You can also stop shipping them with packing foam between each frame and just use a single sheet of thin cardboard. Then instead of cardboard a newsprint like paper. Then instead of that, nothing.

I'm not assuming that companies are keeping prices down out of the goodness of their hearts, but instead following a rhetoric where they don't 100% know for certain the exact price point to sell new product at, and when the product premiers, increase the price based on how well it sells, up to the point where it starts hurting sales. They also have the option of lowering the cost of production instead of increasing the price of an item if that becomes necessary.

Real Estate costs, administrative costs, warehousing, utilities, everything except taxes and the cost of employee benefits would be the same if we're selling widgets at $1.04 versus $1 and rolling the extra $.04 per product over into employee pay.

Already discussed this, and I mentioned that I rather doubt it would increase the cost passed onto the consumer past $.05 per dollar spent. Regardless, the numbers I "made up" exaggerated the amount of full-time employees by a lot and went low, at least from my experience, on the per day earnings of the store.

Few things here.

1. You can't raise the cost of a good by 4 cents because it has to end in a 9. They'll probably raise costs by say $1 and use the minimum wage raise to justify it to customers.

2. It'll be okay to do so for many companies because ALL companies employing minimum-wage workers will have to make the same adjustment to maintain the same profit margin while maintaining everything else. It'll suck for companies and probably a number of small businesses already living too close to the edge of bankrupcy. The objection that "if companies could raise prices they'd have done so already" presupposes that there are no downsides to raising prices other than influencing a customer's decision to buy a good at all. In reality there is the significant down-side of making a customer buy the same good or an equivalent from a competitor. If all competitors sell their goods at the same price then things look a lot better for all equally successful businesses in that industry and only marginally worse for most customers.

3. Companies will get creative finding other ways to reduce costs and the most effective way to reduce costs at point of sale will be to reduce the reliance on high-rent brick-and-mortal stores in those hellholes you call "shopping malls". This change is already occurring independently of the present proposals to raise the minimum wage and any company not looking into these changes aren't doing good business.

4. The demand for mall space will still be high but malls will now mostly be filled with more profitable products. In hellholes malls will have difficulties attracting businesses and will be forced to lower their rents. Children will starve.

Yeah its almost like I have no experience with any of this ever and I'm just pulling the numbers out of thin air!

With skills like that you could have a lucrative career in finance

Also... who the heck works minimum wage for very long?

That's an incredibly ignorant question that even you should have been able to answer on your own in the five minutes it took you to carefully poke out that post. The answer to questions like "Who works minimum wage for very long" and "Who works for less than a living wage for very long" is "people who want to work those jobs or find themselves forced to because they eg. dropped out of school after ninth grade and had four kids to three deadbeats--of whom two are in prison--and now can't find a way out of their poverty trap because they can't sell their kids 'cause no-one with enough money wants to buy a black kid knowing full well the kid'll get executed by the neighborhood watch a few years down the line." Well, that's one answer at least, but there are many variations that are equally accurate while being more succint.