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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

> Every single employer that crawls out from under their rock and howls some version of "nobody wants to work anymore" is saying "I pay crap wages for my crap job, and expected to do so forever".

Even worse, they also expected to make obscene profit off the backs of those workers being paid crap wages.

McDonald's, as one example, makes $10B in profit every single year. [1]. Their profit went up during the pandemic, 13% YoY.

How anyone thinks they shouldn't increase wages and be content with only a few billion in profit is insanity.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MCD/mcdonalds/gros...

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That’s not how it works. Most fast food restaurants are franchised, not company owned. An average McDonald’s owner (franchisee) only makes about $150k per year off it [1]. And that’s after investing a rather large sum of money into the business in the first place. I’ll let you do the math on how much wages could go up for workers before that number turns into “I would make more money doing anything else with my capital”.

[1] https://work.chron.com/average-income-fast-food-franchise-ow...

> I’ll let you do the math on how much wages could go up for workers before that number turns into “I would make more money doing anything else with my capital”.

Then that is exactly what should happen.

The world isn't better because McDonald's is in it and everywhere. If there were less, there would be more locally owned burger joints, and more "regular" folk making money instead of corporate giants.

> “I would make more money doing anything else with my capital”.

Workers should choose to walk away from the current bad deals.

Franchise operators should walk away from the bad deals that result from paying enough to fill out their work force.

Eventually, corporate McDonalds should face a choice about whether to lose market share or stop extracting so much rent from their franchisees.

Isn't that how markets are supposed to work?

That seems to be exactly how the market is working.

>Workers should choose to walk away from the current bad deals.

Right, but they should also face the consequences (ie. not getting paid). Imagine a world where a SaaS vendor rejects an offer from a customer because they think the price is too low, but the government steps in and pays the SaaS vendor anyways.

That is a ridiculous comparison.

A business going under is very ethically different from people starving and being homeless.

As a result, the people who own and operate businesses have a choice to decline business in a manner that people in poverty don't.

That lack of choice prevents markets from functioning property. You seem to be advocatibg removing that choice.

McDonald's has been reducing their number of workers and franchising as per their 2016-2017 plan. So most of the people that work at McD are not even their employees (since McD the brand is now just a real estate/leasing business).

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