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Comment by silisili | Hacker News Reader

It'll be interesting to watch this play out. As someone who eats way more fast food than he should(once a week on avg), I've noticed this big time.

I was in Savannah this summer and had to go to 3 different places to find one even serving. So many places had one employee taking orders and cooking, both. Even Chik Fil A only had 2 people working, and a 45 minute wait.

The BK near me, open til 12, has totally random hours, and is often closed by 7. The Arby's is staffed by people who give food first and act weird when you stare because you need to pay still. Corporate? They don't care. I've tried to contact BK twice about a gross overbilling - they just don't care and don't respond. The credit card company said they never even replied to their inquiries.

It's all cheap food, and I don't blame the workers at all. Fast food work is awful. I'm just curious how all of this is going to end. People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac, and people aren't going to work at McD for minimum wage.

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> People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac

I think people used to say this about Starbucks, where you might pay close to $8 for just the drink.

Fast food can probably save itself by going premium (as Starbucks did, although I don’t know if they are still considered premium) and raising prices and quality. McDonald’s has made that play in the past with the pivot to McCafé and the nicer restaurant design that is now predominant.

What may have to go away is the idea of fast food as something that is attainable for just about everyone. I remember when I was much younger and McDonald’s was a treat - we didn’t have much spare money but my parents could make McDonald’s happen occasionally.

Nowadays I’m totally price insensitive and happy to pay for DoorDash to deliver McDonald’s and tip handsomely. The people who don’t have software jobs or a similar tier probably can’t. Big business will be fine regardless, and if they can’t make it work, the leadership is not worthy of their overpriced MBAs.

I worry about the lower classes though. An under appreciated (for the wealthy HN reader) aspect of the relative success of American development is the broad accessibility of luxuries to the masses. Even the poor masses. If you (dear reader) don’t recognize a fast food meal as a luxury, you are blind to the real consequences of what is unfolding. I understand the desire to cater to labor, but ultimately there are far more consumers than laborers (by definition - all human laborers are also consumers). The grand economic experiment of yanking away the _one_ aspect of the American project (abundance) that has until now been continuing to succeed will have consequences. Not for me, but for the people you think of when you think of labor.

There is a whole class of premium "fast casual" places. Five Guys, Shake Shack, In-N-Out (whose prices are a bit lower), etc. As well as Panera and a whole bunch of chains in that general category.

I rather like them especially when traveling and needing a quick meal (while mostly hating most traditional fast food). But not really places where you take the family for a cheap meal. Heck, I'm in tech and I think the prices are pretty steep a lot of the time. Not that the big fast food chains are exactly dirt cheap if you don't make a lot of money yourself, but maybe doubling their prices for a better product--even if the McD fries are probably still better :-)--pretty much puts them out of reach of many.

This also starts to shade into just regular takeout once the prices get high enough. I rarely order from places like Five Guys unless I have a specific craving for a burger, because once I'm paying $10 for a cheeseburger, I have a whole range of takeout options in a similar price range. More often than not, I end up going for my favorite local Indian place that has excellent entrees priced around $11-13.

Definitely. I don't eat out much at home in part because I don't have a lot of options and I'm mostly fine with cooking myself. Five Guys-class stuff tends to be for places like airports or late night traveling when I don't have a lot of other decent alternatives. For a regular mid-price dinner in a city, some ethnic meal is probably my go-to option.

Burgers also just aren't a good actual takeout option. While takeout/delivery doesn't help any food, Indian/Chinese can usually tolerate it better than burgers. Chicken is another semi-regular go to for me; a rotisserie chicken from the supermarket is something like $5 and fried chicken works pretty well too.

I honestly don't get how Five Guys is an option at all. It's like a half sized burger that has too much on it and it's smooshed up usually and not well put together so it ends up just coming apart on me half the time.

For basically the same price I could get a pub style burger on a nice brioche bun with twice the beef.

I think the value add in Five Guys is in the fries. Apart from the obvious generosity of the amount of fries they give you which completely dwarfs any other restaurant, they go through a serious effort making them taste really good as well. They soak the cut potatoes in running water for 5 hours before frying them in peanut oil with a special double dip method to give a good consistency of fluffy on the inside and crisp on the outside.

I agree the burger itself is pretty mediocre for what you pay. The “all ingredients included” mantra also encourages people to make burgers that fall apart as you pick them up. There’s also nothing really special about it - the company even actively advertises that they use common big box grocery vendors to source their ingredients and anything you eat there is mostly available off the shelf at your local grocery. When I worked there all of our stuff came on a Kroger truck.

>They soak the cut potatoes in running water for 5 hours before frying them in peanut oil with a special double dip method to give a good consistency of fluffy on the inside and crisp on the outside.

FWIW, this is standard procedure for pretty much any place that makes their own fries on location. It might be a step up from most big chains that use frozen fries, but there's probably dozens of small eateries in any decent sized town that do the same.

I actually really don't like their fries so maybe that's part of the problem. I used to work at Chick-Fil-A and would always fry my waffle fries a second time right before my lunch break. That's pretty much the only thing I miss from that job. Being able to make the perfect fried chicken and fries meal for myself in about 5 minutes.

As a Brit I don't understand the fascination with Five Guys. Greasy, gross, mushy nastiness that is way overpriced.

They're pricing themselves against the likes of Honest Burger or Byron here and not even close in quality.

In my (entirely US) experience they haven’t done a good job making sure quality keeps up in restaurants far from their home site.

Their corporate HQ is in Northern Virginia, and the restaurants in that area are excellent (especially the one actually owned by corporate). The same cannot be said of the Midwest. I’m not surprised they didn’t cross the pond very well.

Yeah, I've had this experience with Five Guys here in Britain - the few times I've had one in London, it's been great. Slightly expensive, but quality 'plain, old fashioned burger'.

Visited one in Harrogate on a stay up there a couple of years back and it was ... bad. Given it was a wee treat for myself after a long day, very disappointing.

I brought up Five Guys, mostly because they're one of the bigger and more geographically distributed chains. But I generally agree there are other chains in this general category that are better, sometimes significantly--not that I eat enough at them enough to have a strongly formed comparative opinion. Five Guys is also one of the more expensive and, as someone else mentioned, all their "free" toppings encourage people to toss on a bunch of stuff that makes the bun soggy.

If forced to choose, I'd probably go with In-N-Out though they don't exist around where I live and McDs fries are still better.

5 Guys is a certain type of burger. It’s a high fat burger that is literally smashed into a griddle and usually served with a buttery bun. It’s not trying to be a gourmet burger.

Five guys is great, if I am getting a Togo burger they are the best option I can think of… go maybe once a month or so with the family.

It's affecting them, too. The Five Guys near me, which still advertises hours of 11am-9pm 7 days a week online, is actually only open 11am-3pm M-F, and about half the time is randomly closed for no reason. When I am able to go in, there are half a dozen or more people working.

I'm not sure if it's scheduling or wages or what but this thing seems to be happening across the board, not just places like McDonald's and BK. But those are similarly affected - BK's quality has dropped significantly just in the last 2-3 months, and McDonald's has kept the quality at the expense of closing the dining room more often than not and long drive-through lines.

Five Guys is good, but it's pricey.

If you ignore tips, you can usually get a (chain) steakhouse burger and fries for about the same (i.e. about $14-15.

I cannot trust Uber Eats to deliver food that has fries without the driver dipping into them. Twice in the last few months I've gotten a hand off from a greasy fingered driver and a short order of fries.

I give myself a break from cooking on the weekends and order out, it's been a pretty fast decline in the service offered AND the price has increased.

There's not much recourse either. I can remove the tip, and report the interaction, but haven't gotten my money back. A lot of the stuff I liked to get take out I just can't order anymore, and my trust in the system has eroded.

McDonald’s has always had sealed bags when I’ve ordered, with large tamper-evident tape. They’ve also got advanced stay-fresh fry technology to prevent them going soggy, according to a planet money episode I vaguely remember: https://www.npr.org/2019/10/23/772775254/episode-946-fries-o...

The bags: https://images.app.goo.gl/pmB85VGi5zqamitn6

> large tamper-evident tape

Which depends on how hard the employee presses down the tape. Often, the tape is hardly attached and would be trivial to "remove"/open, and after grabbing what you want, putting it back

That's us. My wife is an excellent cook, I'm completely spoiled. But she wants the weekends off cooking, and we end up looking for easy food. That's what led me down this path of 'what in the world is going on?' and similar thoughts. We're currently spending like 25 a hit(family of 3) for bland to mediocre food and inconsistent service, which just feels wrong.

It is good news. The people that used to have to work for low pay in bad quality of life jobs like restaurants have better options life, so $8.3/person/cooked meal is not possible anymore.

Although, where I am in the US, it has been $15+ per person per cooked meal for years.

A Five Guys about a 20 minute drive away is one of my few delivery options. Whenever I'm tempted I close the computer and maybe call my favorite local pizza place and drive 10 minutes to pick up the order. Burgers want to be eaten right away.

They really need to seal the bags.

> Fast food can probably save itself by going premium

Here (California) it seems fast food has priced itself into premium territory already but the food is the usual lowest possible quality.

I used to eat lunch at fast food chains way too often for the usual reasons: fast, consistent, cheap.

These days it is pretty slow (for the issues covered in the article) and nowhere near cheap, so they have priced themselves out of relevance to me.

I used to get a handful of tacos as Taco Bell for $5 but now it is $11. Right across the parking lot there is an authentic taqueria with better quality food, happier service and the owner works the counter (so not some chain) and the price is the same. So now I go to the taqueria every time.

Same with sandwiches. There's a very nice local sandwich shop but I didn't go very often since it was somewhat expensive. So I'd go to Subway or Togos for a $6 sandwich. Last time I went to Togos I paid $12 for my usual! But the much higher quality local sandwich shop is $11. So now I go there every time instead.

A burger combo at the various drive throughs is also up to the $11-$12 range. So if I want a burger I'd rather go to one of the many semi-upscale local burger places for a far higher quality burger for around the same price of just a bit more.

Aside from the large cost increase of my lunches, I'm fairly happy with the decline of the fast food convenience. It has driven me to higher quality food and supporting the local businesses instead of the big chains.

American abundance is built on trillions of government debt and cheap Chinese/Asian imports.

American relative[1] abundance was also a thing around 1940 after the Great Depression was over and before Perl harbour lead to increased government debt.

At this time there was low government debt and roughly no cheap Asian imports. Therefore, I don’t really believe your hypothesis.

[1] I mean relative to peer countries in Europe before the war—obviously abundance in 1940 could be attributed to the impact of war on those European countries.

Perl harbor was indeed a great tragedy.

Fortunately the US was able to reclaim control of the C

> I'm just curious how all of this is going to end. People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac, and people aren't going to work at McD for minimum wage.

Research on the effect that raising minimum wages has on prices, specifically fast food prices, found that for every 10% increase in wages, some prices increase by 0.36% and other prices decrease[1].

[1] https://research.upjohn.org/up_workingpapers/260/

We're in a weird world where it's hard to find roots and causes. All I know is that wages in the lower end are way up, and so are prices for -everything-. A simple minded person may link the two.

But I'm not going so far as to call the research wrong, as wage increases have been caused by a worker shortage and not legislation.

I suspect wages aren't the only thing impacting prices. External factors like material shortages and supply chain problems have also had an effect.

Prices for labor and commodities are up due to inflation

That's always been my fear, in a way. I've long been a proponent for higher minimum wages, and met with folks telling me it would raise the price of everything. On paper, they were wrong.

Today we see it play out, and they are right. But not because they were strictly right, but by happenstance inflation hit everything.

Good luck convincing those folks now, I guess.

>That's always been my fear, in a way. I've long been a proponent for higher minimum wages, and met with folks telling me it would raise the price of everything. On paper, they were wrong.

Even on paper, they were not wrong. The point of raising minimum wages (which has not happened federally in the US), is to transfer wealth from those who have it to those who do not.

The goal would be for labor prices at the the low end to increase faster than prices, so that the people who were previously consuming more have to consume less, and the people who had to consume minimally can consume more.

When the poor kid who has to work at burger king doubles his wage, the hope is that he can have enough money to save for a somewhat reliable car, at the expense of a richer kid being unable to eat burger king as often.

>The goal would be for labor prices at the the low end to increase faster than prices, so that the people who were previously consuming more have to consume less, and the people who had to consume minimally can consume more.

You're right but the real problem is that those who have the money don't actually spend it on consumption. If they did then you wouldn't need to raise the minimum wage as there would be enough well paying job opportunities for everyone.

A lot of other people have pointed out the current circumstances are extraordinary and possibly not a good read through for a legislative minimum wage increase.

Another POV, anecdotally, from the article:

> Matt and his best friend from McDonald’s, David Putnam, were making $12 an hour at Tim Hortons doughnut shop. The extra money meant David, who was raising his 2-year-old son on his own, no longer needed donated food from the “Blessing Box” near his house. He had recently even been able to treat his mother and stepfather to dinner at the Hunan Buffet across the parking lot from his new job.

If those are the consequences, bring it on.

But the minimum wage hasn't increased. The supply of money increased. It's not even close to the question being considered.

> The supply of money increased.

And that money isn't doing much:

* https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/M2V

Everyone shouts how adding more money will make everything more expensive. In some countries the added dollars don't even circulate once. Inflation is dead.

It seems like you're ignoring that we're coming out of a global pandemic which has led to reduced productivity and efficiency resulting in a goods shortage.

> Today we see it play out, and they are right.

Or, you know, the (global) supply chain is clogged.

> It’s been a troubled few months on the economic front. Inflation has soared to a 28-year high. Supermarket shelves are bare, and gas stations closed. Good luck if you’re having problems with your home heating system: Replacing your boiler, which normally takes 48 hours, now takes two or three months. President Biden really is messing up, isn’t he?

> Oh, wait. That inflation record was set not in America but in Germany. Stories about food and gasoline shortages are coming from Britain. The boiler replacement crisis seems to be hitting France especially hard.

[…]

> In other words, the problems that have been crimping recovery from the pandemic recession seem, by and large, to be global rather than local. That’s not to say that national policies are playing no role. For example, Britain’s woes are partly the result of a shortage of truck drivers, which in turn has a lot to do with the exodus of foreign workers after Brexit. But the fact that everyone seems to be having similar problems tells us that policy is playing less of a role than many people seem to think. And it does raise the question of what, if anything, the United States should be doing differently.

> So why does the whole world seem to be running on empty?

* https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/29/opinion/inflation-global-...

* https://archive.md/fjwyl

I wouldn't trust any minimum wage research in today's politicized academic climate. These are all models of a complex nonlinear system, it's trivially easy to build a model that will back fit your selection of target data while simultaneously outputting any future results that the modelers want (intentionally or otherwise).

If you can raise wages without any damaging effects that just means you were underpaying your workers. In other words, raising a low minimum wage just works by accident. It's not a very reliable policy tool.

What are you on about? The linked study is from over half a decade ago, and it's not from academia.

So... right around Trump's election? This politicization is older than 5 years.

But you're right its from an allegedly independent organization.

You didn't set a time bound on "today's politicized academic climate," so I had to guess. There's always a new conservative bugaboo with some aspect focused on schools, and it tends to come on 5-10 year cycles.

It's CRT today, teaching about gay people existing around then (post-Obergefell v. Hodges), Sharia law allegedly taking over communities not that long ago. It seems the merits and hazards of paying people enough to live is next with this new labor movement frustrating people who are used to abusing lopsided power relationships.

It's dishonest to dismiss valid concerns as "conservative bugaboos". Pew surveys have consistently shown that the majority of global muslims, for example, support establishing Sharia Law and placing it above local laws in foreign countries. I won't get into the issues with CRT but they're not nearly as cut and dry as you are implying. Nor is your interpretation over labor law. I'm at least willing to acknowledge that the progressive aspect is not entirely without merit; are you truly so arrogant as to blithely dismiss the views of about half the country in their entirety?

Half the country? No, of course not. A quarter at best, and I charitably assume most voting Republicans (the quarter) are as concerned about what's happening to their party as the other ~75% of the country. Some of its leadership, most now dead, decided to lean hard into extremist evangelical beliefs some decades ago and people who took up the reins after are still dealing with the fallout.

But it's incontrovertible this class of bugaboos is almost exclusively shared among people who self-identify as conservative. I didn't say all conservatives; you read that into my comment. I have other criticisms for liberal, leftist, Democrat, etc bugaboos. I'm talking about your comment. You do not represent half the country.

A lot of services used by middle class and even upper middle class people essentially depend on wage differentials.

Compare the level of home personal services that people in the US have compared to Southeast Asia for example. American do use gig services and tradespeople, but even lawn services, housecleaners, etc. aren't all that common. I use the latter two as lightly as possible and I view them as something of a luxury/indulgence. And certainly people mostly don't have personal chefs and that sort of thing.

It's not that hard to imagine even fast food becoming more of a luxury good--although something like my local pizza place that I maybe go to every few weeks seems to be mostly high schoolers so maybe there's still a lower wage demographic that seems reasonable to be lower.

But, yeah, I mostly get takeout there because I'm lazy and if prices doubled, I'd just make more at home.

It's definitely in a weird place. People used to do fast food, expecting not much, for not much money. But plenty of premium options exist. A burger from a steakhouse is like 7 bucks. My local food truck, 6 bucks. And that dude makes it fresh in front of you, and puts tiny fries on it(Venezuelan style, apparently).

That Wendy's charges 5.19 for a single is almost an insult, when 80 cents gets you something worlds better.

So does fast food just disappear? It simply doesn't compete with more premium offerings today. Or do they compete with the steakhouse/foodtruck, and eliminate the fast/cheap aspects?

I've gotten back to traveling over the past month and a half or so and the restaurant business is a complete sh-tshow even outside of fast food (which I rarely eat--at least at the big chains).

Have eaten at a place the past couple of days that was only operating at about 50% capacity outside seating (I assume lack of staffing) and still had about a 20 minute wait. A couple weeks ago was at a place in a different city. Arrived and just got a seat at the bar shortly before 3pm closing because the place was packed. Wasn't opening again until Thursday.

Personally I wouldn't care if McDs went away tomorrow but obviously a lot of people depend on or at least think they depend on stereotypical fast food. (And a lot of "fast casual" at places like Five Guys is a fair bit more expensive. Non-chains are often cheaper.)

Which steakhouse sells burgers for $7?

Totally depends on your local places. Even a national place like Texas Roadhouse is something like 9 dollars.

We've actually found places, by chance, that have huge awesome kids burgers for 5 or 6 dollars.

Apparently some places just sell the same foods cheaper under the kids guise. We aren't scammers, we do have a kid.

Seriously - Carl's Jr's six dollar burger came out in 2001, which was about what a burger cost in a full service restaurant back then. That was 20 years ago.

It was named six dollar burger because that was pretty extreme at the time.

In 2001 a Whopper was less than $2, for comparison.

A burger from a steakhouse is 7 bucks? What steakhouse is that? Even 6 would probably be the lowest-priced food truck burger I've ever seen.

Bit of an oddity, but I went to a food truck (then known as "burger 2.85") back in 2015. It's now $3.99. Canadian dollars. just proving that such things do exist!

https://goo.gl/maps/cNhDTEk41RDQwGHz7

> A lot of services used by middle class and even upper middle class people essentially depend on wage differentials.

Definitely seems like an abundance of businesses that are not profitable. They are just able to effectively rob their employees enough to keep going.

A large portion of quality of life for the upper income/wealth deciles depends on lower income/wealth deciles not having better options.

All the trips to tropical islands, or even eating out even at McDonalds regularly.

There's no big mystery. In the short term this will will all end with higher employee wages, higher fast food prices, reduced customer demand (more home cooking), and closure of some marginally profitable restaurants. In the long term more restaurant jobs will be automated, and more of the food prep work will be moved to high volume regional plants.

This article is about a small town in Pennsylvania that is literally 1 mile from the New York border. In New York, the workers are being paid $15 an hour while these guys and gals are <$10. You could easily compare prices with a short drive.

I'm up here in northern Illinois where, based on advertisements, fast food workers are getting $13+ for starting wages. They are all hiring, for sure, but all through this summer and fall you would not have guessed that there was a Great Resignation going on. They all have enough staff to make shifts, there is no unusual wait times, etc. And prices are not crazy, either.

You just have to pay the people! And here's an interesting thing that probably also helps:

> The Fair Workweek Ordinance requires certain employers to provide workers with predictable work schedules and compensation for changes.

https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/bacp/supp_info/fairwor...

We have a Taco Bell / KFC combo restaurant in the area. I went to the drive-thru several months back and was told that I could only order from the KFC menu because all of the Taco Bell people had just picked up their stimulus checks and decided to leave.

Similarly I was in DC and my Uber driver told me that he had been living illegally in a friends house he knew was empty but up for sale. When the house sold he had to sleep in his car which was not Uber worthy. When he got the stimulus check he was able to buy a used police car and converted it to an Uber himself by replacing the seats, dashboard, etc. Both these stories show me how valuable those stimulus checks were to others. I would definitely support direct income relief in the future and those types of programs may be the easiest and most direct way to help those in poverty.

>People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac

And this is what's wrong with people. It doesn't matter how much suffering and misery and other negative externalities went into something, it doesn't matter that they're confronted with the truth of these externalities, they will do whatever they can to save a literal dollar.

True, some people are "forced" into consooming only the cheapest things to survive, but many more people really do have an option to free themselves of Big Corpo, they'd rather just submit in order to save that dollar.

> It doesn't matter how much suffering and misery and other negative externalities went into something

This is uncharitable. It could be as simple as an $8 Big Mac changes the value proposition (quality/cost) enough that people move elsewhere.

If the main selling point of your product is that it's cheap are people wrong to not buy it if it's no longer cheap?

There's one fast food restaurant around me that doesn't lack employees and its Chik Fil A... I'm not sure why but it almost feels like they have too many of them.

McDonalds in particular is becoming very poor value.

I've noticed something very odd lately with their pricing as well.

The value menu meals are advertised as $X on the drive through menu. You order one, and they ask you what you want for a drink, and the POS rings it up as $X meal + $1 drink.

If you don't want the drink, they scrub the meal and enter it as $Y sandwich plus $Z french fries, and $Y+$Z = $X + ~$3.

I do not know the incantation required to get a value meal at McDonalds for the advertised price.

>The value menu meals are advertised as $X on the drive through menu. You order one, and they ask you what you want for a drink, and the POS rings it up as $X meal + $1 drink.

why not just call them out on it? ie. "the menu says the value meal should be $x, why am I being charged $x + $1?"

It doesn't ever do any good. The managers can't ever explain how it's supposed to work.

Order through the app, probably.

> People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac

They will. Grocery prices are getting out of hand. I live in a particularly expensive part of Canada, but a single steak is $25 at the grocery store. A pound of ground beef is around $10-15. A single beet is like $2-3. A pound of potatoes is $5. 12 eggs is $8.

I'm spending $30-40 to cook dinner for two typically. Restaurants seem like pretty decent value right now.

Those prices are not at all representative of what an average Canadian will be spending though, so probably not relevant to the overall trend. Very few Canadians are going to be spending $40 on cooking dinner for two people unless you want to have steak every day.

I did say the prices where I live are a tad extreme. However rising grocery prices are near the #1 concern of most Canadians right now. There's literally articles written about it on every single news outlet right now.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/food-costs-calgary-vi...

https://torontosun.com/news/national/cost-of-food-rising-acr...

Are you living way out in the Northwest Territories or something? Those prices would be way high even in the most expensive parts of the US, even at high end grocers, and I am taking into account the CAD->USD conversion.

Just north-ish Alberta. Like I said, expensive even for Canada, but it's pretty easy to see both inflation's effects as well as the effect of supply chain shortages on our food prices as we import most consumer food items.

There's no reason the price of a Big Mac need increase much at all. In Denmark, your McDonalds meal is made by workers being paid $22/hour, and prices are fairly similar: https://www.newsweek.com/minimum-wage-15-denmark-big-mac-mcd...

Even the 7-Elevens near me are no longer open 24/7. The closest one to me closes around 12 and doesn't open until sometime between 5 and 7 am when someone happens to show up. I was surprised the first time I got there at 4 am (couldn't sleep, needed something to eat) and there was a piece of paper on the door saying they were closed because of short staffing.

You don't need a crystal ball to see where this goes. Several European countries have labor policies which set a high floor on the cost of labor compared to the US. What you see there is pretty much what you would expect: Fast food restaurants are more upscale than their American counterparts and restaurant food in general is less popular due to the higher prices.

> People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac,

1)The price of a Big Mac isn't just facilities, labor, material, and marketing. It's also profits.

2)So? McDonalds doesn't have a right to sell a product a particular price point. Someone's unsustainable-for-society business model is not society's problem.

3)That big mac is costing us all money because McDonalds, like other starvation-wage employers, is relying on government assistance programs to keep their workers fed, housed, and healthy.

Wallyworld hires people to help their employees file for welfare. Wallyworld made $183BN in profits last year. That's roughly $80,000 per employee.

Tell me with a straight face that they can't pay people sufficiently that they don't need to be on welfare.

Let's say that means a dollar or two more an hour. Two dollars an hour more for every employee (I don't know how many of Walmart's workers are minimum-wage retail, but it's certainly not all of them) would mean taking $4,000 out of that $80,000.

A five percent profit loss.

For an employee making federal minimum wage at $7.50/hour, a two dollar raise would be 27% pay increase.

This is nonsense.

It's not 183, it's 138 (see https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/gross-... ), but that's not the error. The big error is that the $138B they make is gross profit. To quote Wikipedia:

>For a firm, gross income (also gross profit, sales profit, or credit sales) is the difference between revenue and the cost of making a product or providing a service, before deducting overheads, payroll, taxation, and interest payments.

Profit after deducting all expenses is net profit.

Wal-mart's net profit in 2021 was 13.51 billion: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-in....

If $183 billion gross profit is $80000 per employee, you're talking about $5900 net profit per employee. Two dollars per employee wouldn't be a 5% profit loss, it would be an 85% profit loss.

Crazy to me how often I see gross profit or gross income erroneously used instead of net profit or net income on HN.

The conviction of your opinion seems out of line with your understanding of numbers behind it.

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