Applebee’s exec urges using high gas prices to push lower wages, sparks walkout
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The static (both in the nominal and inflation adjusted sense) for minimum wage doesn't make sense imo. Minimum wage should be tied to some level of living (not necessarily a great living, but something)
This guy smh
Interesting thought though
I live about 45 minutes from downtown LA without traffic. Which turns into 2.5 hours with traffic.
Slightly smaller yachts for the executives.
Yeah, it will result in lower real income for executives ...along with anyone that make more than 3x the poverty threshold, per CBO's report:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...
>Whereas politicians on both sides of the aisle have criticized the CBO when its estimates have been politically inconvenient,[3][4] economists and other academics overwhelmingly reject that the CBO is partisan or that it fails to produce credible forecasts. There is a consensus among economists that "adjusting for legal restrictions on what the CBO can assume about future legislation and events, the CBO has historically issued credible forecasts of the effects of both Democratic and Republican legislative proposals."[5]
So I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt, that they didn't make obvious mistakes in their analysis that a hacker news commenter could have pointed out. Feel free to read the report in depth and disprove that, though.
This could be defined by local governments with additional standards not written in to this internet comment.
But when someone says
> I wonder what the USA would look like if minimum wage was defined as; two people being able to afford a 1 bedroom apartment within a 1 hour drive without traffic.
Then "nothing stops local government from doing it" seems to me to lack the aspect of wonder the parent had intended to evoke.
I'd be here for using the same standards as rental agencies do though so it's actually possible to get a place: 3x the rent of 1 bedroom for one full time job. And make it within 30 minutes during peak hour (by whichever means is fastest). Also if they cite a train as their fastest, then no car or license requirements on the job and no penalizing anyone if the train is late.
If they want to be feudal lords, they can at least have the bare minimum responsibilities that actual feudal lords had.
Do you really think this is what is causing inflation? Perhaps there are other facts, such as trillions of dollars of almost zero interest money injected since 2008, massive tax cuts for highly profitable companies (eg AAPL) that result in great payouts to people who are already paying low taxes (long term capital gains), complex interacting forces that moved the cost of a barrel of oil from a low of $20 to over $100?
I'm not sure how I see how spending a ton more money (UBI) will help with inflation at this point. 100% debt-to-gdb is already a lot.
Currently private investors are refusing to invest in oil even without environmental factors in the picture - they think it's a temporary spike and are insisting the oil companies pay them back dividends instead.
I'm critical of UBI but using a global pandemic with millions of deaths as an example isn't what UBI is.
Calling it a failed experiment is ridiculous - it was infrequent and an order of magnitude too small.
It’s a no-brainer!
Don't make UBI subject to garnishment/attachment to pay debt and exclude it from income considered available when determining bankruptcy terms. Lending behavior under those conditions will prevent the use of credit you are concerned with, and bankruptcy itself will resolve problematic cases to the extent that lending behavior does not prevent it.
Most minimum wage earners are not in poverty because they are taking too many vacations and buying too many luxury items: they are in poverty because rents are consuming 40-60% of their income, costs of essentials to live and commute to work are rapidly rising, and a single medical debt can wipe out all of their savings in an instant.
Avocado toast is not destroying the middle class - corporate greed is.
People aren't poor because they are lazy and stupid, as ultra-capitalist pundits would like you to believe to prevent you feeling empathy. America is systemically broken in a way that it is no longer 'the land of opportunity': poverty today is a trap that hardly anyone can escape by simply working hard and spending wisely.
Of course everyone gets UBI…
…except the polluters …and CO2 emitters …and meat eaters …and porn watchers …and weed smokers …and tobacco smokers …and alcohol drinkers …and maybe it’s distributed on a curve, depending on race
It could be corrupted so easily. And it’s a single point of failure.
Unfortunately, non-cash welfare has tons of the manipulation you describe. You can get kicked out of public housing for using drugs and food stamps have all kinds of arbitrary limitations on them based on what the state legislature thinks you should be eating.
Uh, no, it's not.
The byzantine structure is because of (and in part to disguise the way that) every component of the system is agenda driven, and often by an agenda rather divergent from the overt purpose of the programs.
And of course, economists don't find it has the negative effects it used to theoretically have, because throughout the 90s they switched from just making things up to actually doing real-world empirical studies. (That is, it doesn't seem to have them up to "60% of local median income" IIRC.)
I prefer sector-specific minimum wages though. Somewhere in the neighborhood of Denmark or Australia.
what are these "extremely unproductive jobs" you speak of? Is the job of a burger flipper really so bad that we should eliminate it from the economy? Is it so bad, that if someone's skills only allows him to do that job, that it's better for him to stay at home and twiddle his thumbs than to show up to work?
I was thinking of things like servants, typists, textile workers.
I don't think they were eliminated because of minimum wage. They were eliminated because of a combination of outsourcing/globalization, which set an upper bound on how much those jobs can pay (at least in the US), and baumol's cost disease, which set a lower bound on what workers were willing to accept. The two forces combined to make those professions unviable. Getting rid of the minimum wage probably won't bring those jobs back. If anything the jobs will go to more productive sectors (thanks to baumol's cost disease), rather than to the utterly unproductive ones like you mentioned.
...aside from how it's funded.
>along with a ton of other scattered welfare programs that have lots of administrative overhead and the typical middleman industries that leech off of government programs.
That sounds great in theory, if everyone is the type of person that can take care of himself for $15k (or whatever) a year. But what about people with special needs? eg. people with mental health problems or medical conditions requiring expensive therapy? Unless you think we should let those people fend for themselves, you'll still need welfare programs to help those people, which mean all the "administrative overhead and the typical middleman industries that leech off of government programs" that you're so against.
Speaking from experience, such people already have to fend for themselves...so nothing really changes.
UBI is the epitome of a cocktail party idea: https://danluu.com/cocktail-ideas/
2) Any income surplus generated by UBI is rapidly consumed by middle people and rent-seekers. That’s how we get inflation.
Since they can afford higher prices, people will charge those higher prices. And you are back where you started.
UBI only gives everyone extra money if it is unfunded; typical UBI proposals are funded by either increased progressive income taxes or cutting other spending (which produces income to the recipient), and so is (in first order effects) zero-sum. (Typically, it replaces rapid clawbacks from means testing with slow clawbacks by progressive tax increases.)
UBI indirectly and unfairly benefits only the people who control those goods and services. If everyone made $1000 more per month, housing prices would raise up to that amount for everyone. This means the majority of the UBI raise would go into just the landlords pockets.
This is why many welfare programs are expense- or need-dependent, because it maximizes the benefit to those who need it without impacting price inflation as much.
Might as well start with:
- Removal/reduction in zoning
- Automate construction approval workflows
- Leverage eminent domain to aggregate land, and sell for profit to the builders.
Its just a win-win-win (given the views / property values would be reduced regardless without extra housing causing SF/LA/Seattle levels of homeless people):
- Homeowners get paid, by the city / local gov, at market rate or slightly above market rate.
- The city / local government has a new profit stream, to be used for more housing / services / reduced taxes. They would aggregate land, re-zone it, get approvals completed, and sell the whole package to the highest bidding developers.
- Developers reduce costs to aggregate land and due to interest payments while waiting for all the land + approvals.
- City gets to better plan the hosing market, i.e. superblocks, transit, etc.
- City dwellers get more access to housing (i.e. cheaper housing), and possibly reduced taxes. Also reduced crime and homelessness because the city is affordable for everyone.
There are ways to achieve all of the above that doesn't require destroying income-elastic priced markets. UBI is not a good solution.
UBI doesn't work well at all, like you stated, if there isn't a big increase in the supply of housing. For example, Seattle needs 10x more housing than it has today, and in 10 years it'll need 100x more housing than it has today. Ideally, all of these should be new luxury condo buildings, with 1000-3000 sqft condos, driving prices of all housing down by 10x. I would really like to see the city make this their only priority.
Seattle has about 740k people and about 370k housing units. 10 times the housing units would be enough for the entire state population at an average occupancy of 2 persons/unit. 100 times would be enough for roughly every US state bordering on or one state out from the Pacific Ocean.
Seattle pretty emphatically does not need that much housing.
Density also facilitates business and pulls in even more workers, who are also customers and it’s a positive cycle.
Seattle needs 100x more housing in the next 10 years if it wants to continue to be a competitive city. As a resident I sure hope it does.
In practice it probably depends on a lot of factors and would need empirical studies.
Of course it would. It's happening right now.
On #2 I think your claim needs evidence or support, I doubt that would be true for the most part (maybe to some extent).
Typical UBI proposals are funded, e.g., by additional progressive taxes, and so no actual income surplus is generated (in a first-order analysis), income is redistributed, compressing distribution.
At which point the proposal becomes a welfare system that pointlessly disburses and claws-back cash.
(1) Eliminates multiple sets of inefficient benefits/eligibility bureaucracy that duplicates functionality already performed as part of taxing authority.
(2) Eliminates a counterproductive incentives associated with typical means-tested benefit eligibility, which has clawbacks at low income levels and rapid marginal rate (sometimes exceeding 100% with marginal income when tallied across all means-tested programs; this effect creates a barrier to progress beyond a low income level. (While progressive income taxes may be raised from previous levels to fund it, when viewed as clawbacks these changes typically kick in at much higher income levels and lower marginal rates than typical means-tested benefit clawback.)
Your second point acknowledges that taxing away UBI through progressive tax rates is a clawback. As I read it, your idea is that the increased marginal taxation due to the clawback will occur at higher income levels than exist with current programs. Why not just change the existing tax rates instead of sending out cash and taxing it back?
The most recent that springs to mind is the elimination of most of the conscription-related bureaucracy post-Vietnam.
> Your second point acknowledges that taxing away UBI through progressive tax rates is a clawback. As I read it, your idea is that the increased marginal taxation due to the clawback will occur at higher income levels than exist with current programs. Why not just change the existing tax rates instead of sending out cash and taxing it back?
A baseline tax credit plus adjustments to existing rates is widely recognized as one mechanism for implementing a UBI, but even the there is often a desire to have an estimated advance mechanism, to avoid a delay of potentially more than a year from when people enter the UBI-covered population and when they start benfiting from it.
I was just thinking of that as an entrenched bureaucracy example but decided to focus things on an entitlement program. Despite having zero purpose for 49 years, Selective Service still manages to spend $26m/year [0].
> often a desire to have an estimated advance mechanism, to avoid a delay of potentially more than a year
The model for advance payments on an upcoming year's tax credits already exists [1]. I can see how this doesn't address downward change in income, but also don't see how that couldn't be added.
0. https://www.sss.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Annual-Report...
1. https://www.irs.gov/credits-deductions/advance-child-tax-cre...
You can rent them for very cheap but just as you're about to move in they suddenly become unavailable for whatever reason? Probably the owner lost their keys or something and then lawyers can argue for years if the owner is actually required to hand over the keys. Or maybe the apartment has no way to enter and lawyers can now argue for years if an apartment needs to have a door?
At least that's what I can imagine would happen.
I mean, presumably in this hypothetical situation we wouldn't want to simultaneously dissolve basic renter's rights.
I'm only slightly kidding. The Indiana legislature was "too busy" to consider a renter's rights bill this year. They were busy trying to "solve the problem" of transgender kids playing on sports teams in schools. That's obviously way more important than lower income people having affordable, safe places to live.
The usual formula for any engagement with hypothetical ideas is for it to be reflexively dismissed with a "that'll never work" response. Most of the time I think this is the instinctive friction we feel at being asked to engage with a new idea, and saying that'll never work for [insert reason] is intended not to express a counter-argument so much as it is to reject the invitation to participate in the exercise.
But even in the genre of "that'll never work" responses, this one is uniquely strange. Normally the "that'll never work" response suggests that there's some obstacle that arises as a consequence of the change to the status quo. But here, it's just a list obstacles that aren't connected to any underlying principle. It doesn't even feel like the usual "that'll never work" response.
And you are back where you started. Or you have to raise prices again, in a never ending loop.
I suppose you can hand out ration cards for food and housing, so those never have a price, just a government supply. That's the only "out" I can think of to keep the loop from happening.
Different segments of the economy can function as shock absorbers that bear the brunt of inflation, while other segments of the economy see their prices rise more slowly then the increase of wages.
Different sectors of the economy face different degrees of surplus and strain, and the relations between those structures are always up for renegotiation as new money enters the system.
> [imagined nonsense rules-layering]
That won't happen for two reasons:
1. It requires a massive conspiracy.
2. Any law like the GP describes would most likely be written to block off the exploits that it took you five minutes to think of. Exploits that are missed can be addressed in subsequent laws.
Practically, a minimum wage defined like the GP's would require a detailed census of actually-paid one bedroom apartment rents, which would be immune to your exploits.
GSA does the same thing for travel expenses. You can determine lodging and per diem expenses for every county in the US.
My immediate reaction to this statement was.. it's insane? In my opinion it should read 'a single person able to afford a 1 bedroom apartment within an hour of public transport commute.'
Otherwise it sounds like you don't think anyone should be able to live anywhere reasonable without roommates?
EDIT: That's what Henry George said. The reason San Francisco land has so much value and the land in an undeveloped part of California has nearly none is the development, meaning the work of developing it, what human hands do to the land to transform it, the construction. You can sprinkle gold on it and nothing, put a bulldozer there (capital) and nothing, send an entrepreneur or economist to look at it and nothing. It's when people work that it becomes worth something.
I live in a neighborhood where the median income is below the national average by about 10% and above the national average by about the same amount. This implies to me that there are is a fair bit of economic diversity.
Also, I very rarely encounter a service worker that does not live within 25 minutes of the establishments in my neighborhood unless they do so by choice to live in a much hipper neighborhood.
Part of this is a university that stabilizes the real estate prices and attracts a lot of low income students who take on service jobs, but also a big part of it is housing diversity. Within 1 block of me are a commercial district, a high rise building, many mid-rise buildings, lots of townhomes and a handful of single family homes including at least 2 I’d call mansions. This housing diversity came about due to several phases over the course of over 100 years of urban planning that specifically centered on making it possible for lots of housing desires to be fulfilled in a single place.
It’s entirely possible if there is enough will. But that will is lacking.
My brain is not parsing this sentence properly. Could you elaborate a touch?
I'm reading it as "the neighborhood median income is, at the same time, 10% below and 10% above the national average income", which is only possible if both the national average and your neighborhood median is 0. I presume I'm reading it wrong.
The secret is Japan doesn't let cities run their own zoning, because they'd just use it to ban new people but try to keep the jobs.
Think of how many people a big hospital employs, and how you'd need to organise living center if all of them had to have a reasonable living space within few minutes of commute. Now you need stores and restaurant there as well and the space to host the workers of these places too, etc. The only way is to build huge tower hosting tons of small appartements, kill all green areas to gain as much space as possible. People don't seem to like that idea that much.
> Because the only way to guarantee that people have less than an hour of commute to their job is to create extremely dense population center
EDIT: in the context of applebees, i suppose there isnt an alternative hmmmm....
Think "people care" (and all the ramifications or that: babies, children, sick, elders + everything around that). All people working in stores (unless we exclusively want online shops). Transportation of goods. Building, sanitation, construction. Any job that requires specialised equipment (like factories), ... .
The whole idea that we can transition to a society where people don't have to move to get to work is an illusion. COVID gave us a false glimpse because most activities were closed or significantly reduced, so it felt like people didn't need to get to work anymore but that's just because they simply did not work. And it was not sustainable on the long run. We made the - right IMHO - choice to subsidise their income, wether directly via stimulas checks, or indirectly by helping their employers, but all that was based on the bet/assumption that we would be able to resume "normal society" and we would be able repay the debt we incurred over the next years.
To shift to a world of "mostly" remote work in reality means the smaller population of higher paid desk workers working from home, and everyone else having to commute to in person jobs.
Worse if companies don't adjust wages to match local rates (per the protests of many tech workers) we end up with deep income disparity between the remote workers and in person ones. Bringing many of the problems of a place like SF to all the other locations.
It feels like something has to give, or the society that results is awfully dystopian.
Travel-to-work areas are circular-ish, and the available space for housing increases with the square of the distance. Accommodating a large hospital's workforce won't make a sizable dent in that. Compulsory tiny rabbit hutches in the sky it is not.
This is precisely backwards! Dense housing creates green areas, sprawl devours them. This should be obvious if you think for even a moment—-dense housing requires less land per person housed, which leaves more for nature.
I live in a cluster of small towns with a major regional hospital, almost exactly the situation you describe. After decades of sprawl, we’re finally starting to do an OK job of building dense housing right next to the hospital, and it’s saving a huge amount of wild space.
I think your confusing "should be able to" with "shall be able to, enforceable by law".
I don't expect that a 15 year old working his first job as a fry cook at an Arby's should be compensated enough that he can afford to live on his own. In fact, that could be dangerously disincentivizing his hard work toward his education.
He's got more money, so he can afford more expensive stuff, increasing demand, which increases prices, and now your fry cook can no longer live on his salary.
Do you want to respond by raising wages again? You're in a never ending loop.
This does not necessarily follow from the previous statement, and may even be completely unrelated.
The only way you keep this person's wage down is increase supply - have lots of people with university degrees. But that's not the real world, in the real world most people are not able to get a degree.
Again, the second part of this statement does not necessarily follow from the first. There are countless ways of tweak supply/demand of McJobs, such as low minimum wages resulting in a glut of retail locations , changing total hours non-degreed workers (read high-schoolers) can work, adjusting rules on temp workers, community college intakes, etc.
There a many variables, and increasing minimum wage impacting a subset of (mostly unskilled[0]) workers doesn't automatically mean an increase in income for skilled jobs.
0. I dislike the term, but it conveys my intended meaning. "Jobs that require no prior training" is unwieldy.
He should be able to live; that doesn’t (for me) extend to “rent the average 1BR apartment for less than 35% of his gross pay, by law”.
PRESIDENTIAL Masterpiece Diploma Frame in Jefferson with Black Suede & Premium Silver Wood Millet Mats - Stanford U
$249.00
So, forcing an employer to pay him a "living wage" makes no sense. The rationale behind that law is invalid. You can invent new rationale, as you've done here, but it doesn't change the fact that his standard of living doesn't depend on his paycheck.
Other people think that the minimum wage should only apply to adults for some reason. Thats them changing rationales. We don't have a lower minimum wage for couples or higher minimum wage for parents. And that the 15-year-old isn't spending the money right now doesn't mean he won't spend it later.
But sure, If you really want I guess you could argue that we should t let teenagers work at all. After all, they don't need the money.
When they don't work, it's because it wouldn't allow the household to buy more stuff on the margin - but rather than "spouse earns so much their income doesn't matter", it's more likely "they wouldn't earn enough to pay for the services they have to hire". Which is a bad thing.
Here is a radical idea. Build more houses. Maybe put them on top of each other so they don't have to be so far away from jobs. American love complaining about the inefficiencies of centrally planned economies, but then make one of the most important aspects of the economy, where people can live and work, into a entirely centralized way of doing.
No disagreement here.
>American love complaining about the inefficiencies of centrally planned economies, but then make one of the most important aspects of the economy, where people can live and work, into a entirely centralized way of doing.
Are they really centralized? NIMBYs aren't some cabal of shadowy billionaires, they're a grassroots effort by local residents. By that definition it's quite decentralized.
As in a roommate who murders hobos or who is a hobo that murders? If a hobo becomes a roommate, are they too stationary to still be a hobo?
A hobo is a migrant worker in the United States. Hoboes, tramps and bums are generally regarded as related, but distinct: A hobo travels and is willing to work; a tramp travels, but avoids work if possible; and a bum neither travels nor works.
> A character who wanders the gameworld, unattached to any community, indiscriminately killing and looting.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/murderhobo#:~:text=Noun,commu....
More labor being "outsourced" to cheap counties, for one. Rather than a restaurant making meals on site, they'll do most of the prep work 50 miles away where the CoL (and minimum wage) is cheap and truck it in.
Make it one bedroom per adult (so 1 bed apt for one, or 2 bed for 2, whichever is more) with a 30 minute commute in peak hour (by any means), as well as enough left over for a deposit on a similar home in 5 years for 20% lvr assuming current property value growth continues.
There’s already a standard for this with things like Section 8 vouchers. It’s hilarious how many HN commenters think these are intractable, impossible problems.
The federal government already tallies prevailing rent for every US city/county.
If the policy goal was to set minimum wage to a 40% of full time gross income, and the prevailing rent for basic housing is $1000/mo, 1000/40%=$2500, or $15/hr. You can rent an apartment for $450 in the small town I grew up in. Same calculation would be $6.75/hr.
Most employers use a similar methodology to set travel expense thresholds, etc.
A system like this could be subsidized by tax credits on the payroll side.
Hard to feel super supportive of massive changes to min-wage for places that literally make affordable housing impossible.
Growing population + massive regulation + NIMBY = you're gonna have a bad time.
Increasing minimum wage without fixing other issues is a ticket to non-solutions.
Wage adjustment like that will drive some of the market effects that are suppressed by the inertia that unchanging property taxes creates. Grandma would move out of her 4 bedroom home that costs $300/yr in taxes if she had to pay the gardener $40/hr.
Those cost increase tax would reduce property cost. In states where property tax adjusts you can see that dynamic.
NYC metro area is cheap compared to California, and the depressed upstate cities feature high taxes and incredibly cheap property.
So gentrification? Get rid of the "undesirables" instead of building more housing...
The problem isn't "grandma" (Or, I think that problem is vastly smaller than lack of new building/investment due to hostile regulations). The problem is anti-grow regulations that block what can be built (IE: must match look/feel, can't build high rises, etc)... and anti-grow regulations that demand massive investment in what can be built (IE: requiring water sprinklers in new homes, solar, etc) making new options grossly over-priced.
Cars aren't more expensive just because of inflation... they are more and more expensive due to regulations upon regulations such as air bags, abs, etc. Some of which is good... but a lot of which is debatable or outright wasteful. Same for housing.
Making grandma move out won't create the massive amount of new housing required for some areas. Those areas need new, affordable housing to be invested in - not getting rid of "undesirables" to raise taxes.
"feature high taxes and cheap property"
It's not cheap if you're taxed to death to stay there. Artificially low prices due to artificially high taxes aren't a solution any more than over regulation is.
And the idea of higher wages won't solve the issue that'll end up being inflation adjusted higher prices to pay higher taxes to pay for higher prices to pay for higher taxes to...
It would implode or we would adjust our standards in every other area to make it happen. We are simply not rich enough to afford that for everyone the way things are currently structured.
(It's usually written $15 an hour, but IMO you should count casual loading to compare to the US.)
Bullshit...the unqualified assertion doesn't even pass a ballpark sniff test using Department of Labor's historical federal minimum wage rates[1] and Bureau of Labor Statistics' CPI inflation calculator[2] against Feb 2022 buying power.
| Eff Date | Rate | Today |
|----------|------|-------|
| Jan 1970 | 1.60 | 12.01 |
| May 1974 | 2.00 | 11.68 |
| Jan 1975 | 2.10 | 11.44 |
| Jan 1976 | 2.30 | 11.74 |
| Jan 1978 | 2.65 | 12.03 |
| Jan 1979 | 2.90 | 12.05 |
Even at a 100 year range it comes out to: ($1.00 = $16.89) https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1922?amount=1
BUT, these numbers may not yet be taking into full account some of the most recent upticks in inflation. SO, there may be some room for error yet. But $24... sorry pal, but nope. Not quite there yet.
And for the Canadians out there: It's pretty much the same deal. I think last I checked, it was at $15.65 for 1$ @ 100 years range.
How about people figure out how much money they need to afford the lifestyle they want and then get a job that pays that much?
The work is already done.
But I do think the idea has merit.
I think the federal structure of the USA lends itself nicely to that problem.
There would be an issue in extremely heterogeneous states like Washington or California, where the big cities on the coast are known for being expensive while the interior is often cheaper, less desirable and subject to snobbery, as in the case of Bakersfield which I have never heard anything good about.
And if it's too much of a hassle for the employer, just pay your employees substantially above the minimum.
Some of them, certainly
> it's important they remain that way for freedom
How exactly does deciding on your own desired housing budget force anyone to remain poor?
All markets change because people buying something and people selling something have changing ideas of what it is worth when they trade. Business owners are subject to fluctuating prices for everything they buy and sell as well, labor, energy, materials, product... and real-estate of course.
The complaint I assume is about transactions affecting someone who is not party to it. I'm not sure how valid that is -- a region based minimum wage effectively already exists due to different costs of living so presumably it could be made to follow some region based formula like the one proposed that is updated every few years...
I don't know enough to know whether it would be workable or not, but your force employees argument is not a justification for it.
What if your lifestyle consists of:
1. pay off student loans in 10 years
2. be able to take transit to work (can't afford a car)
3. save at least 5% of take home pay to get a used car
4. eat ramen and salad
5. maybe see a movie once a month, or go to a bar twice a month
6. internet & cell phone
7. try not to starve or get evicted
8. avoid more than 2 roommates
9. have Obamacare catastrophe-ony health insurance (bare minimum)
And the only job you can get doesn't even pay for that?
That's pretty much the lifestyle of every 30 something I know who is struggling. That's also why this and student loan debt is being called a crisis, because it is. It's not like people honestly want a lifestyle that involves a McClaren and weekly trips to Bali.
Then the solution is to make yourself capable of getting other jobs.
You think everybody with a job paying more than minimum wage is doing something they love?
College as a "necessary tool" to get work is seriously broken. I've considered hanging up my "programming" hat and becoming a fabricator (welder, machinist, etc). Not because of the money, but because I know 1) I could make a decent wage and 2) I would enjoy the work more.
It would look like both minimum wage, and rent/real estate prices going directly to infinity.
A lot of stuff would be automated or simply not exist. I don't see how high minimum wage can "work" to solve social issues if companies can choose between not hiring people and paying a high minimum wage.
There are jobs where you don't need any experience and education anyways. The ones that are typically considered minimum wage jobs, like cleaning or restocking shelves. Employers shouldn't be able to hire teenagers for cheap just because they're younger, especially since a teenager isn't going to be less productive than an adult with those types of jobs.
I'm curious given your view that employers shouldn't be able to hire teens to do low wage jobs what you think about immigration. Is it the same thing, that we shouldn't allow low skill immigrants because they will compete for minimum wage jobs, or do you have a different view there and if so, why?
Otherwise, what experience and education do you expect that a brand new adult entering the job market to have that a teenager will not? An adult who needs (at least) minimum wage to be able to survive, and a week ago was a teenager. Who is going to hire such an adult when they could hire the teenager, with identical experience and education, for cheaper?
Low skill immigrants are still getting minimum wage aren't they? You're arguing that teenagers shouldn't even get that much. Or are you suggesting that low skill immigrants shouldn't get minimum wage either?
One guy I work with has 8 children. Another is married to a partner in a law firm and lives in a home likely worth >$5M. I don’t pay them any different.
If there was no exception to hiring people who are financial dependents you wouldn't be able to hire on such a person for a small rate. You'd either have to overpay, discouraging you from hiring them, or not hire them because you couldn't justify the expense.
Perhaps such labor is uncommon in your profession, but there are many professions where it is common. The kid at the mechanic's who answers phones and gets things for people may not actually be all that valuable compared to a wage high enough for two people to live off of. The job may be really valuable to the kid though giving experience and a bit of money.
In my business, interns are super valuable. We pay $20-25/hr depending on skill.
It blows my mind that people continue to act like rising costs are the fault of their employers, who have no control of it at all.
No doubt, this exec in particular was a moron who deserves to be fired for even suggesting what he did but the overall sentiment just doesn’t jive for so many businesses that are getting squeezed harder and harder everyday.
It sounds so simple to just raise prices, but if it were that simple it would have happened long before. Especially on the lower end of the consumer goods and services market the price sensitivity of people is sky high. In grocery stores companies chose to shrink their products and hope people didn’t notice rather than increases prices for that exact reason.
It gets passed along somewhere and in the end the more people who decide to “just raise prices” the worse the problem gets.
This is a very common situation in much of Latin America - both inflation being transmitted through CoL-indexed social goods, and the corruption that comes from trying to bypass that.
Any durable solution needs to address the questions of "How do we ensure that there are enough 1BR apartments within a 1 hour drive for everyone who wants one to get one?", "How do we incentivize the construction of these 1BR apartments?", "How do we maintain the desirability of these apartments once they're built?", and "How do we prevent one firm from owning all of the desirable 1BR apartments and setting whatever price they want?"
Alternately a large enough ratio of government controlled units within a market could be managed to provide a market weighting to reasonable prices. (you can see that in play in some European cities).
This is commonly expressed as a consequence of raising the minimum wage, but in the most nuanced discussions of inflation that I've been exposed to, people are mindful of the fact that inflation ripples out into different segments of the economy in different ways.
I think the most plausible outcome is that certain segments of the economy function as shock absorbers, which take the hit of inflation disproportionately as the economy rebalances itself and relieves pressures on segments of the economy that were being squeezed unsustainably hard.
And so there is indeed a ripple effect of raising the minimum wage, namely there's more money to spend, but it radiates out into the economy in disproportionate ways, and can be a net benefit to wage earners because prices on critical necessities may rise, but not in proportion to the rise in wages.
Unfortunately it rarely works the way any progressive would want it to. The "buffers" are firms in competitive markets - basically anyone who can't raise prices because there are dozens of other competitors doing the same thing and one of them is going to undercut you if you try. This includes most unskilled labor, many small businesses, small farmers, etc. It most definitely does not include the S&P 500, who got to be one of the top 500 biggest companies by having high margins, economies of scale, and pricing power. This is why the S&P 500 index is roughly double what it was two years ago, while median real wages have fallen about 5%.
There are other contributing variables exerting their influence at the same time: investing, and lending, and spending, and taxing and policy choices are significant inputs that all happen in parallel with wage increases in particular policy and economic climates that have different outcomes from country to country.
It also seems to fly in the face of reason to suppose that efficient markets don't see market-wide increases in prices. Firms don't just compete against each other but against the existential question of solvency, and if we're really talking about competitive markets, then these pressures are experienced collectively.
So neither the evidence of the stock markets nor the theory about competitive markets never increasing their prices seem to do the work that they would need to do, to suggest that people seeing wage increases are not benefiting from them.
Next you zone for type of housing, where you only allow a certain percentage of the most profitable 1BR apartments to be built, and require those to be above certain size thresholds so that a variety of life situations can actually live in your city.
You don't need to "incentivize" construction, the people that do that already make enormous amounts of money.
The apartment directly under mine is used as an office. Down and to one side is a psychiatrist. Ground floor is a cafe and a pizza takeaway. The apartment opposite me has a grocery store on the ground floor, an office on the second, a dentist on the third, and it looks like the rest of the units are residential. I may be missing something important about the rules here because I can’t read German well enough, but it feels self-balancing.
America… well, this is a tourist perspective, but I didn’t realise how realistic SimCity was before I visited.
That they perceive will cause their home values to drop. In reality, they use "home value" as a proxy for "my happiness" and tend to block things they don't like, without really considering the impact on prices.
In very large cities, your SFH is worth a shitload more if someone can put an multi-tenant unit down on it. We still see the odd SFH or diner in NYC, which is now worth bajillions of dollars because the city was allowed to grow to be so dense.
Increasing density is pro home values. Anyone fighting against it is absolutely leaving money on the table. They just don't realize it.
If you dont change any of this, a new "affordable 1br apartment will probably cost 700K.
Places that don't want to grow have to shed jobs and force them to go elsewhere.
There are places in California where you can get a single family home, let alone a 1br apartment, for around $200k. Let’s not kid ourselves and substitute California for when we really mean LA or the Bay Area (places where people want to live, as opposed to susanville, where most people don’t want to live).
We need fewer people in the market and that means less availability of large loans and taxes on commercial real estate loans. You can't have so many people competing to buy real estate to rent to you and pushing out people who want to buy.
And people need to be comfortable when a region doesn't want to grow, force them to curtail their commercial zoning, and people just need to leave and go somewhere else. There's plenty of space elsewhere.
What exactly is the problem with that? The only thing that welcomes growth forever is cancer, and economists.
To make your proposal more reality-compatible, “people should be comfortable when a region has to grow”. This means people’s attitudes as well as infrastructure’s capability to handle increased number of people.
People always want to control everything, and when there is a problem they think they can fix it by forcing everyone to do what they want. No one ever wants to consider that it is them that is causing the problem in the first place.
I have no problem with this. If investors argue it is a shit deal, that is fine, get out of the market and let someone who wants to live there buy it.
I firmly believe that housing cannot be both an investment market AND affordable for everyone.
That sentence is absurd, and shows either someone with an ax to grind, or who has never traveled anywhere unfamiliar to what he prefers.
California has one of the lowest rates of unoccupied housing in the country: https://www.lendingtree.com/home/mortgage/vacancy-rates-stud...
Not only is your explanation of the effect a fantasy born of ideology rather than fact, but even the effect you purport to explain is such a fantasy.
The reason rents and sale prices are high is that people love living in those areas.
> socialist like governments
How do you define that? Loaded terms are important to define; otherwise they become, 'whatever I think', which means different things to the writer and reader.
If more people want to live in your city than you currently have housing for, then it's not simply a matter of "balancing zones" anymore. Your plans no longer match reality, and one of four things can happen:
- Your zoning remains static and housing prices rise according to demand, pricing people out of the market
- You hope businesses leave so that you can convert some of the commercial space to residential
- You decide to allocate existing zones on some criteria other than willing price paid
- You zone for higher density and allow existing homeowners to make money by making room
The first option is gentrification. The do-nothing option. The one that we're trying to avoid because we find it distasteful. If we don't fit more people in the city then it becomes a playground for bored rich people as the market will kick everyone else out.
The second option usually doesn't happen - residential demand drives commercial demand because most businesses want to be close to people. If businesses are leaving, that usually means that people are leaving, too. This also means that balancing zones isn't really a thing you need to actually do. The problem isn't that the space is being used inefficiently; the problem is that there isn't enough space to go around.
The third option is rationing. This takes many forms, and is politically popular with basically everyone. But it doesn't actually solve the problem: there are still more people who want to live in your city than houses to put them in. You're just choosing a different way to allocate those houses, and invariably it tends to be a metric that's easier to corrupt, because suppliers now have an incentive to charge rich people more to bypass the system.
The fourth option will actually fix the problem; and in fact is the only way to fix the problem. But it's also the easiest to politically oppose, because we've set the standard here in America that land is supposed to be divided entirely between large shopping centers and low-density suburbs; and that living in anything else is a symbol of urban poverty. This actually isn't true anymore - the areas worst hit by gentrification are also the ones zoned for high density or mixed use, and this is precisely because of people making it difficult to upzone property.
If we didn't have zoning, or at least had less of it[0], then the market could actually work to incentivize resupply rather than just redevelopment. Then we could talk about social housing or housing subsidies on the demand end, knowing that we have a market that actually responds to supply rather than just pocketing the wealth.
[0] e.g. Tie the planners' hands a bit and just have mixed commercial/residential zones of varying densities, with industrial land use separated out for safety/noise reasons. Japan does this.
The state has all the information it needs, and anything it doesn't have it can find out by mandating businesses comply. It then figures out exactly the housing needs in a given location and build that housing. It doesn't need to be fancy and wasteful like the private market tends to build. It's meant to just house people efficiently. It would be a lot cheaper than current options and we can be sure there's enough supply. It could distribute the housing based on needs. Family of 4 gets a bigger apartment than a single person.
What could go wrong?
Alternatively you could be like San Francisco and lard on regulations "meant" to help that have the effect of reducing supply, resulting in a large homeless population, since people want to live there.
Ah yes, the "ban return on investment and ban certain construction" method of promoting construction. Works 100% of the time, every time. See: SF, Seattle, etc.
Tech needs to create a box. Literally, a hurricane proof box that that plugs into plumbing. Drop it anywhere in the world and fucking live in it. It’s the same box for everyone, like the iPhone, iPhones are not more expensive in Bay Area or NY. All this nonsense over the fact that we all simply need to live in a box somewhere.
Techies just don’t want to live in just boxes.
And remote work really won’t change rents much for normal people. People want to live where their family and friends are, where some good restaurants are, where some good weekend activities are, where some nice nature is an hour or two away, where a good hospital isn’t too far, and where grocery stores stock good food. Any one of these and landlords decide it’s okay to raise prices 30% a year.
People theoretically have a choice, but every landlord everywhere is doing this. People leave one town with rapidly increasing rents and go to the next, and those landlords do the same while the people in the already expensive town never lower prices. There is no escape or alternative.
Home owners are snapping up rentals to prepare to sell their property at market peak.
I actually noticed someone opposite (are maybe it's the same mechanism) in the area I live in:
House sale prices are rising like everywhere else, but rents stay mostly flat.
I'd love to learn more about it.
Rents are even MORE dependent on income and it’s easier for renters to move, so rents often end up below the mortgage cost for a similar purchase.
Rent's are not tied directly to value of property, but need to service the debt linked to property. Or equivalent one.
Bitcoin advocates say good money (Bitcoin) will return the value of all other assets to their utility value because the best passive store of value will be the money itself (which due to a fixed supply would be deflationary).
In that world, people would rather sell assets they don't use to accumulate bitcoin (or money x) because only useful activities will produce more yield than the money itself. This frees up housing, land, precious metals,... and all other resources that are artificially scarce due to hoarding for wealth preservation.
I've heard people estimate, under a Bitcoin standard, the actual utility value of a house would be approximately 5-10% of current prices.
In practical terms, anywhere a person would want to do such a thing, the land would be cheap enough that LVT wouldn't really matter anyway.
If we are to keep trespassing laws, there must be ways to own land permanently and without further cost. There must be a way for man to survive without participating in government enforced labour. All land is owned by some entity; he can't live in the woods owned by the government or someone else; even after buying land and being entirely self sufficient, he cannot simply live, but must pay the government in their currency which he can only get through participating in the labor economy. There is literally no legal way to live freely by your own means. This is a form of slavery that the ancients would find absolutely intolerable.
Increase the price of land or the sales tax, limit the ownership a single person can have, levy inheritance tax, but an indefinite land tax is inhumane.
"Pay your fair share" to the "rent seekers" if it is a place to live that you are seeking...
I can't square a landlord running empty properties when the economy colludes to keep people from buying properties.
Homes should not be straight up financial instruments.
Uh, he's not?
> Marx's Capital
Oh, that kind of "economics". Never mind then.
Paraphrasing Henry George: "Malthus model that food grows arithmetically and population grows geometrically is as arbitrary as saying a dog grows arithmetically and his tail grows geometrically"
> Oh, that kind of "economics". Never mind then.
What is that "kind of economics"?
> What is that "kind of economics"?
Marx’s “Capital” is the bullshit kind of economics. If anything, it is the butt joke of economists today.
Compared to what? Not other mid-19th century economic works... Marx published Capital prior to the so-called "Marginal Revolution" that presaged the emergence of Neoclassical economics - i.e. the first era of economic thought generally compatible with modern theory, so it's basically meaningless to claim that his views are derided by economists today.
Of course, any of those names would necessarily be more agreeable to modern economists by nature of not being inherently anti-capitalist, but that's no credit to their scholarship. If anything, extending the our gaze beyond the realm of the contemporary field of economics would reveal that Marx far outpaces these other names in citation value.
No, I meant exactly what I said. Ricardian theory of comparative advantage, for example, remains being part of foundation of modern understanding of international trade. Every economics textbook teaches it. Same with Bastiat’s broken window fallacy. If their writings don’t get explicit citations in published papers, it’s for the same reason Pythagoras or Euclid don’t get citations in modern mathematics either: their results are so foundational that everyone knows them.
> If anything, extending the our gaze beyond the realm of the contemporary field of economics would reveal that Marx far outpaces these other names in citation value.
Of course, people keep citing Marx. Not economists though, or if they do, not favorably.
Ah, well then I will continue to be puzzled by your response - i.e. why you think any of the classical "economists" you've named are so much better qualified than Marx to critique Malthus (going back to the original premise of this discussion).
Adam Smith is, of course, famous for being the first "economist," but his legacy isn't the result of him being particularly accurate (nor are his actual economic views very clear or citation-worthy). What did Bastiat even produce that could be cited by economists today? Of course the broken window fallacy is popular in Econ. 101 textbooks, as well as with the Austrians and in the free-market blogosphere, but it's not citable research. Ricardo was a seminal figure in the development of modern economic thought, but he was also a product of his era who was wildly wrong about lots of things. Moreover, Marx was familiar with his work, both adopting and critiquing parts of it throughout his career, so it seems a bit peculiar to lionize Ricardo while portraying Marx as incapable of offering a critique of Malthus.
Both Marx and Malthus have present-day adherents, though current positions have evolved well beyond those of their progenitors, but they've both also been widely panned. Obviously, the fact that neither mass global starvation nor global communism have overwhelmed humanity makes it easy to critique the pair, at least on a superficial level. You might suggest taking a more nuanced examination of their legacies, but I think that would reveal this entire discussion's lack of intelligibility. Perhaps you'd like to take a nuanced view of Malthus, but view Marx superficially?
The Malthusian model predicts forever growing extreme poverty as a share of population.
They have only a tenuous correlation at best.
That's still okay, though, as during the process (and even at the end point in your scenario) much better lives and opportunity have been provided to much greater numbers of people.
If people like the QoL benefits of density, we should do what we can to provide it, even if it causes the same sort of CoL squeezing down the road with whatever optimizations we can put in place. It will still benefit more people, and maybe we can come up with yet more optimizations.
The same was true in pre-industrial times too. The cities have always been population sinks, and failed to reproduce naturally. They have always been supplied by the constant stream of people from countryside.
Some variation of your suggesting is better than what we currently have for minimum wage. However, getting that through congress seems impossible, IMO.
According to some website, Miami, FL is the most expensive real estate market in the country, and Florida has a fairly low minimum wage currently. So, I'll work with that.
I assume that a 1 hour drive without traffic puts you at most around 55 miles (freeways are faster, city streets are slower, but this is an estimate).
That could put you in places like Belle Glade, Florida, where the 1 bedroom apartment listings are between $400 and $650 per month.
But, it could also put you in the much nicer West Palm Beach, Florida, where (according to Zillow Fair Market Rent for ZIP Code 33401) the average rental for a 1 bedroom apartment is $1274 per month.
Divided between two people, that's $637 per month. If we go with the rule that 1/3 of your wages should go to housing, that means you'd need to make $1911 per month to afford that apartment. If you worked 40 hours a week, and there are (on average) 4.3 weeks per month, that means you'd need to make $11.11 per hour to afford that apartment.
According to this other random website, the average hourly wage in Miami is $21 per hour. The minimum wage in Florida is currently $8.65 per hour.
In summary, if they took the least generous interpretation of your rule set (the Belle Glade case) they could safely lower the minimum wage. If they took the most generous (the West Palm Beach case) they would need to raise it by about $2.50 per hour.
The average wage across the U.S. is about $27, and 2/3rds of people make "at least" above $15/hour, so it may not affect most people at all, ceteris paribus, and making the assumption that the example region is a useful example.
This is all very hand-wavey and back of the envelop, of course.
Apologies for the approximation nit and acknowledged that it was all back of the envelope, but $11.11/hr struck me as low at face value.
Upping the ante a bit, let's further assume single standard deduction earner with a $1911 net monthly income requirement (because you can't actually pay with money you don't have), which roughly implies 12% marginal tax bracket. Let's also account for fixed 6.2% social security withholding, and fixed 1.45% medicare withholding.
Squaring against this standard 2022 IRS Publication 15-T withholding method[1], we come to the following arithmetic expression to determine gross monthly income requirement:
(grossMonthly - fixed10pc - marginal12pc - ssWithholding - mcWithholding = netMonthly)
x - 85.60 - 0.12(x - 1935) - 0.062x - 0.0145x = 1911
To be sure, this assumes complete omission of common tax-advantaged benefits such as deferred 401(k) retirement savings and medical/dental insurance coverage.
> The minimum wage in Florida is currently $8.65 per hour.
Florida's prevailing minimum wage is in fact $10/hr[2], with scheduled increases at $1 every year towards a $15/hr target by 2026[3].
[1] https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p15t.pdf ref PDF p. 59
[2] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/minimum-wage/state#fl
[3] https://floridajobs.org/docs/default-source/business-growth-...
EDIT: Whoops, accidentally used table values for two-or-more jobs scaling; corrected.
Minimum wage goes up -> everything costs more -> minimum wage needs to go up some more.
So labor expense grows and grows, while expense for "stuff" becomes a smaller and smaller part of that.
So how do you make that stuff? You can't hire anyone - too expensive. So either automation, or buy things from other countries. This means firing people.
Your proposal will lead to mass unemployment.
But it gets worse, since you've tied your numbers to the cost of housing, and cities have the most expensive housing, people won't be able to live in the city (no jobs available that pay enough).
So mass migration to places with lower housing, until the cost of housing in a city goes down. What's you've done is incentivized everyone to kind of spread out in a diffuse way to keep down the cost of housing.
But where are the jobs in these places? There are no service jobs, since services are too expensive for anyone to buy. You'd have to drive more than an hour to find a job.
People will respond by demanding rent control, but that also means less housing is available.
So not only did you cause mass unemployment, you also caused mass homelessness.
We already have something like that - the earned income tax credit. It just needs to be expanded. Every administration before Trump - both Republican and Democratic supported expanding it.
It does take into account the difference between my 18 year old son living at home and a single mother.
The government should collect taxes and implement social policy - not private business.
See also - health care.
In general the US government is very bad at handing out benefits to its population. The closest thing that it can do with consistency is task the IRS with debits and credits on a yearly basis, a task that hasn't changed in decades. Until the US gov't can get better at this kind of work, any benefit scheme is bound to fail.
Even in Manhattan two working adults could easily afford a 1BR apartment on a combined income of $30/hr. If you extend that out to one hour in any given direction it drops to as low as $24/hr.
using your standard, against the current average 1 bedroom apt rent in my area, factoring housing as 1/3 of the budget. I come at $11.00-11.75 as minimum wage for my area...
You can play as many games as you like, but if people aren’t able to generate enough value to justify their pay, Stein’s Law will bring things to an abrupt halt.
2. Make it illegal to reduce hours in an attempt to reduce pay due to higher wages; with out some legitimate reason that pertains to the employee's conduct and not external forces. If the employer has to increase prices to make this work, then fine. Do it. But make sure to not skimp on the cheese, etc. Customers who get annoyed over price raises will ruin you if you are just an ass. And at that point, rightfully so. Fines for something like this should be something like forcing them to pay all their employee's extra $$ per hour every time they do it. This way the money goes to those who need it, and not those who don't; cause lets be real here, lawmakers and governments don't need every penalty paid put into their pocket. Theirs is a crime against the people who work for them, so therefore they should get that cash.
3. Enforce not exactly a minimum wage, but something that might be referred to instead as a 'balanced' wage. Not a living wage, cause that's basically what we are already talking about. No, instead we should just accept that not every job is worth X$/hour. But a person still needs to get the money they need to get by. So what to do? You base it off that persons budget and potential future expenses vs the job they will be doing. If the employer and employee cannot come to terms on what is appropriate, then the employee probably needs to find a different job worth that much instead. Personally, I have no issue with this idea not because it is my own; but because I wish we took this kind of approach more often, instead of 'trying people out' just to fire them. This would reduce that, while being more beneficial to things like income equity, instead of equality, because again... not everything is the exact same. Not all jobs are worth X$/hr.
Basically the premise of 3 is ultimately to enforce fair pay, instead of minimum pay. Minimum makes it into a benchmark. If you meet that benchmark, you are considered an okay employer, even if you're a p.o.s. We need to do away with that, without ruining people's lives at the same time. I think this is the best step forward for that, while being reasonable to all sides needs and demands. Also, things like wage ceilings and gaps and etc would essentially disappear as a notion, since at that point it's up to every single person on a equal front to determine their ideal pay for each job. It's not longer just up to the employer, but also the employee. Some may say it's already like this, but it really isn't. Not like I am explaining. Then again, it also may be a factor of what kind of work a person is in. Like many, I'm currently service industry. Even as I fix computers on the side.
4. All employees should essentially be treated like contractors in terms of taxes. It may be convenient to never have to think about it, but having automatic income taxes and other payroll taxations occur just embolden governments to spend that money however they like. Instead, we should be creating a system that better understands just how much a person uses or contributes in regards to society, and tax them according to both that and their current income based annually; but with each month in a separate table as well for better context.
I think if done right, most people would prefer this system, since it would only ever be taking what you should actually be having to pay for in the first place. That said, rebates will probably not ever be a thing anymore, since they don't have the automatic tax base to fund it all with.
Tit for tat, right?
Either or, these 4 things I think would mostly solve our pay problems. Or at least help us get onto a better path again.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ilr.12007
https://take-profit.org/en/statistics/wages/chile/
Half the median wage is obviously the simplest answer, but some studies have suggested other numbers.
Now you're probably wondering: what does the median wage have to do with a "level of living"? It's simply the presently existing normal "level of living"! The median wage reflects various aspects of the local economy, and is responsive to things like housing prices.
I was impressed with the Trump cheques though. Did not think the US would just helicopter drop money into the economy like that.
That being said, I 100% agree with minimum wage being 3x the median cost of a 1-bedroom apartment for 1 person working 20 hours a week. Why 20 hours a week? Companies LOVE to only give folks part time hours. Of course, in my area that equates to $42/hour, however, note that even at 40 hours a week you are looking at $21/hour. Also, why 3x? When you apply for a mortgage OR sign a lease you typically need to earn 3x the housing cost in order to qualify. Mortgage companies and landlords alike typically want to see housing take less than 33% of your pretax income.
In other words: why should landlords be allowed to capture the majority of value created by society? There are plenty of examples of successful affordable housing -- case in point, Vienna:
https://thetyee.ca/Solutions/2018/06/06/Vienna-Housing-Affor...
Gas prices putting financial stress on Applebee's employees will also put financial stress on Applebee's customers, who may cut spending on things like going to Applebee's.
...implying they weren't already doing so? I'm not sure about you, but I don't think applebees is the type of place you stick around for "the good work culture" or whatever.
* Fear of change has to drive a bit of it
* Satisfaction: This is a personal reason of mine. I make a solid technology wage that probably rests somewhere in the middle or maybe low-middle. I could definitely find myself a 15-20% bump if I tried, but I am so damn happy with my employer that I really don't feel the need. As long as my current wage tracks inflation, I honestly would be ok with not making any more money.
* Convenience
When I worked retail, we were in sales and were top of the food chain. The restaurant people were a notch over regular mall workers in pay, but had to deal with different hours. Many people work multiple jobs… one line cook I remember did prep work starting at 6am at one place, painted, and closed the mall restaurant. He couldnt flip jobs easily due to bus schedules.
The fact is, it's difficult to find resources to escape and you're trapped in a difficult space where gathering momentum to make even small transitions could take years of time while barely staying afloat. This is the life of the precariat class.
Look at Uber… it wasn’t uncommon for drivers to pay Uber to work as comp was less than depreciation. They were basically working for free to cash out car equity.
We are facing headwinds and may need to cut prices
To stay viable this means we need to cut costs
One way to do this is offer lower starting wages. Though this wasn't viable in the recent past, it may be possible now. That's because our pool of workers are feeling pinched and may need to pick up extra jobs
I understand he does not talk about the need to tighten the belt on prices in his email. But obviously all restaurants have been under pressure with COVID and inflation. It may be understood by the recipients that they need to cut costs wherever possible.
You can't ask for grace when you offer none.
Except executive compensation, I suppose.
It's also not an isolated event, just another moment in a trend of big corporate entities pushing wages in only one direction, down. No matter how you word it, it's starting to look a lot like: "We need to lower wages because no one can afford anything anymore because no one is paying high enough wages".
Outside of the moral implication, this doesn't even logically make sense.
People are already facing higher costs, if you pay them lower, they will not work for you, because you know, commuting to work at your place will eat into the budget.
You either get it for high skill industries or farm labor, no other employment.
If I'm reading his point correctly ... He's saying there _was_ an employment crunch, and companies were competing with each other for employees by raising wages. He supposes that an increase in gas prices means that people need more money, so there are more employee hours "to go around". Therefore, companies don't need to compete as much with each other to attract employees, so they can go back to not paying as much.
Rising CoL because of energy and inflation -> people need the jobs more badly -> more labor available -> reduce wages
And before anyone tries to score a few easy points building a strawman, I'm just explaining the logic. I'm not endorsing it or saying it's ethical.
The main fault in their reasoning is the belief that higher living costs necessarily results in more people getting into the labor market.
At some point the marginal benefit to a worker becomes zero or negative, where higher living costs can actually result in a reduction in the labor pool. Whether we are at that point though, is not known yet without more information about the localized economy.
Maybe out of habit or something?
You can't be "Applebees" when you're doing good, then become "Apple Central" when you're getting shady.
It's also why many businesses refuse to sell franchises in the first place. Doing so reduces your quality control.
I think that many corporate executives have thoughts along these lines: they want employees to be so desperate that they'll accept low wages and bad working conditions. That is, of course, why they tend to campaign against e.g. minimum wages, food stamps, and reforms that would make it easier to unionize.
The only difference is that other execs have the good sense not to put such thoughts in writing.
Many years ago I applied to work at Kmart. The wages were lower than I could get elsewhere so I pass and the manager offers to go over "the benefits", he tells me that I can get healthcare (Medicaid) and money towards groceries (Food stamps) as well as rent assistance (another government program). They had systems in place to help you apply to these programs.
More food stamps-> each person work more hours to survive-> more labor supply-> lower wages.
(EDIT) Which would make him not like food stamps.
There are other effects of food stamps, but in this guys view, that’s the dominant term. Maybe he’d like it for his own employees, but certainly not for the market as a whole. I guess it’s the opposite of “restaurants have to pay people more to compete with coronabucks” narrative that started a year or two back.
Not all are like this, but it sure seems like a trend. For every Dan Price, there are a thousand Jack Welch clones.
Wayne really should have had someone who isn't siloed in an upper class bubble proofread this, because 'maintain their current level of living' really sounds like "in order to not die", which is worse than what he meant - even though what he meant is still super gross.
When you run a business, you choose employees. If an employee does something noxious, it's on you to fix it. We don't say, "Well, that's the employee's fault." Your business, your employee hiring, firing, and training.
In conclusion:
When you run a business, you choose franchisees and set standards of behaviour. If a franchise does something noxious, it's on you to fix it. We don't say, "Well, that's the franchisee's fault." Your business, your franchisee selection, training, and standards enforcement.
There's no weaseling out. You run a business, the buck stops at your desk. If you don't like that, don't run a business. It's 100% on you to choose your vendors, landlords, employees, franchisees, contractors, &c.
All your responsibility. In exchange for which, you enjoy the benefits when you get it right.
p.s. Your conclusion is speculation. It's fine to speculate, but I reject the claim that your conclusion follows from your argument. Your speculation could be correct, maybe Chillis bribed the manager to send a bad email, or heard about the ruckus and put their PR machine into high gear to publicize it. All possible, but it doesn't follow in any way from the relationship between franchisor and employee of a franchisee.
More importantly, it's up to journalists and even randos on HN to avoid trying to confuse the relationships involved. If some McD's manager said something stupid and offensive, we can't indict the whole chain. Individual humans have agency.
Here's a perfect example of how a franchisor can play hardball. I worked for a McD's that was a dominant store in our region. Located right off the Interstate and got tons of consistent traffic. Just an excellent, very profitable store. But our owner/operator was a dick to Corporate. So they opened a new store at the next offramp. "Offered" it to our operator, but the terms were ridiculous, so he passed on it. Found someone to take it, and we dropped 30% in sales. Back in the 80's that cost our owner $80K in lost PROFIT. He was pissed.
As some franchises also involve loans, if they don't like how you're running your store they can call in your loans. I'm not saying you have to close, but unless you know where a sunken treasure is, good luck avoiding bankruptcy.
And where franchises are concerned, I have little empathy for the franchisor. They chose franchising as a business model for its advantages, such as making franchisees finance their growth, and having a captive market for products and services they compel the franchisees to resell.
I think when you choose to be a franchisor, you're willingly accepting the inherent tradeoff of growth in exchange for the risk that your reputation and brand will suffer if franchisees behave badly.
I'm sure Ford isn't happy that some of its independent dealers take a hot seller like the new Bronco and mark it up $10,000 or $20,000 above MSRP for customers who ordered one thinking they'd pay MSRP.
But the headlines in the newspapers rarely say "Reggie's Westchester Ford-Lincoln is ripping customers off," the headlines say "Ford Dealers are ripping customers off," and the public rarely gives a lot of thought as to whether Ford can do anything about it, they think, "Ford ought to do something about it."
It's not that I'm paying you for a bacon cheeseburger, it's that when I got chewed out by my boss about some work issue, and I'm telling myself I just need to keep my shit together to the end of the day, and then I'm going to go home and get that cheeseburger from my favorite place, and somehow that's the glue that is going to help me keep my shit together, that your store is open, and you haven't run out of bacon because the manager you sexually harassed was the only one good at keeping on top of ordering.
I, the average preoccupied customer, don't need to hear the sad story of the bacon supply, and frankly the idea of offering it shouldn't even cross your mind, let alone find my ears. It's one thing if I pull the whole story of a broken freezer or a burst pipe out of you, I've done that any number of times, but don't open with it. You're paid not to open with an excuse. Open with an apology, a discount, and possibly a recommendation another customer favorite that's good even without the bacon.
If you can't keep your doors open without a stream of excuses, then you fail at logistics and you should throw money at someone to solve that problem for you, or go back to working for someone else, or someone might send Gordon Ramsay to explain it to you with a lot more swearing and a lot less empathy.
> Besides hiring employees in at a lower wage to decrease our labor ( when able ) make sure you have a pulse on the morale of your employees...Do things to make sure you are the employer of choice. Most importantly, have the culture and environment that will attract people.
This is kind of amazing. Surely they know that the culture and environment that will attract people will be the one that pays better, right? The only thing more amazing is that some brown-nosing sycophant managed to call it "words of wisdom" without vomitting.
No, it's the one that offers the most perks, like foosball tables and microkitchens. Ask any successful Silicon Valley startup. /s
He also owned four other McD's (though none as profitable as this one), so he was able to amortize all his corporate costs across five stores. He pulled in over $600K/year back in the 80's, yet was a Scrooge when it came to treating his employees. Cry me a river about "single digit profit margins." Tons of businesses have small margins, but make it up in volume.
Believe me these people have an easy enough time justifying this shit to themselves they really don't need your help.
You're exactly right: if they can't find a way to run the business without depending on exploitative labor practices they need to shut it down.
So if your Chotchkies franchise is in the middle of a wasteland where nobody can walk, bike, or take the bus to work, and then gas prices go up, doesn't that mean people need, y'know, more money? Won't they be looking for higher wages? Paying less just makes other employers look better and positions you to capture exactly zero of the supposed new growth in the applicant pool. Even not working at all (i.e. not driving to a job) gains a few preference points compared to working at your Flingers. Seems like when they were handing out brains, this guy thought they said trains and said "gimme a slow one."
If the inflation is up, why won't the employees demand more wage to cover the rising cost? It isn't like Applebee is a high-sought after career, isn't it?
These are not employees who get paid time off and can take days off to go looking for other jobs/interview.
Meaning any time they take to find another job might be eating into their finances even more, and really be more of the same (e.g., another restaurant).
Same reason exploitive employers oppose increasing the minimum wage, single payer, etc. Keeping people wretched means a steady supply of new bodies if the ones you're employing start thinking they can negotiate.
The talk to exploit the high gas prices to their benefits sound nothing but delusional.
Alternatively, they're projecting more people will need second jobs and take the lower wages if offered.
Including store management.
From reading the full email it seems like just one sentence lacked tact, only maybe inaccurate, and the rest was .... decent management? Like the part about making schedules for employees further in advance so they could accomodate their other jobs? That's pretty good.
The part about what employment trends will look like due to gas prices and competing employers having to shut down? Is that inaccurate?
Mentioning directly to offer lower wages, didn't have to be mentioned... that way.
Do I like that the managers walked out over that? Absolutely
The user-created title is also incorrect, because it was not an Applebee's exec, it was the director of operations for a company that franchises Applebees who wrote the email.
I also find it interesting that the author of the email doesn't even get a smidgen of credit for his parting paragraph:
> "Your employees that live check to check are impacted more than the people reading this email. Be conscious of that. Many will need to work more hours or get a second job. Do things to make sure you are the employer of choice. Get schedules completed early so they can plan their other jobs around yours. Most importantly, have the culture and environment that will attract people"
I don't think the author is a bad person. He was just caught treating a certain business expense like one treats other business expenses, except in this case it is the wages of the employees and so looks wrong. Many people are of the mind that businesses aren't charities, have no need to pay their employees anything more than the employees accept, and through free association, if you accept an offer, that means you agree with the terms of the offer.
In my mind: If you don't like the wages Applebees will pay, then don't accept a position at Applebees. Maybe there are huge structural problems with society forcing your hand, or maybe you're just a skill-less deadbeat, or maybe Applebees is shooting itself in the foot by not offering high enough wages, but regardless, that is not Applebee's responsibility to pay you more than what they view your labor as worth.
It never ceases to amaze me the way that people with any type of power treat and think about people with less power.
Practically, a real exec at Applebees has a bigger blast radius and can cause pain for more people than this guy. Theoretically, we should expect better behavior by people with more responsibility.
This guy is dumb and careless. He's not some evil dictator.
Central Applebee management puts out vague message about inflation affecting costs and revenues. That hiring managers need to work harder to retain their employees by giving potential employees more flexible schedules (which may have a benefit of cutting costs: some employees may be willing to take a lower pay if they can have a different schedule).
Some middle-manager reads that statement as having to do with gas-prices making prospective employees more desperate for a job.
And the rest is history.
------------
Upper-management always issues vague strategic-level statements. Its the middle-managers who have to translate the vague statements into something that connects with the lower-level employees. This middle-manager colossally failed at the job.
The oligarchs and people at the top aren't your friend. Granted, neither are most middle managers or small business owners, they just have a smaller pool of people to throw into the furnace so it's in their own best interest to show some restraint.
The fact that the director of communication never says he disagrees with the actual sentiment tells me all I need to know about their culture.
He's either confused and claims he doesn't know what the email in question is. Or he's expressing disappointment about the communication.
He is against communicating such things, but he failed to communicate that tearing people that way is disgusting.
Your radical ideas about society, individualism, and economics have already occurred to others. Arm yourself.
Either way, a very low/apathetic thing to suggest taking advantage of people who are already in survival mode.
1. pay workers extra (ie. above the market rate)
2. workers are richer now
3. they use that money to buy the stuff you make
4. ???
5. profit!
Has this actually been studied empirically? If you had to choose between paying your workers $1000 more and pocketing it, surely the latter option is the better one? Sure, they might use some of that money to buy your product, but they're not going to spend all of it, and after your own costs (eg. cost of goods sold), you're going to end up with less than $1000? How is that extracting "maximum value from said labor"?
We’re going to lose this fight to these countries because our country cannot for a second think outside of squeezing the living hell out of a stagnantly growing 350 million person population. That’s why they squeeze you on home mortgages, rent, cars, salary, everything. They are squeezing because they see no fucking growth and that’s all these people understand. If the population isn’t scaling horizontally, they have no other creative ideas. It is unimaginable to them that an enriched 350 million Americans is as potent as a billion person population. We will actually go to your stupid diner and drop 50+ every week. Why are these people so fucking scared?
And how did they achieve it? By paying workers luxurious wages? The whole reason they're successful was that they industrialized and offered labor cheaper than the west, and the west outsourced labor to them. "Henry Ford, capitalist extraordinaire, famously paid his workers $5 a day, double the average automaker's wage at the time" has nothing to do with that's happening there.
Capitalism as a zero-sum game is myopic at best. Based on your comment I wouldn't be totally surprised to hear some esoteric argument to support the economic wisdom behind chattel slavery.
Civilization was created by people working together to survive, and then thrive. Throughout history it has been captured by strongmen annd enabled by fear. The US forgot the face of its father and started to concentrate on "Shareholder Value" insanity after Marshall Plan.
Pirate Equity firms swoop in and start dismantling all that was built for quick profits, not only destroying communities, but eliminating proficiency in all types of industry.
Do you think that pattern is valid, moral and what you'd want to achieve as an entrepreneur? I am curious and not trying to attack, is this the kind of idea you'd want promulgated into the future? How can that lead somewhere positive?
My wife just left a manufacturing company because of the latter attitude, and they're fucked, because she was the only person left who could operate a 50s era prototype machine (that happens to make the only dry test slides in the world).
I'm fully aware this is anecdotal, but if that company had treated workers well, they wouldn't have to be asking people to come out of retirement to operate a machine. That's a loss of value for them.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/03/04/the-stor...
Very civilized era.
Compassionate capitalism is more needed today than ever. Sure, this is likely just some low-level buffoon at a chain mouthing off in ignorance. But that's why it's dangerous; toxic capitalism has thoughtlessly metastasized to the middle.
Given the severe and extreme states most commodities markets have found themselves in of late, I expect an exacerbating withdrawal of liquidity by most market participants -- even posting margin for normal hedging requirements is beginning to require completely untenable amounts of free cash flow. I fear that severe inflation is very much looming at the door.
It doesn't matter how much people talk about CSR or stakeholders, it's still about profit, often on the back of the most downtrodden.
edit: with a 200% penalty for administrative fees.
Isn't this equivalent to raising the minimum wage? I'm not sure what's the point of policies like this other for the cathartic effect/grandstanding.
How would this work? How is this different than a payroll subsidy or the EITC?
- Tie tax rates/benefits/penalties to the discrepancy between CEO/C-suite pay and average/lowest-paid employee pay
- Tax benefits to companies who provide enriching programs for employees (like some universities that offer tuition benefits and programs to help you get mortgages, etc)
- Tax penalties for not giving COL raises each year
Etc.
All that's going to do is cause companies to jettison their lowest paying employees. For instance, Apple would outsource janitors to another company (i'm pretty sure they already do that) and spin out apple stores/genius to another company. That way, the only people you have left are tim cook and other highly paid engineers/designers making 6 figures. Yay we fixed the pay gap!
>- Tax benefits to companies who provide enriching programs for employees (like some universities that offer tuition benefits and programs to help you get mortgages, etc)
1. this just sounds like a roundabout way for governments to fund said "enriching programs", except you're now at the whim of the company rather than the government.
2. this worked great for healthcare insurance, right?
>- Tax penalties for not giving COL raises each year
Sound like that would push employers into moving more of their compensation to year-end bonuses, which can be arbitrarily raised/lowered without being subject to "COL raises". In other words, "good news, you have received a COL raise of 5% this year! bad news, your year end bonus has dropped by 5%"
Our system is completely fucked.
But we're all stopping shy of having THAT conversation, so to address some points:
> All that's going to do is cause companies to jettison their lowest paying employees. For instance, Apple would outsource janitors to another company (i'm pretty sure they already do that) and spin out apple stores/genius to another company. That way, the only people you have left are tim cook and other highly paid engineers/designers making 6 figures. Yay we fixed the pay gap!
True, but this would still overall be beneficial because the CEOs of those janitorial companies are now paid more in line with the janitors, which means that the working conditions are more likely to improve.
> Sound like that would push employers into moving more of their compensation to year-end bonuses, which can be arbitrarily raised/lowered without being subject to "COL raises". In other words, "good news, you have received a COL raise of 5% this year! bad news, your year end bonus has dropped by 5%"
Probably, but how many employees in America get year end bonuses? Because I've gotten like...2 and I've worked a decent range of jobs. They're way less common than you think. Yes, this would probably mean the people at the top would start taking from the middle instead of the bottom to retain their profit. It's not ideal, but I'd rather someone be stuck renting longer/have to cut their grocery bill (middle class) than end up homeless (lower class).
You're right about the enrichment programs, though, now that I think about it. There's a reason I mostly saw that in universities, I'd imagine.
Yeah, turns out problems like these aren't easily solved, hence why they're not solved.
>True, but this would still overall be beneficial because the CEOs of those janitorial companies are now paid more in line with the janitors, which means that the working conditions are more likely to improve.
Amazon has contracted some of its delivery to DSPs, which are essentially what you described. Have those turned into a worker's paradise?
>Probably, but how many employees in America get year end bonuses? Because I've gotten like...2 and I've worked a decent range of jobs. They're way less common than you think. Yes, this would probably mean the people at the top would start taking from the middle instead of the bottom to retain their profit. It's not ideal, but I'd rather someone be stuck renting longer/have to cut their grocery bill (middle class) than end up homeless (lower class).
Not much, because there isn't pressure to game the regulatory system. When such measures are implemented, workarounds would surely spring up. It's not any different than how early in the pandemic, landlords gave move-in bonuses (rather than straight-up decreasing rent), because those bonuses could be easily taken away whereas rent could not easily increased.
Ingredients cost ~USD$11:
In Australia, fresh (never frozen) farmed salmon from Tasmania is $USD29/kg delivered to your doorstep within 24-48hrs of being pulled out of the water. Applebee's salmon menu item[1] looks to have approx 200g serve so that is USD$5.80 for the salmon. Fresh green beans are USD$6/kg (greenhouse as out of season in Australia) and there is probably 100g plated up in Applebee's item, so USD$0.60 for the beans. Premium fresh brushed potatoes are USD$3/kg and there is probably 200g plated up, so another USD$0.60 for the potatoes. Premium fresh asparagus is USD$25/kg (also out of season) and there is perhaps 75g plated up, so another USD$1.90 for asparagus. I've also seen some images of the dish plated up with broccoli instead of beans and asparagus and that is USD$6/kg (also out of season) and assuming 150g plated up, so USD$0.90 for broccoli as a cheaper option. Add two dollars very generously for sundries such as salt, paprika/other spice (not sure what I'm seeing in the photo), olive oil and the slice of lemon. All up, approx. USD$11 for ingredients if you were to make a similar dish at home in Australia. Restaurants generally get better unit pricing from the food service supply chain but the cheaper unit prices of buying in bulk are somewhat offset by increased delivery costs (premium service) and inevitable wastage of buying in bulk.
Typical cost to consumers should be higher than ~USD$36 but is currently ~$USD17 (US including +25% service) or $USD26-30 (AU):
An average food cost percentage for a successful restaurant business (note: still paying minimum or effectively below minimum wage to employees) is 28-35% so picking 30% we end up with this salmon dish needing to have a sale price of USD$36 or AUD$47. Instead, Applebee's are selling that salmon menu item for USD$17 (25% service included) and a salmon dish at a typical restaurant/pub in Australia would be sold for approximately USD$26-30. These sale prices would have to go up higher again to fix the already broken industry with regards to employee treatment and pay (for example, no overtime).
[1] https://www.tripadvisor.com/LocationPhotoDirectLink-g34094-d...
I’m a dyed-in-the-wool ubercapitalist, and I hate scarcity-focused, race-to-the-bottom companies and people like these. It’s a question of values and approach to life.
It's not like bad things do not happen, but the system continuously checks the balance between employee and employer interests and adjusts.
That's what governing IS.
> “The advantage this has for us is that it will increase application flow and has the potential to lower our average wage. How you ask?
> “Most of our employee base and potential employee base live paycheck to paycheck. Any increase in gas price cuts into their disposable income. As inflation continues to climb and gas prices continue to go up, that means more hours employees will need to work to maintain their current level of living.”
Just wow, what a soulless scumbag.
Not that I ever went to Applebee regularly, but seeing as how this is the kind of person the organization promotes, I will never return. I'd even rather starve. Utterly disgusting.
Thank goodness for HN today, because with this broadcast I know that by tomorrow or the next day the news feeds will be awash with this story.
Is it just one worm, or is this Apple is rotten to the core?
Anecdotally, Kaiser is easily the worst offender, not even trying to hide it.
You’ve bean-counted this chain into the ground, maybe spend a little less time looking at financial tricks on your balance sheet and a little more figuring out how you can make food people want to eat at a reasonable price.
* they've been hiring people at $18-20/hr
* the government pandemic aid/unemployment is dropping off and therefore they are no longer "competing with the government"
I think a lot of the "progress" with increasing wages was artificially inflated by government overspending of unemployment and COVID benefits. The people out there looking for jobs were in a sellers market. They could get a better rate because people were staying at home because "they could make more on unemployment". Now we're moving back to a buyer's market as that runs out and people are forced to re-enter the workforce.
While I think we can agree what he is saying here is cold, he has an interesting point. Ultimately the government is responsible for this and it will be interesting to see how it impacts wages and the mid-terms given what inflation is doing.
Personally, it seems like we are in for a "correction" in the labor market where we will see wages go down since more people _need_ jobs and aren't relying on government handouts. But I think he's mainly pointing out that the wages were artificially high and are going to lower back down. Perhaps to $12-15 an hour? Who knows.
Sorry, are you saying that expecting people to work to meet their own needs is them being "held hostage for their lives"?
Pretending like it is is completely insane.
People want to make a minimum of $15/hr. For some small businesses this is a hard ask. But it's complicated further by the fact that many of the people they have hired have walked out when they got busy. Basically, they want to be paid to sit around and do the minimum amount of work possible. All the while not realizing that the person who is employing them is just barely more than they are (and bearing the brunt of bad months by making less).
So personally, I know that many small business owners are definitely hoping that the market changes so that they can hire not only quality people but at a rate that makes more economic sense.
In this case, this isn't some super-specialized job, it's just a job with high variability in load and requires (sometimes) long hours doing tedious (but not physically demanding) work.
On that note, I've seem someone remark that some business owners apparently believe that "don't buy things you can't afford" applies to everyone but them.
> I'd even rather starve
A bit dramatic don't you think? Hyperbole and outrage doesn't usually make for productive conversations.
Ethical filters? They're probably less likely than you think. There's a not-uncommon idea that the sole ethical obligation of a business is to make money for its shareholders, and this soulless scumbag seems to be thinking that way.
This guy's professional mistake probably just saying the quiet part loud, not so much thinking what he did or acting on that strategy.
1) their main job is “be strategic” and as such they throw out all kinds of horrible ideas to improve the normal business metrics / profitability. In healthcare, I hear things that clearly and obviously would worsen patient care and the line “let’s run that by Clinical” essentially means I really doubt that idea deserves consideration.
2) they’ve been hit with a multitude of problems. Rising wages is certainly the hottest topic since they were furloughing people in 2020. They begrudgingly raised menu prices. It continues to puzzle them where all the labor went?
3) as much as I hate to admit it, there might be some truth to the point he’s making regarding gas prices. I’d never put that in writing, but it happens and is rather normalized behavior.
But also, these people do have a choice. They could work elsewhere, they could be more ethical. It is more that the system picks and rewards people like this.
What is often forgotten are many people who reject positions and situations and systems like this. And work elsewhere, for less money and less power, because they made active choice to not be like this.
prbly thought he came up with a genius insight