"some bucks" are defined by how much people are willing to pay for goods. salaries dont occur in a vaccuum.
Only if the demand for underpaid jobs is large enough, I assume.
For example, many small businesses that are not "big mean corporations" that run on already small margins either jack up their prices enough to afford paying more. The customer then gets screwed with much higher prices.
OR all these mom and pop places go under because they still can't find labor, then more people are out of work - where do they then get jobs?
It's kinda like the tireless recruiters on LinkedIn, who keep spamming people about call center jobs. I.e. the problem in that case isn't people don't want to work; the problem is that call centres are a toxic work environment that has systematically burnt through the entire 80's generation of self-taught IT-techs only to find out they were a finite resource and that they're almost out.
As for Mom and Pop places, it's a sad situation, but if we want to help smaller stores then the key is specialization and finding niches that can't be handled online. As with everything specialized, feasability is a matter of supply and demand, and wages shouldn't be kept down artificially just to keep them running.
This means that there's plenty of extra money to pay salaries. The people at the top just don't want to use it for that.
However, there’s actually a lot of demand for hair styling. Maybe even enough demand to fill all those salons given how long my wife waits for an appointment.
But there’s not enough staff to satisfy all the demand. Chairs in the salons sit empty as you walk past.
So what’s happening? There’s already salons with empty chairs, there’s still excess demand and… new salons are being opened!
According to n=1 (i.e. anec-data), staff who used to work at an existing salon are opening their own. Meanwhile existing salon is proclaiming to all customers that no one wants to work. I don’t know how they square this world view with their ex staff opening their own salon.
Working at a salon for minimum wage + tips is not a sustainable lifestyle, so you get empty chairs in those salons.
All it takes to open a salon is the ability to work there and easy credit. So you get a lot of salons.
Think of the fast food model. The owner of a McD used to make $200K+/yr, so there is intense demand to open new fast food restaurants. The employees make less than it takes to survive even with massive government program assistance, so the restaurants are empty with help wanted signs posted and early closing hours and drive-thru only. Then the prices have to go up until it takes $25 to take your daughter to burger king for lunch (true story...) so the customers all go away. Its not real food anyway. Then the owners of McDs make $0. "Everyone knows" you'll be a millionaire if you open a fast food restaurant and credit is very easy so there's an infinite line of people trying to make $200K but getting $0K. The cycle takes some time to stabilize. All those people in line have to get educated (LOL thats not happening) or go bankrupt one at a time, it takes awhile.
Service businesses always collapse from the bottom up. I've seen this in food stores, when an area has too much grocery store sq footage for its population. The collapse always starts with permanent help wanted signs and poor service, but it ends with "nobody would open a grocery store here, the just go out of business".
What about a coop shop?
Why? It's the same workers cutting and styling hair. as when they worked in the existing salons. Many of their customers follow "their" hairdresser to whatever new venue they work at.
>> What about a coop shop?
There's another existing model for temporary hairdressers where they begin working at a salon and they keep all income from all clients they serve. In turn they pay the owner a fixed price to rent their chair for the day. AIUI this is no longer popular but i don't know the specifics. It seems to me that renting a chair should be a lot cheaper than starting up & marketing a salon.
Whether or not customers follow is a complex social issue, assuming an average haircut.
But, it’s human nature to try to do better. Most small businesses fail fairly quickly.
Renting out chairs is a reasonable business model, but it’s not the same as a co-op, because the proprietor gets greedy (or is perceived to be so) and bossy.
I don't think that follows - the business rates, heating costs, energy usage, insurance, etc. will all be cheaper in the 2-chair shops than the 4-chair shop. The 4-chair shop just has extra chairs (but they remain unused since there aren't staff available to fill them) . At the same price point for customers, it's less viable.
If it's a co-op, all expenses and profits will be split among the members. (I'm assuming that the co-op members are limited to the stylists in this case.) The business is not likely to be pursued as diligently as it would be if it was a sole proprietorship, as an individual member will not be proportionately compensated for making an outsized effort. If the co-op is large enough to require a full-time employed manager and other staff, then it's just a privately held corporation, and will perform as such.
Full-on co-op wouldn't work if 1 hair dresser is super popular and 2 others are not so popular. It's a very personal business and a big part of it is one's own contacts. Now if only salon is co-op and hairdressers have to decide together how much they charge per chair to split among themselves... That may get interesting. If hairdresser pays a %, then worse performers may get a chunk of better-off profits. If hairdresser pays for chair days, then worse performers may be subsidising the better ones.
And customers are probably not willing to pay higher prices to attract more workers into this line of work..
Though that they are still focusing on growth as a goal is somewhat perplexing, since this is what got us in this situation (and we are going to pay for it for the next decades, centuries, even millenia...)
Inflation is starting to affect retirement plans, and some are coming out. But companies need to want them.
Labour doesn't pay for their retirement.
>> inflation will eat up all their retirement
Their state pension increases in line with inflation thanks to the penion "triple lock" in the UK (this is temporarily the "double lock" for 22/23).
>> until there is enough labor
Adding labour has no direct impact on pension income, there can't be "enough labour" to reinstate a standard of living in a person's pension situation
Instead what will happen is existing groups who are already below water (e.g. foodbank users) will suffer more pain.
In that case you have a feedback loop creating infinite inflation that goes faster than those rate adjustments goes. There is no magical wand to wish away inflation like that.
When labour is free the amount of work is infinite, but with a higher price some work is no longer worth doing and workers get reallocated into the jobs that are still viable.
In the aggregate, people who want a job already have better paying skilled labour options. Why take a job as a cashier for example?
In a lot of cases, the company owners rake in hundreds of thousands to millions and sometimes billions of dollars a year in profit. The benefit of becoming so large that competition barely exists or simply cannot keep up with economies of scale. Even if you're barely making one cent of profit per unit sold: if you manage to scale up so massively you can sell 100 million pieces of it, you'll still make a million dollars profit overall.
Most of the current crop of companies being seen as "unbeatable monopolies" did not exist a quarter centuries ago or they were small startups people did not give a chance.
But they persisted and won. It can be done again. It is done every day, but just not by people saying "it can't be done".
Oh, and not to mention that while $VENDOR is willing to give Wal-Mart a special deal for, say, a bottle of soda for 20 cents in exchange for Wal-Mart placing an order for a million bottles, they will not give that same price to your small corner store. You cannot compete with that without going into loss leader territory, which is highly dangerous.
Have you ever tried? You can always compete - your imagination is the only limit. Innovate your way against established players for fun and success.
I mean, clearly that’s not true or else we’d live in a world where old companies don’t die and no new companies come about.
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/4916/umfrage/...
Effectively, you're asking us to solve the income gap by becoming billionaires ourselves. Can you see the irony in that?
Of course very few would succeed or become billionaires but in the process they will create jobs and companies and tremendous value for a society that needs that much more than it needs the current wailing and gnashing of teeth against the "evil billionaires" that tried and succeeded.
What makes you think they didn't? There are hundreds of thousands (or way more) who 'failed' for every self-made billionaire.
P.S.: What makes you think Amazon had no competition ? Were there no other booksellers, or generalist stores selling books ?
Yes, and look how entrenched they have become. Search engines, for example, are dominated by Google holding 80%+ for well over a decade. Even Bing, with Microsoft's deep cash coffers, can't get above 9% [1]. Facebook just went ahead and bought the biggest threats (Whatsapp, Instagram) or copied the features of competitors to destroy them (Snapchat). The only threat in the social media marketplace comes from TikTok, who are backed by the Chinese government. Twitter is tiny and Musk is driving it to the ground. Amazon, while "only" at 38% market share in e-commerce, still leaves everyone else including Wal-Mart in the dust [2]. Microsoft utterly dominates the PC and laptop market [3] as well as the office suite market [4].
Even with these multi-billion companies fighting against each other, they can't manage to land any kind of significant blows - so how should a small startup stand a chance?
> P.S.: What makes you think Amazon had no competition ? Were there no other booksellers, or generalist stores selling books ?
Amazon had no competition online, mostly because the competition was asleep at the wheel. And by the time the competition woke up, it was too late - and now "classic" book stores are dying out left and right, not to mention other kinds of specialized stores. Here in Munich, all the small electronics specialty stores closed down, even famous chain Conrad closed down because they couldn't compete any more.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-...
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/274255/market-share-of-t...
[3] https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
[4] https://blogs.gartner.com/craig-roth/2022/08/02/market-share...
For instance :
How rich are your parents?
But I have nothing against people who grew up under a humane system, got help from parents or VCs and made something of themselves. Because I know plenty of bums who had everything they ever needed and did absolutely nothing with it.
It is not possible for everyone to successfully exploit others. You need some victims, too.
If you start from the assumption that people should live and die under reasonable expectations of health, growth and participation in labor, able to bring up their children to aspire to a better living standards than their own, then progressive policies will make sense.
If you start from the assumption that people deserve the life they have and everyone can pull themselves from their bootstraps, and only thing people lack is ambition and hard work, then the progressive policies will sound like stealing from the successful people.
I personally believe that corporations should exist to serve their customers, their workers and then the shareholders, in that order.
> people should live and die under reasonable expectations of health, growth and participation in labor, able to bring up their children to aspire to a better living standards
But I have enough real-world experience and I've been lied to by enough politicians to know that we will never get that through policies. We can only get it though the same mechanisms that pulled us out of poverty and exploitation and offered us this amazing bounty of choice we are enjoying every day in non-government-controlled-domains: free markets.
This is why I support less restrictions and more opportunities for companies and startups.
> I personally believe that corporations should exist to serve their customers, their workers and then the shareholders, in that order.
I do not believe these are separate classes and instead they should mix together instead: anybody should be able to become shareholder at the company they work or consume from, start their own company or simply work for whomever they want.