I love these interpretations. They're at the same time literally true, but completely out of touch with reality. I guess a minimum wage worker at a fast food joint in Manhattan is free to choose to live right next to his job, am I right?
Or look up the national average or industry average or metropolitan area average commute time/distance, and build something around that.
Or give a $1000 stipend to every employee to either spend on gas for daily commutes or two flights a year to come visit.
Could certainly figure something out if there was sufficient motivation to do so.
I don't think it'd be one-size-fits-all either. There might be some situations where you need to cast a wider net and incentivize people to travel more to your job. There might be other situations where you want people to be living closer to where they work.
Contrived hypotheticals don't actually address the issue under discussion.
The national minimum wage of $7.25/hour works out to about $12k/year, so that's about three times as much.
New York State has a higher minimum wage, $14.20/hour. That works out to about $24k/year, so NYC McDonalds is still paying considerably more.