McDonalds has about about 1.7 Million employee's. For arguments sake lets round that down 10 1.5 Million. Assume none of them work full time, in-fact lets say they work 1/3 of a full time job so about 700 hours a year. That's just over 1 Billion labor hours a year. Now they make about 5 Billion in profit so just how much more pay can they squeeze out of that? Every dollar increase in base pay would shrink profits by 20%.