Summary, "Turnover costs money, raising wages reduces turnover, solve for the local minimum with respect to costs."
It is useful to understand that this is a 'natural' floor on wages.
It is useful to understand that this is a 'natural' floor on wages.
I dont think its just different groups of workers but also workers who would normally not give a shit wanting to keep their decent paying job
It's a pizza business, not a pie business. Pizzas aren't pies.
But these distinctions aren't universal. It's easy to see why some people call pizzas pies if you look at variants like "deep pizza" (or "Chicago style pizza").
Essentially you might as well argue whether it's "soda" or "pop".
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=pizza http://dictionary.reference.com/help/faq/language/e02.html
Margins are quite good (I'd rather not disclose w/o permission), but remember demand varies quite a lot by day and hour, plus plummets during the summer when students aren't around.
When you have a stream of qualified and sufficiently desperate applicants you don't have to offer more money than the competition; there are other ways of not being just as awful as the rest of them. Academia is still busy finding out where the wage floor lies.
* don't track turnover
* are too small for turnover statistics to be valid
* don't bother to do the math
* know the link but are culturally and/or structurally disinclined to change their pay structure
Edit: formatting
Their primary offering was not software and their profits grew almost every year, so they had little incentive to make changes: especially ones whose pain is immediate and payoff is harder to quantify.
[1] in the efficient frontier sense, not necessarily the most skilled workers or the best jobs.