I looked it up, but it is hard to find real numbers. I did find that fast food ingredient expenses are 25-35% of a product's costs. Add in advertising, equipment, rent, insurance, licensing, technology, and utilities and I estimate wages are at most 50%, but very likely to be less than 20%
So wages are at most 50%
Imagine wages go up 10%
That means the product price goes up 5% for the wages and any price raise beyond that is pure corporate greed.
Well, because most economists are funded by and basically work in an indirect capacity for reinforcing why the current iteration of our capitalist hellscape is the natural order of things. Their basic philosophies around capital and the economy are that more money for money's sake is the point of everything, and if grinding 80% of humanity into soylent & making the planet mostly uninhabitable is very profitable in the short term, then "economic imperatives" demand it be done. :P
Somehow, the idea that the economy is a human construct meant to serve a persistent, actually beneficial human social purpose (the efficient, effective allocation and distribution of resources in a way that maximizes their collective value proposition) has fallen into the memory hole.
They also ignore any unevenness of distribution. As long as the average wealth or BNP goes up they don't care if 99% of the populace can't pay their bills. Which is incredibly short-sighted, because the productive economy needs people buying the stuff it produces.
Oh, that's another thing, they don't distinguish between the productive economy and the financial economy. They genuinely believe that if you put all the wealth into two computers that trade the same money back and forth every millisecond that we've increased our quality of life as much as if we had invested that in industry and technology. They honestly can't tell the difference between buying an already existing stock (i.e. paying the previous speculator) and buying a new stock (i.e. paying for new equipment in a factory).
Isn’t that the truth. Sometimes I wonder how much of our current GDP is based in “financial innovations” and how much of it is tangible goods and services that actually exist that would still have intrinsic value to individuals if we disregarded all the gains that are basically derived by middle men skimming value or hedge funds buying up everything only to debt load and destroy previously profitable enterprises.
I just tried to google "what percentage of traded stocks are new stocks?" and I got nothing that was even close to a response to my question. The algorithm either cannot find anything even vaguely resembling that question, or the algorithm was paid to push up entirely unrelated answers crowding out actual answers. I should ask Gary's Economics, maybe he can find out.
The hierarchy of jobs arbitrarily* deemed more or less useful or deserving of higher pay is a problem for me. What people in food service (for example) are often called to do physically, emotionally, and mentally during an 8 hour shift is deserving of respect. I GLADLY make less money to NOT have to do that job anymore. But I sure as hell want someone to want to do that job since I enjoy eating out from time to time. Pay is one way to ensure that happens, but a little respect, a little recognition that the work is no less deserving than any other sure would be nice too.
*I dont really think its arbitrary. Pretty sure its a feature of patriarchy
The more fast food companies have to pay their employees, the more they're incentivized to fast-track investment in fully-automated restaurants, which is going to happen anyway. Ditto for every company that has a human employee. It's only a matter of not very much time until even the promised new job market for operators, technicians, service people and so on is also automated.
Along with everything else change brings, it inevitably brings pain. "This is a very sad and difficult time for us, but it's not like it's never happened before," said typewriter repairmen and your neighborhood buckboard dealership.
As the luddites said: "It isn't about the technology, it is about where the extra profits end up." Or something, I'm paraphrasing a half-remembered article about luddites that didn't have any direct quotes.
The problem with corporate fast food automation is not the food, not the fast, and not the automation. It is the corporate structure. Have you ever voted for a CEO? I haven't. Because they're feudal, not democratic at all. Which means they're evil.
Unless you have the technology to staff your restaurant of the future with Lt. Commander Data, you don’t have the technology to replace anyone in a restaurant. You can’t put an iPad next to the dish room and have it wash the dishes, ditto for cooks, servers, hosts, and managers. As a server I have to be a goddamn contortionist to navigate my restaurant while holding trays every weekend. It’s not something you can hand off to Johnny 5.
I'm on your side emotionally. Servers are breathtakingly under-paid and under-appreciated. But printers who set lead type by hand in order to print something didn't think they could be replaced, either. See "Pretty much every manufacturing process in the world."
In any case, I specifically used fast food as an example because they are most definitely leading the charge toward human-free food "service." But again and for the avoidance of doubt, I appreciate your dilemma, and that yours will quickly become all of ours if it hasn't already. And while we're at it, fuck Pro Tools!
Maybe, maybe not. But I wasn't speaking to politics or economics, I was speaking to change, and socialism couldn't have stopped papyrus from killing the stone tablet industry.
Gee - I wonder if the raises in minimum wage, specifically for restaurant workers, has been seen as an excuse for the right wing to complain about the high costs of fast food meals. Sure, they use "inflation" as a stalking horse, but the real reason is that they cannot abide seeing "those people" earn a living wage
I live in Monterey County in California. A place where the living wage for my wife and (disabled) me, according to the MIT Living Wage calculator, is $41.13 per hour. This is a town fueled by tourism, so you can imagine how basically fucking nobody in the massive hospitality sector earns a stable living. 🙃🙃🙃
One of the assistant managers at the local Dollar General is paid $2 less per hour than her male coworker. I reminded her that that is against the law and she needs to report DG. She said that she was just waiting for this to pass so she could tell them to kiss her ass and go work in fast food elsewhere. Still DG needs to be reported for what it's worth.
Meanwhile here in the state of Indiana, minimum wage is still at 7.25/hr. I don’t think anyone pays that low. That said, Democrats need a simple rebuttal every time the Republicans scream about inflation. Just say, “Raise Minimum Wage”. Make them defend not wanting people to make more money. They made “Drill Baby Drill” a thing. Why not?
I've been retired since 2007, and my SS and pension have almost reached the same dollar amount I made when working. There's been an awful lot of inflation since then though. I'm quite pleased that workers are finally getting better pay. I was a lifelong labor booster and a 20 year union member. I do wish my retirement income could catch up.
While it is liberal dogma that raising workers' pay is not inflationary, liberal dogma in this case is solidly on the wrong side of both theoretical and experimental economics. That said, the main driver of inflation in California is housing. With limited supply and strong demand an apartment is unaffordable for single people making $16 an hour if they want to live alone. This will still be the case when they are paid $20 an hour. Raising worker pay gives property owners leeway to raise rents and sale prices, so in short order that extra pay settles in the pockets of people other than the intended workers. To fix this the state would have to arrange to bulldoze many square miles of single family housing and replace them with small affordable apartments. Any attempt to do that will be tied up in the courts forever.
What’s the alternative, then? How do you propose to fix this problem without raising wages for workers AND not giving the capitalist pig’s what they want?
Either the state admits that the current housing regime must be replaced with something more flexible or the problem never gets solved. That will require increasing housing density in communities that would rather see people starving in the streets (or preferable shipped off to somebody else's streets to starve). US cities that have reasonable housing costs and especially reasonable rents pretty much all are located on plains and can expand outward easily, placing new buildings on empty land. Those tend to be in conservative states, but the city will often be much more liberal than the state as a whole, and the cheap housing is the result of geography, not politics. (Or at least not mostly politics.) California cities are mostly built out to their physical limits. And those limits are hard: oceans, mountains, and bays. So to add housing, and eventually reduce costs through greater supply, housing density must increase. The other option is to make the state so unlivable that enough people are forced out, and that increases supply. Except that won't work for the hardcore homeless, who want to stay in a temperate climate so that the weather doesn't kill them.
I didn’t even make $20/hr at my last job that required a college degree and years of experience to apply for. I don’t resent fast food workers, but I am a little jealous.
If there was only some sort of organization or institution to correct this for everyone, something that had power over the state and the economy and could tell the rich to pay up OR ELSE.
What’s that? It already exists but it’s totally controlled by the capitalists and no one, not even the so-called “progressives” wants to get rid of it? Well, then fuck the world then.
And who enforces the worker’s will when the capitalist pigs refuse to obey the union?
Unions are useless unless they A) have support from the government, or B) the power (i.e. money and literal weaponry) to defeat the upper class. When last I checked, American unions have neither.
Remember all that stuff about how the economy will "naturally" pay higher wages for critical jobs that are in demand? Well, I'm in elder care, and I'm making about $13.75 an hour.
Since others are sharing, my first job was waiting tables at Sambo's...remember that place? I started in '73, when the wall "art" had already been changed from Little Black Sambo to Little Beige Sambo. I made $1/hr. + tips. As with every other person's first job, I learned that I had an American worker responsibility to start lying to the IRS! All I needed to do was figure out if I benefitted most from reporting I made more in tips than I really did or less!
It's outrageous that the official Federal minimum wage is still stuck at $7.25 /hr. You can't even buy a Bic Mag meal for that pay.
WHY ARE ECONOMISTS SO BAD AT MATH?!
Seriously, the math isn't hard.
I looked it up, but it is hard to find real numbers. I did find that fast food ingredient expenses are 25-35% of a product's costs. Add in advertising, equipment, rent, insurance, licensing, technology, and utilities and I estimate wages are at most 50%, but very likely to be less than 20%
So wages are at most 50%
Imagine wages go up 10%
That means the product price goes up 5% for the wages and any price raise beyond that is pure corporate greed.
Well, because most economists are funded by and basically work in an indirect capacity for reinforcing why the current iteration of our capitalist hellscape is the natural order of things. Their basic philosophies around capital and the economy are that more money for money's sake is the point of everything, and if grinding 80% of humanity into soylent & making the planet mostly uninhabitable is very profitable in the short term, then "economic imperatives" demand it be done. :P
Somehow, the idea that the economy is a human construct meant to serve a persistent, actually beneficial human social purpose (the efficient, effective allocation and distribution of resources in a way that maximizes their collective value proposition) has fallen into the memory hole.
They also ignore any unevenness of distribution. As long as the average wealth or BNP goes up they don't care if 99% of the populace can't pay their bills. Which is incredibly short-sighted, because the productive economy needs people buying the stuff it produces.
Oh, that's another thing, they don't distinguish between the productive economy and the financial economy. They genuinely believe that if you put all the wealth into two computers that trade the same money back and forth every millisecond that we've increased our quality of life as much as if we had invested that in industry and technology. They honestly can't tell the difference between buying an already existing stock (i.e. paying the previous speculator) and buying a new stock (i.e. paying for new equipment in a factory).
Isn’t that the truth. Sometimes I wonder how much of our current GDP is based in “financial innovations” and how much of it is tangible goods and services that actually exist that would still have intrinsic value to individuals if we disregarded all the gains that are basically derived by middle men skimming value or hedge funds buying up everything only to debt load and destroy previously profitable enterprises.
I just tried to google "what percentage of traded stocks are new stocks?" and I got nothing that was even close to a response to my question. The algorithm either cannot find anything even vaguely resembling that question, or the algorithm was paid to push up entirely unrelated answers crowding out actual answers. I should ask Gary's Economics, maybe he can find out.
There are always those who predict the end of civilization each and every time minimum raise is increased anywhere. Funny, it hasn't happened yet.
Employers miss the days when slavery was legal. It must be the only explanation for managements opposition to fair wages.
The hierarchy of jobs arbitrarily* deemed more or less useful or deserving of higher pay is a problem for me. What people in food service (for example) are often called to do physically, emotionally, and mentally during an 8 hour shift is deserving of respect. I GLADLY make less money to NOT have to do that job anymore. But I sure as hell want someone to want to do that job since I enjoy eating out from time to time. Pay is one way to ensure that happens, but a little respect, a little recognition that the work is no less deserving than any other sure would be nice too.
*I dont really think its arbitrary. Pretty sure its a feature of patriarchy
I don't want this to be true, but it's true:
The more fast food companies have to pay their employees, the more they're incentivized to fast-track investment in fully-automated restaurants, which is going to happen anyway. Ditto for every company that has a human employee. It's only a matter of not very much time until even the promised new job market for operators, technicians, service people and so on is also automated.
Along with everything else change brings, it inevitably brings pain. "This is a very sad and difficult time for us, but it's not like it's never happened before," said typewriter repairmen and your neighborhood buckboard dealership.
Happy Wednesday!
As the luddites said: "It isn't about the technology, it is about where the extra profits end up." Or something, I'm paraphrasing a half-remembered article about luddites that didn't have any direct quotes.
The problem with corporate fast food automation is not the food, not the fast, and not the automation. It is the corporate structure. Have you ever voted for a CEO? I haven't. Because they're feudal, not democratic at all. Which means they're evil.
Unless you have the technology to staff your restaurant of the future with Lt. Commander Data, you don’t have the technology to replace anyone in a restaurant. You can’t put an iPad next to the dish room and have it wash the dishes, ditto for cooks, servers, hosts, and managers. As a server I have to be a goddamn contortionist to navigate my restaurant while holding trays every weekend. It’s not something you can hand off to Johnny 5.
I'm on your side emotionally. Servers are breathtakingly under-paid and under-appreciated. But printers who set lead type by hand in order to print something didn't think they could be replaced, either. See "Pretty much every manufacturing process in the world."
In any case, I specifically used fast food as an example because they are most definitely leading the charge toward human-free food "service." But again and for the avoidance of doubt, I appreciate your dilemma, and that yours will quickly become all of ours if it hasn't already. And while we're at it, fuck Pro Tools!
All the more reason why capitalism is a bad idea and the state needs to control the economy.
Maybe, maybe not. But I wasn't speaking to politics or economics, I was speaking to change, and socialism couldn't have stopped papyrus from killing the stone tablet industry.
Gee - I wonder if the raises in minimum wage, specifically for restaurant workers, has been seen as an excuse for the right wing to complain about the high costs of fast food meals. Sure, they use "inflation" as a stalking horse, but the real reason is that they cannot abide seeing "those people" earn a living wage
Remember that Elon Musk can't afford to live on less than 56 billion dollars. If it was only 47 billion, he'd be out there hustling a side gig.
I live in Monterey County in California. A place where the living wage for my wife and (disabled) me, according to the MIT Living Wage calculator, is $41.13 per hour. This is a town fueled by tourism, so you can imagine how basically fucking nobody in the massive hospitality sector earns a stable living. 🙃🙃🙃
https://livingwage.mit.edu/counties/06053
One of the assistant managers at the local Dollar General is paid $2 less per hour than her male coworker. I reminded her that that is against the law and she needs to report DG. She said that she was just waiting for this to pass so she could tell them to kiss her ass and go work in fast food elsewhere. Still DG needs to be reported for what it's worth.
Meanwhile here in the state of Indiana, minimum wage is still at 7.25/hr. I don’t think anyone pays that low. That said, Democrats need a simple rebuttal every time the Republicans scream about inflation. Just say, “Raise Minimum Wage”. Make them defend not wanting people to make more money. They made “Drill Baby Drill” a thing. Why not?
I've been retired since 2007, and my SS and pension have almost reached the same dollar amount I made when working. There's been an awful lot of inflation since then though. I'm quite pleased that workers are finally getting better pay. I was a lifelong labor booster and a 20 year union member. I do wish my retirement income could catch up.
While it is liberal dogma that raising workers' pay is not inflationary, liberal dogma in this case is solidly on the wrong side of both theoretical and experimental economics. That said, the main driver of inflation in California is housing. With limited supply and strong demand an apartment is unaffordable for single people making $16 an hour if they want to live alone. This will still be the case when they are paid $20 an hour. Raising worker pay gives property owners leeway to raise rents and sale prices, so in short order that extra pay settles in the pockets of people other than the intended workers. To fix this the state would have to arrange to bulldoze many square miles of single family housing and replace them with small affordable apartments. Any attempt to do that will be tied up in the courts forever.
What’s the alternative, then? How do you propose to fix this problem without raising wages for workers AND not giving the capitalist pig’s what they want?
Either the state admits that the current housing regime must be replaced with something more flexible or the problem never gets solved. That will require increasing housing density in communities that would rather see people starving in the streets (or preferable shipped off to somebody else's streets to starve). US cities that have reasonable housing costs and especially reasonable rents pretty much all are located on plains and can expand outward easily, placing new buildings on empty land. Those tend to be in conservative states, but the city will often be much more liberal than the state as a whole, and the cheap housing is the result of geography, not politics. (Or at least not mostly politics.) California cities are mostly built out to their physical limits. And those limits are hard: oceans, mountains, and bays. So to add housing, and eventually reduce costs through greater supply, housing density must increase. The other option is to make the state so unlivable that enough people are forced out, and that increases supply. Except that won't work for the hardcore homeless, who want to stay in a temperate climate so that the weather doesn't kill them.
Won’t somebody think of those poor millionaires?
I didn’t even make $20/hr at my last job that required a college degree and years of experience to apply for. I don’t resent fast food workers, but I am a little jealous.
If there was only some sort of organization or institution to correct this for everyone, something that had power over the state and the economy and could tell the rich to pay up OR ELSE.
What’s that? It already exists but it’s totally controlled by the capitalists and no one, not even the so-called “progressives” wants to get rid of it? Well, then fuck the world then.
UNION
And who enforces the worker’s will when the capitalist pigs refuse to obey the union?
Unions are useless unless they A) have support from the government, or B) the power (i.e. money and literal weaponry) to defeat the upper class. When last I checked, American unions have neither.
Remember all that stuff about how the economy will "naturally" pay higher wages for critical jobs that are in demand? Well, I'm in elder care, and I'm making about $13.75 an hour.
That's awful, especially compared to what the owners charge for your services, and most of us will require them sooner or later.
Since others are sharing, my first job was waiting tables at Sambo's...remember that place? I started in '73, when the wall "art" had already been changed from Little Black Sambo to Little Beige Sambo. I made $1/hr. + tips. As with every other person's first job, I learned that I had an American worker responsibility to start lying to the IRS! All I needed to do was figure out if I benefitted most from reporting I made more in tips than I really did or less!
OMG I remember Sambo's.
Yes this was the era where you couldn’t have a successful business without a racist mascot.
Welcome to the Socialist Hell Hole that is CA. Now, go home!