The Aldi always has a sign for new employees. 3 or 4 years ago, it started a little over 10 dollars. Now its 13.50.
Now, my understanding is that Aldi is hard work, but if they can pay employees over 13.50, I don’t see why any other place should pay any less. I don’t know many industries with tighter margins then Aldi.
KevinC
10339
I happened to drive by a McDonald’s yesterday and saw they had a big hiring sign up offering $12/hour. I know some employers are crying because they can’t get wage slaves to show up for $7.25 an hour but I think it’s long overdue that we had some wage pressure at the bottom. If I have to pay more for my chicken nuggets that’s fine by me.
$24,000 a year, how can McDonald’s afford that!?
In the Seattle area it’s more like $15/hour. But this place is expensive, and Washington State has a high minimum wage, $13.69 an hour.
In Southwest Ohio, where I live, the cost of living is supposedly very affordable. The minimum wage here is $8.70. It is also a heavily Conservative area, especially in the suburbs. I can’t tell you how many people I heard wailing about the Biden Administration pushing the minimum wage to $15 and how that would put everyone out of work and make hamburgers cost $10 and every other ridiculous line of bullshit you can imagine.
Help Wanted signs I have seen around town lately:
- Target - $15hr
- Wendy’s - $12hr
- Car wash near me - $12-$15hr depending on shift
- McDonalds - $11hr
- Metal Fabrication place - $12.50hr entry level
- Scrap Metal processing center - $12-$15 based on experience
- Marco’s Pizza - $12 hr. (kitchen)
It appears as if the Conservative nightmare of $12-$15hr service jobs has already become reality. Yet somehow, some way, the prices I am paying for stuff at Target, my spicy chicken sandwich, my large pepperoni pizza, my car wash with the works, etc. haven’t really gone up much, and what increase there has been has happened because of prices of materials/ingredients rising due to COVID effects.
I am hoping that one of the silver linings of the terrible tragedy this country has faced over the past 15 months will be that people finally wake up and realize they’ve been lied to for decades. That paying a living wage for jobs doesn’t suddenly result in massive unemployment or $10 chicken sandwiches, it just results in millions of people lifted out of poverty, and in turn millions of people putting more money back into the economy, which allows everyone, workers and businesses, to benefit. If you run an Ohio business that was paying people $8.70hr and no benefits, and you were just barely getting by, perhaps your business model was based on exploitation, and perhaps you don’t deserve to stay in business. Is that not the very “market forces” you claim to worship doing what they’re supposed to do?
Matt_W
10343
Hamburgers don’t normally cost $10?
Maybe those fancy Red Robin hamburgers with the side of bottomless fries that you fancy boys eat every week, but us red-blooded All-American farm boys who drive through Dairy Queen in our lifted Ford F-350’s with the dual rear wheels and the diesel exhaust are only paying $5.99 for our Bacon Cheese Grill Burger, the way God and Trump intended it!
But but but what about the owner’s boat payments?!
It’s all about the graft. Not just moral.
Senate Bill 221 — which was pushed by the Republican majority and opposed by Democrats — also allows new committees backing Kemp’s reelection and those of legislative leaders to raise and spend unlimited contributions from donors, essentially circumventing current limits on how much individuals, special interests and businesses can give to candidates…
…In addition, there will be no limit on when the committees can raise money.
Timex
10347
Jokes aside, I’ve known folks who owned restaurants, and it’s a pretty back breaking, constant stress job. 60% of restaurants fail in the first year, and 80% in the first 5. Restaurant owners aren’t sitting around eating bonbons while their workers do everything. It’s a hard freaking business.
Menzo
10348
Relying on the free market to decide whether your business lives or dies sounds like communist propaganda to me.
What’s needed is for the government to step in and make sure these private businesses stay afloat through artificial means. That’s capitalism!
“Restaurants are a very tricky investment.” - Jonathan ‘The Duke’ Mardukas
I know a lot of people who own and manage successful small and medium businesses, including restaurants, and they all work their asses off. It takes a decade or more of working like that to hopefully, finally get to a point where you are successful enough to hire someone else to manage operations and maybe take some well deserved time off to enjoy your success. Even then many of the people I know can’t bring themselves to step away, and still spend most of their time at their business.
A business owner has every right to hire only part-time, no benefits, minimum wage workers in an effort to make ends meet. However that business owner, no matter how hard he or she personally works, gets zero sympathy from me when they complain that their ability to hire part-time, no benefits, minimum wage workers is impeded by everyone else offering better hours/benefits/wages to attract that same labor pool. That is simply how the free market works. Republicans trying to kill COVID relief in an effort to make $9.00 an hour look more attractive to displaced workers is peak robber baron.
Here in Ohio, if you made $9.00hr before you got laid off, and you worked full time, your unemployment benefit from the State would be $180 per week. With the $300wk COVID boost that puts you at $480 per week, at least temporarily, which is more than you were making while working. It would take a $12hr full-time job to equal that benefit, which is why most places are now offering $12+ per hour. While it may seem like staying home and collecting $480 a week is WAY better than working hard to collect that same $480 (and this is certainly the Fox News and Republican narrative), the vast majority of people are smart enough to realize the COVID benefits have a countdown clock, and finding a job that equals or exceeds what those unemployment benefits are paying you before they run out means securing that additional income for good.
COVID and the relief packages have done what no Republican in office would have ever voted for, they have forced the labor market to adjust and brought millions of Americans closer to a living wage. The fallout may be that consumers end up paying a few cents more here and there, and some small businesses that can’t adjust to the wage increase go under, but for every business that does so another will rise in its place, because people aren’t ever going to lose the dream of being successful business owners in this country.
Menzo
10351
The other reason why some people aren’t going back to work is because not all kids are going back to school. If you’re a single mom, you don’t really have a choice if you can’t afford babysitters and your kid is still doing school at home.
Timex
10352
Yeah, I think this is a major component of it.
My wife is a pastry chef. A pretty well-paid one by industry standards, even.
It’s just that industry standards are absolute dogshit. Her income was only slightly net-positive with our two kids’ daycare costs. For her assistants making $13/hr in Minneapolis…lol, yeah. Single young people who moonlight at other jobs can make it work. You know, sufficiently exploitable and vulnerable or ignorant people.
If the hospitality industry as we know it collapses tomorrow, good. I love going out to eat, but not on the backs of exploiting a permanent underclass.
My sister is a pastry chef in San Diego. If they didn’t have her in-laws help with kid watching, no way could she afford child care on her pay.
This is nicely put, and I agree with you, with one significant exception this NOT the free market the business are competing the $12/hour wages are being provided by by state and Federal government. In the federal government funding, it is coming by borrowing money, which future generations having to pay it back.
Now, with interest rates absurdly low, I have little problems borrowing money to do things like pay for infrastructure even as broadly defined by Biden. However, if you step back it is crazy what we are doing. We are paying people to stay home, we are also paying restaurant, bars, and retail owners to make up for the losses. The number of new jobs last month fell well below the number needed for a quick recovery.
A year ago, this made a ton of sense. We wanted to make staying home more attractive than working. Because working was literally killing people, the societal cost of working far outweighed the contributions these non-essential front-line workers made to the economy
This even made sense back in Jan when the Covid relief bill was being debated and we are still losing a Pearl Harbor every day. At the time there was a good debate should they end the extra unemployment money in June or Sept. It seemed to me at the time that we should continue until Sept. because I didn’t trust Congress to act quickly enough.
However, with 57% of the population vaccinated, and anyone who wants a shot can get one. We are in a far different spot than we were last year or even in January. It is safe for vaccinated people to work and there is clearly a demand for eating out and shopping that there wasn’t last year.
I’d much rather use the money for infrastructure, than extended unemployment and PPP loans.
Paging @triggercut, who if he’s willing to contribute is an expert on such things.
Menzo
10357
Timely story on CNN about this. I don’t know what the answer is. My gut says that some restaurant food is going to have to get more expensive so owners can pay workers more.As others have mentioned, with rare exception, it’s not like restaurant owners are sitting on huge profits that they can eat into.
