The Dolphins Make Me Cry.com - Forums

The early results appear to be bad.  Massive closing and layoffs, (this is according to Tiktok).  Huge price hikes.  Many people not happy.

Massachusetts has raised its minimum wage to $15 an hour.  However, my store continues to give its employees raises every year.  However, we are not even close to making $20 an hour in retail.  I hope they learn from CA.   

This is false.  CA did not raise "the minimum wage" to $20, but instead the minimum wage for fast food workers (https://www.npr.org/2024/04/01/1241743207/california-fast-food-workers-20-minimum-wage-april).

Like many corporations in the US, fast food restaurants have been hiking their prices since 2020, leading to record corporate profits during the pandemic (https://fortune.com/2022/03/31/us-companies-record-profits-2021-price-hikes-inflation/).  But the increased prices were widely blamed on inflation due to free money for poor people instead of corporate price gouging during a global emergency.

in short, GOOD.. let fast food places price themselves righto out of the market. It's already a better deal to go to the supermarket or local bakery and get a large sub for $7 - 8 and it be much better, higher quality food for half the price of a big mac meal.

I saw an example where an owner of 10 fast food restaurants claims that the wage increase results in an extra cost of $500k yearly for him. That makes his profit from the restaurants from 1.3 million / year to 800k / year. If he'd rather close his stores than settle for $800k / year then that's his problem.

In the age of corporations are people and the only motivator a corporation has is the share price of their stock. I'm fully in favor of government increasing the minimum wage. Those who can compete will, those who can't will fail. That's capitalism.

Also while we're on the topic of government and wage floors. Any job you work at for over 30 hours a week that results in you being eligible for welfare payments or food stamps should get taxed twice the amount spent on those welfare payments or food stamps. We also need to as a society do away with part time / full time distinctions. You work for a company or you don't. Making someone ineligible for health insurance or any other widely distributed benefit because you cut their hours from 35 / week to 32 / week on purpose to make them inelligible is incredible bullshit.

One more thing:

What are you "hoping that your store learns" from the bad results, massive closing and layoffs, huge price hikes, and unhappy people in CA?

Unless you're saying that you don't want your employer to pay you too much money, you seem to be having some internal conflict between the right-wing talking points you're seeing on Tiktok and the impact of a raise on your real-world quality of life.

Whether you legislate it or not, it's gonna have to happen.  California cost of living is too high to pay less than this for hourly work.  People just won't work at these places for less and there will be an exodus and then your Burger King experience won't exist.  You can legislate to help the industry along or to normalize it and stabilize it, but capitalism will do this job, too.

We have no laws like this here and these places are already starting you out at $15, because why else are you going to live in Boca and work at Dunkin Donuts.  This idea that these are summer jobs for kids is just not reality.  It's unskilled labor for people who need to live.

There is no such thing as unskilled labor. I can no more run a Dunkin' drive thru than i can fly an airplane. They're both skilled positions, the skills are just different.

You equate taking orders in a drive-thru to flying an airplane? I honestly don't know how to respond to that. I sure hope you don't select doctors the same way.

This is where we disagree on the issue. People who "need to live" should not be working at Dunkin Donuts or McDonalds unless they are in management. There is a point where you just cannot charge enough to make a decent profit when you sell something like fast food and that's what business owners are in the business for in the first place. Plenty of manual labor jobs that pay more and offer more benefits because only they are making more on the end product.

Recently a popular local Coney Island hot dog and ice cream place closed down because the owners were killing themselves but couldn't afford to hire people to help them. They had plenty of business coming in but decided it better to work for other people.

It is a different skill set, but still a skill set.  One person posted the question, "why are assistant managers at McDonald's better at deescalating than the police?".  Response, "because if we don't we get fired". Every job requires skill!  Ever had a brand new cashier or waitress?

That's fine, but then you won't (and you don't) have staff at Dunkin' Donuts.  That's why you go to places and there's nobody behind the counter.

It seems to me to be equally plain that no business which depends for existence on paying less than living wages to its workers has any right to continue in this country. By "business" I mean the whole of commerce as well as the whole of industry; by workers I mean all workers, the white collar class as well as the men in overalls; and by living wages I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living.
Franklin D. Roosevelt

More to question what CF is saying -- why would you work at Dunkin for X amount of dollars when there are other jobs that will pay you more?  That's just how capitalism works.  Where I live, this concept of a high school workforce just champing at the bit to take $10 an hour jobs just isn't a thing.

Thanks for the semantics but it is the proper term when hiring employees.

Your philosophy doesn't work in the US, where people working for poverty wages receive government assistance.

When you advocate for places like McDonald's or Walmart to pay adults less than a living wage, you are effectively subsidizing the profit of those businesses with taxpayer money.  And as we have seen over the past 4 years, corporations will raise prices whenever they think they can get away with it, whether their costs increase or not... so you aren't even "keeping prices low" by allowing these businesses to pay their staff pennies.

Then raise the prices.

I don't understand why people have "plenty of customers" but would rather just fold up shop than attempt to raise prices to a sustainable revenue.  Again, we have big corporations out here gleefully price gouging and posting record profits, yet there are small businesses who won't raise prices even if the alternative is closing down entirely.

Sure, I think the point he's making here, and it's true as someone who hires people, is that after you've trained someone to do an entry-level job, they have value to you.  Sure, you might be able to find someone to do the job for less, rather than giving that person more money, but you'll have to train that other person, and in my experience, it takes a long time for that person to be fully self-reliant after training.

I've never worked in fast food, but I imagine it takes a while to become "good at your job", even in something like that.  And when we're talking about the completely uninitiated, you kinda have to teach people or let them learn through modeling, how to be polite, how to speak, how to engage, etc.  I could probably work fast food and be good to one once I learned the technical stuff, but I have decades of customer service experience in unrelated fields.

I think you overvalued what it actually takes to learn a fast food job. I bet most anyone from this site can learn it all in a day or two, minus the back office stuff which probably isn't very difficult either. Customer service isn't a difficult skill to learn. That's why it's called unskilled labor. If someone has to go through extensive training for it I have to question their value.

We actually have one of those that just opened a few weeks ago. It looks like a normal Dunkin' Donuts from the outside but once you go inside you order at a kiosk and pick up from the counter. No human interaction whatsoever and they don't have an option to order at a register. They have signs saying it's faster and easier to use the DD App. I went last Saturday morning for the first time and and surprisingly it was running pretty efficient even though busy.

Places like Walmart make plenty of money and are able to pay and offer benefits but who is going to pay $30 for a hamburger, fries and a drink? If you pay someone $20 an hour then then that employee has to sell $30 worth of product in an hour to make up for it and break even. Companies pay taxes and insurance on every person working.  Multiply that by every person working that isn't selling and the price goes up.

Plenty of customers means they were always busy or at least during times you would expect. It doesn't mean they turned a large profit. Again .... they can't charge $10 for a cone and $20 for a hotdog.

They don't get paid the same and they shouldn't. One skillset has more commercial value than another. But it doesn't make one job a "skilled" job and the other an "unskilled" job. They're just 2 jobs that have 2 different skills and 2 different values. But both require skill.

if you can't make the economics work in a way that you aren't exploiting workers, then closing is the correct decision. Not every business deserves to survive.

The economics of that is just not true. We see it in other places, for example Denmark, where the mcdonalds average wage is around $22/hr (thanks unions) while the price of the big mac is about the same as here. You can see this in the big mac index:
https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index

Big mac prices:
US - $5.69
Denmark - DKr39.00 ($5.68 at today's exchange rate)

The difference between the two. Unions in denmark don't put up with the kind of fast food sob story bullshit that started this thread in the first place.

I'm all for capitalism. But i'm sick and tired of hard nosed "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" capitalism for everyone, except for the rich and corporations who get to be capitalists with profits but all of a sudden are the most socialist groups when it comes to losses and bailouts.

If economics was football, companies would be playing offense, and in the US, barely anyone is playing defense. Unions, consumer groups, regulators. Those are the defense against rampant exploitation. Price gouging, monopolies and price fixing that's going on all over the place.

You don't find it the least bit ironic that in one breath you say "Not every business deserves to survive" but then say all employees deserve to make  X number of dollars regardless of how much they are putting out?

BTW  ... I do agree with the business portion of it but I think more lower end job people are bitching themselves out of jobs more than they are getting more money. Like I said ... no human interaction at our new local Dunkin' Donuts and it's spreading.

Places like Walmart have more of their employees on government assistance than businesses paying everyone a minimum of $20/hour, that's for sure.

$30 is, what, two value meals an hour?  If your hourly customer-to-employee ratio is a number less than 2, your fast food business model isn't viable.

I am quite happy to make the following two statements without the slightest hint of irony or contradiction:

1) Not every business deserves to survive
2) Every employee deserves to survive

I think calling out Wal Mart and calling out every place of work is apples and oranges. I don't think most people would disagree about places like Wal-Mart. Home Depot and Lowes pay pretty well.

They are having to that for every employee who isn't selling too and we both know there are more people working behind the scenes than our front. You have to multiply that $30 and hour over 10 maybe 15 other people too.

We are going to have to agree to disagree on what "surviving" is. In my opinion your poor life decisions are not my fault. No reason I have to suffer in order to get a hamburger. 

Try 1.5 - 3 not 10.

When was the last time you went to a fast food restaurant that had a total of 10 to 15 people working? And if there is a total of 10 people working then it is a very busy location with 3-4 cashiers.   

That's easy. I went to Chick Fil A today so nah!! They probably had 10 people working the drive lanes itself.

And approximately how many cars were in line?
Do you think that Chick-Fil-A had at least 4 sales every 10 minutes?

Bet you can't go to chick-fil-a today

A ton of cars. I'd say easily 30+ as there are two lines around the building at anytime. It's crazy how efficient they are compared to everything else.

Ok I give. Why is that?

He wrote that on a Sunday.  That would be my guess.

Gotcha, thanks. I didn't even look at the date and assumed it was yesterday and had something to do with the eclipse.

I don't know what Chik Fil A does, but it's definitely a better experience with ordering than other comparable fast food places.

Not in the same category, but I do like when places have screen ordering, especially in cases where there's a lot of mini-decisions, like having a sandwich or a pizza made.  Wawa does this and it makes getting a sandwich pretty nice.

I don't have any feelings this way or that on the CA FFW minimum wage raise to $20ph. I think it's fine though somewhat hilariously political in the sense that, initially, Gav's friend Greg Flynn was going to dodge it thru political chicanery. (That was remedied through public outcry though, ostensibly.)

However, I can tell you my experience with something that happened at the law office that I run. It used to be that my employees were paid a set wage, and then, depending on the firm's numbers, would receive several bonuses throughout the year. These bonuses were substantial, with the highest amount of bonuses ever received by one employee in one year being 42.5k.

However, the taxes on them were extremely onerous. Because they're considered "unearned" under our tax structure (and here I mean the federal structure, not so much South Carolina's, which is barely a tax structure at all) they were taxed usuriously. Given the progressive structure of federal taxes, the math seemed better for my people (though more risky for the firm) to just repackage their bonuses as part of their regular salary. A vote was taken (though I had more or less already made up my mind to do it) and we all decided to do it.

Our bi-monthly payroll cost went up SUBSTANTIALLY. Our payrolls, when tax was factored in, used to come in at about 26.7k per payroll. With the raises, it's now 33.8k. (Entire firm is 9 people.) However, I've noticed some really good effects as well. The employees seem happier to come to work. As a result the productivity has climbed. We are 74k ahead of where we were this time last year (my firm does flat fees so that's not based on "luck" as it would be if it were a firm that did contingency fee agreements) and abuse of the company cards (every employee has a firm Amex that I monitor) has decreased by about 85%. It was never that bad to begin with, but it's been substantially cut down. In addition, because the agreement was to factor in 75% of the bonuses of last year as their raise this year, (this was to be cautious in the initial stage of this raise) it appears as though the profit margin will be HIGHER this year, despite the highly increased wages.

Now, given the kind of business my place is, I can say that in a white collar profession, the raise of the minimum wage, at least when done voluntarily, has only had good effects thus far. However, I am not sure as to what will happen in CA with some of the fast food workers. Those business's profit margins are much lower than ours, and they have the additional cost of inventory, which my business, being a service business, does not have.

I wish the people in that state the best. I hope it works out, but the lack of voluntariness does concern me a bit.

^^^^ That is not how the tax code works. If you receive a salary of $1000 per week or receive $500 per week and $26,000 per year bonus you will owe the exact same federal income tax.  However, what will vary significantly will be the amount of withholding, as the week you get the $26,500 check your withholding will be based on that being your weekly wage.  But you will get some of that back as a tax refund.

But good for you for recognizing that paying employees fairly leads to better results for the business.

Yeah, I've noticed people at my job complaining about "being taxed dramatically more if you work overtime" and I have had to explain to them that taxes don't work like that.  It just means you'll get more back (or owe less) when you file your taxes.

My first job was commissioned retail sales at a now-defunct West Coast electronics chain.  The salespeople would get huge checks for November and December - about 1/3rd of their yearly income - but the withholding would be massive.  But they'd be getting most of that withholding back a month later when they did their taxes.