Here’s How the Price of Your Favorite Fast Food Would Change With a $15 Minimum Wage

a reply to: BMorris

Consumer Prices in United States are 20.31% lower than in United Kingdom

Consumer Prices Including Rent in United States are 17.45% lower than in United Kingdom

Rent Prices in United States are 10.34% lower than in United Kingdom

Restaurant Prices in United States are 31.29% lower than in United Kingdom

Groceries Prices in United States are 8.06% lower than in United Kingdom

Local Purchasing Power in United States is 40.31% higher than in United Kingdom

Our country has to stop engaging in illegal foreign wars. Period. That money that is wasted in those ridiculous wars that gain nothing for either side is a bill we cannot possibly pay. Our government needs to enforce extant immigration laws and apply them to ALL borders. The explosion of illegal immigration at our southern border is currently by design to keep unemployment high and wages down. Our country needs to have a real economy, which includes manufacturing. But, unfortunately, the opposite will continue to happen until....well....until.....

a reply to: Stormdancer777

I think people ask for too much.

Way back when people didn't have to have the latest electronics, cell phones and the bills that go with them. Back then you got second hand clothing and passed them down, down and further down then made quilts from what scraps were still good. If you had a car it was also second or third hand and you learned to change your oil and fix small problems yourself. Baby diapers were cloth because you could wash and reuse them time and time again. There was no cable tv - tv involved 3 to 4 channels and if you got them all you were lucky.

Because of my disability I have not worked for over 10 years (14 to be exact actually) and have had to break into a new field, one that I can physically do.

My husband was also starting again in a new city that we were not planning on staying in for long.

I went back to college for two semesters to brush up on my English and math skill then found a small company willing to give me a chance - doing something I had never done before after having been out of the workforce for so long. The company was having their own financial problems so giving me the chance worked out for both of us.

I was paid minimum wage which in my area was 7.35 an hour. That job was a stepping stone and I used it as such. Gaining experience is key.

For three months I also supported my husband while he looked for a job. On minimum wage. No welfare no nothing, just my pay. We paid all our bills with that, and ate also. We were not above public transportation. We are not above second hand clothes. Actually, I don't own even one item of clothing that was purchased new outside of my underwear, socks and bras. Even my shoes are second hand. My clothes are very nice however, all the best name brands, all the best materials. What I wore yesterday (shirt, pants) would have been 150 dollars had I purchased them new. But I only spent 2.50 on the shirt and 4.00 on the pants - 6.50 total, and the shirt still had the tags on it when I bought it, and the pants had probably only been worn once. You have to know what thrift stores to go to.

Then, once my husband got a job making only slightly more than myself we were able to save.

Because of the experience I now have, as well as the beautiful letter of recommendation and references that came with it, I have passed all the testing and initial interviewing process for a new job possibility and have an interview tomorrow. The job starts anywhere from 10.42 - 15.38 an hour, depending upon experience.

They have excellent benefits and it's a large company I can grow with as they provide the opportunity for growth, promoting from within. I have other job possibilities also, ranging from 10 - 12 dollars an hour - all full time, but the one I want is the company that has the opportunity of personal growth. My interview with them is tomorrow.

On top of that, I am starting my own business - using my newly gained experience. Something is going to work out for me, or both things will given time. It's personal drive and a willingness to start from nothing which will get me anywhere.

You have to be willing to work your way up; start at the bottom and live on very little in the beginning of your career path to make it in this world. It has ALWAYS been like that, college degree or not.

If I can support two people on 7.35 an hour - rent, food, transportation and everything, and save for a future if two people are making that, then I see it as people being unwilling to live within their means - not that the economy is so bad that it cannot be done, because quite frankly, it can. You have to decide you can, and then do it with what you have.

You have to start low, putting in all the effort, in order to get something better. If you see everything as a stepping stone to the next step, then eventually you will get where you want to go. In the meantime, living within your means is key.

a reply to: OccamsRazor04This is indeed one of the manipulative ways that the western governments are destroying our economies. Their are so many regulations and red tape along with sky high taxes to keep the robber barrons that run our banking systems alive and well that we cannot compete with third world countries. Soon we will learn our lesson as most of western countries will start to have most of their populations living in third world conditions with occasional pockets of wealthy fortresses with in them. Some of the ways that we can solve some of the problems are to substacially reduce red tape, useless regulations and taxes. Standards must be at the point of sale on goods and services not at the point of manufactor which foreign made goods can often avoid. It should be put on the retailer to prove that standards are being met. This alone would bring many jobs back to the usa, canada, Australia, and England etc as it would be hard if not impossible in some cases to prove that standards were being met in third world countries and would increase the cost of importing goods.
Entreponours should be encouraged to set up more small businesses particularly in fields that dont yet exist. Home based businesses should be encouraged and given tax holidays under a certain turnover in non conventional fields

How about we freeze the prices and raise the minimum wage and they can make the difference out of corporate profits and CEOs salaries and bonuses? How is that for an idea? Mcdonalds made 1.5 billion in 2013, I hardly feel sorry for billionaires losing a few dollars so people can afford to live.

a reply to: damwel Hm. I have to say, I may be with you on that one. It would be nice if we lived in a world of natural market forces....but, unfortunately we don't. We live in a world where one group has and uses all the power to manipulate and fabricate market forces, through artificial scarcity, future shares buying, and price fixing. If this is indeed the world we live in, then we should engage in it to protect our own interests, as no one else will. Until then, we will be at their mercy, with them dictating (as they do) how little they want to pay us for our labor, and how much they want to charge us for their services/products.

Edit: Wrong thread, whoops.

Edit: *sigh* wrong thread

originally posted by: OccamsRazor04
a reply to: Aazadan

I will await your info.

I would be very happy to be wrong. From everything I have seen almost none of the poor would be helped, as most of them do not have min. wage jobs, and the middle class would take a significant hit.

I know people who have lives in Aus. and the USA and the middle class of Aus. talk about how much better prices were and how much further their wages went in the USA.

You're misunderstanding where the break point is. It's a linear scale. At the bottom of the scale the lowest income earners have about 76% more buying power, and that scales to 0% around the median wage. Those above the median wage have less buying power but it again scales up, if you're just a little bit above you only have 1% less. Far above around the 110k mark such as lawyers and software engineers worked out to about 10% less. Where the real hit to buying power happens is in the case of upper level management. They end up with around 20% less. The thing is however the economy is much healthier when everyone is participating.

As far as your assertion that only 5% of people are on minimum wage you can't look at the minimum only because while that's part of it you also need to be looking at the purchasing power of those up to the point of the new minimum. Up to the median wage or so people end up with more buying power, that's the bottom 50% of income earners. The lower you are the more you have proportionally but it's far more than the bottom 5% which see a boost.

originally posted by: SearchLightsInc

^^ That is total and utter bullsh!t.

Nope. This is actually a true story and how I really feel

I work harder when my employer respects me as a human being and pay's me a living wage. My current employer pay's me a living wage and in return i ensure their customer's are happy and keep their business with us.
Had they not been paying me a living wage then i'd probably be at the point where i couldn't give a rat's arse if you wanna take your business somewhere else.

OK. Well is you employer a fast food company? Or do you have a real job that deserves a higher wage?
Answer that, then ask yourself if someone working fast food deserves what you make.
You should get paid for the job you do and fast food work does not warrant a $15/hr. salary

Paying me nothing as an incentive to get me to work harder so i can get into management is counter-productive. You are paying me less for my labour and making me feel worthless and separated from the company in the process.

Not what I was saying. As I took on more responsibility and my job became harder, I received raises. The was it should be. You make it seem like I was doing labor for slave wages or something.

Make your employee's feel part of the business and its guaranteed that people will work better for you because they are INVESTED.

INVEST: devote (one's time, effort, or energy) to a particular undertaking with the expectation of a worthwhile result.
I would say my path has me invested in the company. Way more than some kid who will walk in the door making a cool $15/hr
The whole point I was trying to make is that when you give people things they haven't earned, they won't ever learn how to earn something. It will also make everyone else think that they deserve something because "they got it"
Next thing you know, you have tons of people looking for handouts instead of looking out for themselves.

originally posted by: damwel
How about we freeze the prices and raise the minimum wage and they can make the difference out of corporate profits and CEOs salaries and bonuses? How is that for an idea? Mcdonalds made 1.5 billion in 2013, I hardly feel sorry for billionaires losing a few dollars so people can afford to live.

No, they made $5 billion in profits. Increasing wages for every worker by $10,000 / year would cost them $18 billion. That means they LOSE $13 billion a year, and close, and everyone is out of work. Congratulations, you just put every single company in the US out of business.

a reply to: OccamsRazor04

Lol where did you get those figures? Sean Hannity?

originally posted by: OccamsRazor04

originally posted by: damwel
How about we freeze the prices and raise the minimum wage and they can make the difference out of corporate profits and CEOs salaries and bonuses? How is that for an idea? Mcdonalds made 1.5 billion in 2013, I hardly feel sorry for billionaires losing a few dollars so people can afford to live.

No, they made $5 billion in profits. Increasing wages for every worker by $10,000 / year would cost them $18 billion. That means they LOSE $13 billion a year, and close, and everyone is out of work. Congratulations, you just put every single company in the US out of business.

That's not actually what happens though, you yourself have agreed to as much when you've looked up Australias numbers. They have that minimum wage, they're still in business, prices are higher but the bottom half of the population is significantly better off.

One person at the top with a lot of money can only eat so many McDonalds burgers, that person even with the money to buy a lot of products is still limited to the consumption of a single human being. When many people have a bit more money though you have the consumption of many people. That in turn leads to a higher volume of sales, which means more work needs to be done, which creates a need for more employees.

If one business or corporation has to pay more in wages, that business will fail. When they all have to do it though something else happens because it's not a factor in competition. Instead people do better and the companies still make their profit.

One more thing I had a hunch about so I just checked. That number of people in the US on minimum wage actually calculates the percent of people making the FEDERAL minimum wage, not minimum wage for their area. That MASSIVELY reduces the numbers and makes it look like no one is on minimum wage when the truth is many people are.

Among those paid by the hour, 1.6 million earned exactly the prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. About 2.0 million had wages below the federal minimum.2 Together, these 3.6 million workers with wages at or below the federal minimum made up 4.7 percent of all hourly paid workers

www.bls.gov...

Tricky wording on the part of the articles that claim only 1.1% make the minimum wage. Only about 1/3 of states pay the federal minimum wage, and most of them are sparsely populated. The complete list is: Idaho, Utah, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Iowa, Wisconsin, Indiana, Kentucky, North Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire. The population of those states comes to 100,930,681. According to BLS there are 75.6 million working people for 316 million legal citizens. That means 23.92% of the population works which means these states combined have a working population of 24,142,618. With 1.6 million earning exactly the minimum wage that's 6.63% of the population earning minimum without accounting for local minimum wages. When you include people earning less than the minimum such as tipped positions you get to 3.6 million workers which is 14.91% of the workforce.

a reply to: Aazadan

I used different numbers, with 5% making the minimum wage. Including tipped people is not smart, as I know several people in tipped professions making well over 50k a year. In fact I don't know a single tipped person making less than I make.

originally posted by: damwel
a reply to: OccamsRazor04

Lol where did you get those figures? Sean Hannity?

No, it's called math. How about you tell me how many employees Mc Donalds employs that need a raise, and how much on average that raise should be.

originally posted by: Aazadan

That's not actually what happens though, you yourself have agreed to as much when you've looked up Australias numbers. They have that minimum wage, they're still in business, prices are higher but the bottom half of the population is significantly better off.

One person at the top with a lot of money can only eat so many McDonalds burgers, that person even with the money to buy a lot of products is still limited to the consumption of a single human being.

Yes and I can say as people have more money they will choose better products so less people will eat at McDonalds.

Either way the poster said he wanted to MASSIVELY increase costs and not allow them to increase prices. It doesn't take much more than 2 brain cells that occasionally come together to recognize that's a disaster. What's their profit margin? How much of their expenses are salary related? How much are their profits when you almost double salary related expenses? Hint: It's in the negatives, they close down, everyone loses their job.

It would be like legislating gas stations have to buy gas for $2 a gallon and they can only sell it for $1.75 a gallon because they make such big profits currently. Numbers. Don't. Work.

originally posted by: OccamsRazor04
a reply to: Aazadan

I used different numbers, with 5% making the minimum wage. Including tipped people is not smart, as I know several people in tipped professions making well over 50k a year. In fact I don't know a single tipped person making less than I make.

I was using the numbers directly from BLS, the people who put out the report everyone else quoted, spun, and reported on. I quoted the relevant text and linked the page. Those are the official numbers and tipped positions were counting tips, it's quite common for tip positions to still end up at minimum wage (especially as reported taxable income, which is all we can really go on as there's no way to measure unreported income).

a reply to: Aazadan

Just saying I was trying to use much fairer figures.

a reply to: OccamsRazor04

I'm not sure how you can get figures that are much fairer than coming directly from the source with no spin. 15% of the population (that's measurable) makes minimum wage.