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The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

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Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#61

Post by jrs235 »

pydry wrote: post #44
mdorazio wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an example, average restaurant profit margins are between 2% and 6%. They cannot absorb labor rate increases without raising prices or going bankrupt. Margins tend to be similarly low for many other industries as well. Tech is a massive outlier in its ability to absorb large wage increases.

Their landlords can though. Evidence from LA suggests that this has happened as restaurants negotiated cheaper rents in response: https://anderson-review.ucla.edu/a-15-minimum-wage-may-have-... Restaurants do also have a tendency to be run out of business and replaced by other restaurants when the minimum wage gets hiked though. Restaurant owners take hikes extremely personally. The market can be an unkind mistress.

McDonalds, Dollar General, Chick-fil-a, and many others are really in the real estate/property space. They just have an affiliated model that supports their (real estate) investments and reduces their risk (of holding vacant commercial property).

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#62

Post by VictorPath »

dugditches wrote: post #32
stavros wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that the company can't absorb the raises.

lots of smaller ones can't in fact. this also gives rise to ununionized outfits as well. as theyre able to keep wages lower and bid more competitively.

Only one in fifteen private sector jobs in the US is unionized, you do not "give rise to ununionized outfits", that is the standard.

Ford has been unionized since before World War II. Actually the opposite happened in its case, unionizing GM and Chrysler made unionized Ford easier.

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#63

Post by giantg2 »

wonderwonder wrote: post #42
pydry wrote: post #7

This paper is a good rebuttal to talking points like this tweet that crop up from time to time: https://i.redd.it/b57t1w5jllb61.jpg (I was trying to look up a similarly awful article referencing EMTs earning $minwage + $2 I saw a while back but googlefu is failing me)

This is a terrible rebuttal. It essentially says because society has decided to underpay the people that look after our kids for 8 hours a day, that no one else should be able to make money either. The correct take should be teachers are woefully underpaid for the work they do which includes looking after our kids in the event of a school shooter. Strange to me that so many people rally to keep their fellow citizens…

Teachers in my state make a good living. I know some that make more than I (dev, MSIS, 10yrs exp.) do. Granted we're in the top 10 states for teacher pay. Some other states are woefully underpaid, but it's not universal.

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#64

Post by StefanWestfal »

ethanbond wrote: post #27
shockeychap wrote: post #15

I found this to be many words with little information. It largely boils down to "when Amazon increases wages, other employers follow suit, to varying extents." There was almost nothing about the myriad of other effects, including things like inflation, effects on already higher wage earners, effects on automation, and more. They touched on the increase in unemployment from competitors, but that was it.

Or the most critical consequence: rent. Rent goes up. Landlords get richer, minimum wage earners go back to poverty. Pretty obvious cycle. High paying employer moves somewhere? Rent goes up. Normal employer pays more? Rent goes up.

Could you explain? I would assume that only a part of the increase in wages would go to rent. I live in Norway where the minimum salary is high. Rents are too but the average person has to spent less time working to pay for housing.

Do you think the hours a person needs to work to pay for housing would stay the same if the wage increase?

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#65

Post by dahfizz »

wallaBBB wrote: post #18
fortran77 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps part of the reason for inflation is the rising minimum wages.

And yet the inflation outdates and outpaces the rise of the minimum wage, even prior to covid [1] If it was to match inflation it would be more than $15 [2] And if it was to match productivity, it would be even more [2][3] [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/labor-day-2019-minimum-wage/ [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/21/politics/minimum-wage-inf... [3] https://cepr.net/this-is-what-minimum-wage-would-be-if-it-ke…

> If it was to match inflation it would be more than $15

Neither of your sources support that claim:

> Even worse is that federal-minimum-wage-earning workers today are paid 31% less than the $10.54 an hour they would have been paid in 1968, when the minimum wage reached its highest (inflation-adjusted) value. [1]

> The wage hit its peak in inflation-adjusted terms in 1968 at just over $12 [2]

The productivity argument is silly, and your third source says as much. Minimum wage has not kept pace with average productivity because minimum wage jobs themselves have not kept up with average productivity. CEPR makes the argument that doctors and software engineers just make too much money, and this somehow hurts the minimum wage earners. Which is a wild bit of mental gymnastics to claim that minimum wage earners should profit from high-skilled productivity, but the high-skilled workers should not.

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#66

Post by vorpalhex »

leroman wrote: post #34
xyzzy4747 wrote: post #10

When people get paid more, the prices of everything go up, including other people's wages. Inflation is often a self-reinforcing cycle.

According to a fact you just came up with? Don’t believe it works this way, most money goes to the top earners, raising lower wages should not have that big of an effect as a result.

Please don't be rude for the sake of being rude.

Most views hold that increasing the minimum wage increases the cost of goods and services, in particular food, also increasing downstream things like rent, but it's still a debated point and not settled. [1]

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/052815/does-raising...

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#67

Post by giantg2 »

folkrav wrote: post #22
teekert wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's shocking how little we pay the people that spend so much time with our kids.

This is one of the main reasons why I left the field before even graduating (elementary education, left halfway through the degree). The amount of bullshit you have to deal with on top of the terrible compensation and how little people seem to value the profession despite its importance played a big part. I'm not even 5 years out of school as a dev (and not even as a college level graduate), I already make way more t…

"The amount of bullshit you have to deal with"

This. My state pays well. I have friend who earned his teaching cert but never used it because of how terrible student teaching was, including child behavior and school policies.

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#68

Post by nemo44x »

folkrav wrote: post #22
teekert wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's shocking how little we pay the people that spend so much time with our kids.

This is one of the main reasons why I left the field before even graduating (elementary education, left halfway through the degree). The amount of bullshit you have to deal with on top of the terrible compensation and how little people seem to value the profession despite its importance played a big part. I'm not even 5 years out of school as a dev (and not even as a college level graduate), I already make way more t…

You should consider you've only been a dev in a massive bull market for software engineers. Teachers don't get laid off or face the types of uncertainty other types of careers do.

You'll always make more money in private industry but you will probably work more and have less time off. Teachers get a lot of time off and work about 35 hours per week during the school year. And then of course the summers. It's an especially good career if you have kids yourself as you are home when they are.

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#69

Post by sovnade »

wallaBBB wrote: post #18
fortran77 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps part of the reason for inflation is the rising minimum wages.

And yet the inflation outdates and outpaces the rise of the minimum wage, even prior to covid [1] If it was to match inflation it would be more than $15 [2] And if it was to match productivity, it would be even more [2][3] [1] https://www.epi.org/publication/labor-day-2019-minimum-wage/ [2] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/02/21/politics/minimum-wage-inf... [3] https://cepr.net/this-is-what-minimum-wage-would-be-if-it-ke…

Tying minimum wage to productivity never made sense to me. Obviously as technology progresses, productivity would increase. There wouldn't be an incentive to invest in productivity-increasing tech if it was directly offset by wage increases.

Tying it to inflation though is a no-brainer. We do it for social security payments, congress salaries, etc. There's no justifiable reason for not doing this.

Re: The Effects of Major Retailers Raising Their Minimum Wages

#70

Post by pydry »

vultour wrote: post #29
pydry wrote: post #7

This paper is a good rebuttal to talking points like this tweet that crop up from time to time: https://i.redd.it/b57t1w5jllb61.jpg (I was trying to look up a similarly awful article referencing EMTs earning $minwage + $2 I saw a while back but googlefu is failing me)

This is one of the worst arguments one could ever make. Literally the same as telling someone your salary and they go "wow, you're so overpaid, I make less than half that!". No motherfucker, you should be making more money. It's insane that instead of advocating for higher salaries people will attempt to drag each other down.

Pretty much every argument against raising the minimum wage is disingenous in some way, but a lot of profits are at stake so we will get to hear them all eventually.
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