Trader Joe's Shrugged

How are they underpaying people? They pay what the market supports. If you get an $8/hour job as a greeter and you think that's less than you're worth, then you are welcome to not work there. If the supply of labor becomes scarce, then the wages will rise. The thing is that there are some jobs that just don't warrant high pay. If I can teach you your job in an hour and it requires no skills or experience, then why should I pay a huge wage? It's like buying a netbook and paying Mac Pro prices. It's silly. While I know Wal Mart people generally work hard, the work itself is on a level of difficulty on par with collecting aluminum cans. If you find yourself working for 10 years as a Wal Mart cashier, then it's your own fault. There are so many government programs for workforce education, technical training, university, etc. Instead of watching Dancing with the Stars or keeping up with the Kardashians, it might behoove some of these career low-wage earners to try to work a little smarter and learn a skill that they can monetize at a better rate than they currently earn.

For a short stretch in 2008, I was actually living out of my car, making barely $200 a week DJing at some shit clubs in Houston. I knew how to use a computer, but I certainly didn't know how to code. Here it is in 2014 and I make more money in a day than I did in an entire month back then. I taught myself, reached out to complete strangers who where experienced to recruit them as mentors and in 2010 I started getting paid to code. I'm not saying everyone should learn to code, but there is a way out of shit-paying jobs -- but it involves taking initiative instead of blaming everyone and relying on the "system" to help.

I have little sympathy for folks who continue to make minimum wage for years -- it's their own fault. That's not a popular opinion, but it's true. There is nothing stopping that Wal Mart greeter from spending his after work time learning something new.

Poverty is a choice. Maybe not a conscious one, but a choice nonetheless. I see plenty of satellite dishes when I drive past the public housing complex. I see plenty of $200+ sneakers using food stamp cards at the grocery store. I see a lot of blame, but very little personal responsibility -- it's always the "Evil" corporation's fault. It's the government's fault, it's Wal Mart's fault -- it's everyone's fault but the person who is actually in the situation.

It seems likely to me that this policy would polarize, not mitigate, the effects.

That is, if a neighborhood is kind of on the line between okay and bad, this policy might help push it up into okay -- businesses would say, "Okay, there is enough going on in this neighborhood that we can deal with moving into it even if we have these hiring restrictions," and then the hiring restrictions may in fact improve the neighborhood.

But if the neighborhood is solidly bad, the business says, "Let me get this straight: you want us to move into a part of the city where it's by no means clear that we can prosper anyway, AND you want to make it really hard for us to hire people, AND you want to slow down any improvement that our presence may make to the neighborhood by meaning that it all has to be organic rather than imported? HELL NO." And so then nobody takes a chance on really poor neighborhoods and they get worse and worse.

On the gripping hand, I don't think it's a plausible policy in America. It seems outside of the type of business regulations which can actually get enacted.