Introduction
Introduction Statistics Contact Development Disclaimer Help
_______ __ _______
| | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----.
| || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --|
|___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____|
on Gopher (inofficial)
Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
Did California's fast food minimum wage reduce employment?
kirito1337 wrote 8 hours 49 min ago:
I'm a tax evader haha
mwkaufma wrote 8 hours 52 min ago:
Betteridge's law of headlines:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines
wtcactus wrote 9 hours 3 min ago:
This is a side question, but, are people in California now not expected
to pay the extortionary tips American businesses expect?
Whenever I pointed how backwards were the tipping expectations in the
USA for anyone from Europe, the excuse was always that those tips would
compensate the low wages paid in the food industry. Well, now that they
have a standard minimum wage, are they doing away with the tipping
practice?
spicyusername wrote 12 hours 11 min ago:
If a business can't provide a living wage, it shouldn't exist.
It's really that simple.
Imagine doing this analysis on the effects of requiring a business to
pay it's slaves, and coming to the conclusion that some slave-based
businesses would have to close, since their business model was so
skewed, it could only function with slave labor...
Who cares! We don't want a world with companies that can only work with
those kinds of business models!
Slave labor shouldn't subsidize artificially low priced products and
artificially inflated executive salaries... the end.
burgerguyg wrote 8 hours 8 min ago:
You're a tool... of landlord propaganda.
There is no such thing as a living wage in a housing market like
this. The recent bill in WA to control rents limited rental
increases to the rate of inflation plus 7% (or a flat 10%, whichever
is lower). So when inflation is at 3% every year, and rents rise 10%
every year, how long before someone who gets a 5% annual raise (40%
higher than the rate of inflation) can't afford rent?
As long as the rental market cannot meet rental demand, raising wages
just bids up rents. No more people get housed or are able to create
savings to weather emergencies. All that money just gets transferred
from business owners to landlords, using minimum wage workers as
mules to transport the money.
Your bias is demonstrated by the fact that you seem to think this is
all about greedy business owners and you put ZERO responsibility on
the landowners and politicians who have perpetuated this housing
crisis.
Meanwhile, in states without property tax caps, overheated housing
markets raise the property taxes of seniors until they can no longer
afford their homes, even if they're paid off. My property taxes are
still just a fraction of my mortgage but they've more than doubled in
the past 8 years and in another 8 years I'll be 64 and likely pay
more annually in property taxes than in mortgage payments.
So seniors and digital nomads sell their ridiculously overpriced
homes in superheated markets and take those profits to cooler
markets, increasing property values and property taxes, which may
seem like a benefit until it heats up the local housing market too
much.
But we saw Marc Andreessen and his wife demonstrate their nasty NIMBY
values trying to stop a measure increasing housing density in
Atherton, California a few years back. The same hero of VC who
invested 9 figures in Adam Neumann's housing startup doesn't want any
of the plebes it would serve within a bike ride of his home.
themaninthedark wrote 10 hours 51 min ago:
What's funny(in a sad way) is that there are arguments made regarding
labor to pick crops saying we need migrants because local labor won't
do the work for cheap and regarding manufacturing saying that cheap
labor enables us to have a higher standard of living.
elhudy wrote 11 hours 27 min ago:
Is it really that simple though? Aren’t there cases where if those
same people would otherwise be unemployed, society might be better
off having the perks of that business’ existance, and subsidizing
those workers up to a living wage using tax $?
JustExAWS wrote 11 hours 29 min ago:
This is a crazy take. It’s not the company’s responsibility to
provide a safety net. It’s the government’s and the government
should collect taxes to do so.
We already have a system for this in theory - the Earned Income Tax
Credit. The program use to be widely supported by both Democrats and
Republican administrations.
What’s a “living wage” anyway? It’s not the same for a s…
mother of 3 as it was for my then teenage son.
And I find it rich for people on HN to say that companies that
can’t afford to pay its workers are commenting on a site run by a
VC fund where almost none of its companies could afford to pay
anything if they weren’t being propped up by investors and most of
the companies will never make a profit
greenchair wrote 11 hours 45 min ago:
Interesting perspective. I need a paragraphs worth of text
translated once a week by a native speaker. Should my biz not exist
or am I allowed to use "slave labor" fiverr?
CommenterPerson wrote 12 hours 0 min ago:
Thank you for stating this so simply and clearly.
It's absurd to see so many commenters, who are probably mostly wage
earners, mindlessly repeat the right wing propaganda. Civilization
needs some minimum decency.
itsme0000 wrote 12 hours 3 min ago:
Except that the study found California economy grew faster than
states with low minimum wages. The law is actually necessary for
growth. Conservative economists just lied, nobody thought this was
actually going to cause unemployment.
tossandthrow wrote 11 hours 58 min ago:
This is the message.
One of the reasons why equality is so freaking important for a
market economy is because it lets more people participate in it -
equality is prerequisite for a market economy (and a democracy, but
that is another discussion)
jleyank wrote 13 hours 15 min ago:
Ontario fast food minimum wage, $17.20. California’s $20. And the
cost of living there is higher. Our fast food places, and whatever you
call the next tier is doing just fine - the damn things are everywhere.
Hard to find something that’s not some kind of chain. Probably a
whole lot of takeaway or delivery, but things seem to meet society’s
needs without decimating budgets. Maybe it’s a balance of having
real workers and moderating profits for the longer term?
refurb wrote 10 hours 15 min ago:
The vast majority of fast food workers in Ontario are foreigners
working on visas.
And plenty of them are exploited and forced to kickback a part of
their wages to the owner. The government does nothing and the owner
gets below minimum wage workers.
It’s shockingly common in Canada.
bena wrote 10 hours 17 min ago:
You see this in other countries as well. They pay decent wages to
fast food employees and don’t play the tipping game either.
Prices aren’t out of control and service is decent.
bborud wrote 13 hours 33 min ago:
Could it be that with a higher minimum wage, more people work these
jobs full time, thus reducing the number of people employed part time?
If the same number of hours are produced with a lower number of workers
that should be a plausible explanation, yes?
croes wrote 14 hours 36 min ago:
Isn’t it fascinating if you raise the minimum wage some people say it
destroys jobs but when people get fired because of things like robots
and AI the same people claim it’s no problem because it those things
that killed the jobs create just other jobs.
More money to spend also creates jobs
Glyptodon wrote 16 hours 33 min ago:
I find it weird how people care so much about employment overall rather
than sufficient employment. Like if a job doesn't pay enough for people
to comfortably have a family and leasure time, to me it's somewhere in
spectrum of slavery, indentured servitude, and poverty trap, and not
compatible with a society of equals and representative government.
Which is to say it's a job that shouldn't exist. While I don't think
minimum wage is really the ideal mechanism of determining this, it's
obvious that paying somebody federal minimum wage is an immoral
exploitative joke... But also it'd likely be even worse without it.
But more to the point, why do these people obsessed with work and jobs
always think anything that creates any kind of job is "good" no matter
how bad, dangerous, or poorly compensated? Jobs that amount to licking
poison for nickels in a country where you we could probably quarters
the lowest currency denomination without issue somehow being "good" for
the lockers is ludicrous. Low wages have massive negative externalities
for society.
qudat wrote 8 hours 36 min ago:
> Like if a job doesn't pay enough for people to comfortably have a
family and leasure time, to me it's somewhere in spectrum of slavery,
indentured servitude, and poverty trap, and not compatible with a
society of equals and representative government.
So should a teenager, just entering the workforce, should be paid
enough to support a family?
I’d rather sacrifice a living wage for the opportunity of upward
job mobility, that’s the metric I really care about. It’s not the
job you start with that matters, it’s the job you end with, and how
long it takes to get there.
jeroenhd wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
I don't think people expect one income to support a family anymore.
Two working parents has become the norm for all but the highest
earners.
But yes, two teenagers may very well need to support a family. All
it takes is one broken condom and being born in the wrong place at
the wrong time.
There's not a lot of upward job mobility for most people. We can't
all be CEOs. Even if that teenager has aspirations for a bigger
career, they'll have expenses like college tuition, books, and
travel.
dartharva wrote 8 hours 55 min ago:
You find it weird people don't want to starve? It may feel weird to
you in your ivory towers but people still want to live no matter how
demeaning their life gets.
Jobs are a product of the economy. In the end their prices (wages)
move with market forces. The only way you deal with scarcity is by
increasing supply (i.e. boosting industry), but alas there's always
"intellectuals" like you sneering down on it as if people should just
choose to die instead.
gruez wrote 9 hours 0 min ago:
>Low wages have massive negative externalities for society.
The alternative to low wages isn't necessarily high wages. It could
also be zero wages, as the study in the OP demonstrates.
Glyptodon wrote 6 hours 57 min ago:
Which goes to show that rather than minimum wage we ought to have a
welbeing floor, perhaps with UBI, perhaps based on keeping key
costs, like food, housing, healthcare, and education minimal.
Philorandroid wrote 10 hours 25 min ago:
Having lost a job suddenly, any employment is better than none. A
perfect job that provides everything you need is pretty far detached
from "this is sufficient", or even "this will slow my fall while I
work something else out", and this kind of bitter resentment towards
anything less than a job that pays out an idyllic American existence
is what causes them to be priced out by legislative fiat like the
minimum wage.
More to the point, not every skill level or job is _worth_ that kind
of compensation (as uncomfortable as it might be to entertain), and
attempts to circumvent market forces by making lower wages illegal at
some arbitrary point have substantially more damaging externalities
than 'low wages' -- which are as much a system of slavery as gravity
or magnetism, and just as resilient to ideation.
Glyptodon wrote 6 hours 47 min ago:
I agree everything people might want done isn't worth the cost of
having a human do it. But I don't see why such jobs should exist. I
also don't think the base level of welfare needs to "idyllic," but
enough for everyone to act as good citizens without being trapped
in cursed doom cycles of impoverishment.
In general, though, it wouldn't matter what the minimum wage is if
everyone had a sufficient level of general welfare without
working...
Which goes to show that rather than minimum wage we ought to have a
welbeing floor, perhaps with UBI, perhaps based on keeping key
costs, like food, housing, healthcare, and education minimal.
tossandthrow wrote 10 hours 2 min ago:
> More to the point, not every skill level or job is _worth_ that
kind of compensation ...
This is a fair stance to take, but you need to accept the
consequences of the stance when people get desperate.
> attempts to circumvent market forces by making lower wages
illegal at some arbitrary point have substantially more damaging
externalities than 'low wages'
A population of people who can not feed themselves are going to
kill you on the street for the canned tuna you might have in your
bag.
> Having lost a job suddenly, any employment is better than none.
While this is true for you it is not true for the society as a
whole.
This entire comment seems be written with a complete disrespect for
macro dynamics and taken right out of a hunter gather society.
It completely ignores everything modern governance - and it is
quite frightening.
navi0 wrote 17 hours 40 min ago:
Real question: If government-mandated wages are good policy, why not
set the minimum wage to $50/hr?
Why not $100/hr?
comex wrote 17 hours 33 min ago:
Because if the minimum wage is too high, employers can't afford to
pay it, so it will just result in reduced employment rather than
wages going up, aka economic "deadweight loss".
That much is obvious. What is in question is the effects of more
realistic minimum wages like this one. Some claim that _any_ minimum
wage will only result in deadweight loss, which is true in simplified
models, but the effect in the real world is not so clear, hence the
need for this type of research.
banginghead wrote 17 hours 54 min ago:
Why is the entire discussion between: "people should be able to pay
rent and buy groceries and maybe save a little money on minimum wage"
versus "those greedy poors"? I mean 10% of the US population are
millionaires, we're all paying billionaires' taxes so they only have to
pay a pittance, and soon we'll have a trillionaire. But no, screw the
minimum wage workers, they should work extra jobs ... we'll never tax
the rich what they owe, they are worshipped like gods.
derelicta wrote 18 hours 31 min ago:
Really, one can only truly understand the term "labour aristocracy"
after reading this comment section. People show 0 solidarity towards
people of their own class. The west is doomed.
darksaints wrote 20 hours 0 min ago:
As someone who kinda followed this debate for a while, I will point out
that there is actually a large split down the middle of the on whether
minimum wage increases decrease employment. And that split isn't
actually due to ideological bias (which is the usual accusation), but
rather methodology: almost all of the studies which confirm employment
reductions use one methodology, and almost all of the studies which do
not confirm employment loss use another methodology, and there is a
large debate in econometrics as to how reasonable the assumptions are
for each of the two methodologies.
One thing that always seems to be at a disconnect between the economic
literature and policy makers is the economic context of the raise in
wages. Even those economists that have bought in fully that minimum
wage increases don't typically decrease employment will have several
caveats to that statement, usually worded in the form of "small
increases in the minimum wage". That is to say that there are often
small inefficiencies in our current markets which allow employers to
reduce wages in cartel-like fashion, and small increases in the minimum
wage can claw some of that back in favor of the employees at the
expense of employers' economic rents, but not at the expense of
economic output. But large increases in the minimum wage absolutely can
jump the shark, decreasing economic output by effectively making low
margin sectors untenable entirely. If that weren't the case, we would
be able to raise it infinitely without any negative effects, which is
absolutely absurd (and unfortunately that is the takeaway that
ideologues often get from reading abstracts).
A more useful economic model would go a step further than just saying
"you can raise the minimum wage without harm to the economy", by
incorporating econometric analysis which can accurately predict when
and how much you can raise it without incurring economic harm.
tlogan wrote 20 hours 15 min ago:
While pitched as “helping people,” California’s fast-food minim…
wage law has a different goal: reshaping the state’s tourism appeal.
By making dining out feel more distinctive (and by nudging the market
toward small restaurants and local chains) it’s a strategic play to
make California a cooler place to visit and eat.
That’s how I’ve interpreted it - because otherwise, it makes little
sense why the wage for the same work would vary based on the size of
the company.
wyager wrote 19 hours 51 min ago:
You're giving way too much credit to the emergent intelligence of the
CA legislature
didibus wrote 20 hours 21 min ago:
I'm unsure you can make any conclusions here. The employment in the
fast food industry went down, but we don't even know if it caused more
unemployment. Those workers might have all found a better or similar
paying job in another sector.
Without that information, there's nothing to learn here, exception
those still employed in the fast food sector now make more money.
mbrumlow wrote 20 hours 10 min ago:
Yah. I mean, magically they are all CEOs now, kinda crazy, right at
the same time minimum wage went up. The lord works in strange ways.
Really no. All you have to look at is the number of total jobs and
now unfilled jobs. We don’t need to know about the people and them
magically becoming CEOs.
mattwilsonn888 wrote 20 hours 30 min ago:
It's not that people shouldn't have a minimum standard of living, it's
whether we are going to take easy and ineffective routes to solve the
problem that look good on paper and in commercials or whether we can
have the adult discussion about the monetary system and how it affects
citizens.
aidenn0 wrote 21 hours 58 min ago:
If there is a correlation, and the correlation is causal, I'm not sure
how this matches with every fast-food restaurant near me having
"hiring, start immediately, no experience needed" posters outside.
throwawaylaptop wrote 22 hours 15 min ago:
In my medium size CA town, the Burger King just flat out closed.
Other than long johns silver in the 1990s, I've never seen a major
franchise just quit and close.
Aloisius wrote 22 hours 58 min ago:
This is in stark contrast to the Berkeley Institute for Research on
Labor and Employment study that claimed the law had no negative effects
on fast-food employment.
The Berkeley study has been cited quite heavily by policy makers.
[1]: https://irle.berkeley.edu/publications/brief/effects-of-the-20...
jandrewrogers wrote 21 hours 12 min ago:
They did a study of Seattle’s minimum wage that did not hold up
well in subsequent studies, in part because their assumptions about
how adverse effects would manifest were poor. They seem to have
memory-holed that. Seattle’s minimum wage is higher and more broad
based than California.
Regardless, with the passing of time the adverse effects have
worsened to the point that even proponents in Seattle acknowledge
there are serious issues that have resulted which need to be
addressed.
California looks like it is trying to speedrun Seattle’s mistakes.
cavisne wrote 20 hours 19 min ago:
Is this true? I don't agree with the point of view of Seattle
politicians but I've never seen even a hint of them acknowledging
problems with their approach to anything. If anything the politics
seems to be moving further left, after a very brief shift due to
the truly disgusting state of the city during COVID.
hedora wrote 22 hours 4 min ago:
The Berkeley report doesn’t count number of jobs. It looks at pay
and number of restaurants operating (both went up).
It could be that part time positions decreased but full time
positions increased, along with hours per job position / total hours
/ hourly pay and restaurants operated. That’d be a good thing for
everyone involved (except maybe the cardiovascular health of the
customers), and is compatible with both studies’ conclusions.
miley_cyrus wrote 22 hours 5 min ago:
This group is well known for bias, over and over through the years.
Nothing they report should be taken at face value.
"A considerable amount of financial support for the Center comes from
labor unions: According to federal reports, over the last 15 years it
has received nearly $1.2 million in labor funding."
"The IRLE’s highest-profile researcher is Michael Reich, who
co-chairs its Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics. Reich made a
name for himself at a young age co-founding the Union for Radical
Political Economics, with the stated goal of supporting “public
ownership of production and a government-planned economy.”" [1]
[1]: https://us.fundsforngos.org/news/nonprofit-accuses-uc-berkel...
[2]: https://epionline.org/release/biased-uc-berkeley-research-te...
[3]: https://epionline.org/release/biased-uc-berkeley-research-te...
waffleiron wrote 14 hours 16 min ago:
In contrast the study that's linked by OP is funded by:
Amazon, giant banks, ExxonMobile, Google, Microsoft, investment
firms.
[1]: https://www.nber.org/about-nber/support-funding
Spivak wrote 20 hours 20 min ago:
You have made a good case for a close reading of the study. Are
they wrong? Is the methodology bad?
magicmicah85 wrote 10 hours 19 min ago:
This is based on my very quick reading of the studies so take
with grain of salt. The NBER study (OP) studied the entire fast
food worker industry using data from BLS, whereas the Berkley
study cautions against using BLS because it applies to the entire
industry. The $20 minimum wage requirement only applied to fast
food workers who work at limited service restaurants with 60 or
more chains.
If your concern is only for who the $20 minimum wage was supposed
to affect, then there was likely no decrease in jobs based on
only that data. However, since causes have effects on more than
one intended group, it's very likely that the $20 increase did
reduce employment overall and the Berkley study was very careful
to downplay that data as not being useful for the purposes of
their study, even though they are related. The effects on one
part of the industry can affect the rest and to ignore it is a
questionable choice.
AuryGlenz wrote 17 hours 42 min ago:
Even their abstract seems biased:
"...and price increases of about 1.5 percent— or about 6 cents
on a four-dollar hamburger."
Ah, yes, the fabled four-dollar hamburger. I know I never need
to spend more than 4 dollars nowadays when I get fast food.
Spivak wrote 4 hours 48 min ago:
A hamburger is at McDonalds is $1.89 in my area, a McDouble is
$3.29. The double cheeseburger is $3.99. What they call the
"daily double" which is a silly name for a hamburger with the
works is also $3.99.
I don't think using the basic burgers is a bad choice since
specialty burgers probably don't compare well across chains.
milesvp wrote 1 day ago:
I’ve seen some interesting research suggesting that higher minimum
wages lead to lower turnover, which can lead to some very real cost
savings. I had an interesting epiphany while watching a business
lecture about calculating costs associated with hiring, that there are
very real points in the minimum wage curve (which should be laffer
shaped) where raising the minimum wage has the potential to both
increase labor participation and decrease total labor costs.
I now like to joke that minimum wage laws are subsidies for businesses
too dumb to factor in hiring and turnover costs.
bena wrote 10 hours 19 min ago:
Welfare is also kind of a subsidy for low paying employers.
If Walmart doesn’t pay enough for its employees to afford to live,
then the government steps in with ebt and housing vouchers, etc. to
make up the difference.
That’s money Walmart isn’t paying. In fact, they get to kind of
double dip. As those employees will likely shop there. So the ebt
gets spent there. The government essentially pays Walmart to feed its
employees.
The employees are being double hit. Because their income is still
taxed, then they essentially get scrip that they’ll likely have to
spend at the place where they work.
It’s why you’ll also never see any real movement on the welfare
issue. It’s a way to funnel tax money to the rich via poor people.
wonderwonder wrote 1 day ago:
As frustrating as it is as an employee to lose hours, customers are
also frustrated by this as quality and speed are reduced. You have
fewer employees being forced to perform the same quantity of work.
Everything goes downhill and then people eat less fast food, causing
the business to lose income and then reducing staffing and the cycle
continues.
I avoid all fast food now except for Chick Filet not due to the food
itself, which isn't great but just due to the terrible customer service
I get everywhere else.
My kid asked me for McDonalds the other day and for once I said yes, we
pulled in at 10:20am and ordered 3 chicken biscuits before breakfast
ended at 10:30am. They of course asked us to park and after 15 minutes
I went inside and asked what was going on. they apologized and said
they were out of chicken as they got a rush when I ordered and it takes
7 minutes to cook.
There were a grand total of 4 employees in the store sitting at a busy
intersection with a double drive through line and an indoor eating
area. Just utter lack of management and employees and customers pay the
price.
its 10 minutes before breakfast ends, I'm pretty confident the same
rush happens every day at that time. Just such a terrible experience.
Definitely saying no next time my kids ask for McDonalds, its not worth
30 minutes of my life to drive through and order a chicken sandwich.
Animats wrote 1 day ago:
FRED (the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), has useful data.
First, all food/beverage hospitality workers in California.[1] Huge
COVID transient, followed by recovery to almost the pre-COVID level.
But no further increases.
Full-service restaurants had a similar transient, but never came back
to pre-COVID levels. Employment peaked in mid-2023, and has declined
since. Full-service restaurants didn't get the $20 fast food minimum
wage. But workers there may have tip income.
California does not have a lower "tipped minimum wage", and all tips go
to workers.
What FRED calls "limited service restaurants and other eating places"
shows about the same curve as full-service restaurants.[3] This
includes both the fast food chains and the fast-casual restaurants. If
you have to order at a counter, it's "limited service", even if they
bring out the food later.
So, the part of the restaurant industry that wasn't affected by the
increase shows about the same trend as the part that was. Basically,
post-COVID, onsite eating never fully came back. Food delivery became a
much bigger part of the industry.)
Those stats are regardless of business size. California's minimum wage
law for "fast food" applies only to businesses with at least 60
locations. But it also includes such
things as 7-11 stores that sell hot dogs and pizzas heated up on site.
So, not an exact match to the FRED categories.
Overall, the COVID transient and its aftermath is bigger than all other
visible effects. [1] [2]
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000007072200001SA
[2]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000007072251101A
[3]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SMU06000007072259001SA
socalgal2 wrote 23 hours 4 min ago:
Why did it only affect California and not other states?
ajross wrote 10 hours 35 min ago:
I don't see that it did? The linked article is specific to CA
data, it's not a broad survey.
socalgal2 wrote 5 hours 58 min ago:
It's in the second sentence
> In unadjusted data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and
Wages, we find that employment in California's fast food sector
declined by 2.7 percent relative to employment in the fast food
sector elsewhere in the United States from September 2023 through
September 2024.
exe34 wrote 16 hours 29 min ago:
Did it? I haven't looked into the data. The trends seem familiar
where I live in the UK and the few places I've visited since the
COVID incident.
BoardsOfCanada wrote 16 hours 15 min ago:
I assume she's referring to the claim in the article.
com2kid wrote 16 hours 38 min ago:
Similar patterns in Seattle, many once popular sit down restaurants
are now empty and only serve as sources for delivery. Huge
buildings with dozens of tables sit empty.
dboreham wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
Seattle seems to have its own particular issues (somewhat shared
by SF in my experience): there's no longer any compelling reason
to go to downtown. There are plenty of reasons to avoid downtown.
Restaurants in Woodinville seem very busy. Similarly restaurants
in Sonoma are also very busy. I think the customers went
elsewhere.
Online shopping has removed some proportion of the reason people
would visit a city downtown. Remote working has removed some
proportion of the reason people would be in a city downtown.
There has to be some unreproducible draw to get people to go to a
city: The Vatican/Mona Lisa; food and culture not available
elsewhere, etc. Conversely the city has to be not a s.hole.
com2kid wrote 7 hours 15 min ago:
There was never a reason to visit DT Seattle outside of Pike
Place Market. The restaurants there if anything have gotten
better over the years, I'd say a decade ago most of them closed
after lunch because everything catered to office workers.
alexose wrote 7 hours 31 min ago:
Portland, too. The neighborhoods are doing OK, but downtown
still feels empty.
It’s interesting to me that it hasn’t depressed commercial
real estate prices all that much. Rents are still crazy
expensive, with many vacant storefronts and even entire
buildings along the light rail lines. The market forces around
commercial real estate seem disconnected from reality in a
surprising and unintuitive way.
Still, downtowns can be cyclical. NYC in the 70s is a prime
example. The days of Taxi Driver are long gone. I guess the
question is what stimulus needs to be applied to kickstart the
turnaround process.
FredPret wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
I’m far from a commercial RE expert, but I know they do
tend to have very long leases. That would make it less
responsive to sudden changes like 2020 and the subsequent
changes
wkat4242 wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
Wow here in Spain it's nothing like that. We still go out for
dinner a few times a week (especially around lunch time when most
restaurants have a 3-course menu for €12-14)
bane wrote 7 hours 23 min ago:
We used to eat out a lot. COVID changed it. What changed? We
were forced to really learn how to cook properly, then we saw
how much money we were spending eating out, and how much
healthier and to-our-taste we could make our own cooking.
When things went back to normal, the prices to eat out had
jumped so high, it simply wasn't worth it. $15 of fast food to
feed both of us turned into $35-40. A $45 dinner out at a
restaurant (taxes and tip included) turned into $60-75 meal.
Tip expectations had gone from 15%-18% to 20-25%. Add beer or
wine or a cocktail and we're instantly at a $100+ night out.
At home $10 of protein, $5 of vegetables and other ingredients
and a good youtube video with a recipe, $15 bottle of wine and
we were all set.
ilamont wrote 5 hours 35 min ago:
One of the biggest shifts in pricing we've seen is Chinese
restaurants. Entrees that were <$15 before are now around $20
or a lot more for fish dishes. It's not unusual to have an
$80 takeout bill.
Lunch specials fortunately are still under $15 at our
favorite places, but only on weekdays.
wkat4242 wrote 1 hour 46 min ago:
Oh here prices haven't really gone up that much. A 3 course
menu would now cost 12-14€ where it was 10-12. An entree
from takeaway would be €5 or so.
The only exception is Uber eats. I notice that most
takeaways charge more than on the local takeaway app
(Glovo). Probably because most tourists don't know Glovo
they are used to spending more.
I'd normally never use Uber (we also have a local
alternative for the ride service called Cabify) but I got a
free Uber one promo so I tried it out. But with the higher
pricing the free delivery is so not worth it.
ilamont wrote 7 hours 47 min ago:
I once read somewhere that franchise or investor-backed
restaurants in the U.S. were often categorized by AOV per
diner, with menus tailored to hit these targets: Pre COVID it
was $10 (quick service restaurant/QSR aka "fast food"), $20
("fast casual" like Chipotle), $50, etc.
These numbers are trending up as costs go up, and owners are
pretty ruthless about staying on top of labor and materials and
discounts ( [1] ).
Customers are really turning against the ever-increasing price
of going out to eat, with the perception that quality isn't
improving. Tipping is another issue that really rubs people the
wrong way.
It's a joy to visit countries like Spain or Taiwan or Japan
where costs to eat out are very reasonable, quality is good,
tipping is nonexistent, and you don't feel like you're being
hustled out the door to improve some cold turnover metric.
[1]: https://fransmart.com/dan-rowes-tips-for-learning-the-...
Zee2 wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
$14US in Seattle will barely get you a side of fries. A popular
place near me (not fancy!) lists their pretzel+dip appetizer
for $17US, or €14.50.
With these prices, restaurants and eating out in general has
become completely inaccessible to a huge swath of people. And
even for those who can afford it, it’s a less frequent treat.
It has a noticeable impact on the liveliness of the city and
the social vibe, from my experience.
erikerikson wrote 7 hours 24 min ago:
This has been long-term problem for Seattle. I moved here
after Portland where the restaurant culture is fantastic.
Food is wonderful and inexpensive in Portland so I enjoyed
going out. Here in Seattle, it's prohibitive and the quality
to cost curve is bad so I make delicious inexpensive food at
home.
dmoy wrote 8 hours 7 min ago:
In Seattle a single restaurant burger will run you €12-14. A
restaurant with a proper three course meal is like €80++,
assuming zero alcohol.
For the restaurants, their rent is pushing like €250-300/m^2
(or much higher in some locations, much lower if you drive
more)
vineyardmike wrote 22 hours 42 min ago:
…the California minimum wage?
contingencies wrote 1 day ago:
As restaurants are replaced with robotics there will be severe job
losses to this sector. Temporary measures cannot alter the greater
transition.
zmmmmm wrote 1 day ago:
if employment reduced, did the industry contract? Or did it maintain
its size and make do with less employees?
It's not good for the individuals, but in broader economic terms, an
industry that delivered the same value with less people is effectively
increasing productivity which is economically generally a good thing.
Of course one industry is not a closed system, whether those unemployed
people go and contribute somewhere else in the economy or sink into
unemployment is a critical question.
If the industry contracted then it's harder to argue it's a good thing.
bluefirebrand wrote 1 day ago:
> It's not good for the individuals, but in broader economic terms,
an industry that delivered the same value with less people is
effectively increasing productivity which is economically generally a
good thing
Not if all (or the vast majority) of the extra value produced is
captured by a vanishingly small portion of the population
That is the trend we are following and it is exceptionally bad
standardUser wrote 1 day ago:
I would hope so, since if it didn't everything we know about economics
would be wrong. But this question only makes sense if you value all
employment equally. If the state lost a tiny amount of jobs, and most
of those were among the lowest paying, then I'd want to know A) what's
been the impact on cost of living and B) what's been the impact on
government welfare spending, before I could begin to assess if it was a
positive overall for the state economy.
CommenterPerson wrote 1 day ago:
"Relative to employment in the fast food sector elsewhere in the United
States" .. could drive a truck through that "elsewhere".
In 1992, New Jersey made just such an increase in minimum wage at fast
food restaurants. Card & Kreuger ("Myth and Measurement") analyzed data
in adjacent areas in NJ & PA. They found that employment in the NJ area
actually increased. Take a look at the first chapter of "Economics in
America" by Angus Deaton (Nobel 2015).
Comparing CA to elsewhere in the US (where? everywhere?) looks a bit
shady. Given the government agencies are being led by political hacks
these days, I don't trust it one bit.
antonymoose wrote 1 day ago:
Circa 1992 would the area be increasing in population and so
employees to service that volume?
vondur wrote 1 day ago:
It's still a net loss of jobs. I'm certain the future will involve
increasing automation to further reduce headcount. A McDonald's
recently opened near me with no seating, and orders can only be placed
through the app or at the drive thru. I spoke with the owner who
mentioned two main reasons for this setup: first, ongoing issues with
the local homeless population and second, a desire to minimize
staffing. Fewer employees are needed when there's no dining area to
clean or counter to staff. I’m pretty sure this is the direction
things are headed in California.
bamboozled wrote 10 hours 50 min ago:
I guess I'm a minority but when I generally dislike McDonald's but
one of the reasons I continue to go there is because they often
employee so many people from different demographics. It's been a
redeeming quality trait of theirs. They give young people a start
with work experience , 20-40s some managerial experience and
sometimes elderly people a job too.
Once I'm just ordering a shitty burger from a machine, I have
probably lost any reason to give them my money at all, there is just
way better alternatives.
motorest wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
> A McDonald's recently opened near me with no seating, and orders
can only be placed through the app or at the drive thru.
I personally know a couple of Uber Eats restaurants whose only
physical presence is literally a garage in a residential
neighborhood, and they only take orders from the app. I also know of
a Uber Eats competitor whose business model includes rider hubs that
stock on a limited set of high volume products for quick delivery.
I wouldn't call them net loss of jobs per se. I see those as entirely
different businesses with completely new business models. It's more a
kin to ordering groceries online than to going on a night out.
V__ wrote 14 hours 0 min ago:
I just can't understand McDonald's long term strategy. I can either
go to them or to a locally owned burger place near me, and spend
about the same. Waiting times are the same, and every other metric is
worse at McDonald's. I went to McDonald's last week because I haven't
been there for over a year and well, I won't be going for the next
few years again. If they can't compete on price, speed or taste, they
only compete on location and/or their current customer base. I just
don't see how that is a viable long-term strategy.
omoikane wrote 8 hours 6 min ago:
McDonald's main value for me is consistency: it might not
necessarily taste great, but it tastes roughly the same everywhere.
There are better restaurants, but there is a greater probability
of finding a McDonald's because it has more locations. McDonald's
might not be the best choice, but it's usually a great fallback
option if you are unfamiliar with the area.
Workaccount2 wrote 10 hours 45 min ago:
I haven't been to a McDonald's in over a year, but back then at
least app had insane deals that blew away anything else.
croes wrote 14 hours 41 min ago:
A net loss in fast food jobs doesn’t mean net loss over all.
More money in low wage jobs is mostly spend and not saved and can
lead to more jobs in other sectors.
UltraSane wrote 18 hours 59 min ago:
" ongoing issues with the local homeless population"
This is the REAL issue.
bko wrote 22 hours 24 min ago:
People like to think that employment is pretty much the only good
that does not result in a mismatch of supply and demand from a price
floor.
Take for instance a proposal that says "no one is allowed to sell
their used car for less than $10k". Maybe the justification is poor
people are desperate and sell their car too cheap and all these
dealerships and buyers are a monopsony underbidding the real value of
the car, profiting off these uninformed, unorganized individual
sellers.
Does anyone think this is a good idea? Would anyone bother reading
studies contemplating the effect this may have?
No, of course not. Everyone knows that this would essentially mean
many cars that would have sold under $10k would just not get sold.
Sure some people would benefit, maybe getting a higher price for
their car. Some things would shift, maybe people would opt for
scooters or e-bikes or something.
But I wouldn't want this price floor if I was on either side, trying
to offload a bad car or buying one.
bawolff wrote 15 hours 44 min ago:
That's a terrible comparison. As a society we want cars to be
cheap. A race to the bottom for cars is a good thing. The cheaper
the better.
We do not want a race to the bottom for wages. If full time
employment is not enough for basic necessities, that is the sort of
thing that leads to riots. Society in general does not want that.
Society prefers stability.
marcosdumay wrote 18 hours 37 min ago:
Well, employment and taxes are special because they can increase
the propensity of people to spend. So, yes, they don't obey
whatever idea of "supply and demand balance" uninformed people get
from the news.
UltraSane wrote 18 hours 56 min ago:
Except that every company's wages is another company's revenue.
Healthy consumer economies depend on consumers actually having
disposable income, but this is becoming increasingly less and less
true in the US.
CPLX wrote 19 hours 31 min ago:
We absolutely do have laws that are the equivalent of “no one is
allowed to sell their used car for less than X".
These laws take the form of transfer and registration fees for
vehicles, taxes, and especially inspection requirements. We also
have much stricter requirements on what a large commercial
enterprise can sell versus a private individual.
We have rules like that for everything. We also say you can’t
sell houses for less than X by mandating things like how many
stairwells they have, and so on.
To the extent you’re tempted to argue some semantics about how
you could still sell a car for a dollar you’re wrong and missing
the point on purpose by arguing over the definitions in a way that
doesn’t change the principle.
We do this because we are a society and we get to decide what the
society looks like. Prices are downstream of our value system.
bruhlikereally wrote 20 hours 34 min ago:
Hate to boil this down to the basics, but I think it’s pertinent
here. You’re comparing human beings working to survive to used
vehicles. Even removing the complete lack of reckoning with basic
humanity, the basis of your analogy is a ridiculous starting point
to argue from. The value of an asset is not in any way analogous to
the value of labor.
pxmpxm wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
Injecting appeal to emotion is almost universally a sign of a
weak argument, especially when it comes to thinly veiled labor
theory of value angles.
izacus wrote 17 hours 58 min ago:
It's a typical thinking of someone who read "Econ 101 for kiddies
and libertarians" and never got the rest of education that
explains all the ways those pronciples aren't as simple as
descibed. And how people aren't interchangeable with cars.
gonzobonzo wrote 20 hours 19 min ago:
> You’re comparing human beings working to survive to used
vehicles.
You could flip this and say "you're comparing people who are
selling off an essential possession just to survive to a bit of
company work."
The way people frame things in completely different ways to
justify their preexisting beliefs is part of the reason why it's
difficult to get people to consider other possibilities. The
person could be doing their job to survive, or they could be
working a few hours on a fun job on the weekend for a bit of
extra cash. A person might just be getting rid of their used
vehicle, or they might be giving up an essential possession
because they're in dire straights.
pietrrrek wrote 18 hours 26 min ago:
> The person could be doing their job to survive, or they could
be working a few hours on a fun job on the weekend for a bit of
extra cash.
Your statement makes it seem as if these populations are of
equal size, but in reality the vast majority works to survive.
An item should not have a minimum price as it is just an item,
meanwhile every person is, well, a person, and should be able
to sustain themselves.
gonzobonzo wrote 18 hours 4 min ago:
People sell something to survive (their labor, their goods,
etc.). It doesn't mean that every single transaction they
make is for the sake of survival, or that external actors are
a better judge of what their prices must be.
In college I would often make some extra spending money by
partaking in social science experiments. I didn't really care
if the compensation was below minimum wage - I had time, it
was easy enough, and it was easy to opt in when I could. I
wasn't doing it for survival, but for a bit of extra spending
cash. If someone forced them to significantly increase wages,
I might have benefited, but it's far more likely that they
would done fewer experiments with a more select group and I
would have been worse off.
If someone is on the edge, and it's only a minimum wage job
that they have open for them, California's minimum wage could
help them if they're one of the lucky ones who benefit from
it, or could hurt them if they were one of the people hurt by
the loss of 18,000 jobs it caused (per the linked report). A
policy that leads to fewer jobs that pay more tends to just
increase inequality.
unethical_ban wrote 20 hours 47 min ago:
It's an interesting point, but it's the closest thing to
guaranteeing a minimum return on a person's work and preventing
downright slavery that we have.
benreesman wrote 21 hours 26 min ago:
Minimum wages are an economically imperfect (as you've pointed out)
but politically possible way to put some downward pressure on much,
much bigger failures of our species and society to have attitudes
and policies around acceptable minimums for basic human needs that
are even logically self consistent, to say nothing of enlightened.
We can't quite get it together on saying "food, shelter, healthcare
are human rights" or it's sinister sibling "we'll let you die in
the cold if there's no profit to be had from you".
Those are both consistent, actionable policies, but no one wants a
consistent policy on this because everyone gerrymanders it
dofferently.
So we get clunky hacks like minimum wage that are sort of the
average of Aspirational Star Trek and Aspirational Blade Runner.
zukzuk wrote 22 hours 9 min ago:
The cost of employment is not comparable to the cost of a
particular good. Employment has much more complicated implications
on the economy and on society. A minimum wage is set in part to
prevent a desperate race to the bottom, and to (try to) ensure
something approaching a living wage. It’s a blunt and often
ineffective tool, but viable alternatives are scant. The free
market won’t solve this one any more than it solves the problem
of healthcare.
TulliusCicero wrote 7 hours 40 min ago:
> viable alternatives are scant.
Not really? Other countries do industry-wide union agreements
that apply to the whole sector, seems to work well enough for
them.
HPsquared wrote 12 hours 36 min ago:
Where do we see a desperate race to the bottom? People leave if
there's too much competition / low wages in an area. At least in
America where the people are nomadic.
Amezarak wrote 12 hours 27 min ago:
People forced to move because of low wages is a societal
negative. High population churn disrupts communities, worsens
local governance, and causes atomization.
kaashif wrote 10 hours 11 min ago:
Suppose a town forms around a coal or gold mine. Then the
mines dry up, or demand for what they're mining dries up.
There are no jobs and no reason for people to live there any
more.
If this community ceases to exist, is it a societal negative?
And further, will a high minimum wage speed up or slow down
the decline of this community?
vidarh wrote 14 hours 32 min ago:
Interestingly, minimum wage seems to be more likely in places
with weak unions.
In places with strong unions, there is often a de facto,
negotiated minimum at least on a sector by sector basis instead.
E.g. Norway has a roughly 50% unionisation rate, and no minimum
wage in most situations, but most sectors are covered by
negotiated agreements between the unions and employer
organisations.
int_19h wrote 16 hours 24 min ago:
Viable alternatives are many when you look at minimum wage
closely and see that it is, in essence, welfare funded by a
regressive (even more so than usual) sales tax: businesses will
pass most of it to their customers, and the fraction it in good
or service sold is broadly inversely proportional to the price of
that service. That is, people who buy the cheapest stuff - i.e.
the poor - are those who are disproportionally taxed, as
percentage of their overall spending. So it's taxing the poor to
feed the poorest.
The obvious alternative is to tax the rich to feed the poorest.
We can start with capital gains.
solatic wrote 16 hours 50 min ago:
Most arguments for minimum wage solutions are better served by
UBI-style solutions tied to having a job somewhere. People show
up to work to benefit society in some way deemed valuable by
someone who put a much larger investment in play (maybe tie to
some really small minimum wage like $2/hour just to make sure the
business owner really does deem the labor beneficial), but the
vast majority of the worker's income comes from wealth transfers
from the wealthy (via UBI) instead of from the working classes
(who are the vast majority of clientele at places like
McDonald's).
Prevent a desperate race to the bottom? Ensure something
approaching a minimum wage? Nobody cares, so long as they're
getting a UBI check from the government.
fredophile wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
I don't disagree with you and think that UBI and universal
health care are better alternatives. However, there is a much
easier path forward to getting higher minimum wages and we
shouldn't stop making incremental changes just because there is
a potentially better solution that we will probably never
implement.
navi0 wrote 17 hours 41 min ago:
Real question: If government-mandated wages are good policy, why
not set the minimum wage to $100/hr?
(Btw, the American healthcare system is about as far away from a
free market as it gets. Don’t think that example supports your
point.)
6510 wrote 15 hours 8 min ago:
I think the solution here is to have you work at a fast food
restaurant with a salary just low enough not to be able to eat
at the end of the day. There really is no substitute for
experiencing first hand what it is like to stack 500 burgers on
an empty stomach then telling your kid there wont be any dinner
today. Imagine some land whale exploding over her 7th burger
not approaching perfection closely enough and that it seems you
are not taking the issue seriously enough.
lsaferite wrote 12 hours 20 min ago:
You were doing fine until you jumped to an aspersion.
carlosjobim wrote 10 hours 8 min ago:
The audacity that a starving person would insult somebody
for their obesity! How dare they?
bawolff wrote 15 hours 41 min ago:
> Real question: If government-mandated wages are good policy,
why not set the minimum wage to $100/hr?
Because min wage policies have a cost and a benefit. The
benefit only happens at relatively low numbers (enough for
basic necessities). After that point you dont get more benefits
but the costs still increase.
watwut wrote 16 hours 48 min ago:
How is that a real question? If it is reasonable to make a
policy with number X, how come it is not reasonable to make a
policy 5X or 0?
Because you intentionally picked large unreasonable number and
now want to argue it implies much smaller number is reasonable.
If maximum speed of 50km/h is reasonable in cities, why not
making it 5km/h?
kaashif wrote 10 hours 40 min ago:
It is still useful to ask the question just so we know the
answer. I admit the person asking in this case probably
didn't mean it this way... :)
On speed limits, when it comes to road deaths, you get people
saying "one death is too many" and so on when one of their
loved ones die, even when speed limits are set to 20 mph.
These people are wrong. Asking why a 1 mph limit is bad can
help reveal that we do put a cost measured in lives on
convenience, and we do face the risk of death when driving a
car, and everyone has a number they think is reasonable.
Asking why $100/hr is too high can at least help us decide on
a quantitative way to decide on a number rather than just
guessing.
HPsquared wrote 12 hours 32 min ago:
In the early days, the speed limit was indeed walking pace -
often with a person needing to walk in front waving a flag!
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts#Locomo...
handoflixue wrote 17 hours 4 min ago:
Humans have certain fundamental maintenance costs. $100/hr
vastly exceeds maintenance. However, if you pay below those
maintenance costs, then society effectively picks up the tab
via other social costs and programs. For instance, if employers
don't provide healthcare, then we either pay more for emergency
medical treatments and other publicly-subsidized healthcare
programs, or we accept being a country with a bunch of people
dropping dead at age 40 of entirely preventable problems.
This is very different from most other goods, because no one
really cares if you break your chair, the chair's parents
didn't spend 18 years of their life on it, etc.. If you break a
chair, you bear the full costs of replacing it.
Also, the full cost of replacing a human is vastly higher than
the maintenance wage.
gruez wrote 9 hours 3 min ago:
>However, if you pay below those maintenance costs, then
society effectively picks up the tab via other social costs
and programs.
No, that doesn't hold because humans need these "maintenance
costs" regardless of whether they're working or not.
Therefore it's fallacious to claim that such "maintenance
costs" stem from the job itself. It's a sunk cost arising
from the person existing in the first place.
mjevans wrote 6 hours 43 min ago:
Exactly why healthcare should be just one more part of the
standard social contract. We the people should
collectively pay (single payer) for everyone to have the
required basic healthcare in bulk, without the stress of
billing, collections, etc.
Same idea as police, fire, basic education. We want a
properly educated, health, safe workforce. That's the
basis of a healthy, productive, strong society.
zeroCalories wrote 11 hours 2 min ago:
It would be more efficient to pay someone market rate, have
needed work get done, and subsidize their existence than to
try and offload that cost onto employers.
handoflixue wrote 9 hours 50 min ago:
Is it? Minimum wage is a pretty simple law, compared to the
paperwork and bureaucracy of existing welfare programs. I
suppose you could go with Universal Basic Income, but I'm
not convinced society is actually ready for that one yet.
How would such a program even work? If we say the
Maintenance Wage is $15, is the government just paying the
difference between that and the market rate? If so, it
seems the ideal salaries to offer are $0 (let the
government subsidize it) and $16+ (but you could just get
two $0 workers, so I'd expect pay scales to really start at
more like $30?)
This seems like it rapidly descends into Bureaucracy or
Communism
zeroCalories wrote 9 hours 22 min ago:
Just because a law is simple does not mean it's
efficient. We are talking about the total value being
produced. But if you want simple, something like a
negative income tax would be simple and decently
efficient.
atq2119 wrote 10 hours 16 min ago:
That effectively becomes a subsidy to those employers
though, plus an incentive to drive wages down even more.
danans wrote 7 hours 39 min ago:
Why would it drive wages down? The less desperately
that workers need a job (due to universal basic income),
the more they can demand, assuming they also have skills
that fill the employer's need.
The trick for this to work is that the UBI has to really
cover a lot of basic needs.
Overall, this works better for lower skilled workers than
it does for higher skilled and higher paid workers. But
it could also make sense for people staying home to raise
their children, a job which is not compensated today.
zeroCalories wrote 9 hours 31 min ago:
The alternative is that certain types of work simply do
not get done, as shown by the article. That means if you
care about providing for these people you'll now be
responsible for shouldering 100% of their cost as they
sit around unemployed.
biztos wrote 16 hours 9 min ago:
I wonder how the “replacement cost” of a human should be
calculated in light of the low birth rates in so many
countries.
> Also, the full cost of replacing a human is vastly higher
than the maintenance wage.
itsmek wrote 17 hours 16 min ago:
Your question can be applied to literally any market
intervention with a grey area. If housing code is good policy
why not make all houses 10 times as strong?
If your question is why is minimum wage a good policy, you
could start here for a summary of the arguments and evidence:
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage
BurningFrog wrote 18 hours 57 min ago:
The price mechanisms of supply and demand are very well
understood since the 1800s, and apply to anything that's bought
and sold, including labor. 150 years of solid science.
When facts conflict with beliefs we hold dear and perhaps define
our identities, our brains are very skilled at finding ways to
keep believing what we want to believe.
Especially when the facts define your in-group. Changing such
beliefs, makes you one of the people you and your friends hate.
The mind will convince itself of pretty much anything to avoid
such social suicide.
itsmek wrote 17 hours 47 min ago:
This comment is weirdly heavy on lecture and light on
substance. I'm going to ignore the second two paragraphs and
just stick to the first. The person you're replying to says
that labor is different because it has more complex costs to
society aka an externality. Your rebuttal, as far as I can
tell, is "nuh uh". I can think of a very simple externality -
low paid workers are supported by the rest of us via social
programs. Goods that require similar support from the rest of
us (cigarettes for example) should also be regulated because it
breaks the economic magic that makes efficient decisions and
allocations. We have known about these basic (literally econ
101) flaws for almost as long as we've studied markets.
I am open to being convinced by either you or OP but your
argument is failing to do so.
BurningFrog wrote 7 hours 10 min ago:
My claim is just that wages are prices which arise from the
same supply vs demand dynamic as any other price. This
important truth is sadly very controversial, which I think is
really damaging to society.
Of course, I can't prove that from scratch in a HN comment.
What I can do is point out that in the science studying this,
it is an uncontroversial fact.
I didn't substantiate that, which made it less convincing,
but here is an Economics textbook saying the same thing: [1]
I know, you can think of an externality. Trust me, Economists
can also think of externalities, far more than you or me. In
general, they just add interesting nuance to the
supply/demand model. They don't completely invalidate it.
But I can't easily demonstrate that, so I suspect I have not
changed your mind.
[1]: https://pressbooks.oer.hawaii.edu/principlesofmicroe...
fredophile wrote 7 hours 1 min ago:
I'm not the poster you replied to but I appreciate your
clarification. However, I still don't understand your
argument. I don't think anyone has argued that supply and
demand don't apply to the labour market. However, it seems
that you do agree that there are externalities if workers
are paid extremely low wages. Is your argument that the
government shouldn't put in laws to mitigate or prevent
those externalities? Are you saying that minimum wage laws
don't actually address the externalities and should be
removed? Are you trying to promote other solutions to
solving those externalities? If so, what are they? Is there
some other point you're trying to make that I'm completely
missing?
BurningFrog wrote 5 hours 46 min ago:
Many people argue that supply and demand don't apply to
the labour market!
Often because they're not even aware of the concept. The
more sophisticated claim that it doesn't apply to the
labor market.
The minimum wage discussions are dominated by this view.
The supply/demand analysis is simple: If a worker has
skills worth $12/hour on the labor market, and the
minimum wage is $15, that worker will be unemployed,
making 0$/hour. They'll also not learn new skills, since
they can't get a job.
Try bringing that up in a minimum wage discussion, and
you'll be called many nasty names. Often equalling market
wage to human worth, which means you think the poor are
lesser humans. A few sophisticates will bring up vague
externalities arguments, as if they negate the whole
supply/demand concept.
From my perspective minimum wage laws is one of the main
factors keeping people in poverty, but that concept is
impossible to even explain to most people.
My main thought about externalities is that they their
effect is usually minor, and can be ignored. Many of them
are also positive. For the bigger ones, it's a case by
case analysis.
Is the externality you're thinking of something around
the government paying money to the working poor?
itsmek wrote 3 hours 31 min ago:
That's a strawman. I don't doubt that you've read these
things that bother you so much that you bring it up in
unrelated discussion, but to the extent serious people
critique supply and demand, they don't say it doesn't
apply at all (literally all things have supply/demand
curves) but that the market distortions in our
concentrated economy lead to suboptimal outcomes for
society and that the simpler market model (in econ 101
you learn this model is optimal under many assumptions
including "perfect competition" that is rarely true of
the real world) is an incomplete model of reality which
leads to the wrong answer. If you're going to argue
against anything please argue against a serious point
like one found in an introduction to the topic such as
[1] and characterize it fairly. If you don't understand
this graph then you aren't ready to debate the topic
[1] #/media/File:Monop...
To demonstrate that this is a strawman, I will parrot
back what that basic wikipedia article provides as a
critique of your point: often in the real world that
$12/hr number you provide is depressed by a one-sided
monopsony (few large employers vs many small employees,
a fact known as market concentration that has grown
stronger over decades) and minimum wage can provide
effectively a mega union against it to put it simply.
When a market is dominated by a single entity what is
something "worth"? You may say whatever the market will
bear but in noncompetitive markets that is absolutely
not the most efficient allocation of resources for the
broader system. If insulin were a complete monopoly
would it be worth $1M/vial because a billionaire would
happily pay that much to save their life? I use the
extreme to demonstrate the concept of market failure to
you. By pointing out monopolistic forces am I saying
"supply and demand don't apply"? Maybe in a way, but
putting it that way is reductive and unproductive for
our collaborative search for the truth in this
discussion.
Or, for a totally separate but less abstract argument,
say someone has no skills except for an ability to dig
a ditch at $5/hr - it is low value because you could
pay someone $50/hr to rent and operate a trencher and
be 100x more productive at less total cost and a better
overall outcome to society (I think these numbers are
probably roughly reflective of reality), but this low
skill person is unable to run that trencher. Is it
better for society to "learn new skills" as you say by
digging ditches for years? They probably would get a
bit stronger but obviously never get close to the
trencher's productivity or bang per buck. This is an
exaggerated toy model but it demonstrates the point
that many sub-minimum wage gigs teach negligible skills
compared to formal education. I point this out just to
object to your example - many people turn to education
if possible when they fail to find employment, so to
say sub-minimum wage employment will teach them skills
whereas unemployment will be worthless just doesn't map
on to most people's experience in the real world and to
be frank sounds out of touch.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#/me...
UltraSane wrote 18 hours 52 min ago:
History has already shown that the free market will reduce
wages to the point of slavery and destitution. Minimum wage
laws are very important to counter the psychopathic greed of
many company management.
Labor isn't just another good, it is actual human beings whose
wages greatly affect their quality of life.
Your rant about in-groups is odd.
TheOtherHobbes wrote 14 hours 15 min ago:
The predictable end game of unregulated free markets is the
opposite of freedom for 99.99% of the population.
There's a curious authoritarian tinge to these "free market"
argument. "Free markets are powerful, therefore if I support
free markets I am a powerful insider."
It usually takes an encounter with a major economic reverse -
like being bankrupted by healthcare - for proponents to
realise that the free market doesn't care about them either,
no matter what they believe.
dangus wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
We need to detach from the "jobs at any cost" mentality behind your
first sentence.
By that logic ending child labor is "still a net loss of jobs."
I mean, here you are talking about a business owner having issues
with the local homeless population who are homeless because their
jobs don't pay enough to afford housing.
All these business owners race to the bottom paying their employees
scraps and then wonder why they have empty dining rooms with no
customers to afford their products sold at record-high profit
margins.
Obviously, minimum wage doesn't really fix the economy on its own,
but it is a very important tool in a toolbox for ensuring that
capitalism is restrained from following its worst instincts.
unsnap_biceps wrote 1 day ago:
I currently live in a petty remote area and we have literarily zero
homeless folks in our hamlet area. (We actually have a fairly robust
program that provides housing for folks in need). We have one fast
food restaurant in the area and it's a McDonalds. It was one of the
main hangouts for folks in the area. We would have weekly meetups
there. After Covid, they closed the seating area and installed the
touch screens. They went from employing around 7 to 9 folks down to
only 3 and talking with the franchise owner, they're not planning to
ever hire back up and re-open seating. He did mention that the gross
revenue is way down, but net revenue is about the same and his stress
in managing the location is way reduced with the headcount reduction
and simplification of the business.
fullstick wrote 10 hours 28 min ago:
How do you know there are "literally zero homeless folks" in your
area?
K0balt wrote 8 hours 59 min ago:
(Deleted because misplaced)
p_ing wrote 10 hours 23 min ago:
Often advocacy groups or municipalities will perform counts on
specific days each year.
So while one does not need to say "literally" in that sentence
(it wasn't figurative, after all), it is possible to say "zero
homeless folks" as there may be data backing the statement up.
estearum wrote 11 hours 7 min ago:
> I currently live in a petty remote area and we have literarily
zero homeless folks in our hamlet area
This is a common observation and should make more people ponder:
why is it that higher local wealth/economic productivity increases
homelessness (especially if you control for public services to
counteract the effect)?
jjk166 wrote 6 hours 12 min ago:
You're swapping cause and effect. Places with lots of economic
opportunity and significant public services to assist the
homeless are the place where you can have large homeless
populations, ie large numbers of people just barely scraping by.
Decrease the money flowing in and the population will go down,
because they would no longer be able to survive. Those who can
will go elsewhere, you can imagine what happens to those who
can't leave a place where they can't survive. One must be very
careful using "number of people observed with a particular
symptom of the problem" as a proxy for how well the problem is
being handled.
estearum wrote 6 hours 5 min ago:
High-productivity places without lots of public services also
have a lot of homeless people though
jama211 wrote 6 hours 43 min ago:
Because the wealth isn’t distributed properly. Fairly obvious
I’d say.
TulliusCicero wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
1. Remote areas often have some kind of very cheap housing
available. It may be low quality housing, but at least it's very
affordable.
2. Remote areas don't have services that cater to homeless
people.
K0balt wrote 8 hours 57 min ago:
I have an interesting observation about homelessness.
I live in a country where the average household makes about
US$6000 a year.
The cost of living here is about 1/2 of the USA, with rents about
1/4. The unemployment rate is about 5%.
Homelessness is very, very low (to the point of near
invisibility) and mostly limited to illegal immigrants.
The thing that seems to make homelessness a non-issue here is the
tolerance of ad-hoc construction. This leads to neighbourhoods
where construction is really low cost / quality, but people are
housed.
I don’t really understand why these neighbourhoods don’t
devolve into hotbeds of violent crime as I would expect them to
in the USA, but they mostly don’t.
Mostly, the construction tends to improve over time, and the
neighbourhoods often gradually metamorphosize into more
contemporary and inviting areas with vibrant small businesses and
elegant homes.
I often wonder if it’s cultural, as poverty is not seen as
failure but rather a temporary condition to be transcended as
possible?
magnetic wrote 8 hours 15 min ago:
Which country is that?
K0balt wrote 8 hours 11 min ago:
Dominican Republic
amy_petrik wrote 6 hours 41 min ago:
>dominicans
>no homeless
bro if everyone is homeless than nobody is
K0balt wrote 4 hours 25 min ago:
? Not sure what this is supposed to mean. I’ve lived
here for over a decade and have seen very few people that
don’t have a home of some kind. Family connections
obviously play a large role.
dmoy wrote 7 hours 54 min ago:
Doesn't Dominican Republic have like a 50% higher homicide
rate than the US? Or do you mean it's just not localized
in the spots you'd expect it to be?
K0balt wrote 4 hours 15 min ago:
It’s not high for a developing nation. since 2015 the
average is about 13/100k. By comparison, Louisiana is
19, New Mexico is 14, Missouri is 13, Maryland is 11,
Alaska is 10.
kelipso wrote 7 hours 40 min ago:
Normalize it by region, maybe. Mexico has much higher
homicide rate, for example.
K0balt wrote 4 hours 0 min ago:
The DR has a homicide rate similar to the worst 20% of
US states, but much lower than the most murdery ones.
dmoy wrote 2 hours 38 min ago:
Yea that's why I was wondering if GGP was talking
about specific areas. There's certainly cities in
the US with eyewatering violent crime rates (St
Louis, Baltimore, etc). Not sure if OP was
specifically talking about a similar localization
within the Dominican Republic.
K0balt wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
Idk. IMHO the crime exposure here is pretty
insignificant if you aren’t going to the tourist
hotspots. At the touristy places it’s about like
NYC risk wise.
yonran wrote 9 hours 43 min ago:
> why is it that higher local wealth/economic productivity
increases homelessness (especially if you control for public
services to counteract the effect)?
May I suggest the book Progress and Poverty by Henry George [1]
that asks almost the same question. The answer is that private
land ownership allows landowners to capture economic growth of
prosperous places, so wages barely cover rent at the margin. This
is particularly relevant to California which passed a disastrous
constitutional amendment Proposition 13 (1978) which slashed
property taxes from around 2% to 1% and declining, especially for
older estates, which is pretty much the opposite of the ideal
policy to deal with the problem of rising rents.
[1]: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55308
steveBK123 wrote 10 hours 31 min ago:
I think two factors - high productivity leads to high cost of
living, which means people without labor skills have a hard time
making enough money for food and shelter.
But ALSO - these areas tend to lean towards higher levels of
social services such that they have much higher homeless shelter
/ services / etc per capita.
So while many people may go homeless in place, certainly there is
some homeless migration towards areas that actually provide
food/shelter and don't harass/arrest them/chase them away.
brianwawok wrote 7 hours 37 min ago:
Don’t discount the weather. Sure is nicer to be in Hawaii in
December in a tent than in Michigan
steveBK123 wrote 5 hours 8 min ago:
That explains a lot of west coast & Hawaii but not NYC…
lotsofpulp wrote 4 hours 2 min ago:
NYC has a right to shelter law.
steveBK123 wrote 38 min ago:
Precisely which is how the rest of the state leaves NYC
to shoulder the responsibility
aldonius wrote 10 hours 47 min ago:
I'd suggest high local wealth and economic productivity tend to
correlate strongly with increased housing costs.
People move there for the jobs, and the ones who do have jobs
tend to have relatively well paying ones, so can pay more for
housing. But the ones who don't have a well paying job are in
trouble...
[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-housing-shortages-c...
IncreasePosts wrote 9 hours 27 min ago:
So these people decide to become homeless instead of moving to
a nearby area with a lower cost of living?
estearum wrote 9 hours 4 min ago:
Like everyone else, homeless people tend to have ties to
specific areas, and by the time you're homeless you tend not
to have the capital required to move and restart someplace
else.
Basically at what point do you decide you're "failing" (no
moral valence intended) in one area in which you have a
support network that you're willing to risk moving to a
totally new area and starting over? At that point, do you
have the resources required to do so successfully?
IncreasePosts wrote 7 hours 22 min ago:
I live in Boulder and homelessness is a big problem here.
Some people tie it to housing costs, which I don't buy.
There are nearby towns with housing that is substantially
cheaper, within a 30 minute bus ride if you really need to
get to Boulder for some reason.
And how good is that support network if it leaves you
camping in a tent down by the river? I'm not taking about
moving across the state, just down the road a bit.
nobody9999 wrote 3 min ago:
[delayed]
D-Coder wrote 3 hours 12 min ago:
> There are nearby towns with housing that is
substantially cheaper
Someone who doesn't have a job can't afford
"substantially cheaper" housing anyway.
cheschire wrote 10 hours 54 min ago:
Correlation is not causation. One does not increase the other,
rather the rise in one is correlated with the other.
estearum wrote 9 hours 21 min ago:
I disagree. As the comments point out, there is an extremely
clear mechanistic explanation as to how these are causal.
msgodel wrote 13 hours 56 min ago:
Touch screens have been around for a long time. Just like the
situation on the upper end with AI: I don't think it's the
technology, people are actually getting worse at socializing
(creating stress for the people responsible) and so socialization
is becoming more expensive and opportunities for it are becoming
more rare.
This could get a lot worse before it gets better.
mathgeek wrote 13 hours 32 min ago:
McDonalds broadly rolled out touchscreen ordering after covid
became a thing. That’s why it gets called out in these
discussions.
bombcar wrote 11 hours 52 min ago:
They existed before Covid but many franchisees didn’t want to
bother with the expense (or saw relatively bad uptake).
Now they’re ubiquitous but mainly for people who don’t use
the app, it seems.
ghaff wrote 11 hours 33 min ago:
My general observation is that a lot of self-service wasn't
super-popular pre-COVID. But, now, it's become more
entrenched and a lot of people just grumble and deal with it
while a lot of stores made the investment and accept the
(probably overall) reduced cost even if customers don't love
it. My local DIY home store doesn't even really have
regularly-staffed full checkout lanes any longer.
HPsquared wrote 12 hours 38 min ago:
Ironic because it involves hundreds of people touching the same
object. Not the best for infection control!
lotsofpulp wrote 3 hours 59 min ago:
I am under the impression most infections from infectious
disease is from airborne particles.
lotsofpulp wrote 23 hours 22 min ago:
Never having to deal with a member of the public inside your
property is a huge liability and hence stress reducer.
UltraSane wrote 18 hours 58 min ago:
Yeh having to deal with actual customers is such a pain.
Der_Einzige wrote 18 hours 45 min ago:
This but unironically
TheOtherHobbes wrote 14 hours 22 min ago:
The platonic ideal is no customers, no employees, no
management, and no government.
Just AIs trading Bitcoin with each other.
HPsquared wrote 12 hours 39 min ago:
The platonic ideal is doing only your preferred form of
work, and getting paid universally usable currency.
lIl-IIIl wrote 18 hours 59 min ago:
But on the other hand... Some people open cafes specifically
because they dream of creating a place for the community to hang
out. At least that's what they say. I often see McDonald's fill
that niche for older folks.
Yeul wrote 16 hours 31 min ago:
Haha yeah there are people like that in the Netherlands.
And then everyone comes with their laptop to work and it
becomes an open office.
jjani wrote 6 hours 31 min ago:
That can all be trivially fixed by style of seating and
tables, removing all power outlets and so on. People who
don't go there to work won't care.
I live in the country with probably the highest sit-down cafe
density cities in the world (Korea), and this issue has been
figured out ages ago. If you know any such cafe owners who
don't understand how to deal with this, I'm happy to have a
chat with them. Or they can come over here and I can show
them a dozen cafes so they can see it with their own eyes.
You simply set up the cafe to accommodate the exact % of such
laptop users as you're comfortable with, which can be 0%,
100%, or anywhere in between. If you do for some reason want
to run a cafe where 100% of seating is usable for laptop
workers, then the way to keep it all profitable is also
straightforward: 1. you make your cheapest coffee (converted
to Dutch CoL) 7+ euros a cup (use some single origin stuff
that's still cheap when bought from wholesale). 2. As food,
only offer small sweet bites and make those similarly
overpriced. 3. Make the seating dense so you can fit a lot of
these office workers. Bar seating is especially
space-efficient for this.
The Netherlands even has an advantage; people can't just
leave their setup on the table and leave for hours as it may
well get stolen - this is not an issue in Korea so some
people actually do this, the worst case scenario for cafe
owners.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK wrote 7 hours 43 min ago:
The $10 comfortable folding chairs that recently became
available changed the equation for me. Rather than sitting in
a cafe, I much prefer to take my laptop and a chair and go
sit in a nice park, on the beach, or even in the woods.
ykonstant wrote 15 hours 41 min ago:
Is that a bad thing?
lupusreal wrote 12 hours 39 min ago:
For the case of
> Some people open cafes specifically because they dream of
creating a place for the community to hang out
Having people sitting alone looking at a laptop for hours
while buying the minimum amount of coffee needed to not be
just flat out loitering, I think it would be a problem both
from a cold business perspective, and even more so from the
human perspective.
cess11 wrote 11 hours 5 min ago:
Cafés as a place to be for cheap where the weather can't
reach you while you read the newspaper you can't afford
or a book or plan a revolution is quite old. Like
centuries old, perhaps millenia if you count gossip and
include inns.
ghaff wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
I suspect the economics have changed in a lot of cities
though.
ghaff wrote 11 hours 38 min ago:
I think it's pretty common today though. There are a
number of cafes with a lot of seating where I see a whole
lot of tables with someone seated working on their
laptop.
silvestrov wrote 12 hours 45 min ago:
it is if you want the place to be financially viable.
mananaysiempre wrote 11 hours 23 min ago:
The common non-tourist behaviour in a café in Vienna is
to sit there talking for hours, buying a few cups of
coffee total. It has been like that since before laptops
were a thing. Yet the cafés remain viable.
ykonstant wrote 11 hours 12 min ago:
Same here in Greece.
bombcar wrote 11 hours 54 min ago:
I’m going to build a cafe inside a faraday cage
someday.
Just to see what happens.
Maybe I’ll not serve alcohol and call it Zero Bars.
dpb001 wrote 11 hours 35 min ago:
Better yet, serve alcohol and call it Bar/No Bars.
spaceguillotine wrote 20 hours 29 min ago:
so is not opening a service based business
bawolff wrote 15 hours 51 min ago:
Sounds like that is the path this business owner took.
One macdonalds deciding they dont want to be a sit-down
resturant anymore doesn't prevent anyone else from opening a
competing resturant.
XorNot wrote 19 hours 19 min ago:
Sure but it's also a scaling factor. People are going to choose
the tradeoff that's right for them or their insurance costs.
exe34 wrote 16 hours 27 min ago:
Capitalism working as intended. Wealth extraction without
having to give back to the community.
carlosjobim wrote 10 hours 13 min ago:
You can just choose to not buy hamburgers from that
McDonald's. No person needs unhealthy food.
exe34 wrote 8 hours 18 min ago:
I haven't eaten that sort of food for over a decade.
bawolff wrote 15 hours 48 min ago:
They give back by paying taxes.
Like i think the intended path here is that taxes pay for a
library, a park, or a community center. Having random
businesses create hang out spots out of the goodness of
their heart is not the intended path. They can if it makes
sense for their business, but community needs should be
primarily funded through taxes not business charity.
andrepd wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
Would make sense, your reasoning, if they actually paid
taxes. Unfortunately everything is very broken on that
front, labor pays much higher taxes than corporations,
the richest don't pay taxes at all, and the shortfall is
plugged by cutting public services and issuing debt on
what remains.
fn-mote wrote 11 hours 12 min ago:
The comment thread is about a McDonalds franchise
owner. They are not going to be committing Apple-level
tax evasion. They will be paying taxes like everyone
else.
anon7725 wrote 7 hours 29 min ago:
Not “like everyone else”. In comparison to an
employee, a business owner has a vast array of tools
available to them to limit taxes.
bawolff wrote 6 hours 20 min ago:
Income tax on employees is a tax on the business
exe34 wrote 5 hours 42 min ago:
That's right, if my income gets taxed more, it's
my employer that could default on his mortgage.
bawolff wrote 2 hours 50 min ago:
You are being sarcastic, but yes that is indeed
how it works.
Increased payroll taxes increases expenses for
the business and if expenses increase enough
business will go under.
Wage taxes suck for the employee, but they are
not the only party affected.
exe34 wrote 15 hours 10 min ago:
Only yesterday some people on here were trying to
convince me that taxes were literally like slavery for
rich people!
mathgeek wrote 13 hours 30 min ago:
If it’s that bad for wealthy folks, imagine the
impact on everyone else.
DarkNova6 wrote 1 day ago:
I fail to see the causality how this is caused by minimum wages.
socalgal2 wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
The causality is raising the minimum wage pushed business to do
this sooner rather than later. this is why, as per the study,
California lost more jobs than states that didn’t raise the
minimum wage
joshuamoyers wrote 23 hours 31 min ago:
Its not at all imo. Franchised businesses are not in the habit of
employing low skill workers as a public service. This data is
interacting with both covid effects and infrastructure
upgrade/rollover - in other words, it takes a while for companies
to adopt affordable touch screen ordering systems and its been
phased in at a ton of non-fast food (at least in my area) over the
same period of time. Local health grocery store has touch screen
ordering at their deli, as well as simultaneously going cashless.
Most coffee shops too. Look at most international airports - almost
all the kiosks have one or no attendants now.
trod1234 wrote 1 day ago:
That owner neglects that the latter fuels the former, and gets to a
point where no business can occur at all (given sufficient time
horizons).
01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote 1 day ago:
The owner isn't neglecting it, it's a tragedy of the commons.
If the owner was to overhire, it might reduce the homeless
population a little, but at great cost. And other businesses nearby
will benefit for free.
Only large coordination at the level of state or national
government can afford to implement welfare as a real investment in
their citizens. If you do it at the city, county, or corporate
level, it's just charity.
standardUser wrote 1 day ago:
That's the direction every company is headed everywhere. It's far
more prominent in locales with very high labor costs, but once those
technologies are easily scalable they will roll out everywhere, even
places with cheap labor.
morkalork wrote 1 day ago:
There used to be many grocery and liquor stores that you handed in
a list of what you wanted at the counter and the staff collected it
for you from behind the counter. With the way stores are locking up
items it seems like we're steadily returning to that era.
bombcar wrote 11 hours 47 min ago:
We literally have that now - what do you think Walmart Pickup or
other similar things are?
We’re a few years from the Walmarts in the really bad parts of
town turning to pickup and delivery only.
lupusreal wrote 12 hours 53 min ago:
All grocery stores were once like that, before Piggly Wiggly
invented the "self service" model of grocery store in 1916. It
could turn out that the self service model is ultimately a
historical oddity of the 20th century.
jhbadger wrote 10 hours 8 min ago:
It's funny how old things become new. From the late 19th
century (and in declining amounts all the way up until the
1980s), people in the US routinely would order things from the
Sears Roebuck catalog and have them delivered. Local merchants
used to complain about how this was taking their business. Of
course ironically, Sears got out of catalog sales in the 1990s,
shortly before e-commerce took off.
Workaccount2 wrote 10 hours 47 min ago:
Frankly an app driven pick-up only grocery store would probably
be pretty popular nowadays.
lovich wrote 1 day ago:
No, you don’t understand. If the government hadn’t been
involved, private organizations would have kept employees around
even when cheaper alternatives exist.
This is sarcastic of course. Ideally if our economy distributed
rewards across all of society everyone would be for changes like
this if they did actually speed up automation
michaelt wrote 14 hours 30 min ago:
In quite a few industries, companies are very reluctant to risk
$$$$$ on developing new automation (which might not even work,
and even if it does work might not be cheaper)
Why spend $$$$$$ developing a drone delivery system that might
face insurmountable technical hurdles like range, capacity and
safety if you can just pay undocumented migrants on bicycles $2
per delivery?
laughing_man wrote 19 hours 41 min ago:
The government does have an effect, though. If a company is
avoiding automation because automating things is expensive, a big
jump in labor costs may speed the process along. If you push a
bunch of companies to automate, automation becomes cheaper for
everyone.
carlosjobim wrote 9 hours 59 min ago:
It will force all businesses to either become more effective or
close down. Depending on how you look at it, it's a good or a
bad thing.
Squeeeez wrote 1 day ago:
Where do people eat then? Coming from someone completely foreign to
such a culture.
PopAlongKid wrote 10 hours 49 min ago:
This reminds me of the Sonic fast food chain. The first (and so
far only) time I've visited Sonic was some years ago, I was staying
at a motel across the street, walked over there to order, and was
surprised there was no place to sit or even a normal counter to
order at. The ads they run on TV give no indication that Sonic is
strictly a drive-thru operation.
senkora wrote 1 day ago:
There’s almost always still a parking lot because of zoning laws,
so you can eat in your car while parked.
rascul wrote 21 hours 25 min ago:
I have always preferred to sit in my car to eat at a park or some
relatively peaceful place in the shade without too much activity.
Sitting in a big dirty room with a bunch of people watching me
eat has never been comfortable.
AuryGlenz wrote 17 hours 45 min ago:
I agree. I can listen to a podcast in my car, there's no
chance someone will cough or sneeze near me, etc.
My first time being into a McDonalds since I was a kid was
earlier this summer when I gave my 3 year old the option of
going in or staying in the car. I was pretty shocked at how
barebones it was now. There weren't even napkins available and
none with our food...which, when you have a kid with, is an
issue.
bombcar wrote 11 hours 46 min ago:
This varies widely - my cutoff is whether they still have a
soda refill machine on my side of the counter.
rilindo wrote 1 day ago:
This does feel like we are going back to the beginning of how
fast-food started (minus the large crew of people)[0]
[0]
[1]: https://youtu.be/YqyCaATQPtk?t=74
iamflimflam1 wrote 18 hours 42 min ago:
Video is unavailable to U.K. viewers.
xeromal wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
I was thinking of this exact clip! I love this movie.
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote 1 day ago:
At home in front of the television while scrolling their phone
inglor_cz wrote 1 day ago:
This unfortunately sounds like where the trend has been going at
least since Covid.
People started treating "meeting other people in person" as a
tiresome chore, and the world is adapting to that change.
pests wrote 23 hours 32 min ago:
> “meeting other people in person” as a tiresome chore.
Someone linked the short story The Machine Stops by E. M.
Forster the other day where this is an element. A character
makes a big deal of having to meet her son in person, opposed
of through the machine.
Written in the 20s, gets a lot of things uncannily correct for
a society 100 years later. Video calling, silence/do not
disturb mode, notifications, air conditioning, people no longer
wanting to look at real things with their eyes, etc.
bombcar wrote 11 hours 45 min ago:
[1]: https://youtu.be/dhQW0ufJRBQ
Spivak wrote 1 day ago:
You're implying that food delivery is antithetical to seeing
your friends in person. We have people over and then order food
all the time.
inglor_cz wrote 15 hours 46 min ago:
It is not completely antithetical, but I would bet on a
fairly significant correlation between those two.
Animats wrote 1 day ago:
Very true.
Pre-COVID, I used to go to a small kabob restaurant in Silicon
Valley. During COVID, I'd order from them via Doordash. The
food wasn't as good cold, though, even if re-heated. After
COVID, I started going back in person. Often, I'd be the only
in-person customer, despite a steady stream of deliver drivers
going in and out. Now, they're out of business.
rambambram wrote 10 hours 31 min ago:
Super off topic, but I'm going to borrow "kabob"! Sounds even
better than 'kebab'.
sitkack wrote 1 day ago:
I was amazed at how good and cheap the food was in Mountain
View and Sunnyvale. That is a bummer.
nobody9999 wrote 1 day ago:
>Pre-COVID, I used to go to a small kabob restaurant in
Silicon Valley. During COVID, I'd order from them via
Doordash. The food wasn't as good cold, though, even if
re-heated. After COVID, I started going back in person.
Often, I'd be the only in-person customer, despite a steady
stream of deliver drivers going in and out. Now, they're out
of business.
Because DoorDash/GrubHub/UberEats/etc. charge the restaurants
more than their gross margins. In such an anvironment,
unless a restaurant raises prices 25-30%, they're eventually
going out of business.
I'd say that these companies are most certainly not providing
25-30% value add. Rather, it's just leeching off
restaurants and their customers.
It's disgusting and has killed many, many restaurants where I
live (NYC), even though we already had a culture of delivery
before these parasites came along.
And more's the pity.
tsoukase wrote 1 day ago:
In Europe the discussion about minimum wage vs unemployment is going on
since the 90s. The results show that there is a small correlation. If
the former happens in small steps the latter remains stable.
Some greedy employers will lose an extra butter, a few will fire
someone and all employees win.
parineum wrote 19 hours 24 min ago:
> a few will fire someone
> all employees win
twobitshifter wrote 1 day ago:
Any charts on numbers of gig employees? I see help wanted signs at fast
food places all the time, but it may be that these workers are shifting
to gig work.
RobKohr wrote 1 day ago:
So, this cut out the least fit for work. One group heavily cut out
would be those without work experience such as kids and other first
entering the marketplace.
Fast food is a stepping stone job, and if employeers have to pay more
for labor then they will be pickier about it.
Let's think about the reverse. If we cut minimum wage, the sector would
be much more loose about hiring first time workers, convicts, or people
just not fit for other jobs. The people could grow their skills and
contribute more to society, a society where low end business constantly
complain about how hard it is to find skilled workers.
High minimum wage contributes to more people on social safety nets
living on low fixed incomes because the gulf between that and paid
employment becomes too great and there is no low wage on ramp for them.
twobitshifter wrote 1 day ago:
This is a good attempt at a thought experiment but it doesn’t bear
out at all in the evidence.
You need a fixed number of people to run a restaurant, there’s only
so many positions to be filled. You aren’t hiring on extra people
and spending a certain amount on labor, they’ll just pocket any
excess.
You can invest in automation but today that’s at a cost higher than
paying a living wage and with lower service quality.
JumpCrisscross wrote 1 day ago:
> You need a fixed number of people to run a restaurant
What? Just varying restaurant hours changes labour requirements.
Menu complexity adds another dimension. Quality of service another.
Restaurants are highly variable-cost businesses.
delusional wrote 1 day ago:
> Fast food is a stepping stone job, and if employeers have to pay
more for labor then they will be pickier about it.
Why? It would seem to me that there's plenty of room in the balance
sheets to just pay people more.
nomilk wrote 1 day ago:
Some things often overlooked in minimum wage discussions:
- Wages often go over or close to the minimum anyway, due to market
forces, and do so without costly
bureaucracy/enforcement/taxation/distortion
- Minimum wages make everyone whose marginal value is less than the
minimum wage unemployable (since you would choose not to hire someone
for $20/hour if their marginal value is $15). This is disastrous for
someone who'd love to work at $x/hour, but who lives in a state which
legislates a minimum wage > $x/hour, since they go from being employed
at a low wage to unemployed.
astrobe_ wrote 15 hours 49 min ago:
The marginal value being too low is just the company being bad at
optimizing. Yes, contrary to fairy tales, companies are not so good
at this because internal politics and/or poor management.
My country switched from 39 to 35 hours maximum working time per
week, some years ago, in order to reduce unemployment (we are talking
about around 25M workers). The net result was that companies did not
hire more people (or less than expected), they figured out ways to
make their working force more productive.
> This is disastrous for someone who'd love to work at $x/hour
This does not exist, period. If x is below the cost of housing and
eating in the area, it's not worth working, or it is a last ditch job
that delays dying on the streets - that's the reality we are talking
about. I am pretty sure that the minimal wage they set is just above
that, unless I missed the memo and California became socialist.
chii wrote 15 hours 3 min ago:
> The marginal value being too low is just the company being bad at
optimizing.
not really.
If there's a job for cleaning the sidewalk of a joint, or for
holding up a sign, but this marginal value is very low, then a
minimum wage greater than this value will prevent this productive
work from being done (or it'd be done by an existing worker, at the
sacrifice of some other productive work they _could've_ done).
There's no way to "optimize" this.
Personally i am not a fan of minimum wage. I rather have tax payer
money spent on creating valuable workers through training. There's
lots of models for such programs - for example, an apprenticeship
model, where a firm pays for the cost of an apprenticeship (which
includes wages as well as cost of training), in exchange for an
agreed upon number of years of employment at an agreed upon fixed
wage post-training (they cannot quit or will have to pay back the
cost of training for example).
astrobe_ wrote 8 hours 52 min ago:
> Personally i am not a fan of minimum wage. I rather have tax
payer
Tax payer?
> in exchange for an agreed upon number of years of employment at
an agreed upon fixed wage post-training (they cannot quit or will
have to pay back the cost of training for example)
Well I've heard of such model once, a scam school used it for
what basically was forced labor. Thankfully the contract was
nullified by a court. It's not surprising to me, as I have heard
too many stories of harassment and abuse at work.
There's not even a need for that, normal programs such as
part-time school, part-time work paid half the minimum wage
already exist in my country and are generally appreciated. But
they exist mainly for skilled work only, such as engineer
positions.
The issue is that you don't need much training for sidewalk
cleaning, so "innovative" programs won't solve anything. What is
needed is to push back against abusive practices caused by the
imbalances of the worker market. Companies are predatory by
nature.
nxobject wrote 1 day ago:
> Wages often go over or close to the minimum anyway, due to market
forces, and do so without costly
bureaucracy/enforcement/taxation/distortion
By "minimum", do you mean "statutory minimum"? I'm not sure what the
policy implication of this argument would be otherwise – an
argument against wage and hour enforcement?
twobitshifter wrote 1 day ago:
For fast food, the marginal value of an hour of work is a measure of
how much a business can make from labor and the position, not some
innate quality of the person. It’s flipping burgers not rocket
science.
jeroenhd wrote 7 hours 17 min ago:
That also goes for other fields as well. I've seen enough comments
here on HN from people who thought their employer would offer them
a Sillicon Valley wage if they moved to the middle of nowhere to
live like royalty, often because they thought companies pay them
based on how much value they add, especially when WFH became more
widespread during COVID.
All companies pay people as little as they can to keep a certain
amount of employees of certain quality around to do the work. The
fewer options you have (or the more options your employer has), the
worse the deal you'll have to accept becomes, and the lower your
pay will be.
As for skills, I know plenty of people in IT who would go crazy
working retail or interacting with customers within a month.
Flipping burgers may be the easy part, but resilience against
customer behaviour and monotonous/uninteresting work isn't
something everyone has.
milesrout wrote 1 day ago:
There is a huge difference in the quality of workers in fast food.
Some people are slow. They are inefficient. They let things burn,
they count change slowly, they are clumsy. They can't multi-task.
It is cognitively simple for you, because you aren't thick. But for
people of well-below average intelligence, flipping burgers and
doing something else at the time is just not possible.
throwaway4496 wrote 1 day ago:
> Wages often go over or close to the minimum anyway, due to market
forces, and do so without costly
bureaucracy/enforcement/taxation/distortion
Yes, when there is an shortage or competitive number of low wage
workers, not when unemployment rate is approaching 5% overall and
close to 20% for low income earning bracket in most places.
nomilk wrote 1 day ago:
That's the virtue of the pricing system! The invisible hand means
if wages are low in particular profession, it encourages looking
elsewhere, particularly in professions in short supply, whose wages
will be high.
standardUser wrote 1 day ago:
> it encourages looking elsewhere
Which is why the only rational position of a true believer in the
free market is to abolish international borders.
foxglacier wrote 16 hours 46 min ago:
I used to be a true believer in the free market and I did want
to abolish international borders to enable free trade of labor.
What I didn't realize though is that nobody wants to require
immigrants to pull their own weight and exclude them from
social welfare if they're unemployed, etc. If you had a very
free market country with no social services that would be
overused by unrestricted immigration, then yes, an open boarder
might be a good idea. Perhaps this is similar to internal
borders in China, which are reasonably open but immigrants from
other provinces aren't eligible for social welfare and
effectively have to go back home if they lose their job.
throwaway4496 wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, nah, the idea that the problem with low income workers is
that they're not pulling themselves by their shoestrings properly
is well and thoroughly debunked.
People don't work in low income jobs because it is the easiest
option, but because it is the only option often.
AuryGlenz wrote 17 hours 39 min ago:
Source for that debunking? Because I sure as hell can walk
into any Walmart and see it in action.
gibsonf1 wrote 1 day ago:
The 18,000 people who lost their jobs may disagree.
toomuchtodo wrote 1 day ago:
California created nearly one in five of the nation’s new jobs -
[1] - August 16th, 2024
> California’s job expansion has continued into its 51st month,
with Governor Gavin Newsom announcing that the state created 21,100
new jobs in July. Fast food jobs also continued to rise, exceeding
750,000 jobs for the first time in California history.
> “Our steady, consistent job growth in recent months highlights
the strength of California’s economy – still the 5th largest in
the entire world. Just this year, the state has created 126,500
jobs – solid growth by any measure.”
This is slightly out of date; California is now the world’s
fourth largest economy as of April 2025, passing Japan. I assert
the data shows the state does not have a job creation issue.
[1]: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/08/16/california-created-nearl...
[2]: https://www.gov.ca.gov/2025/04/23/california-is-now-the-4t...
ath3nd wrote 1 day ago:
These 18,000 are most likely employed somewhere else at 20-25% wage
increase. Note that a different study didn't see a rise in
unemployment: [1] which means that these people affected actually
got a better living standard.
[1]: https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/california-minim...
miley_cyrus wrote 22 hours 1 min ago:
This group is well known for bias, over and over through the
years. Nothing they report should be taken at face value.
"A considerable amount of financial support for the Center comes
from labor unions: According to federal reports, over the last 15
years it has received nearly $1.2 million in labor funding."
"The IRLE’s highest-profile researcher is Michael Reich, who
co-chairs its Center on Wage and Employment Dynamics. Reich made
a name for himself at a young age co-founding the Union for
Radical Political Economics, with the stated goal of supporting
“public ownership of production and a government-planned
economy.”" [1]
[1]: https://us.fundsforngos.org/news/nonprofit-accuses-uc-be...
[2]: https://epionline.org/release/biased-uc-berkeley-researc...
[3]: https://epionline.org/release/biased-uc-berkeley-researc...
ath3nd wrote 17 hours 38 min ago:
And the nation is currently ruled by somebody who orders
rewriting past papers on climate science: [1] So why are we
taking at face value that study from nber which is increasingly
staffed by Trump loyalists?
[1]: https://phys.org/news/2025-08-rewrite-national-climate...
khalic wrote 1 day ago:
The study is sound, pretty small impact considering the increase in
living conditions. What surprises me is people arguing that somehow a
business is more important than livable wages. Americans and slavery
really is a love story
stefan_ wrote 1 day ago:
Amazing how they are all universally experts in economic analysis of
minimum wage. This thread is a goldmine. If only they educated
themselves in collective bargaining next.
SpicyLemonZest wrote 1 day ago:
If your goal is to make sure anyone who wants a livable wage can get
one, you can’t just decide you don’t care about the things that
produce them. There’s a number of areas in California that already
suffer from a lack of businesses; you may be more familiar with this
phenomenon by the labor-focused name we usually use for it, “high
unemployment”.
snapplebobapple wrote 1 day ago:
3.2% decline in a year is massive because a year is way too short a
time to see anywhere near the full effect due to things like leases
often being for 10 years, technology rollouts being slow, etc. On a
10 year timeline i would expect tjat number to be much higher. Its a
value judgement whether the wage was a good idea or not but it does
us no good lying to ourselves about what that judgement actually cost
Workaccount2 wrote 10 hours 24 min ago:
Living wage is a NIMBY problem, not a wage problem.
It's like thinking you can solve a GPU shortage by giving people
more money to buy marked-up GPUs. That won't do anything except
make GPUs even more expensive.
The solution is to build more GPUs. To build more housing.
snapplebobapple wrote 7 hours 5 min ago:
I mostly agree with you but I do think the issue is a lot more
complex than that. I do think there is a valid criticism based on
market power abuse at the minimum wage in the food sector, for
example, especially with the rise of chains over the last several
decades and with labor markets at the low end being much more
geographically constrained than most analysis of this situation
appreciates. In my opinion there is a kernel of truth to the wage
should be higher than minimum in many places if the market was
functioning properly and had stronger competition but I kind of
doubt that's more than a couple dollars and that is being used to
push through bad leftist policies to push wages of their special
interest groups up when their other policies are highly
inflationary in the costs of basic needs like housing as well,
which actively harms these people. it would probably help the low
end a lot more having policy that generally pushes down the costs
of basics (like getting rid of most of the zoning/approvals
processes for building anything so people can build whatever fits
the economics of the area on whatever land they want in
areasonably short period of time, removing carbon taxes, sales
taxes on basics, etc).
jeroenhd wrote 7 hours 6 min ago:
We've seen with GPUs that building more doesn't solve the
problem. Large corporations buy up all the stock and the
leftovers are still ridiculously expensive.
Unless there's something preventing the rich from treating supply
as an investment to get even richer off of, increasing production
only facilitates wealth collecting at the top.
snapplebobapple wrote 7 hours 2 min ago:
That's not true. You are seeing a massive bubble in AI
infrastructure unfold that is gobbling up gpus faster than we
are increasing supply of gpus. That bubble will pop at some
point (probably soon) and things will get more normalized int
hat market too (unless that pop coincides with something really
stupid happening like China invading Taiwan, which would take
out massive amounts of production capacity)
burgerguyg wrote 8 hours 42 min ago:
EXACTLY. I've been saying the same thing for so long. As long as
the imbalance of supply and demand exists the way it has, giving
the lowest wage earners more money only bids up rents. There is
no such thing as a living wage in a system of scarcity where
buyers compete for necessities instead of necessity
owners/producers competing for buyers.
thrance wrote 1 day ago:
That's what you get after decades of relentless propaganda. Anything
remotely socialist is completely taboo there.
slibhb wrote 1 day ago:
"Decades of relentless propaganda" also known as the "the 20th
century"
thrance wrote 1 day ago:
Really clever. Bet you'd love it being a coal miner in the Gilded
Age. "Hum, no, livable wages are literally communism, you
wouldn't want to kill millions, would you? I'm really smart."
You're exactly what I was talking about. Indoctrinated into being
absolutely opposed to anything in favor of workers, spontaneously
regurgitating those same few tired "arguments".
lanfeust6 wrote 1 day ago:
The poorest people are not the ones working minimum wage
full-time. However, the poorest do want to purchase take-out.
Increasing the minimum for fast food realistically helps a
pretty minute demographic of workers, but the carry-over cost
to consumers means that poor people can afford less fast food.
Maybe that's not such a bad thing, but if it's meant to help
the poor (who either earn nothing or earn much less
consistently) it's pretty ineffectual at it, particularly when
accounting for differences in cost-of-living, and the types who
typically work minimum wage fast food in particular. Walk into
a McDonalds and you'll mostly see students and immigrants,
that's not "the poor". "Livable" needn't arbitrarily mean a
spacious 1-bedroom apartment either, which is why migrants paid
below-market wages don't worry about rent.
Cash transfers and other schemes are better. We already do that
to a small extent and could just expand it.
Edit: should clarify, it's a balancing act because a higher
main wage on net can be beneficial, but after a certain level
will lead to undesirable effects
throwaway173738 wrote 20 hours 17 min ago:
If unemployment insurance and state fmla pay are any
indication, any cash payments will be driven into the same
laggy rough to navigate bureaucracy by the coalition between
the people who like being cruel to poor people and the people
who think insurance is some kind of handout.
lanfeust6 wrote 8 hours 14 min ago:
That doesnt follow. We already have welfare/handouts and it
idnt hard to navigate, some people just need guidance doing
so, which is available. 90% of people living on the street
have a) a bank account and b) a smartphone
lerp-io wrote 1 day ago:
unemployed but at least they will live longer lol
croes wrote 1 day ago:
Are they only looking at the fast food jobs?
Would that be incomplete?
Higher minimum wage could cause higher employment in other sectors or
raise their revenue and wages.
ethan_smith wrote 1 day ago:
This is a critical point - economists call these "spillover effects"
and they're often underexamined in minimum wage studies, as
cross-elasticity between sectors can lead to employment shifts rather
than net losses.
frikskit wrote 1 day ago:
Small decrease in employment in exchange for ~25% higher wages for
those employed? Did I get that right? Obviously every single row in the
dataset is a unique human, but overall sounds like a big success?
sethammons wrote 13 hours 25 min ago:
Squid Games, in a nutshell.
kesor wrote 14 hours 49 min ago:
What about all the people who are now priced-out from working at all
because it is not economic for the business to employ them at these
rates?
fortran77 wrote 6 hours 48 min ago:
That was the original intent of minimum wages!
[1]: https://mises.org/mises-wire/racist-history-minimum-wage-l...
dehrmann wrote 17 hours 12 min ago:
One issue with a minimum wage is there isn't a great economic theory
for what it should be. So even if this one had good effects, it
doesn't mean $25 per hour would also have positive effects. It's also
possible a personally beneficial outcome was a net-negative.
timmg wrote 21 hours 37 min ago:
> Small decrease in employment in exchange for ~25% higher wages for
those employed?
It's a 25% higher minimum. It doesn't mean everyone was making the
minimum before the law. Certainly not all were. (It would be
interesting to know actually how much the wages went up on average.)
Also, do we know if prices went up? Because that could have a
negative effect on the rest of the local population.
refurb wrote 21 hours 43 min ago:
If you assume the minimum needed for life is X, I’d say optimizing
for the maximum receiving X+ is a better outcome than fewer getting
X++
Aloisius wrote 22 hours 48 min ago:
First, 2.3 to 3.9% decrease in fast food employment in a year isn't
really small given only a fraction were affected by increase.
Second, the effective wage increase for fast food employment was
actually quite a bit lower than 25% since several large
municipalities had higher minimum wages and not all fast food
restaurants were affected.
Third, employment appears to still be dropping.
forrestthewoods wrote 1 day ago:
> overall sounds like a big success?
It depends on how many hours were worked. Which the paper did not
measure.
slibhb wrote 1 day ago:
Maybe a good trade if it was just a loss of employment. But there are
other downsides...like fewer hours and higher prices.
ugh123 wrote 1 day ago:
Yes. The paper doesn't go into detail about the wider economic
effects in the state in business growth, tax revenue, and less
reliance on public assistance.
coldtea wrote 1 day ago:
And the "decrease in employment" could very well be attributed to
other factors, like inflated prices and shallow pockets of consumers,
translated to them skipping on fast food more often...
anonymousiam wrote 1 day ago:
It depends upon how you define "success." I visit California
regularly, and since the new minimum wage law went into effect, I've
noticed reduced hours, reduced staff, and increased prices. So now
my normal breakfast spot isn't open when I want to go there, so I eat
at home. The places I visit when they are open are mostly empty,
because the customers don't want to wait longer and/or pay higher
prices.
So aside from the fewer employees getting a raise, the businesses are
now under financial stress because of the reduced revenue, the
customers have fewer options for where to eat, and the State of
California and the local city/county governments will receive less
tax revenue from these restaurants.
Like most of the other recent California legislation, it's a
"success" at further damaging the local economy and encouraging
people like myself to stay away.
littlestymaar wrote 16 hours 22 min ago:
> since the new minimum wage law went into effect, I've noticed
reduced hours, reduced staff, and increased prices.
The problem with that line of reasoning is that in the meantime:
- unemployment has declined, which means it's harder to find people
wanting to work in such a place.
- inflation has kicked in, raising prices over the board.
In that context, attributing the changes you've seen to a
particular policy is very very hard (and the linked paper doesn't
do a better job than what you do here…).
anonymousiam wrote 2 hours 12 min ago:
Most of those in favor of the government interference cite the
points that you made. They don't really ring true though.
Inflation has slowed, but the changes in the restaurants were
sudden, and coincided with the new wage law.
runako wrote 20 hours 23 min ago:
> I've noticed reduced hours, reduced staff, and increased prices
Anecdotally, this also describes how things have played out in the
South generally. (Southern states generally have no set minimum
wage, so they mostly default to the $7.25/hr set in 2009.) Perhaps
this is different in other regions?
I have similarly stopped going to most "fast" food restaurants
because the waits are interminable.
This is in states where an hour of minimum-wage labor will not
gross you enough money to buy a pound of store-brand ground beef.
It's not the wage.
xienze wrote 6 hours 54 min ago:
> Southern states generally have no set minimum wage, so they
mostly default to the $7.25/hr set in 2009.
You may be shocked to learn this, but just because they follow
the minimum wage doesn’t mean companies are _actually_ paying
minimum wage. Even in my southeastern state, McDonald’s is
paying $12/hour. Why? Because there’s no takers, even in a LCOL
area, at $7.25/hour! That’s why all this handwringing over the
federal is so stupid. Local labor markets will dictate what an
acceptable wage is.
runako wrote 5 hours 45 min ago:
That's great, I live in a HCOL area in a Southern state and
McDonald's here also pays higher than federal minimum.
BUT in other parts of the state, especially rural areas, there
are definitely jobs advertised for < $8/hr. In those areas,
McDonald's is paying a premium wage compared to Local Burger
Joint. McDonald's pays $12/hr so they can get a higher caliber
of employee than Local Burger Joint. Neither pay as much as
Perdue.
> what an acceptable wage is
We agree on this, but probably on what factors go into making a
wage "acceptable" and the degree to which taxpayers in other
parts of the state/country should have to subsidize those
wages/owners' profits via social support programs.
(I understand there is a third group of people who don't really
care if the working poor are able to eat, but in the spirit of
charity I do not assume anybody willing to engage in discourse
is in that group.)
benbayard wrote 22 hours 28 min ago:
Is your usual breakfast spot a location with more than 60
locations? The minimum wage increase here only applied to chains
with more than 60 locations.
A lot of what you're describing is nation-wide. Food is more
expensive everywhere. Cost of living in California is up
significantly. Rents for restaurants is significantly higher as
well (at least anecdotally, my wife's family restaurant has to
close because they doubled the rent after their lease was up, I
have heard this is incredible common).
This study by UC Berkeley attributed a 3.7% increase in food price
because of the minimum wage changes. It's quite likely that food
overall getting more expensive is responsible for a lot of what
you're seeing.
If we can't afford to pay people in California a wage where they
can live here, then maybe the economy overall isn't sustainable? A
$20 minimum wage is like $2800 take home per month and in many
places that can barely cover rent.
Hilift wrote 8 hours 23 min ago:
A better example would be Los Angeles and the new $30 per hour
minimum wage for hotel and airport workers. Conceptually it makes
sense. The crux of the issue and some opposition is there are
more people now who use those jobs for primary income for a
family, where in the past it may have been perceived as jobs for
supplemental income and no health benefits.
mensetmanusman wrote 21 hours 11 min ago:
The property tax laws need to force people to maybe not sit in
large empty houses.
anonymousiam wrote 20 hours 59 min ago:
Why, if you have the money, should you be forced to have
roommates or tenants? What sort of freedom is that?
lotsofpulp wrote 14 hours 0 min ago:
If you have the money, paying proportionate land value tax to
pay for society's upkeep and protection of your land is not a
problem.
If you don't have the money, then you are free to live on a
smaller surface area.
sethammons wrote 13 hours 15 min ago:
My property tax has gone up over 6x in 7 years.
How am I supposed to plan my retirement? Plan to leave my
home of years, where I have built a life and have all my
things? If you think that, you are a sick person and I have
to imagine you are younger and only thinking "but I want
that nice house, so f*k off old person, take some money and
go die somewhere else."
lotsofpulp wrote 7 hours 44 min ago:
The price is the price. Maybe you shouldn’t have eaten
avocado toast so much and saved more for retirement?
Renters have to move all the time, regardless of where
they built a life and have all their things, many times
because their income is being taken to subsidize people
living on large lots (earned income tax is stupid, it’s
working people paying for the rent seekers who get to
enjoy living and profiting from larger spaces).
Another option is to have multiple kids, and bet that a
few might support you in your old age.
Also, I would like to see which region nominal property
taxes increased 6x in 7 years. I research real estate
all around the US, and I have never seen anywhere close
to that increase. You can link to a Zillow link of any
random home in the broader region, as they all would have
experienced the same rise.
Property tax rates are usually 0.5% to 2.5% of market
value, and you would be in very rarified company if the
market value of your house went up 6x from 2017 to 2024.
phil21 wrote 8 hours 17 min ago:
Old people should not be prioritized over the young.
A 600% increase in property taxes over 7 years is an
extreme outlier. Zero of my friends or family have ever
once experienced such a thing happening.
I certainly am not a fan of how heavy my property taxes
are in one of the heaviest taxed cities in the US - but I
would absolutely vote down anything resembling something
like Prop 13. It's an immoral bit of tax code that favors
old people over the young and productive - like seemingly
most of our current policy.
I should not be paying a different rate than the young
couple moving in next door to me simply because I got
here first. The services need to be paid all the same
regardless of my age.
> How am I supposed to plan my retirement? Plan to leave
my home of years, where I have built a life and have all
my things?
Yes, obviously. I have this giant asset called property I
can sell and downsize to something reasonable in
retirement. Or in the worst case - move. I could also use
the equity in my home to pay for living expenses if I
must. This was considered normal and expected just a
couple generations ago.
This whole "let the old eat their young" streak of
society needs to die off sooner than later.
sethammons wrote 6 hours 45 min ago:
Letting some old person stay in their lifelong home is
not the old eating the young. Kicking that old person
out of their home literally is the young killing off
the old.
phil21 wrote 2 hours 3 min ago:
Old people don’t need to monopolize real estate the
way they have over the past 40ish years.
At least when being subsidized by the young via tax
rates. The old voted themselves in a benefit at the
expense of those taking care of them - it’s not
sustainable. They cannot have their cake and eat it
too. I say this as someone far closer to “old”
than young. I should be paying exactly the same
amount as my young neighbors for the same house
value. Anything different is immoral at best.
The young productive couple with kids has far more
utility being located closer to work and other
economic opportunity than a retired couple, so
retirees sitting on the most productive bits of real
estate is a problem beyond even taxes. That we forced
young couples to buy places out in the exurbs and
spend hours a day commuting while also trying to
raise kids would be laughable to an alien species
looking at us from a big picture standpoint.
We have an inverted sense of priorities at the moment
- likely due to demographics and voting power. These
will rapidly shift as demographics change, hopefully
without too much backlash over what we have done to
the young.
If we want to make a point that overall property
taxes are too high in general I’m much more
receptive to that idea. No (residential) property
owner should be privileged over another due to age.
lotsofpulp wrote 5 hours 33 min ago:
Is kicking out an old person not being able to meet
rent different? Or not being able to pay property
taxes at the current arbitrary levels?
mdavid626 wrote 14 hours 13 min ago:
True, but if the other half of the country can't affor any
house, then surely we should find some solution.
jaggederest wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
If you have the money the taxes should be no problem, surely?
kriops wrote 13 hours 28 min ago:
Taxes are only ever a problem if you have money … or
something equivalent.
gopher_space wrote 23 hours 44 min ago:
You need to factor rent increases into your thinking, both
commercial and residential. Your breakfast spot is a business that
no longer makes financial sense to operate.
Feed the location of a business into a trip planner and note every
neighborhood within reasonable commute radius. Calculate the
average cost of renting a room in these areas and then multiply by
three. That's your de facto minimum wage because you have no
applicant pool beneath it.
Adding on to this, your competitors in a better financial position
are all paying well above minimum. There's probably a McDonalds
across the street starting people at five bucks an hour more than
you, and they have that wage plastered on a banner right out front.
Uvix wrote 1 day ago:
> I've noticed reduced hours, reduced staff, and increased prices.
That's not exclusive to California - my state didn't have a similar
minimum wage law but they have the same changes in their
restaurants.
The bad news is, I basically stopped going out because I couldn't
rely on businesses being open when I wanted to go.
The good news is, I've lost a lot of weight from not going out.
DarkNova6 wrote 1 day ago:
This only makes sense if staffing is a major cost factor, which it
isn't.
MarkusQ wrote 1 day ago:
It is. Typically over 30%, higher in fast food.
[1]: https://www.5out.io/post/a-detailed-breakdown-of-restaur...
simoncion wrote 1 day ago:
Is your normal breakfast spot a fast food joint? If it is not, it
is my understanding that is not affected by the "higher minimum
wages for fast food workers" regulation.
If it is a fast food joint... well, I can't speak for all of
California, but the fast food places in the section of San
Francisco that I live (and roam around) in seem to have a
reasonably healthy amount of customers in them.
Perhaps things are different where you are, but I've noticed food
getting markedly more expensive, have heard of commercial rents
getting higher and higher, and have heard that many of the folks
who would have done waitstaff jobs have decided to fuck off for
places that were (at the time, if not now) less expensive than
California. Oh, and there was the whole "flight from the expensive
cities because WFH means that many folks don't have to tie
themselves to an expensive, small apartment in a city they don't
really like" thing a while back that gutted the downtowns (and
leisure districts) of some-to-many big cities because -like- many
folks exercised their new option to leave and left.
Were it me, I'd consider blaming factors like those before I blamed
modest increases in wages.
cosmic_cheese wrote 1 day ago:
I’d point to savings-driven relocation as well. It’s why some
suburban towns have seen an increase in number of restaurants
even as options in cities decline.
If the desire is to reverse that trend, the best way to move the
needle is to bring housing prices (by far the largest living
expense) in cities back down to earth so they’re affordable to
normal people again, however that’s best done (probably
building more housing, unlike SF which decided to instead
prioritize offices and retail, leaving it vulnerable when the
pandemic hit).
underdown wrote 1 day ago:
Labor is typically ~33% of a restaurants costs.
nxobject wrote 1 day ago:
Was your normal breakfast spot subject to AB 1228 regulations?
hyperman1 wrote 1 day ago:
One possible reason: People don't need a second job anymore.
JKCalhoun wrote 1 day ago:
Sounds like a net increase then in the money put into the California
economy. Perhaps that has helped other sectors as well — like
retail seeing more money spent in their stores as a result.
alphazard wrote 1 day ago:
It's too soon to say. Increasing the cost of labor will reduce jobs
in the short term, and increase the cost of fast food. In the medium
term, that may lead to people cutting back on fast food, which then
leads to more job loss.
If fast food companies have perfect knowledge of their market, then
the immediate job loss would be all that happens, but they don't so
it will take some time to adapt to the new market, and see if
consumers will bear the increase in cost.
That's not even considering substitutes for labor, which have never
been as competitive as they are now. AI, robotics, single-purpose
machines, etc. One negative to a minimum wage is that we don't
actually know the market price of labor. When there is a shift from
humans to machines for labor, it will happen quickly and without
warning, rather than slowly as humans become dissatisfied with
decreasing wages.
barchar wrote 1 day ago:
Also, you only really need to cover any increased taxes, everything
else you pay them is someone else's income (fast food workers
probably spend almost all their income). So your getting a big
income increase to people very likely to spend it, this creating
more employment.
Maybe here this will be offset by decreases in welfare program
usage and the very, very high effective marginal tax rates that
creates.
sroussey wrote 1 day ago:
Indeed, the positive for increasing minimum wages is that it makes
robotics and automation more cost effective.
With Silicon Valley being in California, one might think this is
done on purpose—favoring the automation sector over the wage
holders.
Once these companies get some scale in California, they can then
drive prices lower to be competitive in other states.
In the end, sacrificing minimum wage workers in California will
lead to (generally California based) automation companies taking
this revenue across the country.
barchar wrote 1 day ago:
It does really disfavor low productivity industries.
Actually, a core part of Sweden's original plan for social
democracy was to have "solidaristic wage policy" where high wage
workers would accept a lower wage in exchange for a higher one
for low wage workers. The idea was you'd both squeeze low
productivity businesses out _and_ provide a windfall to high
productivity ones, who could expand faster.
toast0 wrote 1 day ago:
Labor reduction in fast food doesn't necessarily look like
'automation'
It's things like self-ordering, machines that make change (if
cash handling still matters), conveyor ovens/charbroilers, more
centralized food prep, self-service and automated beverage
dispensing.
Plenty of automation is happening outside of California though.
Here's an Illinois bases company's blurb about beverage
automation [1].
Reducing labor in small amounts increases service capacity, and
in large enough capacity lets you operate a restaurant with a
smaller minimum crew.
[1]: https://dimontegroup.com/projects/cornelius-quick-serve-...
MarkusQ wrote 23 hours 42 min ago:
> Labor reduction in fast food doesn't necessarily look like
'automation'
> It's things like self-ordering, machines that make change (if
cash
> handling still matters), conveyor ovens/charbroilers, more
centralized
> food prep, self-service and automated beverage dispensing.
Those are things that were previously being done by people that
are now being done by machines. In other words, automation.
throwaway4496 wrote 1 day ago:
Robots will always be cheaper, it is not a matter of if they will
come, it is a matter of when. That is no reason the state should
subsidise workers for big corporations by allowing them to pay
such low income that workers are often eligible for social
security.
sokoloff wrote 1 day ago:
People with better fitness for employment had their situation
improved. People with less fitness for employment may be more likely
to be harmed.
That’s a big success for the former group for sure. Whether
that’s a policy success is slightly hazier than you presented I
think, without other interventions to support those who are more
likely to be harmed by the reduction in employment.
MLR wrote 1 day ago:
If it's actually only a 2.7% decline in employment relative to
baseline then the increase in total wages paid would have to be
very small to make this a bad policy.
I agree that a lost job should carry some kind of premium compared
to a total increase in wages paid, and you also have to go and look
at the total hours worked to get a good picture, but if the total
relative increase in remuneration was higher than about 10% or so I
think that's probably enough to be able to hand wave the employment
decrease.
If it only turns out to be 5% I'd be a bit iffier about it.
In the UK we have a pretty generous minimum wage (for over 21s), I
think even relative to $20 in California, and the effect on
employment has been very small while minimum wage jobs now give a
pretty OK life, so I'm inclined to support high minimum wages
generally.
roenxi wrote 1 day ago:
> If it's actually only a 2.7% decline in employment relative to
baseline then the increase in total wages paid would have to be
very small to make this a bad policy.
That seems unlikely to be just that though, this study was just
on the people who lost jobs. If 20,000 people are out of a job,
there is probably another larger cohort on less hours. And we
also don't know how much wages rose. The people who were fired
were the ones who could only justify being paid the minimum. The
ones who stayed might already have been paid more like $17, $18
or $19/hr.
So yes to what you say, but the study doesn't say anything about
whether total compensation went up or down.
tialaramex wrote 1 day ago:
Also low minimum wages are actually just corporate welfare.
The gap between what a minimum wage job pays and what it costs to
scrape by is covered by government or charity, if they didn't do
that the workers would die, which means the jobs don't get done,
so that means the resource spent by governments or charities as a
result of a low minimum wage is a subsidy for the employer.
Instead of paying what it costs they get it for cheaper to create
a fiction of "employment".
inglor_cz wrote 1 day ago:
This isn't so straightforward. I would argue that they have
some effect on the customers as well.
In the US, fast food restaurants are remarkably cheap, which is
probably caused by low wages as well. If the workers were paid
Danish or Swiss wages, quite a non-trivial part of the US
population would be no longer able to afford a visit.
Now there is a wider question if that wouldn't actually improve
their health, but that is already a bridge too far from the
conversation. Miserly wages of restaurant workers do make the
restaurants themselves more affordable to the general public,
and the customers seem to be content about it.
Yeul wrote 16 hours 21 min ago:
The Netherlands has a lower minimum wage for people under 21.
This is why you see a lot of teenagers working at McD.
A big Mac is still 5 eurodollars.
WarOnPrivacy wrote 1 day ago:
> what it costs to scrape by is covered by government or
charity, if they didn't do that the workers would die
I take this to mean the assistance covers the gap to prevent
death.
I would amend that to note the following: We can exist in a
state of profound poverty w/o assistance for a very long time
without dying. Persistent Hunger and crisis-level stress kills
very indirectly; it commonly takes decades.
source: me + 5 kids. a decade of hunger-level poverty in a red
state.
hellcow wrote 1 day ago:
This right here. We should demand not to subsidize the richest
companies in the world. The Walmart family can afford to pay
their employees a living wage. Instead you and I pay for that
in taxes, while they extract billions in profit and value from
their business.
If anything we should be subsidizing small businesses to give a
more level playing field against companies with global
economies of scale.
burgerguyg wrote 8 hours 35 min ago:
Have you actually looked at what Walmart pays? Even in areas
where the minimum wage is still $7.25, they're paying nearly
double as a starting wage. They raised their starting wage
over $10 in 2017 and have consistently raised it even where
they're not legally obligated.
Meanwhile, all raising wages in the current market does is
implement a wealth transfer from businesses to landlords with
minimum wage workers as the mules transporting the money.
If you let the housing supply remain this tight and just
increase wages, you just bid up rents and make the most
economically vulnerable fight over the insufficient supply of
affordable units.
WarOnPrivacy wrote 1 day ago:
> We should demand not to subsidize the richest companies in
the world.
Not without overturning Dodge Bros vs Ford, I believe. The
ruling created shareholder primacy, the privilege of
shareholders to have maximum bites of the corporate apple. It
rigidly protects shareholder (and by ext, executive)
interests.
The never-ending wealth that flows from that - first buys
politicians, then officials, judges and (eventually) every
part of regulation & corporate oversight.
ref: [1] .
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co
delusional wrote 1 day ago:
> I agree that a lost job should carry some kind of premium
compared to a total increase in wages paid
I don't think it's nearly that clear. Western nations are at a
near record low unemployment rate. We should want to remove low
paying jobs.
p1dda wrote 1 day ago:
What do you think happened to the tens of thousands that lost
their jobs? Are they homeless now?
delusional wrote 1 day ago:
I'd hope we could find something more productive for them to
do.
parineum wrote 19 hours 50 min ago:
Hope in one hand...
roenxi wrote 1 day ago:
But that was the best job they could find. Presumably those
people are going to be unemployed now. I mean, maybe they're
kids and their families will have enough slack to just adsorb
the change but in theory they need welfare checks now to
survive since they probably can't justify anyone paying them
$20/hr. So it actually costs the broader economy more than the
salary they lost - firstly the work they were doing isn't being
done, secondly someone else now has to work to earn the keep of
the person who was just laid off because the job that paid them
around what their skills were worth just got regulated out of
existence.
ItsMonkk wrote 1 day ago:
The abstract states that there are 2.7% less fast food jobs,
not 2.7% less jobs. There might be 2.7% less fast food
restaurants as a result of this change, but in their place
will be other businesses that employ people of higher than
minimum wage. Those businesses might hire the best fast food
workers while the average fast food worker continues to be
employed doing fast food. As a result, there may be no people
who have now become unemployed as a result of this change,
and only increases in wages. The data is inconclusive.
Regardless, instead of arguing over which commercial property
takes which spot and trying to engineer the perfect fit with
the limitations we are dealing with, we should be increasing
the amount of places that are zoned for commerce. This will
bring increased demand for labor, which will increase wages.
thfuran wrote 1 day ago:
>in their place will be other businesses that employ people
of higher than minimum wage.
Why would raising fast food minimum wage create these
businesses?
ItsMonkk wrote 21 hours 56 min ago:
If one of these fast food places shuts down, it's not
like the lot is just going to sit vacant forever.
The primary effect of these types of laws is that
businesses that employ fast food workers are less
profitable, and thus when they compete against other
businesses for a given lot, will bid less for the land.
If the marginal buyer changes, it would have to do so to
a business that relies less on minimum wage fast food
workers.
jandrewrogers wrote 20 hours 48 min ago:
That isn’t what’s happening. A lot of these areas
are permanently hollowing out far beyond fast food, at
least with respect to local businesses. Lots of places
in decent neighborhoods are boarded up and stay that
way. This is an issue even in some cities with strong
population growth.
I recently had the mayor of a major west coast city
tell me this was a permanent trend, that there was no
way to reverse the loss of these small businesses and
that the disposition of all that real estate was a
major issue, compounded by a loss of basic neighborhood
services like groceries that used to operate out of
this real estate.
The future isn’t other businesses that somehow
magically pay higher wages. The future city planners
are seeing is all delivery all the time from warehouse
districts, and ghost towns of commercial real estate
for which there is no purpose. Even city centers are
starting to turn into suburbs in terms of occupancy
density.
ItsMonkk wrote 6 hours 15 min ago:
Sure, but this has nothing to do with the land values
which are still extremely positive. It has everything
to do with Prop 13 allowing speculation. Repeal Prop
13 and all of those lots will be better cared for and
rented out.
lxm wrote 1 day ago:
> their place will be other businesses that employ people
of higher than minimum wage
Worth noting that California’s regime extends to fast
food industry exclusively.
Presumably some of those job losses were absorbed by
industries still paying minimum wage - retail,
construction, warehousing, etc.
Presumably if those losses were not absorbed by those
low-skill sectors, the job loss figure would've been
higher.
So I guess, as you said, data is conclusive.
delusional wrote 1 day ago:
> but in theory they need welfare checks now to survive since
they probably can't justify anyone paying them $20/hr
Are you implying that there are people in the world who just
can't do anything productive enough to be worth $20/hour?
That they are so useless that this was the only thing worth
doing with them?
That seems fucking insane. If that's true, we have a huge
problem with misallocation of value.
nradov wrote 22 hours 37 min ago:
There are a significant number of people with developmental
conditions such as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome or Down's
Syndrome who, realistically, are never going to be capable
of generating $20/hr of economic value. The higher we raise
the minimum wage, the more of those people we condemn to
permanent dependence on government aid.
nobody9999 wrote 5 hours 32 min ago:
>The higher we raise the minimum wage, the more of those
people we condemn to permanent dependence on government
aid.
Condemn?
You mean take care of the least among us, which is, as
many have observed, a KPI for a just society.
delusional wrote 14 hours 59 min ago:
Where I live we solve this in part with state sponsored
offsets in wages. If you hire a person with a medically
diagnosed handicap, you get some of the wages back from
the government.
That way they aren't "dependent on government aid". They
get to work for a fair comparable wage, avoid having to
deal with too much additional paperwork, and don't have
to be constantly faced with a stigma of being worth less.
They are treated equally, and the employer gets to handle
their crap on the back end.
It's not some insurmountable gotcha to drag people with a
handicap into the conversation.
sokoloff wrote 1 day ago:
I think it's self-evidently true that there is a not
ignorable group of people who can't create enough value to
be worth being paid $20/hr (plus the employer-paid
overheads) and have that be something that an employer
would voluntarily do.
Around 10% of the population does not score highly enough
on the ASVAB (an aptitude test for the military) to qualify
for military service. The military, like any large
employer, has an awful lot of jobs that require minimal
skills and aptitude and for 10% to be Category V
[unqualified for military service] based on aptitude, I
would expect they wouldn't be the employees to create
$20+/hr in value for private sector or other government
employers either.
lupusreal wrote 12 hours 20 min ago:
> I think it's self-evidently true that there is a not
ignorable group of people who can't create enough value
to be worth being paid $20/hr (plus the employer-paid
overheads
Ignore the mock outrage of my sibling comment, they are
uninformed.
You are absolutely right that some people aren't capable
of work valuable enough to pay at least the minimum wage,
and in fact there are programs in place specifically to
serve these people. The Fair Labor Standards Act allows
qualifying employers to hire people with disabilities
(including mental disabilities) for less than minimum
wage. This is specifically to ensure that employment
opportunities still exist for such people, who otherwise
could not provide labor worth at least the minimum wage.
In some cases, other state programs may pay part of the
disabled workers income, effectively the state
subsidizing the employment of the otherwise unemployable.
The real problem I think comes from people who are
able-bodied and mentally capable, with no legitimate
disability, who are just unwilling to take the jobs
available to them because it doesn't fit their desired
lifestyle (e.g. let them be lazy and keep their hands
clean.) Entry level jobs in manufacturing settings have
better pay than being a cashier at a burger joint. A
first time factory job for a 19 year old highschool
dropout with no developed skills but a willingness to
show up on time and try hard will almost always pay more
than the minimum wage, but finding people who are willing
to even apply to such jobs can be challenging due to
perceptions of social status and entitlement. These are
people who have no legitimate disability but are unfit to
work due to their poor attitudes towards working. Our
system doesn't accommodate them, unlike people with
legitimate disabilities, because the general consensus is
those people need to get bitch slapped by reality and man
the fuck up.
delusional wrote 9 hours 59 min ago:
> Ignore the mock outrage of my sibling comment, they
are uninformed.
I'd like you to point at the "mock outrage". If it's
anything it's very real outrage. Real outrage that this
disgusting example of a military IQ test as the decider
of the worth of a person, is being perpetuated by
otherwise intelligent persons. You cannot point at an
IQ test and say "that proves this person is worthless"
because the next step for that line of reasoning is
eugenics. That's where the outrage comes from.
With that out of the way, I can address your point. A
point that's much more interesting than what you're
responding to. It's true that there are differences in
people's abilities. Some people have mental
disabilities, some people have physical disabilities.
Those disabilities can affect us in different ways in
different tasks. You can't neatly stack people in a
gradient of ability, because tons of different tasks
require different kinds and combinations of abilities.
I think we agree so far.
My problem starts when you then extrapolate that into
"for such people, who otherwise could not provide labor
worth at least the minimum wage". Firstly you pick the
symbolic "minimum wage" which abstracts away the actual
value. That implies, at least to me, that you think
those people would be unable to provide "labor worth
the minimum wage" no matter what the minimum wage was.
That obviously silly, but I'd encourage you to fix that
with a number.
Secondly, and much more importantly though. I think
that your argument reveals a skewed sense of value. My
argument is not, and was never, that there can be no
difference between what peoples abilities. My argument
isn't even in this case that disabled people should be
paid if they had no disability. My argument is instead
that paying somebody able, less than the cost of a
parking spot in New York City is ridiculous. The core
of my argument is that the normal wage should be so
high that the potentially reduced wage for disabled
people would still be above $20/hr.
The outrage you're detecting isn't at the revelation
that disabled people exist. It's that we are discussing
paying real people actually working $20/hr as some sort
of unreasonable expense.
Workaccount2 wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
The problem is that people don't understand that it's a
market that determines wages, and instead think it's a
number that employers just come up with off the cuff
and minimum wage is the only thing stopping them from
picking $1/hr.
lupusreal wrote 2 hours 9 min ago:
Right. They also fail to understand that many low
end jobs only provide very marginal value to
companies and could easily be eliminated if the
minimum wage exceeds that value. For instance,
baggers at grocery stores hired as a convienence to
shoppers and to speed up checkouts. But this is only
very marginal value; customers and cashiers can do
the bagging themselves and the negative side of that
is only very slight to the business. It's an easy
job to eliminate first, many stores these days don't
have one. Low minimum wages create more jobs like
this, which are good jobs for teenagers or people
with intellectual disabilities.
Lowering the minimum wage for people with
disabilities creates more jobs for people with
disabilities, demonstrating the whole point. Higher
minimum wage price less capable labor out of jobs.
delusional wrote 10 hours 29 min ago:
Don't you think it's a little unlikely that people,
in this day and age, with the current political
climate in the west, don't "understand that it's a
market". I think it's extremely unlikely.
I think it's more likely (because that's what I'm
doing, and I expect others to do the same) that we
are rejecting your market based framing, because it
unnecessarily restricts good political action. I
understand that wage can be viewed through the lens
of the labor market, even Karl Marx knew that. I just
don't think that's a very important or useful lens to
view it through.
It's much like viewing political climate action, or
product safety action, through the lens of the
"market". You can do it, it's just not very useful
for setting public policy.
The "labor market" didn't get children out of the
factories, restrictions on that market did.
delusional wrote 14 hours 55 min ago:
Ohh no, it's Jordan Peterson.
Not every job is the military. Most jobs are in fact not
the military. Not qualifying for military service does
not render you worthless in the general economy.
Furthermore, being worthless in the general economy does
not render you worthless in society.
I wasn't qualified for military service in my country,
not because of intelligence but some physical conditions.
I became a banker.
ghaff wrote 1 day ago:
You'd probably have to know more about what the jobs were.
Certainly there's more self-service and fewer people waiting
around to help customers in large stores than there were at
one time. And small-time retail has also fairly visibly
declined in favor of big-box and online purchases.
po1nt wrote 1 day ago:
It's 100% lower wages for those who lost jobs.
bravesoul2 wrote 1 day ago:
They are working the same hours elsewhere for free?
po1nt wrote 1 day ago:
They might be living in a tent on a sidewalk for free if you ban
them from working.
bravesoul2 wrote 1 day ago:
They might get another job.
People dont think holistically about the economy. They think
there are jobs. When they go there are that fewer jobs.
Immigrants come in a steal jobs. Etc.
But in an economy, each richer consumer creates more jobs. The
McD employees now buy better food, creating work for that
supply chain. Or they can pay for education. Or they buy a
takeaway coffee more often.
The immigrants who come and do jobs work hard for lower pay
them spend that money into the economy.
po1nt wrote 9 hours 17 min ago:
If they could get higher paying job they would already do so.
No legal immigrant dreams of working at McDonalds. No illegal
immigrant would be employed by McDonalds.
parineum wrote 19 hours 42 min ago:
Why not set the minimum wage at $50? Why not set $20 for
everyone?
More money in employees pockets means more jobs and more
disposable income, after all.
StevenWaterman wrote 1 day ago:
If the total salary has gone up, for less work done, it is a
positive change. You can solve the inequal distribution via taxes
and benefits.
Start: 100 people paid $100
After minimum wage change: 90 people paid $125, 10 people paid $0
After tax increase: 90 people paid $113 + $12 taxes, 10 people paid
$108 from taxes
Now everyone is paid at least as much as they were before, and
fewer people are forced to perform labour
In practice it was only 3% unemployment not 10%, which means the
tax increase is less and there is more of an incentive to continue
working. You can also pay the displaced workers less than their
original wage, to reach an equilibrium where everyone is happy with
either work+more money, or leisure+less money. Or have it be
age-based with an earlier retirement. Or have people work
part-time.
We need to stop seeing having a job as being inherently good. Being
able to live is good. Humanity should strive for 100% unemployment.
kgwgk wrote 1 day ago:
"Less work done" doesn't look like a positive change, you can't
tax your way out of a smaller pie. Specially if you strive for
humanity to produce no pie to start with.
StevenWaterman wrote 13 hours 19 min ago:
I disagree that increased employment and increased labour
always makes the pie bigger. If minimum wage was low enough, we
would decommission our cement mixers and use a human with a
shovel instead. But that's not an improvement. Automation is
happening, jobs can be replaced right now. The problem is that
humans are too cheap to bother automating, and that the profits
of the automation are not being distributed to the displaced
workers.
OrvalWintermute wrote 1 day ago:
Total salary going up for less work can truly hurt people that
are low, aptitude, low skill, and do not produce sufficient value
to hit minimum wage.
Ray20 wrote 1 day ago:
Well, on the other hand, it can be seen as something like a
eugenic program to cleanse society of those unworthy of the
state. After all, there is nothing stopping them from going to
work somewhere else where there is no such minimum wage.
po1nt wrote 1 day ago:
Then we should increase the minimum wage to 200$/hr or more.
StevenWaterman wrote 1 day ago:
The total salary would go down if you did that
po1nt wrote 9 hours 12 min ago:
How can you know that? That's also such an arbitrary number
to obsess about. Setting bilionaire income tax to zero would
increase total salary also.
thfuran wrote 1 day ago:
Then we should just increase the presidential salary to 110%
of the total 2024 US workforce salary.
sethammons wrote 12 hours 57 min ago:
Billionaires don't care about their salary.
thfuran wrote 10 hours 1 min ago:
They would if their salary were more than ten trillion
dollars.
ath3nd wrote 1 day ago:
Nah, they didn't lose them, they got employed elsewhere for what
they are worth, so if we do random calculations, it was probably
something like 25% increase for many of them.
The unemployment statistics were not influenced by raising the
minimum wage here, so you can assume that the people who lost their
low paid jobs simply moved elsewhere and got better paid jobs. It's
mostly the employers' loss, which is how it should be. If you can't
afford to start a business, don't start a business.
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote 1 day ago:
Correct?
simianwords wrote 1 day ago:
Also consider non linear utility of money.
skrebbel wrote 1 day ago:
For hamburger flippers? A 25% increase in wage might well be
superlinear for some of them (eg better circumstances and
opportunities for kids)
simianwords wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah but the other people lost their jobs and 100% of wages. So
you can compare net utility gain or loss.
skrebbel wrote 1 day ago:
Yes but that’s not the argument you made.
simianwords wrote 1 day ago:
I didn’t make any argument. I was expanding on parents
point.
skrebbel wrote 1 day ago:
Yes and I was responding solely to your expansion, which
I believe is inapplicable here.
frikskit wrote 1 day ago:
Why not set very low maximum wage ceilings and have 100%
employment? /s
barchar wrote 1 day ago:
This has been tried, and actually does work reasonably well.
Well, not maximum wages as policy but policies where high
productivity workers take a lower wage than they could
individually bargain for in exchange for boosting wages of low
productivity workers.
It provides a windfall to the most productive industries and a
squeeze to the least productive ones.
em500 wrote 1 day ago:
Why not set very high minimum wage floors and make 100% of worker
rich? /s
Turns out economics is actually more difficult than "higher
minimum wage is good/bad".
themafia wrote 1 day ago:
Are you going to reduce lottery payouts and maximum stock
investments as well?
Will I still be allowed to hunt for food?
Society is something better encouraged than gamified.
Ray20 wrote 23 hours 58 min ago:
> Are you going to reduce lottery payouts
They will decrease on their own if people think about where to
get food, and not about extra money for the lottery.
> and maximum stock investments as well?
No, there are no restrictions. Any amount of investment. But
there are only government's stocks and the terms of return on
investment are determined by the government
> Will I still be allowed to hunt for food?
Only deep in the sparsely populated provinces. To avoid armed
rebellions.
> Society is something better encouraged than gamified.
You'll be surprised at what methods encourage people best.
Read the biography of Korolev, who sent the first satellite and
the first man into space. A case was fabricated against him, he
was sentenced to 10 years in a gulag, but after a year he was
transferred to a prison for engineers, on the condition that he
will be a very effective engineer.
And he was. The results of such encouragement were amazing and
almost unachievable by any other methods.
themafia wrote 16 hours 17 min ago:
> And he was. The results of such encouragement were amazing
and almost unachievable by any other methods.
Oh boy. You've missed the glaringly obvious. They only did
this because they couldn't pay him. In other countries that
paid their engineers they produced more and better products.
History is clear and obvious on this fact.
> You'll be surprised at what methods encourage people best.
There's very little surprise when you study the actual
science of human psychology and performance and not the
journals of demented cold war generals.
Anyways, thanks for being honest about wanting to create a
Company Scrip Town, I and many others, of course, will
never cooperate with you. You're right to fear rebellion.
Ray20 wrote 10 hours 8 min ago:
> They only did this because they couldn't pay him.
But they could. But no amount of money will encourage an
engineer as much as the need to escape the gulag.
Especially if you add some variety to their experience by
staying in the gulag.
> In other countries that paid their engineers they
produced more and better products.
It is precisely for this reason that the overwhelming
majority of engineers in the USSR were not threatened with
the gulag for inefficiency. And many believe that this is a
good thing, and that "efficient" engineers threaten to
destroy the labor market entirely.
> History is clear and obvious on this fact.
Yes. The Soviet space program created by Korolev is the
pinnacle of human engineering thought, only God is above
it. History is definitely clear and obvious on this fact
> I and many others, of course, will never cooperate with
you.
That's the best part. You will vote yourself out of
economic freedom, and then there will be no reason to ask
about your opinion. Just look at the trends and public
opinion on the necessity for economic freedom. You are
already in checkmate if you look a few moves ahead.
roenxi wrote 1 day ago:
Because that happens naturally without a law. People lower the
wage they ask for until they get a job.
actionfromafar wrote 1 day ago:
I think they were sarcastic.
frikskit wrote 1 day ago:
Thanks, yes, I was trying to show how the alternative is
absurd
<- back to front page
You are viewing proxied material from codevoid.de. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.