Minimum Wage

[Jeffrey Lebowski]

I remember when I lived in Hawaii in Waikiki MCdonalds had a Automatic drive through Machine it was quite the hit despite all the jargon that it would take "jobs"

The McDonald's over somewhere between Lone Tree and Highlands Ranch had those kiosks that took your order. People still prepped and handed your food, but it was possible to order a very big, complicated order and not ever say a word, completely avoiding people.
I so rarely eat at McD's, but honestly....I liked it.

[kidicarus13]

That kind of money will buy you a lot of time and expertise from automation experts who will gladly write programs and develop robotics capable of doing the menial tasks now done by the average worker, and at a long-run cost savings.

There's already precedent for this in the retail world with the advent of automated check out systems, and I would argue the only thing keeping fast food from doing the same are development costs and tradition.

Sent from my SGH-T999 using Tapatalk 4 Beta

[Gman]

Or, alternately, give it to them and the price of everything rises - putting them no better and likely worse off than they were. Oops! But hey, it is a bigger number!

Absolutely. Cost of living goes up proportionately to where they're in the same boat, but fewer of them are working. I would't buy fast food at the prices they'll have to charge. I've already reduced my dining out budget by 75%.

[spqrzilla]

I think its adorable that the unions are trying to organize fast food workers even as Obamacare is turning our nation into a nation of part-time workers.

The idea that minimum wage is a problem is so hilarious that I may hurt myself laughing.

It wasn't a dozen years ago that local fast food places were advertising $10 / hour starting wages because the economy was booming so much that they had to offer more to get people to work.

Meanwhile, the union twits think that they can wish away economics by thinking really hard about how much they love Tinker Bell.

[Gman]

The union bosses get to bring in union dues without producing squat. They make a very comfortable living and send dues to politicians for quid pro quo legislation. It's a great racket.

[MrPrena]

I am not a fan of raising minimum wage. YES, i've worked some jobs that pays minimum wages.
As long as it is NEAR par with growth/inflation, it is fine.

There are some starving small business owners who receive far less than a minimum wages.
How about those career start up positions which pays about 30k/yr , but work 70+ hours?

[centrarchidae]

I get all of that at Chik-Fil-A, and I don't think that they pay much more than minimum wage.

Then again, minimum-wage jobs are usually the jobs that people have when they're first learning how to have a job, show up on time, do all of the crap you're being paid to do, etc. The folks that can wrap their heads around it generally move up in the world. The folks that can't, generally end up at the McDonalds at Colfax and Osage.

For 15/hr, here is what I'll expect with my next visit to McD's. I'd like to be greeted at the door with a smile. I'd like to be escorted to my freshly cleaned table where I patiently wait for a server to ask for my order. Then, they bring my 10 nugget meal, with ice cold coke, to my table while asking how many BBQ sauces i want. Yes, I do want more than 2 sauces. After the fact, Id like the server to come over, clear my tray , refill my drink and ask if there's anything else I would like. No more rude, incompetent workers. No more Spanish. No more forgetting stuff in my order. No more messy drink stations. No more crap on tables. Want to be paid more? Go earn it. Unions is the last thing we need here

ETA:

And don't get me started on the stupid ballot initiative that our fellow Coloradoans voted for a coupe years ago that tied the Minimum Wage to the Inflation rate ... so when inflation starts to spike it'll kill a bunch of small businesses and balloon unemployment all at the same time ... "yay free money taken from evil rich people!"

It's even worse than that. It's linked to the Consumer Price Index, which tracks changes in consumer commodities, for the Denver-Boulder corridor. Doesn't matter what the rest of the state is doing, economically. Not only that, but the list of commodities changes whenever some administration wants to fudge its numbers in order to look better (such as when the Bush-era BLS took beef out of the basket and replaced it with chicken in order to make inflation look lower than it was.)

[jerrymrc]

TABOR is frankly the only thing keeping Colorado from becoming East California.

This ^^^^^^^^^^^ Without TABOR We would be screwed. Checking "NO" is a minor inconvenience compared to the rape we would have been subjected to the last couple of years.

[Rucker61]

Another $8 an hour, as many have pointed out, funds an awful lot of automation. I manage Chinese suppliers, and even with the hourly wage they pay, it's worth it to automate. One of my suppliers reduced his workforce from 8k to 5k workers in just under a year. That's a lot of cost savings. And Foxconn, the largest contract manufacturer in the world, announce last year an effort to automate their factories with 1 million robots, thereby getting rid of 1 million jobs. Folks crying for a big jump in minimum wage don't understand economics much at all.

[Cylinder Head]

I would be okay with paying the good people at Wendy's more if they could understand "plain with cheese" but apparently that phrase is just impossible to comprehend.