Probably emigrate, to be honest. A brain drain or loss of labor might do the trick. It's the ultimate peaceful vote of no confidence. The system isn't changing right now because it works for those in power. Without bodies to do the work, they'll change their tone.
I don't expect this to happen, though. A lot of engineers are comfy with the top-tier healthcare provided by their employers, so they're likely not willing to leave America. (There are a lot of other perks of our country too, I'm just highlighting this one dimension. I'm certainly not going to leave over this even though I also feel my efforts to affect change are futile.)
I suspect that there are even people who believe healthcare isn't a right.
This is definitely a hard question to answer and I have been struggling with it myself. It can feel like a monumental effort when it feels like you are one person doing it. It does feel like the tide is turning though as issues like single-payer become more prevalent. I would say seek out more sophisticated associations/efforts that promote the issues you are passionate about and make sure they don't have a problem staying afloat, by contributing time or (more importantly) money to them. That might be a more effective way to support your cause.
Have you considered contributing your technical expertise to something like Code for America?
Their two flagship projects (GetCalFresh and Criminal Justice) reform both started off as simple web forms to make it easier to file for SNAP (food stamps) and sealing eligible marijuana convictions respectively. However as they gained traction they were able to engage state and local governments as collaborators and significantly improve the outcomes.
For the criminal justice work that meant fully automating sealing convictions in San Francisco, that then provided the “proof” for a state bill that passed to require all California counties to do the same over then next few years.
So while it seems like getting money out of politics is impossible I’d suggest working on stuff you care about at your state level, and providing working proofs will help people trying to support sensible legislation for reform.
While true, it’s great to find someone else has done all the legwork on how to cancel a shit ISP and switch to a better and cheaper one.
Or pre-wrote everything one needs to complain to the regulator about a bull-shit charge and get their $ back.
It certainly takes a certain mindset to take advantage of the above, but making it easier encourages it.
The above are two things I’ll be publishing tonight. There’s a few hundred thousand people in my mom’s town that suddenly have a decent internet option.
Voting and protesting are ultimately pointless if the options to vote for aren't enacting the changes needed, and if the protests aren't causing enough disruption to people in power for them to change anything.
If you really want change, then you need to somehow climb the ladder of power and enact the changes yourself. Unfortunately, if you take the political or corporate path, you will most likely be so disillusioned by the time you get anywhere that you will join the other side.
You can also become a revolutionary of sorts, by leading others through your charisma or prose.
Of course none of these are anything a "typical" person can do, but in fact, a "typical" person really has no power whatsoever unless someone atypical manages to organize them together.
You may find community organizing rewarding. Depending on your comfort level, you can try things like:
- Volunteer work
- Participating in city/town board/council meetings
- Direct action (eg the TN chapter of the DSA replaced tail lights for free, since broken tail lights are the most common reason for minorities getting pulled over)
- Canvassing for candidates, referendums, etc.
- Solidarity actions (eg joining strike members on the picket line)
If you're not sure where to start, try researching local candidates that share your views and find out which organizations endorsed them.
In many states, she would have free healthcare through Medicaid, due to the expansion. But many conservative states sabotaged it for their citizens and opted out. North Carolina is one such state.
If she’s only making $9.50 an hour she qualifies for some pretty cheap if not free healthcare. When I was in college working in a restaurant it was between $30-40 a month for healthcare I was making approx $20-25k a year.
Healthcare is mentioned exactly one time in the article.
Yes, it's mentioned once, in the context of her not having affordable insurance options.
> At 29, Brown works approximately 40 hours a week, splitting her time between a McDonald’s in Durham, North Carolina, and a food-service gig a local hospital. “It’s still not enough,” she said. Both jobs are part-time, and she doesn’t receive health insurance through either employer. She can’t afford insurance on her own, either. That’s a problem since Brown is diabetic, and she has to pay for her medical expenses out of pocket. She’s trying to do all she can on her own—she receives no food stamps or other assistance, she notes—but it rarely feels like she’s doing enough.
I just put her stats into the healthcare.gov calculator.
She can get a bronze plan for $370/month, and she qualifies for a $370/month premium tax credit - meaning she can get a bronze level plan for $0/month.
The government knows that this is a common state for people, and would allow her to pay her estimated tax credit monthly directly to the insurance company.
You and I are capable of finding, reading and understanding that document. I don't know if it is realistic to expect that from someone who spends all of their time and energy on mere subsistence.
How do the tax credits work? As in, you get the money back on your tax refund? This woman makes about $500 a month. And those plans are typically $8000+ deductible, basically shit plans. In most states, people qualify for Medicaid when they make less than $1,200 a month. Which is completely free care.
You can take the tax credit and apply it to your taxes at EOY, or you can have advanced payment where the tax credits are paid out monthly to your insurance company to help cover your premiums. Using the latter method, she basically just gets free health care - she doesn't need to wait a full year to recoup her $370*12
I suspect that for most people making, say, less than $60,000 a year, paying cash for insurance and then expecting to be reimbursed by filing incomprehensible tax forms is not an option. This person simply can't afford it. Tax credits are useless when you are living paycheck to paycheck from two crappy jobs. She is probably eligible for Medicaid.
The ACA specifically supports paying your estimated tax credit directly to the insurance company on a month to month basis, meaning you don't need to front the cash before you get it back as a tax credit.
370/1520 = 25% of your GROSS income to stay alive. She doesn't pay $370 a month in taxes, and the tax credit doesn't come out of Social Security tax, which is her largest tax.
She isn't paying $370 out of pocket though. She could be paying $0 out of pocket using the advanced payments to pay for her premium. And tax credits can make it so you are owed money by the government - it doesn't matter if she pays $370/mo in taxes or not.
As other posters have said, bronze doesn't buy you much - but I can't understand why she can't afford it if it is $0 out of pocket.
Well maybe you should fly out there and explain to exhausted mickey-d's worker how she could magically get free health insurance. Seriously; it would be an epic good deed assuming you're actually right.
I know people who have been in this position: just because you read something on a website doesn't make it necessarily true.
Why would I need to fly out there? Open enrollment is happening right now, and I just plugged her stats into the form on healthcare.gov. It literally took me less than 90 seconds.
Obamacare bronze is useless for someone super poor. Even the HMO Obamacare plans like kaiser charge $100 dollar copays for a doctors visit, which is clearly out of reach for someone like this.
Sadly, I think the most cost effective approach is often not to use insurance at all but instead go to the free / community clinics which could provide a subset of care at a lower price.
I agree, but at the same time an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of treatment. 40% of American adults, including the woman featured here, are obese. You can't just eat 3000 calories of junk food a day and expect the doctor to "fix it"
> You can't just eat 3000 calories of junk food a day and expect the doctor to "fix it"
What you're saying is true, but that's not what everyone believes. If you watch any episode of My 600 Pound Life, you will realize just how unwilling some of these people are to help themselves because it's hard work (and many people featured on the show die as a result). Yes, those are obviously extreme examples, but they're all extremely well documented.
I absolutely agree we should focus on taking care of ourselves before it leads to enormous health issues, but weirdly it doesn't seem the US healthcare system is designed for that.
You may disagree with the presentation, but it's still a documentary about real people's lives. If you watch the show you'll realize it's very sympathetic to the people suffering from obesity. I agree (as mentioned originally) these are extreme cases though.
And a Potemkin village still has real people in it. The point is: TLC [1] reality TV programs exist to entertain. They'll choose the most entertaining examples, not the most typical or illustrative. That bias means that's it's especially problematic to use them to show how "these people are."
[1] The network of "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" fame
I agree with you we shouldn't generalize, but ironically you're doing the same thing about television shows. If you've watched the show, what do you find disagreeable about it? If you haven't watched it, maybe you shouldn't be so quick to judge.
Anyway, I concede it's a bad talking point for the point I was making.
EDIT: On second thought, my original comment is such a tangent I probably should not have made it. While I may disagree with some of the details of your reasoning, I agree with your overall point.
I watch that show. It's one of my favorites. Maybe it's beneath your level of intellect--I presume you're a 10x'er who only watches PBS--but I've learned a lot about the super-obese and their challenges from this very sensitive show.
> but weirdly it doesn't seem the US healthcare system is designed for that
That's true. Your average interaction with a physician in the US to a 20 minute conversation while they fill out some forms in Epic, barely paying attention, then kick you out of their office as quickly as possible. A month or more later the bureaucratic machines of both hospital and insurance finally get around to sending you a bill for $250+.
Fixing healthcare would (by definition, IMO) alter health system incentives. If the government were responsible for all citizen's health, AND it wasn't too heavily influenced by lobby groups, it would make a lot more sense to focus on prophylactic measures, such an promoting healthy eating.
Doctors should be paid for how healthy their patients are, not for continuing treatments of the chronically ill.
> not for continuing treatments of the chronically ill
So my rheumatologist gets nothing for continuing to monitor and advise and prescribe treatment for my arthritis? Which isn't exactly something I can willpower away...
Sorry, typed that first bit out on my phone and ended up with a truncated thought. I was mostly referring to the way current financial incentives focus on _treatment_ versus prevention or cure.
In truth the change I was hoping for would happen at a slightly higher level than an individual doctor. More "health system" or municipal healthcare group.
I wasn't suggesting "willpower", nor making claims about your particular situation. I have observed cases where doctors are more willing to prescribe ongoing medications for chronic conditions, rather than investigating more holistic solutions to help alleviate symptoms. Arthritis symptoms can often be greatly reduced by diet or lifestyle changes. If your doctor helps you test and implement those – great! I've seen many cases where they don't, and my point is that they're not incentivized to do so.
I looked at the USA menu and there are only a handful of healthy options (the salads, and possibly custom egg only dishes via the all day breakfast menu and talking to the line cook)
https://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en-us/full-menu.html and that's without the salad dressing, were this the only diet available it lacks any substantial quantity of fruit, dark green veggies, fatty fish, whole grains/nuts off the top of my head that are usually recommended as items in a healthy balanced diet, the salads are also mainly iceberg lettuce which is not that great nutritionally. Also, not sure what would fit into her choices as diabetic.
Chicken Nuggets, Egg White Delight, Grilled Snack Wrap, Sausage Burrito, Egg McMuffin, Sausage McMuffin (w egg too), Fruit and Maple Oatmeal, Fruit n Yogurt Parfait, Strawberry Banana Smoothie, Mango Pineapple Smoothie, Gogurt, Fruit slices, Artisan Grilled Chicken Sandwich, Grilled Chicken BLT Sandwich, Southwest Grilled Chicken Salad, Bacon Ranch Grilled Chicken Salad, regular hamburger, coffee. We can leave Filet-O-Fish and Fries in the more debatable categories but the fish and potatoes themselves are nutritious.
It's also as much portion size and controlling intake of fries and soda as it is about the food items themselves. Adding a large coke to any meal is probably worse than the food itself. 80g of sugar with no nutrition or fiber.
I'll give you that its a low source of nuts and unbreaded fish. But if we are talking about working at McDonalds and not having meal prep time, that could be supplemented by bags of almonds, pistachios, peanuts, cashews, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and cans of tuna, salmon, and sardines at home.
That leaves dark veggies. Their bacon ranch salad says its "romaine, baby spinach, baby kale, red leaf lettuce, ribbon-cut carrots and grape tomatoes." Youd probably want to supplement some cooked greens at home.
Being able to buy the above food at 50% off would, imho, be a great foundation to a healthy diet, if you can control portion and avoid temptation.
> 40% of American adults, including the woman featured here, are obese
This is severely lacking in empathy.
You know WHY they are obese, especially including the woman featured here? Junk food is dirt cheap. When you work your ass off for two weeks and have all of $200 dollars to show for it, you are not going to be cooking healthy foods and free range Chicken eggs. You are going to get the cheap stuff, the highly caloric, highly processed stuff. And guess what, she works at McDonalds, which gives employees some food every 5 hours worked.
Or if you don't work there, you can hit a Taco Bell and fullfill your hunger with $5. $5 may be enough to get ingredients to cook a better meal, but again, this person works her ass off in multiple jobs and has a long commute by bus.
I don't disagree with empathy, but I definitely push back on the idea that McDonalds is cheap. People will always go to the grocery store and it's very hard to beat rice, beans, eggs, and ethnic veggies. That makes the cost and time proposition of McDonalds only okay at the right time of day.
I absolutely understand where you're trying to come from, but I think it seems like a bit of a stretch. Saying lack of time to prepare a healthy meal is a valid reason for poor eating habits is a weak excuse. Pan frying an egg and some veggies (using food item examples above) takes less than 5 minutes.
So we are going under the impression that this person is homeless? Renters/home owners would have ovens, simple cooking equipment. If the person doesn't have access to ANY of those things - there are bigger issues than food.
It’s really common in some places to have underserved shelters. In nyc I was considered super lucky to have a stovetop with an oven. Also, subsidized housing has been historically undercared for.
From the article she had an apartment years ago, but due to rising rents and stagnant wages over the years in the same area now she lives with in her boyfriend's parents' home and she and the boyfriend contribute rent back to the parents. I imagine part of it is her schedule is not the same as anyone else in the home, also due to her dietary needs, so possibly if she cooked it would be a lot of single serving meals/cooking.
also, covered under 3(selecting -> fresh produce lasts from 1-28 days, so one has to shop often for some items, constantly manage, plan and cook and note inventory and refresh, her struggles to just make ends meet and stay awake just makes this sound impossible. If I were working full time, there's very little chance I would be eating/cooking as well as I know I should without using money to just buy meals, the work/commute part of the day would wear me out and I'm in a much better position than her.
A big part of why this isn't viable for most is that not only don't they have the time to cook, a lot of the food you buy is perishable. Meaning that you'll throw it out before you use it.
Where is she supposed to get the energy, time, and mental resources to lose weight? Energy to exercise, time to self-educate, mental resources to maintain discipline, emotional health to value herself enough when the world doesn't value her?
This is very very important. Many people in these comments are arguing that there are choices that she could make to help her situation. That's true. But some kinds of conditions (lack of sleep, lack of time to yourself/to think, physical fatigue, fear of reprisal from most people--employers and colleagues--in your life) make choice itself into a limited resource. Could you technically decide to move/work out/fix whatever? Sure. Are you likely make that choice, be able to make that choice, or want to make that choice if your day-to-day is as depleting as what is described? No. Barring a few outliers, the ability to choose is suppressed for people in bad situations like this.
I get the fat and obese are frustrating, but you are victim blaming in the context of a US that lets unfettered advertising and product pushing of unhealthy food, healthcare, support, education, and lifestyles.
If economics and policy actually worked, there would be regulatory feedbacks, but not in 'murica
So advertising and marketing are to blame for people overeating? At some point you have to take responsibility for your decisions and the consequences. I don't think it's victim blaming to point out that something that is entirely within their control.
Here's a thought experiment. Imagine if every fatty acid in your gut is contained in a cell that will independently try its best to maintain homeostasis. When it's under stress -- from any source -- it will secrete hormones.
Now imagine an anorexic woman who recovers, but she overcorrects and ends up overweight in the eyes of her anorexic friends. They shame her for overeating and she tries to eat less, which puts her adipose cells under stress. Is it possible that she'd keep gaining weight from the stress of undereating? If it's impossible, how do you know? If it's not impossible, should we blame anorexics the same way we blame people with habits that you think are bad?
The most powerful tool in any union is a strike, but McDonalds is okay with that now, and won't be bringing in any scabs to replace those who are gone. They will be replaced by machines and the consumers are going to see a value-add.
> By tech fantasy are we talking about the kiosks which are already providing a value-add to customers?
No, we're talking about the making and packaging diverse types of food to order. That's why people go to McDonalds, and it's something that's surprisingly difficult to automate. McDonalds workers will be able to strike effectively as long as that's true.
Also, I don't consider ordering kiosks a value add for a customer. I've used them, they've been little to no benefit over ordering in person. It's just futzing around with yet another flaky touch screen, and who knows if the last person who used it had a cold or something. Their handling of process exceptions is like Google's customer support: non-existant. They're just a cost saving measure for business owners. It's not about "providing a value-add to customers" at all.
Remote ordering is a small value add, since it does permit some level of customer multi-tasking.
I tried that kiosk once (I don't often go to McDonald's) and was surprised to find that you could not order by number/meal. It took me 10 minutes to figure out how to order what we wanted and then at the end there were no "buzzers" in the bin and I had to re-order at the counter!
There’s a compelling argument that unions, combined with the fight for $15 minimum wage, will do nothing but make the situation worse. Nobody is going to pay $20 for a burger and fries. McDonald’s would either have to go almost entirely automated or cease to exist as a company.
I was basing it on the other meals, which were on the order of $11-13. A Big Mac meal isn’t $5.99 where I live so the gap feels larger to me.
Either way, I think that the assertion of “this thing worked over there so it will work the same way here” is overly optimistic. But ultimately I don’t much care - I rarely eat there, so if McDonald’s got very expensive or went out of business, it wouldn’t have much impact on my life. If they want to unionize, more power to them.
I’m not a fan of unions overall. I recognize that they’ve done some good things, but the people I’ve known who were in unions or worked in union shops don’t describe places that I’d want to work in.
If you’re referring to that Huffpost article from a few years ago, that got pulled because their math was faulty. It was based on assumptions about costs that weren’t rooted in reality, namely that the ingredients were the largest expense in the cost of the food. It’s not, it’s actually the labor, which is why increasing the employee wages has a disproportionate impact on the cost of the menu items.
McDonalds, the corporation, would have some financial runway in which to adapt. The franchisees that own and operate individual McDonalds restaurants, however, they would most likely be decimated.
The restaurants are almost entirely owned by franchisees and run on fairly tight margins. You can argue that the corporation makes too much money or whatever, but they’re not the ones who will be screwed if I’m right.
I’m arguing that the restaurants aren’t especially profitable and their margins are thin. It’s a bit like a rental property, in the sense that you have to have more than a couple in order to make much money at it.
This has never been my understanding about the major ones, at least. The licenses are incredibly expensive to buy, but they are quite profitable. But I recognize we're both speaking totally vaguely and without sources, so I'm not sure why I'm replying when I have so little to add myself :)
If those franchises will not be able to make ends meet, corporate will have to reduce their tithe. Trust me, there's a lot of money that can be squeezed from the shareholders.
Some math to really drill this home: that's 32K per employee. Literally a livable wage around 50% higher than the minimum they offer currently for someone working 40 hours year round, no vacation.
Many localities in the US have instituted higher minimum wages. In DC, the minimum wage is $14, and I can assure you that a burger and fries is not $20, the local McDonald's have not automated, and they seem to be doing fine.
They would have to accelerate their automation of front of house. But other than that they won't get rid of the rest of the workers. One day they might work out how to automate some things but given the broken blizzard machine is a meme I don't think McD has the ability to automate anything else. So they McD will move upscale which is fine. They don't have playplaces anymore and they're no-ones favorite burger anymore. Lots can be said against unions but they have their place and a single company union sounds like it could work here.
> The bus stops running at 10 p.m. on Sunday, but McDonald's asked me to stay until close at 1 a.m. They asked me to stay because they need my help. I know it’s going to be rough to find a way home, but I need the money so I said yes.
Cannot she ask them to pay for a taxi then? Also I didn't understand why she lives so far away from work.
"Cannot she ask them to pay for a taxi then? Also I didn't understand why she lives so far away from work."
1) Its unlikely the 30$ she's worth closing or whatever is worth hirind the taxi about.
2) Moving is expensive, and moving to a more desirable location even moreso. She may not be able to afford the time to seek out a space, the credit to be approved, the deposit, etc.
Why would McDonald's pay for a taxi for her? I can't imagine them doing that.
She might not live that far from work. It might be a 20 minute drive, but with the bus system in most towns in the US it's not crazy for that to take a couple of hours on a bus with walking (the closest bus stop to her is a 30 minute walk it said). I'm sure if she could get a job closer that pays as well she would've by now.
A bike would possibly be the ideal solution for someone in her shoes. Of course, there's that lovely enhanced risk of dying you get for daring to brave the streets on two wheels in the US. But if she gets back significant time from changing it up, it might be worth it.
She's contemplating affording a car. If she can swing that, she can swing a used bike. Plus, there are, at least in my city, charitable organizations that will just give you a one.
We don't know how far she works. We only know how long her commute takes. Bus routes in cities without good bus infrastructure are often circuitous and don't represent the fastest way to get to any particular place on the route.
Fair point. We do know that it would take 25 minutes by car, but two full hours by bus.
My commute is about 10 minutes by car. Which works out to 4 miles (3 by bike, because there's a trail). So it's doable – if those same 10 minutes where at highway speeds, it would be less so.
Regardless, it's getting better, but even 3 miles gets me sweaty and I have to take a shower. We can safely assume this person's commute to be longer. Now she has to go to work all sweaty – at a customer facing role. This won't be well-received.
She doesn't live in the city because according to Google Maps Durham, NC is 15 km across and you can walk to almost any part of the city in less than 2 hours.
Ok, so cycling is not a 100% solution and won't work every single day. I did not mean to present it as such.
Even if only 50% of days are suitable for cycling, if it saves her an hour a day then, at her hourly rate, a decent bike will return it's investment in less than half a year. And that's assuming her bus rides are free. She/a person similarly situated would have to judge for themselves whether it is a useful tool.
McDonald's...paying for a taxi? Yeah, maybe in Germany. I'm aghast that anyone could think that would happen in America. I'm at the bottom of the bottom at an IT organization and I don't even get a compensated bus pass. Nor would I expect one.
Yes, I just commented on this above. Maybe this happens in Germany or Finland. The idea of a McDonald's manager (at least in the US) paying for an employee's taxi to get to work is laughable and simply unheard of.
Her job is already going away; McDonald's around me have already replaced cashiers with kiosks. Unionizing and requiring $15/hr + full benefits is only going to accelerate McDonald's automation plans. Is the answer to fight for $15/hr or is the answer to go back to school, apply to more jobs, and/or go into a trade? Honest question.
> If the answer to fight for $15/hr or is the answer to go back to school, apply to more jobs, and/or go into a trade? Honest question.
Seems to me the goal should be to get a wage where you can afford to go back to school. I don't think it's fair to argue that the kiosks are replacing the cashiers only because they want a $15/hr wage - that's coming whether they want to or not. The only thing that the cashier can do is do their best to collect the resources right now to get out of that situation, and one of those is more earnings.
There are places in the world where you can make a living without any particular skill set, but I don’t think the US, or any other first-world country, should really be among them.
The US needs immigration reform to bring more high-skilled people into the country, but it also needs emigration reform to find new homes for people who can’t necessarily make a reasonable living in a first-world country.
It sounds to me that you're advocating for sending low class/uneducated/low skilled Americans to developing countries. Is this a fair representation of your proposal?
Please correct me if I misunderstood this, but are you seriously suggesting that the way we solve problems of poverty is to just get rid of the poor people?
That doesn’t seem to be what he’s suggesting at all. It seems like he’s suggesting they relocate to a place where they can make a better living, like my parents did by moving to the US in 1971.
Yes, but it seems like the implication is "relocate to a place where they can make a better living, instead of fixing the problems". Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but looking at the sister comments here seems to indicate that I'm not the only one if I did.
Why do you think that people without skills will have better life in developing countries? The salaries there are even lower, for example, in Russia hourly rate in McDonalds is $2-4 depending on the city. The only kind of housing the employee can afford is a room in a shared apartment or sharing a room with a friend or living with parents for free.
Wow this is incredibly dystopian to think about. Just imagine, you're born into a country that by no will of your own becomes more and more expensive. You're given an inadequate education to function in this country, so you're forced to work menial jobs to make ends meet, and hope that by some lottery stroke of luck you will somehow develop the time or the money or the skills to have a good life. BUT if you don't get this stroke of luck, you are asked to emigrate away from your friends and family?
Can you imagine writing your 12th grade anti-deportation exam, and looking around the room and knowing that the lowest ~15% of your peers will be asked to leave the country?
I don't even want to think of the new suicide rate in that world.
You've already been dunked on by plenty of other people, but I don't think they did a good job of explaining why you are wrong.
The USA has a labour shortage problem. There aren't enough people that want to spend their lives picking fruit, doing maid services, working fast food, and just generally taking care of all the problems that wealthier people pay to have taken care of.
You can pay immigrants rock bottom wages to do this work, which is the status quo in the USA today. They accept it because it comes with the promise of a better life one day. If not for them, then for their children.
If you want to send all those people packing, then get ready to pay $10 for a tomato. No, robots aren't going to help, either.
Why would an unskilled poor person do better in an environment with worse resources to help them?
In a poorer country they would have a decreased cost of living but a decreased earnings and fewer family and friends.
I cannot comprehend the thought process that leads you to come to this conclusion.
Example my wife is disabled we live on my very modest income due to costs of life and medical care we have zero wealth of any kind and a well maintained 2004 car. I think I have $13 in the bank right now.
Where ought I move to increase my fortunes and who would let me who would also pay for my wife's medicine.
To be fair I never said it would be to the advantage of the people we relocate, but it would be to the advantage of the rest of us. Imagine a society with no poverty, no homelessness, next to no crime, etc.
It's not that it would be to their disadvantage it would ruin and kill them.
Poverty often follows medical issues which then wouldnt see any help. Compare total mortality with projected mortality and you can figure out how many exactly you are murdering.
To facilitate the operation you will have to gut civil rights setting precedents with horrible implications for everyone's freedom.
If you can send someone to a foreign land because they are poor, lame, or merely unsuccessful removing all of their rights merely because their fellow citizens will be richer for it then what rights do YOU have left that are inalienable?
Presumably your rules don't apply to all those who have no wealth or income who depend on others so now dependants are slaves who need fear losing their status if they fall out of favor.
We can apply the same logic to the working poor who now must fear deportation as a result of losing their asses when terminated.
Spousal abuse and labor mistreatment will rise substantially.
Then we must ask what nation would willingly serve as our ashtray of undesirables.
Your idea is like an endless cornacopua of horrible implications. The last time I read a blueprint for a worse outcome it was written by George Orwell.
i think you're not wrong in the sense her living standard would be higher in a lot of ways in emerging economies. it does leave the question where the us should source its service workers from.
McDonald's around me have already replaced cashiers with kiosks
Here, too. But usually half of them are broken in one way or another, like the touch screen doesn't respond or the receipt printer is out of paper, or something I saw in a TV commercial isn't in the menu structure, or the pricing isn't the same as in an ad, etc... These are things a cashier is still needed for.
As an aside, I find it curious that my local McD only got the kiosks maybe two years ago, but I used them in Germany almost 20 years ago. They are fantastic for when you can't speak the local language.
Edit:
Is the answer to fight for $15/hr or is the answer to go back to school, apply to more jobs, and/or go into a trade?
The vast majority of McD cashiers I see are in no position to go back to school or change jobs. They're too old, low-skilled, physically constrained, or low-education to do that.
I work in an organization that deals with the poor a lot. If you're 50 years old and only have a fifth-grade education and need to survive, you don't have the time to go to school. You're probably working two or three jobs just to have a place to live.
Is a cashier needed, or just an on call tech who oversees a dozen restaurants? I would imagine working on the kinks in the kiosks and improving their reliability to be doable.
Doesn’t that imply automation isn’t worth it? If you need full human redundancy, why bother? I think you’re a bit pessimistic on the tech’s response time too.
Can the guy on call clean the stalls in the bathroom too? Change the trash? You probably need a custodian too on shift. The mcDonalds by campus gets trashed instantly during drinking hours.
Without money ? My girlfriend was a cashier. Now she's studying law because my job can provide for us and we have free healtcare in belgium. Otherwise it would be impossible !
> apply to more jobs
That basically mean more slavery since she will apply for job that pay like McDonalds. It wont solve any problem.
It is not impossible in the United States. This individual qualifies for both Mcdonald's tuition assistance ($2,500 / year) and FAFSA. FAFSA will more than likely pay for her schooling + books if she's starting at a community college.
"Going into a trade" here means to start a training/apprenticeship program to be a carpenter, plumber, electrician, welder, etc. Probably not a viable option for the woman ITA.
He means he imagines that skilled trades people are absolutely willing to pay random people off the street to learn instead of working for companies who want people who have already spent 10s of thousands to pay schools to learn.
He thinks poor people could be electricians helpers tomorrow instead of mcds cashiers if they only applied themselves.
I suspect we'll see high-paying jobs getting automated even faster, so her newly acquired skills may become obsolete before she graduates (also, she won't be able to afford the tuition fees). I don't think there's an answer to this problem: Nash equilibria cannot be easily beaten unless someone is imposing the rules and enforcing compliance... which probably won't happen.
The price/performance ratio of kiosks etc will fall so fast that the difference between $8/hr and $15/hr will only make a 5 year difference in the adoption of the kiosks.
It's not like they can replace human personnel that easy. Ordering kiosks are the low-hanging fruit, and then comes a long, long stretch of nothing, because it turns out that developing McDonalds-compatible robots capable of preparing burgers and packing up meals is about as easy as developing actually-working autonomous vehicles. And about as expensive. It's probably easier to automate the managers away. Meaning the McDonald's of tomorrow will surely rely on a horde of human personnel for food preparation and related simple tasks for the foreseeable future.
But of course it's kind of convenient if people at least think that their job can be automated tomorrow: that makes it easier to make them sell their workforce for peanuts today. You just need to hope that they don't realize that it doesn't make a difference once the day comes on which they can be automated away - it won't matter then whether they get $9.50 or $15 an hour, the automation will be cheaper regardless. But by demanding $15 now they will at least have earned a lot more during the decades until that day finally arrives.
I think people without any real background in the difficulties of automating purely human tasks (particularly manual ones), consistently underestimate the cost, difficulty and expense of maintenance for said automation.
I used to work in a kitchen, so maintaining food service grade of cleanliness on robots, sounds frighteningly expensive to me.
On the other hand, you can walk into a Krispy Kreme and watch the machine work. There's no reason that machine couldn't make french fries with a few changes.
Maybe everything won't be automated all at once, but if the economic incentive is there, it will happen. Pizza making robots are already a thing. There's no reason the shake machine can't measure its output to the cup instead of pulling a lever; drink machines in many places already do this. Dispensing the cup too is not a big step.
About those automated drinks at McDonalds...when I order mine with 'no ice,' the machine is apparently incapable of filling the cup with the additional amount of coke that would normally be displaced by ice. It will simply fill the cup just 2/3 of the way. They seem to have realized this though, but instead of increasing the volume of coke dispensed, the machine drops ANOTHER cup which the employee is supposed to use to fill the actual cup to the top. The employees only do this half the time, however, which makes the entire process even more maddening. Somehow neither man, nor machine, can get a no-ice drink right at McDonalds.
That is because those machines are made in a way to mix the 'perfect' ratio of water + syrup. They take in account the ice as well. If the cup is 0.5l, it plans to be 0.4l of liquid + 0.1l of ice (random values), so if you chose no ice, you get 0.4l since that is the 'perfect' ratio. (And probably what they advertise ie '0.4l coke = 1 euro' or whatever, they just give a 0.5l cup to account for ice)
> There's no reason that machine couldn't make french fries with a few changes
That machine is, like, 5 machines including an oil moat. With all of them together it makes up something like half the entire store's footprint. It's only remotely viable because that shop mostly only makes one thing. No breakfast sandwiches in the morning, no burgers at lunch time, just donuts.
Plenty of employees are still required just to make the different types of donuts and donut-adjacent items (and also presumably to be there in case a monumental grease fire starts, or the dough machine blows a gasket starts spewing dough all over).
> Pizza making robots are already a thing
Presumably making the frozen ones sold at grocery stores, which might be a meaningful percentage of all pizza sold, but effectively 0% of any other pizzas?
As you note, Krispy Kreme is a small scale donut factory with a store front ;-)
This is an entirely different thing than a McDonalds.
Yes, I could trivially make an automation machine to cook meat, we have them, they're called a charbroiler, similarly, toasting buns is pretty easy. The hard an expensive part is assembling all the parts into a package.
But you concede that some jobs would be automated if the labor prices were higher, and yet you think that's fine? Do you acknowledge a trade-off whereby fewer workers can get higher wages OR more workers can get some wages and prefer the former?
For argument's sake, let's assume that no jobs can be automated. The cost to the franchise owner to operate goes up, and in response they raise prices -- but at some prices they're going to really start losing business, so they also have to lower costs elsewhere or simply get lower profits. How does it all shake out? The fact is that it has to be paid by someone, and it'll likely mean fewer McDonalds are opened because it'll just be harder to make them profitable.
Maybe you're OK with that trade-off, but it IS a tradeoff that will happen, and it means fewer jobs.
Your analysis presumes that the business owners can and will absorb anything without reacting, as if more value can be extracted but there won't be a new equilibrium. I assume that the franchise owners aren't making the kinds of profits where that is true, I assume they're mostly bumping along on fairly low margins.
This is an entirely different question that has nothing to do with the original article, and nothing with the thread starter's comment.
But for the sake of it: yes, in a time of practically full employment, I do indeed prefer less workers to make more if this trade-off you assume is even a realistic model of reality (which is a big if, in my opinion).
The cooking machines are nearly automatic already. They are all designed to accept input and produce output without human action in between. I want to create an automated pizza shop, and have made some mock ups. I don't think it's as hard as you mention.
I would argue it's substantially easier to produce a fully-automatic McDonalds than it is to produce an autonomous car that can actually deal with any reasonable situation in the real world.
With a McDonalds restaurant, you can control your environment almost perfectly. If you throw away the kitchen that was designed to be used by humans, and then develop a kitchen never intended to be used by humans, you can drop a lot of environmental constraints in terms of the automation concerns. Trying to fully-automate the existing kitchen layout will certainly end in disaster.
As you reach 100% automation, it actually starts to get easier because the system is now all oriented in this direction, and you have standardized specifications/interfaces across the board. Also, once you fully-automate a single McD restaurant, the next one becomes trivial because it's simply another copy of the exact same thing.
100% agreed. A friend of mine is doing a food automation startup and in 6 months they’ve basically got it working. They’re planning on six more months of nailing it all down and launching. Based on what they’ve done I think they could do a fully automated McDonald’s in about two years. I would imagine it would then take another 5 years for such a system to spread to nearly all fast food restaurants... which implies to me within 10 years it’s pretty likely we won’t see humans in the kitchen at quick service restaurants..
And I think it’s more than that before we have no humans behind the wheel of cars!
So then what happens when someone makes a mess of the dining area or the bathrooms? I've seen roombas encounter dog excrement—not pretty. Or if a fight breaks out among customers? Most Mcdonalds operate pretty lean, sometimes two people. I can't imagine a complex automation setup and hiring a pricey/hr guy to service it every week is going to be cheaper than two guys on minimum wage and no benefits.
Perhaps you simply disallow that customers be able to enter the actual restaurant at all, and operate it more like a gigantic drive-thru/walk-up vending machine.
> Ordering kiosks are the low-hanging fruit, and then comes a long, long stretch of nothing,
DOM Pizza Checker (Domino's camera 'AI' that checks the pizza toppings are correct) could be used for other things, other than it's 'other' current use of store tracking. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/dominos-turns-its-pizza-check... Stores now get updates ;)
Designing food so it's optimised for cooking has been going on for a while but I suspect there gains there. Even if you can design more food variety for fast food that can be cooked or created efficiency, it can cut out labour at other food outlets as they close and society moves to highly efficient food outlets like McDonald's.
Automation in processes is where it's at. Designing food and processes for mostly automated machines and schedulers.
But you are correct, so far the threat of automation to keep wages low seems to have had more impact than automation.
>Is the answer to fight for $15/hr or is the answer to go back to school, apply to more jobs, and/or go into a trade? Honest question
So if everybody in this situation goes back into school, applies for more jobs, and/or goes into a trade, what do you think will happen? Do you think minimum wage jobs are only being offered because people aren't trying to get higher paid jobs?
They should take those displaced cashiers and speed up the drive through line or clean up the tables or any of the other vast number of things a human can still do (and from my experience needs doing) at a McDonald's.
The later part isn't guaranteed, in fact unskilled labor lost to automation (jobs requiring high school education) has only been getting worse and worse over time. What happened to the days when you could get a middle class lifestyle with a high school degree with a factory job?
An interesting reminder: kiosks don't eliminate the labor of the cashier, they pass the labor on to the consumer. The same amount of labor overall is still happening in that building, just more of it is unpaid.
I have always done the work of expressing my desired food item. Without a kiosk that desire gets repeated by another person to a computer. With a kiosk that repetition does not happen, the order is directly expressed to the machine. It appears to me there is 50% less labor with a kiosk.
The question is if it requires more effort than using the cash register.
I agree the kiosks are a bit harder for a customer to use, I accidentally ordered something like 80 chicken nuggets the first time I used one, simply because I tried to add extra sauce.
I still prefer them because it's easy to have a bunch of kiosks which means there are shorter lines.
Meanwhile those ordering kiosks still require about the same amount of cashier staff as before since they are such a terrible and confusing experience to use. Just another reason to not go to mcdonalds I guess
> McDonald's around me have already replaced cashiers with kiosks
My local McD just got them, as part of an extensive remodel. By "extensive", I mean that early this year they tore the whole place down and built a new one there, which opened near the end of October.
I've used the kiosks when I can, but for most of November I had to use the human cashiers. Why? Because the kiosks insisted on applying a "discount" that actually raised the price! The cash registers used by the human cashiers would also apply that discount, but the interface there allows the cashier to remove it. The kiosks (and the mobile app which also applies it) do not allow removal.
On the one hand, I am impressed that their software is automatically applying discounts instead of making the customer manually ask for it. I've seen at other places things like a parent order a burger and a drink and their child order fries and a drink, and unless the cashier notices that this is cheaper as a combo (burger, fries, drink) plus another drink, it will be rung up at full price.
On the other hand, come on! It's pretty obvious that if you are going to be looking for discounts to apply, the software needs to have a check to make sure that the total with the discount is not more than the undiscounted price and if it is not apply the discount.
This situation came about at my local McD because to celebrate being at the same location for 40 years, they rolled back prices on several items to '80s level for the month of November. Among the items rolled back were Sausage McMuffins, to $0.79.
Sausage McMuffins and Sausage Burritos are part of the "any 2 for $3" discount. So if your order included two Sausage McMuffins, or included one Sausage McMuffin with one Sausage Burrito, it would decide to apply the 2 for $3. In both cases that raised the price.
A couple times that month I wanted two Sausage McMuffins and a Sausage Burrito. To order that at the kiosk or on the app and get the correct discount ($0.79 for the McMuffins, regular price for the Burrito) could only be done by doing it is 3 separate orders! (Well, I suppose it could be done on one order and then selecting cash payment...that prints a receipt that you take to a human cashier, who can then recall the order at their register and collect payment. I assume that they can modify the order at that point to remove the 2 for $3).
I have toyed with the idea of making it illegal for companies to replace people with robots and not give those people some other job to do. On the other hand, I have pretty strong feelings about regulation tending to favor large industries even when it is intended to restrict them, because they can afford expensive lawyers who find loopholes and other ways for them to exploit the law.
I worked as a cashier once and it wasn’t the same as it is for my friends who still do. These days, they all have employment contracts, non-competes, and self checkouts taking their jobs. Back in my day, you could just leave any retail job like that and go across the street
An employer's desire is to pay/benefit you as little as you will possibly take. It is ALWAYS an adversarial relationship. No matter how much you like your boss, someone up the chain is trying to screw you, somehow
I feel sad that you might not know this: What you said doesn't apply to many, many other countries around the world. Hundreds of millions of people don't live like this.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the norm for a lot of low-level jobs in the United States. You end up giving in because the job market for such jobs is saturated and others will take it for lower wages/off-the-books.
When I was 18 (many years ago), I remember having a job that did the same "we need you to stay later" BS. The buses stopped running at 8PM in the suburbs and I had to regularly walk 5-6 miles back home. Cabs and Lyft/Uber aren't much of an option when it would significantly eat into your paycheck. Most people get tired of giving you rides because you cannot afford a car.
Using a bicycle was more dangerous than walking; some people would throw things out their window at you or swerve/yell to scare you.
Factor in how managers "reward" certain employees with better shifts or punish by cutting hours. I could see why many people switch to the dole or dealing.
I bicycled to work for several years. Mostly cars full of shit-head teenagers that do that.
The really strange one was 5 AM on a 4 lane street, no other cars around, and a single car comes up behind me and starts honking, about hitting my rear tire.
Part of the problem are the actual employees. Many let themselves be abused and do accept these ridiculous shifts making you 'a bad employee' in the eyes of the boss.
I agree. It's worth noting that successfully getting high minimum wages enacted can be expected to make more jobs more abusive in this way, because rationing by willingness to take abuse would substitute for rationing by wages.
A more humane and less distorting way to help poor people is to just give them money.
These questions like "why doesn't she simply x or y" make me sad. The person in the article is poor, not dumb.
She likely can't move. It's expensive to move, no matter who you are, and since she has two jobs, it seems like she's going to spend a lot of time on the bus no matter what.
She definitely can't demand McDonald's pay for a taxi, or she can ask, be turned down, and have her hours cut for next week. They'll cut her hours if she just leaves at the end of her shift, and they ask her to stay.
She's already doing something that could ultimately have a positive material impact on her life, organizing with her coworkers. It's just that the many interlocking systems around her life all work against her; bad public transit, bad pay for physically exhausting work, and having to fight so hard for something as basic as a union at her workplace.
This is a situation that calls for compassion, understanding, and working alongside her to change the systems that keep her in this situation, not suggesting "why doesn't she".
Also, she is “dumb,” because poverty is exhausting and exhaustion lowers your IQ massively. Have everyone in this thread run away from a mass shooting and then ask them to debug a deadlock.
But if she and her boyfriend work full time even for $9.50/hr, they still earn 9.50 x 320 = $3040/month and that's not a little sum. With such income, do they really have to live in some rural area with poor public transit and job choice? Something doesn't add up here.
That’s assuming they both get to work full time. The article mentions $215 as a McDonalds paycheck. Assuming that’s typical, and they’re both working two jobs, you get $1720/month.
She mentioned that it was less than she anticipated. Also, a month has 4.33 weeks on average, so even with the $215 weekly, they would be making $1863 per month.
Before I had a programmer job when i was younger, i completely 100% empathize with her in having those types of thankless jobs and constantly being tired. I can't imagine being trapped in that going forward. I bootstrapped my situation but I had a nice parents, a middle-class upbringing and a decent school to start everything, and a knack for programming... but I know/met so many who do not have this leg up in whatever they do in those experiences and have to continue that scraping by. This is why I lean toward UBI. I know both people who really want to succeed but are stuck from so many things or even people that will never try. It is what it is and is only getting worse with automation. I feel sorry for people that have not experienced these things that insist of the work ethic being the answer and are blind to reality.
Yang's implementation is very regressive. You have the regressive VAT tax, but then you also have the fact that you are cutting government benefits then giving everyone $1000. So the poor just end up net poorer.
Example:
Now:
$12,000 a year + $12,000 in benefits = $24,000
$50,000 a year + $0 in benefits = $50,000
UBI:
$12,000 a year + $12,000 in UBI = $24,000
$50,000 a year + $12,000 in UBI = $62,000
The poorer person receiving benefits is actually poorer then before, relatively.
How does that change my point though? Either way they end up net poorer. If you're poor and don't take the $1000, you are the same and everyone else is $1000 richer. This makes you effectively $1000 poorer. Yang actually says UBI will save money compared to benefits. So if you pick UBI you're even more than $1000 poorer, if he's right.
Could be stay the same or even go down. Producer still have to compete with each other and they even might lower their price to entice buyer to spend their UBI.
There is no particular reason to believe that increases in costs would exactly match the benefits granted leaving you 1000 dollars poorer even if ssdi income was better than ubi. Furthermore ubi would not be negatively effected by a spouse earning money in a way that actually punishes families for working nor would it require suing the government for 5-10 years while they pretend your family member isn't disabled.
On net the only people who come off worse are unmarried individuals receiving ssdi who are too young for social security retirement income.
Average ssdi income is around 1200 10 million people are on ssdi aprox 6 million under 65 45% in the overall US population are unmarried.
One could reasonably suppose at least 2-3 million out of 327 million will make no more money and will see slightly to somewhat higher costs. This could be corrected by cola.
In comparison the bottom 25% is 82 million strong and will benefit substantially as will the next quartile to a lesser extent another 82 millions
$12,000 of benefits does not equal to $12,000 of UBI. UBI doesn't limit you on what you want to buy. UBI doesn't require paperwork or lengthy approval process. UBI doesn't go away as you make more money.
You picked a perfect example where it seems bad, but consider an opposite one:
Now:
$12,000 a year + $12,000 in benefits = $24,000
$24,000 a year + $0 in benefits = $24,000
$50,000 a year + $0 in benefits = $50,000
UBI:
$12,000 a year + $12,000 in UBI = $24,000
$24,000 a year + $12,000 in benefits = $36,000
$50,000 a year + $12,000 in UBI = $62,000
Also keep in mind that the more well off people will end up paying more VAT because they spend more. VAT can also be tweaked to not tax on necessities like basic groceries/etc.
Your assumption is that Govt benefit starts coming your way the moment you need or ask for it. From limited personal experience AND from what I read, applying for and getting any kind of government benefit is very time labor intensive and involves long waits.
And many don't get it because they don't meet a threshold.
And those who get it, have to not work (aka not make money), in order to keep getting it.
You're missing a couple of things - first, it isn't zero sum. I don't care if I'm poor relatively as long as I'm not poor absolutely.
Second, the average benefit isn't $1,000 a month and in almost all cases the $1k per month is an increase on existing benefit numbers.
Third, since it doesn't come with strings, you don't have to worry about losing your benefits when you get a job or a kid leaves the home, when you relapse or when you get sick and can't manage the tangled web of government red tape.
Or you can simply move somewhere else where life is cheaper, a place that nowadays isn't sustainable because currently the local job market is nonexistent. UBI can solve that!
> I don't care if I'm poor relatively as long as I'm not poor absolutely.
This might be true for you personally, but it is not true in general; whether people are dissatisfied with their level of wealth/poverty has a great deal to do with how it compares to others.
We're not talking about dissatisfaction here. We're talking about meeting basic needs like food, housing, and health services. Wanting to be satisfied of these things is absolutely true in general.
It's perfectly possible to get by with rice and lentils and a few vegetables, and if that's the common lifestyle of everyone in the community/country, many people are well satisfied with it. I've lived in such places.
But if you see the people around you enjoying an endless variety of steak and sushi and lobster and so on, and you're working all hours yet still only able to stretch to rice & lentils, your satisfaction may be less.
An illogical reaction? Maybe. A human one? I think so.
These people need to grow up? Or, more realistically, we need to start promoting some healthy values, instead of harmful ones. This should start with: banning advertising, teaching practical philosophy (how to think about your life, how to be content with your life etc.) in schools, discouraging competition for its own sake.
> You're missing a couple of things - first, it isn't zero sum. I don't care if I'm poor relatively as long as I'm not poor absolutely.
Sure, but even people with benefits are struggling to get by. To not be poor absolutely we should be giving them $1000 a month on top of current benefits. Just $1000 a month will leave many absolutely poor. Also, I'm not an economist, but I don't think we can really predict what will happen with inflation, rent prices, etc, when the vast majority of people become $1000 richer. I find it hard to believe it won't cause increases in prices in at least some things. If that happens you aren't just poorer relatively.
> Second, the average benefit isn't $1,000 a month and in almost all cases the $1k per month is an increase on existing benefit numbers.
It doesn't really matter just changes the amounts a bit. Even if you assume benefits are $100 a month only, you still only gain $900 a month from the UBI(because you lose the $100). Everyone else is gaining $100 more then you.
> Third, since it doesn't come with strings, you don't have to worry about losing your benefits when you get a job or a kid leaves the home, when you relapse or when you get sick and can't manage the tangled web of government red tape.
Yeah fair enough, I'm not against UBI. I'm only against Yang's implementation. I think we should add it on top of existing benefits. I also think it is only a band-aid or should be a small part of the overall solution.
Many currently receiving benefits might gladly give them up in exchange for $1k/mo, cash in hand, with no risk of losing benefits due to higher income or filling out a form incorrectly.
But even if not, I think there's a case that giving everyone else UBI has ancillary benefits:
- More cash in the hand of your neighbors means more customers, which means more economic activity, which potentially means better employment prospects, in a virtuous cycle [0].
- Strain on existing benefit-granting institutions is greatly reduced, as those who opt for cash exit the system, meaning faster response times and more assistance with forms/approvals/etc.
- The working class tend to be more economically interdependent by necessity; someone who declines UBI still comes ahead from a spouse, relative, grown child, etc. who requires less economic support.
- Yang has spoken at length about the effects of economic anxiety; even someone who declines UBI may experience less anxiety (and therefore greater executive function and capacity for long-term planning), simply from knowing they have a "Plan B" for basic necessities.
In addition to offsetting costs, I think one of the motivations for the "either/or" strategy is political viability with libertarians and moderate Republicans, whose exaggerated fears of "socialism" can be assuaged by the opportunity to shrink bloated federal bureaucracies. (I'm somewhat sympathetic here: the most efficient charity is usually to write a check to the poor [1], and I suspect UBI or negative income tax has greater efficacy than most means-tested federal programs, with possibly the exception of health care.)
> Yang's plan would require that the cashier has to choose between the "UBI" or her existing benefits.
I'm neutral on Yang's campaign, but I like the idea of a UBI because administering it will be much cheaper than running existing benefits. Means-testing has a real and very sizeable cost.
What will happen to all the guvment workers who will get laid off once existing benefits have been supplanted by the UBI? They will go home to merrily enjoy their new UBI checks.
It’s the government: They’ll just move everyone over to the new Department of UBI, with an Administrator of UBI, a Deputy Administrator of UBI, an Assistant To The Deputy Administrator, a team of consultants, inspectors, auditors, inspectors of the auditors, auditors of the inspectors of the auditors, and so on. Nobody will actually lose their job.
I think UBI is definitely interesting, but it can't wholesale replace benefits. For example, a major illness like cancer now can wipe out your income, your savings, and a UBI quite easily. I think UBI might be better than a range of some lower end benefits - but the also exists a variation of needs where we should commit to helping people with, that is going to exceed almost any general UBI threshhold in many cases, and still needs to be covered as benefits.
One example might be medicaid - given it's in an incredibly barbaric and stressful way of exhausting your finances first, then trying to get onto the program all while fighting the illness.
Yang talks about this on JRE, the idea is that individuals know what they need better than the boards designing "one size fits all" benefits. The Freedom Dividend is meant to help replace complicated benefits for those receiving less than the $1k with a more flexible fund.
Cutting back existing benefit programs saves money in bureaucracy and empowers individuals to spend in ways that most benefit them.
people are still gonna end up broke and need food, but now there won’t be food stamps specifically set aside for food, or Medicaid funding specifically set aside for healthcare? Terrible choice. People need $1,000 a month on top of what they have, not a check and slashing all their present support.
Yang has separate plan to tackle housing price. So essentially the choice is between food stamp or UBI. I would argue UBI is better since it allow you to buy anything you want, no paperwork/approval process required and you wouldn't lose it as you make more money.
I do wake up at night but its only since I started closing the window for winter. I have a feeling I have very low tolerance for heat (I like sleeping at <70º F).
100% agree that something needs to happen. The way we treat less-fortunate people is shameful and undignified.
My biggest concern with UBI specifically is that it will be absorbed by landlords and other societal rent-seekers. My personal opinion is that we should democratize workplaces, through unions in the short-term and co-ops in the long term. McDonalds cashiers should have a say in their working conditions beyond the bare minimum employment regulations (that are so often ignored in retail and food services).
Keeping people constantly tired and "on the edge" might be a deliberate strategy. Or at least a very convenient coincidence. If they're too tired and too reliant on their current jobs to protest or quit, they'll stay quiet and politically compliant.
While I wouldn't be _surprised_ if it's a deliberate strategy, I think it's more likely that the incentives just align in, as you said, a very convenient coincidence for the political elite and bourgeois interests in society.
> The way we treat less-fortunate people is shameful and undignified.
i think the crux has always been separating the unfortunate from the lazy. i don't think anyone would have serious a problem with supporting the former if the latter could be sieved.
I honestly don't think this is that important, and I think means-testing or 'laziness'-testing is more effort than it's worth.
There will always be lazy people in society, and we have a lot of evidence that lazy people are a burden no matter how hard we try to make their lives. I'm happier giving people enough to get by unconditionally than having them steal or cheat enough to get by.
Trapping people in poverty means if they decided to not be lazy at some point, it's incredibly hard for them to get out of their situation and it's much more likely for them to fail. Furthermore, poverty only affects poor lazy people. Rich lazy people (those that got lucky or were born into wealth) can live on dividends their whole lives with no 'punishment'.
Lastly, attempts to distinguish lazy people from non-lazy people are easily corrupted by monied interests that don't want to pay as much into society. See the 'welfare queen' narrative that was popular under Reagan.
Teams suffer tremendously when they are forced to include lazy people. You get the additional Mythical-Man-Month complexity without any gain in productivity.
Society would be better off if lazy people were excused from the workforce. The weird obsession with forcing everyone to run on a treadmill has got to go.
The older I get the more I think labels like "lazy" are not really useful.
Some people are beaten down, discouraged, unexcited at doing hard manual labour for just enough money to get them through to the next day. And some, even if you get them to work, are not going to be much use there.
I know in my own career (have worked for decades with no sabbaticals or more than 3 weeks off at a time), I'm really lucky to do a job that I find interesting. That allows me to really dig in and work long and hard.
If I was doing a shitty manual labour job I think I'd revert from being an apparently extremely hard working person to one of the laziest ones around.
This is a very good point. Beating people down rarely results in their most productive work. Any good manager knows this.
Hell, I generally enjoy my job but go though legitimately lazy periods. These are well-contrasted by productive periods, but 9-5 work is a strange thing and people aren't machines.
My point was mostly that even if these imaginary lazy people exist, it doesn't invalidate the need for real economic freedom where you can choose not to work. You were fair to call that out as a lame take though, and I appreciate the perspective.
This makes me literally laugh. McDonald’s employees will destroy whatever they are given control over. In the past, smart people could get out. But with automation we need to change our views because then people really will be trapped in these kinds of jobs. Ubi or something.
I come from a broken home with one parent neglectful the other with mental illness(my mum is amazing but she had massive issues for over a decade which fortunately have improved), I worked minimum wage jobs for nearly a decade before I got myself out of that trap by something that was a solace and a hobby becoming a career.
I whole heartedly support people who organise to ensure a more equitable split for people like them, I got out the trap but for every me there is a dozen who didn’t, never will.
I was fortunate to be born in the U.K. and for the last 39 years at least have never had to worry about health insurance care, that’s just the final cherry on the shit sundae isn’t it.
She works full time hours but because it’s split over two jobs neither corp provides medical insurance, what an insane inhumane system.
I think about this a lot. I’m not a web developer but the accessibility of the tools for web development (an RPi, a keyboard/mouse, and wifi), the democratization of learning materials for web development, and the commodification of dev services (even through platforms like Fiverr and Upwork) make me feel like it could be possible to set up people of limited means with all they need to self-teach their way to a better career. I know not everybody has the knack or inclination for development work or even autodidacticism, but for those that take to it, $45 worth of hardware and a few hours of pointing in the right directions could be life-changing. Am I wrong about this? What significant barriers am I missing?
I envision an open-source disk image (likely a NOOBS) with learning materials, support resources, and community tools built-in. One could sell pre-loaded SD cards and/or full hardware packages to make it turnkey, or as turnkey as RPi gets, further reducing the barrier to entry. Perhaps even donations and grant money could subsidize hardware.
Has something like this been done? Is web dev a good fit? Thoughts?
The key problem with UBI, as much as I love the idea, is that any UBI amount will instantly be sucked up by landlords using every trick in the book. What the landlords leave on the table, will be sucked up by rising costs for energy (petrol, electricity, gas) as honestly all three will at least double or triple by efforts to save the climate.
In the end the workers will be as fucked as they were before UBI. The problem is modern capitalism itself. Ford-era capitalism where capital owners were proud in paying employees a wage they could live on... that could possibly work for a long time, but many equate even this level with outright "communism".
As someone who's worked in both, I don't entirely agree. Dishwashing was just tiring in a different way. But you could just entirely shut off your mind and zone out. I remember getting into a sort of meditative state while listening to music, it was kind of cool.
Tech jobs are just mentally stressful sometimes. I can totally see a good amount of people not wanting to switch places honestly.
I give a lot of credit to my success to my work ethic, which was nurtured by my parents encouraging me to work at a young age. Paper route by 10, then a soccer referee, then a janitor in a public ice arena. It’s amazing what you learn about hard work from cleaning a hockey locker room. The thing is I didn’t even “need” those jobs. The money was largely spent on a massive CD collection (which I eventually sold to buy an early iPod). Still, those jobs have had a tremendous impact on who I am and give me respect for labor of all kinds.
> No one truelly cares about self-service, it's just hype.
My grocery store recently instituted scan-as-you-go via a smartphone app, and I love it. I bag as I go along, precisely the way I want everything bagged (no crushed bread, no meat juice dripping on the candy) and basically walk out the door.
> precisely the way I want everything bagged (no crushed bread, no meat juice dripping on the candy)
I'm not sure what stores you go to, but just about every (bagger/cashier who bags) that I have ever interacted with has done their job quite well, and much faster than I would.
They have incentive to do so, because when they fuck up, or are too slow, they get chewed out by their manager. They also have 8 hours a day to practice.
Combined with the shit-show[1] of the self-service checkout station UIs (I haven't memorized every one of the 50+ produce codes - the cashiers have), and there is no universe where I get a better service in the self-serve checkout aisle.
Unfortunately, most of the full-service aisles have been eliminated, because it's cheaper to make customers waste their time struggling with the machines, than to employ cashiers. To the grocery, my time is free.
[1] To add insult to injury, the bagging area for the self-service machines is tiny - you can barely fit two shopping bags on it, so you end up playing a game of Tetris, as you try to scan your items. F* everything about self-service checkout machines. I still use them, because, thanks to the shortages, the full-service aisle lines are always too long.
You mention a variety of solvable (and in Wegmans' case, solved) issues.
The system I'm talking about is scan-as-you-go. No issue with the size of the bagging area. You're just putting things into your reusable bags directly in the cart.
Produce codes are simple - every produce display is labeled with a four or five digit code, and there are scales with label printers scattered throughout. These scales also display a bar code for use with the scanning app so you can forgo the label entirely. Even the folks going to a human cashier use these.
I've also been fairly impressed with their self-service UI when my phone's been too low on battery. Several years ago when they tried it out the UI was abysmal - it's clear they've made serious improvements in that realm and I've found it fast and user-friendly.
I like being able to decide how I organize my stuff. I can forgo bags for cases of soda, I can make the bags heavier than a cashier might, I can load them up based on how I'm going to unload at home.
Wegmans has kept the human cashiers, incidentally, with no noticeable increase in lines. Self-service is thus far an option, but one I prefer.
> She says she plans to work for as long as possible, trying to provide for her baby. As part time employees, we don’t get health insurance or paid sick days.
And the cycle repeats. I know it's a cold, impersonal take, but when life sucks, having a child is going to make it worse and most likely just lead to a new generation of suffering.
As much as a $15 minimum wage might help, even at $12 in Colorado, McDonald's already has touchscreen machines you can order from instead of at the counter - which might already not be manned all the time (it seems that now they often have a single person taking orders at the front counter and the drive through). So I'm skeptical if $15 minimum wage would work. It might work for the hospital job, at least the margin's there are higher and they are less able to automate the job away.
" I know it's a cold, impersonal take, but when life sucks, having a child is going to make it worse and most likely just lead to a new generation of suffering."
She could've had the child when her economics were in a better place. She could've been assaulted. She could've been denied the education to prevent the pregnancy. There are a bajillion and one reasons why a child might exist and she is responsible for it.
> She could've had the child when her economics were in a better place. She could've been assaulted. She could've been denied the education to prevent the pregnancy
It's possible but not probable when you consider that 42.3% of births are paid for via Medicaid [1].
> I know it's a cold, impersonal take, but when life sucks, having a child is going to make it worse and most likely just lead to a new generation of suffering.
This is very much a class thing. Well-educated middle class and higher simply can't comprehend why a single mother or even married couple would even think about having children when they can't provide the basics, let alone a solid education in good schools that aren't feeders for prison.
The folks who make that decision do so because they see it as a part of life and don't see any change in their circumstances for the foreseeable future. No light at the end of the tunnel, so just get on with living.
I'm probably going to catch some flak, but I see some optimizations she can make.
- McDonald's offers college tuition reimbursement, when you're low income this is one of the best ROI you have available to you.
- McDonald's offers a 401k plan with up to 7% match. Even if you took the 10% early withdrawal penalty this is money in your pocket.
I don't think the best use of her time is lobbying for a $15/hr minimum wage that will more quickly move her to a $0/hr wage. Gain knowledge, skills, and have a good work ethic and it is not that hard to get ahead in America.
My larger point is that the formula for improving your situation isn't that hard. You may endure hardship on your path, but for many it is within reach.
I believe the idea that a person making $400-500 a month can "add money to a 401k and then take it out again" is not only unreasonable, but completely out of touch with reality.
It reminds me of when one of the more well-off kids at college is shocked to find out that his/her colleagues are taking out student loans, and suggests "why don't you just ask your parents to pay for it?"
> McDonald's offers a 401k plan with up to 7% match. Even if you took the 10% early withdrawal penalty this is money in your pocket.
This woman is literally living paycheck to paycheck, and your suggestion is to... put money into a 401k? That simply isn't an option for people living in poverty like this.
> Gain knowledge, skills, and have a good work ethic and it is not that hard to get ahead in America.
This is a really out-of-touch perspective. One's ability to gain knowledge and skills is determined by the amount of free time they have when not working, and when you're only earning $9.50/hr, you have to spend a _lot_ of your time just earning enough to scrape by. It _is_ hard to get ahead in America when you're poor. Lifting oneself out of poverty is not easy to do here (or anywhere). If it were, we wouldn't have nearly 30% of our country's inhabitants living in or very near to poverty levels.
I'm saying she puts it in and takes it out as soon as she can. This gives her more disposable income. The only issue I see is the time it takes her to make the first distribution, but then she shouldn't have any issues with lagging income if she budgets it properly.
It's not that out of touch. She doesn't have to work at McDonald's. I know there's opportunities out there that pay better and are in LCOL areas, but they have to be pursued.
I'm sorry, but I can't empathize when I read through an article and the only thing she is doing to better her situation is use the power of government to force someone to pay her more. I gave actionable advice that she herself has the power to act on to improve her situation.
The 401K administrators wouldn't allow this scheme of yours to be feasible. When you open a 401K account and start contributing to it, you can't just keep withdrawing from it at regular intervals like you suggest. At most you can make a one time loan against a balance that exists in your account if you want to keep using the account without closing it. You have to pay this loan amount back with interest--you're paying yourself back with interest, but still when you're in poverty paying anything back in excess of what you started out with is just another hardship.
If you opt to take a loan against your 401K, then you will be required to re-pay back the loaned amount through regular paycheck deductions until it is paid back, and you aren't permitted to take another loan until this first loan is repaid in full. Furthermore, a number of 401K plans that have employer matching typically have some form vesting requirements before those funds can be accessed; often a year or more.
Regardless, in this scheme withdrawing any amount (i.e. making a loan and not repaying that loan, or withdrawing funds and closing the account) will end up losing her money in the end given that McDonald's is only matching up to 7% while withdrawing early from the account incurs a mandatory 10% early withdrawal fee that 401K administrators are required to levy and report to the IRS.
How does putting in $100, getting a $7 match, and immediately pulling it out and paying a $10.70 penalty on the withdrawal leave her with more disposable income? (She avoids income tax on the $100, but then pays tax on the withdrawal so if they happen in the same year, that’s also a wash.)
I literally can’t see how this tactic helps her in any way.
It's a dollar for dollar match on up to 7% of pay. Let's say she makes $100. She puts in $7 and her employer also puts in $7. That's $14, and upon early withdraw she would pay $1.40 (penalty) + income tax (likely $0). She would come out with an additional $5.60.
Additional note: Only plan participants 59.5 or older are eligible to make in-service withdrawals (as are terminated employees, of course). Probably not a viable income augmentation plan for most.
>This is a really out-of-touch perspective. One's ability to gain knowledge and skills is determined by the amount of free time they have when not working
She spends something like 4 hours a day on most days on the bus. That's plenty of time to read.
>Lifting oneself out of poverty is not easy to do here
My family came from poverty. It's easy to do if you come from a culture which values self improvement. I know it's unpopular to say, but most poor people are poor for reasons related to their genes, personality and upbringing, not because of the system. Just as cream rises, the lower end of the bell curve tends to fall, and no amount of education or financial assistance is going to change the distribution of achievement in society.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't have a safety net to help those who are in need, but our expectations should be grounded when we consider allocation of scarce resources.
> I know it's unpopular to say, but most poor people are poor for reasons related to their genes, personality and upbringing, not because of the system.
Some kind of implied false dichotomy here. Is upbringing unrelated to the system?
I won't say it's entirely decoupled but yes, it's mostly separate, I'm talking about the values that you learn from your parents and social peers as a child/teenager.
>> I'm probably going to catch some flak, but I see some optimizations she can make.
> This woman is literally living paycheck to paycheck, and your suggestion is to... put money into a 401k? That simply isn't an option for people living in poverty like this.
Another optimization she could make is to save the money she spends on food for herself and her family. It won't be easy, but after a few years of not eating she could probably save up enough learn to code and pull herself up by her bootstraps. /s
Economic mobility in the USA should be relatively high if what you are saying is correct - however, it is not. "Work hard" is not a solution to the problems our economic system has created. It is something someone yells before burying their head in the sand.
I laid out two things she isn't doing that she can do today to improve her situation. I'm not ignoring a problem, but offering advice. Teach a man to fish, as the saying goes.
Other than the low salaries, there are two compounding issues here:
– Transportation. The US is very unfriendly to forms of transportation that are not cars. There are a few exceptions, but these are exceptions. Good public transport or even bike lanes would massively improve conditions for a lot of people.
– Health care. Private companies are overcharging people and have made health care(hospitals and medication) unreachable if you don't have your costs subsidized by your employer.
– Education. Higher education would likely help this person. But how could she afford it?
> Good public transport or even bike lanes would massively improve conditions for a lot of people.
Bring up public transit or bicycling to people in nearly every non-urban part of the United States and you'll get a million reasons why it won't work.
Car culture is so engrained in America that people have convinced themselves there is no alternative. "I'd get sweaty", "Oh but I have to carry...", "Walking to the stop would take...", "My kids...", "I don't want to sit next to people..." . Even the rare people who actually have to drive refuse to understand why they should be among the strongest proponents of alternative and public transit.
A 80 year old man was remarking how Gen Z (and late millennials) aren't even getting their licenses as teens anymore.
It's amazing to think that he was the first generation of the ubiquitous automobile in the US and now can't comprehend how the generation before him got around.
The automobile also changed land use patterns dramatically, and the truism is that transportation is land use. See eg Cleveland, Ohio, which now has roughly the same population as it did in I think 1940, but takes something like 4 times the land. So people in 1900 didn't have to travel as much to access a similar amount of opportunity, because things were closer together.
I remember some pictures of Pittsburgh from the 1940's. With the steel mills belching smoke. You can imagine why people fled to the Suburbs. Seems like considering environmental regulations and the resulting clean up that that was ultimately a mistake.
A friend found an old San Francisco bus schedule from the 1920s. I just remember it was faster to get from downtown to the Outer Richmond in 1925 by bus than it now. And actually faster than it is by car too.
Also remember San Francisco to Yosemite was I think 6-7 hours by train at one time.
Trains, busses, and street cars were much more common in my city until the 50s. Every major town around me (within 4 hours), and my city was established by because they were a rail stop.
I feel this is most pronounced when I go to the mountains 2 hours North; which was a popular summer destination at the turn of the 20th century to the mid century. Now it's a long drive away and no longer has the visitors it used to have.
The streetcar to longbeach was faster in 1925 than the light rail train following the same right of way today. The redcar in LA county was larger than the nyc subway system today.
Ripped out 60 years ago and only now are the same right of ways being reconstructed at the cost of billions.
> Health care. Private companies are overcharging people and have made health care(hospitals and medication) unreachable if you don't have your costs subsidized by your employer.
Medicare for all is one of the most important policies to alleviate pressure on lower-income people. Even for the middle class, the freedom to change jobs or take time off without fear of disaster will take such a load off of society.
If we implement it like the Scandinavian countries, the average poor family would still have to pay 600-700 per month. I believe that would be about 2/3 of her monthly income.
The Scandinavian implementation is not the only option; although it would still be an improvement. ~$700 is about what people pay for 'Bronze' plans before their deductible. For someone with a chronic condition, the average out-of-pocket would be much higher to access any amount of care.
Alternatively, the Canadian system does not require any sort of insurance-like payment to access all but a few parts of the healthcare system. While wait times are a bit of a problem for non-emergency care, Canada pays ~1/3rd of what America pays for healthcare. That leaves significant funding available to improve on that system simply through more doctors and and better equipment availability, while still being much more cost-effective than the current system. It should also be extended to dental and drug insurance, but again, there is ample funding available to accomplish that and still remain cheaper than the current system.
Medicare For All is most similar to the Canadian 'insurance', and the best candidate for healthcare reform. There are some important conditions for it's success however---the restrictions on price negotiation must be removed; equivalent private insurance must not be allowed; and taxes must be increased to appropriately fund the system. Ignoring any of these will allow the system to be corrupted by wealthy interests (of HN includes many), and could result in a system deliberately designed to fail. Rich people _must_ use the same healthcare service as poor people, aligning incentives among all socio-economic classes, ensuring the system remains effective and well-funded.
No they wouldn't, taxes don't just pay for healthcare in Scandinavia it also pays for free daycare, free college and a year of state paid parental leave.
As to education she probably would have received a stipend for college or have taken loans for a skill. She hasn’t. While it would suck to take out loans to be a chef or plumber, it would provide her with marketable skills. My reading of the article is she peaked at 14. She didn’t think anything would be better. She probably didn’t try.
I worked a pizza (among others) job through high school and college.
I've been overworked at many professional technical jobs in different roles before.
I'm paid a great deal more now, and yet I was never more tired or worn out or found it hard to study than when I worked the ovens at the pizza place.
I often work with people who have never worked such jobs. They're upset that they're 'overworked' and spend their time in the fancy break room with all the perks. Many I suspect have no clue.
There is no bigger lie than hard work = prosperity. It is literally the exact opposite. Think of the hardest shittiest jobs and they are almost always the least paying. The richer you get the less hard work is, until you're able to reach the pinnacle of doing absolutely nothing but managing your money and taking advantage of discounted cap gains taxes. I grew up rich with every opportunity and never had one of these jobs, but it's clear as day.
To get more money you have to pry it from people's hands. You have to have something they can't resist not paying you for. That's it.
The suffering of low minimum wage is supposed to "encourage" people to move up the value chain, as the conservative doctrine goes, but it just doesn't work when all your time and energy is spent surviving.
Honestly, I only made it out (I was probabbly not going to make it through college due to all the work and my own personality when I was young was NOT ready for college) because I got lucky, had some mild technical skills and the .com era came along and companies wanted warm bodies.
I picked some aged old company and they hired me. That company stuck around for a long enough time to establish a career.
Working pizza ... could easily have kept me down due to that and other challenges.
This is a damn good point. Whenever my friends, or kids of my friends, start talking about taking some foodservice or other really hard, low-paying job, I roundly encourage them to avoid it if remotely practical and build marketable skills and connections instead.
Another bad thing about those types of jobs is that they can start to warp your mind after a while, to the effect that you start unconsciously considering your superiors / managers as role models, and start trying to 'move up the ladder' because the pay is marginally better, when in reality most of the time the _top_ of the "ladder" at such organizations are compensated less than entry-level positions for in-demand skilled workers --
I've been continuously employed [out of what I _thought_ was necessity] since I was 16, and until I was about 26 the majority of my jobs were in the foodservice / warehouse / gofer / etc hard-work-long-hours-very-low-pay category. If I had to do over again, I would have stayed away from those situations by any means available and used that time to build valuable skills [as I later did], which would almost certainly have resulted in better outcomes, sooner.
>There is no bigger lie than hard work = prosperity. It is literally the exact opposite.
Hard work leads to prosperity.
That's not the same as equating prosperity to hard work.
Most prosperous people achieved prosperity due to earlier hard work and sacrifice of themselves (or their immediate ancestors.)
Clearly, the 'value chain', as you put it, exists as evidenced by the numerous posts on this thread of describing the previous fast-food-type jobs they held that led them to more 'prosperous' positions (at least, affording enough prosperity to spend time posting messages to the internet instead of digging ditches or flipping burgers.)
The problem with this discussion is the definition of "hard". Is pushing a rock up and down a mountain easier or harder than getting a degree in computers? For me it's the former, studying cool stuff in cafes seems "easier".
It's odd how the same people who are prone to excuse criminals on the basis of the criminal's poverty, so frequently accuse rich people of having obtained their wealth through illicit means.
Eh not really. The idea that stealing because you need to in order to eat/have a place to sleep being a lesser crime than stealing to be wealthy makes a lot of sense to me.
By this logic, dead end jobs that do not lead to prosperity, should be among the easiest ones. No one has ever said, "I don't want to have to work hard, so I'm going to go into retail."
At least for me, the one retail sales associate job I had wasn't terribly difficult or stressful except the week before Christmas and Black Friday. And on those days I was so busy that it was always over before I realized it. If I got paid as much as I do now to go back to that I would probably switch jobs to that again.
Every single office job I've had, except my first (which was a data entry job, not programming), has been a lot more stressful a lot more often, and I'm including the job where the first thing my coworkers and I did each morning was play a video game to determine who was going to go pick up coffee (Carcassonne on Xbox Live Arcade, if you're curious, took about 20 minutes).
The best predictor of income, more then academic performance, more then having married parents or educated parents or going to pre school, is parental wealth.
And this is true whether your folks won the lottery or earned their money through hard work.
hard work = prosperity, I don't think I have ever seen or heard that without further advice or instruction. Hard work is only one component toward advancement. You have to have a plan to advance and make good choices as well.
>I often work with people who have never worked such jobs. They're upset that they're 'overworked' and spend their time in the fancy break room with all the perks. Many I suspect have no clue.
Not that it's a realistic idea but damn if everyone had experiencing working in the demanding, underpaid, crappy jobs in the service industry, we might be more empathetic and better off as a whole.
I’ve always thought that working in a retail/fastfood/service job of some kind should be a necessary requirement for graduating from childhood to adulthood.
You learn a lot of little things you can do to make the cashier's job easier.
My local store had a good sale on 12-packs of soda and so I decided to stock up with a dozen packs (I like a variety). I loaded them into my cart upside-down so the barcodes were facing up. The cashier just had to take the hand scanner and zap each one super easy and didn't have to lift any of them. It saved both of us time and effort and the cashier was extremely appreciative.
I'm not so sure about that. I worked in a takeout place for a few years, and it just made me a lot more cynical. the privileged and the poor seem to enjoy abusing service workers at about the same rate in my experience.
> the privileged and the poor seem to enjoy abusing service workers at about the same rate in my experience.
Agreed. When I worked retail and waiting jobs, I got grief from both out-of-touch wealthy people, and bitter poor people (although there were also kind people from both of those categories).
Myself, and I suspect most people, I got grief from everyone.
Poor.
Middle Class.
Wealthy.
Those with accents.
Those without accents.
White.
Black.
Tall.
Short.
You name it. It's brutal if you have to work such jobs for a long time. (Like say, throughout high school and college.) A lot of people out there turn terrible as soon as they interact someone of lower status providing them a service. Even if you never make a mistake, you can't escape it. I remember a girl spilled a drink on the dress of some woman. Apparently the table was already bad, and it turned worse. Manager made me take the table. (Not proud about it, but I was the best doormat he had.) I don't even remember the rest of the night, but I remember that table. Remember every face. They didn't even look like bad people either. That's what was so surprising. Man, that has stayed with me.
So if you only got grief from a few people, then you should thank your lucky stars. You got off easy.
Please re-read my comment, because your response came across quite poorly. I didn't say I only got grief from a few people (quite the contrary!). Clearly you read into it what you wanted. Here's the gist of your response, without knowing anything about me or my background:
- "you were lucky."
- "thank your lucky stars"
- "You got off easy"
- "It's brutal if you have to work such jobs for a long time"
I worked retail, bused tables, and waited for almost 3 years full-time, and I'm certainly not claiming to have only gotten grief from a few people. I never said anything even remotely close to "few people" in my comment. I suggested that there was a trend to the people I got grief from, in agreement to the GP comment. Note: a trend, not an absolute cut-off.
In addition to the comment I was responding to, there are other comments in this thread making similar assertions, so I'm not the outlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717225
interestingly, I did identify one group of people who were consistently great customers. every construction worker who walked through the door treated us with respect and always tipped, even for carry-out. not sure why exactly, but I appreciated it.
I agree wholeheartedly with this. Everybody needs a &^%$ job once in a while to reset their empathy scale.
Walmart does something interesting for their software development process. Say a developer is working on a warehouse automation system -- that dev. is then trained and works in the warehouse for a month. Same goes for checkout/cashier, or customer service, or whatever. You WORK that job for a month and you'll understand just how trying it can be to struggle with lousy software on top of a sometimes difficult public. You'll know the trouble spots and the workarounds, and can take that education back to a nice safe quiet desk where you can then go on to help solve the problems.
I work on software for datacenter server technicians and try and spend a week every quarter on the floor doing their job, honestly find it one of the most enjoyably aspects to my role
...and imagine if the moonlighting software devs were only getting paid what the warehouse workers were receiving, instead of their normal developer pay.. the work becomes a lot "harder" / more thankless when your pay is 1/3 or 1/4 as much.
Add on the stress of wondering where your next meal is coming from, or how you're going to pay rent this month... every day, for the rest of your life, and your quality of life sinks dramatically.
Yeah this stuff literally changes your life in pretty much every aspect. I have personally observed the shift in peoples' way of living and thinking as they move from one financial situation to another, whether upward or downward. I try to regularly reflect on my situation and recognize how comparatively lucky I am to be in the position I am in, and how it's never "set in stone".
I've been in a weird variant of that for 16 years: I've had crippling anxiety that today might be the day that my computer dies. Try as I might, I cannot shake it - because it's not an irrational fear.
I simply look at eBay and see the $200-$400 price tags to replace my current machine (10-year old ThinkPad T400) and try not to cry. (This one was given to me by a friend)
I found an 800MHz AMD Duron with 128MB RAM on the side of the road in 2013. Browsing the web on that box was fun, even after maxing out the RAM with everything in the house and getting it up to 320MB.
In 2005 I was running a 66MHz 486DX2 with 8MB of free diskspace (oh and 4MB RAM).
The outlier was the Pentium 4 I used for a bit in 2006 - it had a crippled motherboard that couldn't do DMA to the HDD, only PIO, so the cursor would freeze if anything was accessing the HDD even for a fraction of a second. This was the Firefox 2.x era, so with 512MB of RAM I was mostly staring at "Task Manager (Not Responding)" instead of doing anything useful.
My point with all this: it has taken me about 20 years to realize that my general lack of success at mastering computer science wasn't entirely due to the learning difficulties and other mental health issues preventing me from holding down a traditional job - it was access to sane equipment.
I have had the ABSOLUTE HARDEST TIME EVER (emphasis appropriate and necessary) to FORCE myself to do ANYTHING with computers beyond what I'd describe "theoretical learning". "But what if I start this project and the computer dies tomorrow?????" is what a part of my head sort of screams/cries out anytime I have a new idea (with that many anxious questionmarks).
Unresolvable problem, currently. And an interesting one, too, since if I _could_ start a project, and hold it together, I might actually be able to get somewhere and move up.
...Except for the fact that the disability support I'm currently eligible for only recognizes casual/part time work payment structures, not bulk post-payment consulting/bug-bounty up-front types of remuneration, which is the type of thing I have any confidence in my abilities with. (Since I can cram and do the work in a sprint, then run away and have a break for a million years afterwards.)
So yeah, I am practically disabled because of how my mental health issues are classified, not directly because of the issues themselves (which have an impact but do leave me with some level of functionality which I am unable to effectively use).
I did it in my first engineering job (mechanical) I would take training on all the manufacturing methods riveting, soldering, wire tracing. I was lucky that my group didn't want to train but we had a group average to hit, so I got to do all of it.
This is an excellent policy. I think people should also be forced to live in a dangerous ghetto before voting to take away my guns and capital punishment. I wasn’t a staunch supporter of either of those things until I had experience with situations that they are relevant to.
Wanting guns to protect yourself with seems like a position that could come from this experience. Why capital punishment? IIRC it hasn't been shown to reduce crimes of passion, and there are other ways to keep dangerous people off the street, so I don't see how it follows. I'm not fundamentally opposed to capital punishment (though I recognise that it's more expensive than life in prison given the current system), I just don't see how it relates to living in a shitty area. I have lived in neighborhoods where I was accosted by strangers on a fairly regular basis, and those experiences have made me glad to own a firearm, but they haven't moved my views on capital punishment in either direction.
That's a great idea. Buffer, the social media automation tool, does (or did) something similar. IIRC, every new employee spent a week doing customer support. Doing customer support work is a really good way to figure out customers issues & pain points very quickly.
I think this is a phenomenal idea. The last project I worked on was designed to look good in a demo or on mocks but not really to be usable.
I was constantly asking our designers and PMs to try using our product as a user might. I'd write up little scenarios that I knew our users struggled with and invite people to try them out with our product.
Sadly, I found it impossible to persuade anybody to design for anything except what looks good on a presentation of UX mocks.
I begged to job shadow the future users of my software at my last job and I was told there not enough time.We are all too busy. Keep your head down. Do what you're told.
But I'll be able to understand their job better and what the software really needs to do to make than more efficient and productive. They'll appreciate that and be more likely to buy in and adapt to the product they'll be using.
That's not your job. Your job is to implement the features you're told to implement.
But the users saw those features and said that is not what they asked for.
So? Why do you care if the project fails? It's not on you if it fails. Just do what the BA's said to do.
Boss, they aren't translating the business needs correctly. We have to rebuild features 2 or 3 or 4 times. Is we could see what they do and talk to them it'd only take once. That's happened a couple times during user acceptance. They said that's not what what we asked for. I said what did you ask for? I coded it right there on the spot and they signed off on the user story.
Go back to work. I'm busy. This isn't a productive conversation.
Definitely a good idea. Apparently some of the top architecture schools do this as well. They'll make students cook for everyone in a kitchen for a couple of weeks with the assumption that you won't be able to design a kitchen if you haven't really worked in one.
Recently I had to try to do a task using our software because the person that normally uses it was not available. The process sucked and I quickly made changes to make it much more useable. The person was nearly in tears after trying my fixes. I asked the person why they never said anything and they said they thought it would be too hard to fix (it wasn't) and that I always seemed busy so they didn't want to bother me.
Working a shit job only produces empathy if the external consequences are similar: no savings, no disposable income, poverty, etc. You don’t need that extreme to have high empathy, such as understanding context and limitations. Some people just aren’t good at empathy and even that scenario wouldn’t help. This is also complicated in that many people cannot differentiate empathy from sympathy.
> Everybody needs a &^%$ job once in a while to reset their empathy scale.
Imho that's trying to solve a symptom, not the actual problem.
Why does society tolerate &^%$ jobs in the first place? Why not strive to make jobs non-&^%$?
Instead, it somehow has become completely normalized that these kinds of jobs exist, and anybody who doesn't want to work them is considered "too entitled", which all goes back to this notion of "work as a virtue".
And while the idea that this experience might help change something from the desk job, the reality is most people will just be glad to be having their desk job, with a lot having a mindset of "I went through the &^%$ jobs to get here, everybody else should have to suffer like I did!".
It's pretty obvious that @freeflight mean these jobs don't necessarily have to be shit.
They can be low / lower pay and still be a fairly reasonable place to work with fairly reasonable people to work with.
But, if we accept that work conditions fit some kind of natural distribution / bell curve, it's probably unrealistic to believe there will be no shit jobs.
> Why does society tolerate &^%$ jobs in the first place? Why not strive to make jobs non-&^%$?
We do strive, which is why we have non-shit jobs now. After the advent of agriculture, overwhelming majority of people has worked mundane, tiring, repetitive and straining jobs. It’s only recent increases in technology allowed us to produce immense amounts of wealth, finally allowing huge swaths of population to enjoy light, interesting and fun jobs. We still have lots of shit jobs out there, but don’t worry, we’re working on that.
We should pay the most for those jobs. Instead those who move money from this account to that account our convince people to spend more money than they need to make the most. Fake work.
As radical as this sounds, there might actually be something to it.
Service and social jobs are usually those "closest to the base", being in constant contact with people from all walks of life, while at the same time usually the least well paid.
That's a lot of exposure compared to many other jobs, in particular, desk jobs and pretty much most management and executive positions.
Imho the importance of such real in flesh contact to other people, across peer groups, is vastly underestimated these days.
The ever-present social media gives digitally affine people often the misleading idea they can find everybody, with all their issues and opinions, online but from my experience that just holds not true.
There's plenty of people out there that don't even know what Facebook is, as unbelievable as that might sound.
Hypothesis: McDonald's pays brilliant automation or engineering type minds to do difficult to automate work like we are discussing here. Big salaries. Only part time. The other half is spent on the engineering. Make these jobs sought after.
Slowly the org transitions to much higher paid people in these roles across the board.
I think part of it is mgmt types think they save money reducing wages for the most numerous type of employee and it creates a black hole race to the bottom.
High end restaurants have very well paid front of house because they have a financial incentive to perform. Cashiers don't.
They were saying that people complaining about their good job and how they were overworked had never worked a shit job. If you eliminate the shit jobs, people will still complain.
Because society has evolved to consider the economic aspirations of people who own stuff to be a higher order virtue than liberty or the public welfare.
By some definitions I would consider subsistence farming a much more meaningful job than what tens of millions of Americans are doing now - middle management, financial advisory, advertising, bureaucracy (medical, managerial, political, regulatory, etc), legal discovery, data entry, tax accountants (which only exist because Turbotax bribes the government to keep taxes broken), and many more.
There are tons and tons of bullshit jobs that don't produce anything valuable, don't fulfill anyones need to have a meaningful life, but somehow keep butts in seats often at keyboards getting paid to justify someone elses jobs existence.
There is a reason why job satisfaction is abysmal, why depression and opioid abuse is rampant, and why those weren't as large problems two centuries ago when people were almost universally subsistence farmers. The labor wasn't easy but it always justified itself to those doing the work (assuming it was your own farm, growing your own food, which was and has always been pretty rare). You knew why it had to be done, something lacking in many modern careers.
This is where there's a kind of evolutionary gap that comes into play. Sitting in front of a screen for 40+ hours a week, and spending additional time at the screen for recreation doesn't seem conducive to good mental or physical health.
Shit jobs aren't synonymous to menial jobs. Shit jobs are ones where you suffer physically and mentally, and that suffering usually has little to do with actual job responsibilities, and more with a shitty boss (manager or entrepreneur) treating you like a consumable and trying to optimize you.
E.g. flipping burgers at McDonald's isn't a shitty job because you're flipping burgers; it's a shitty job because you are paid badly, made to work much faster than it's healthy, and the management is shitty to you both personally and structurally, in how they plan the shifts, etc.
I'd argue that any shitty job could have a non-shitty variant with mostly the same tasks and responsibilities, and only the conditions changed. Which leads me to the answer to your question: anywhere between invention of agriculture and the industrial revolution, or perhaps even up to XIX century. Even when people toiled on farms, to then give most of it away to some nobles with swords, at least they weren't micromanaged day-in, day-out by said nobles.
The uncomfortable truth here is that foodservice/retail managers are also relatively low paid low skilled jobs and therefore have a tendency towards being populated by people without the skills to humanely manage their employees and employer.
One step up, the corporate managers putting the pressure on the local managers are themselves pressured by market conditions to cut cost and drive efficiency. And who drives those market conditions? You and I, my friend. We like cheap stuff. The consequence is that others suffer.
That's why I don't believe unregulated markets are be-all and end-all. These feedback loops are stronger than any one of us, the lowly worker and the lofty manager alike, they'll eventually grind us all to dust if we let them. Brakes must be put, because humans can't survive a perfectly efficient economy.
Menial or low skilled work doesn’t have to be a “shit job”. They are that way because society allows them to be.
I worked on a farm throwing hay. It’s literally backbreaking work, but I had an awesome employer who thought about safety and making for a better workplace. If Amazon were running that farm, I’d be crippled by debilitating pain today.
You can tell who was born with a silver spoon in their mouth by their response to this. The "why can't we just make all jobs great forever" responses crack me up. It's classic virtue signalling by liberal elites: demand that life be a perfect fantasy land for everyone, then put forward zero realistic proposals to achieve it. Doesn't matter that it will never happen because you've already gained your social capital with your circle of people who think and act just like you.
It seems to me like it used to be a lot more common for people to take up a "shitty" (e.g., low paying, menial, and hard) job when they were young, to help pay their way through school, for some extra pocket money, etc. You would do this during the summers, or part-time, or both. This was just considered an ordinary part of life and a character building experience.
It seems like this experience is a lot less common now. In part because we're coddling our children and our young adults (hard work increasingly seems to be a dirty word and something no one should ever have to do), in part because we're handing off all the worst jobs to illegal immigrant labor.
I'm sure this will prompt some "ok boomer" type responses (I'm not that old btw) but that's just how it was when and where I grew up. I was expected to work and make money as soon as I was able, because my family wasn't rich. They were also super clear with me that there was no free rent after I turned 18, and that if I wanted to go to college I needed to pay for it myself. So this fantasy land "we'll have only perfect jobs for everyone and work will always be a fulfilling endeavor" crap does not connect with me and I suspect does not connect with 90% of Americans. It is popular with techno-fantasists who went to Stanford and work in SV and drink the kool-aid from their employer about how they are changing the world by optimizing the profitability of some billionaire's advertising inventory.
(None of this is to suggest that Cierra Brown's situation is fine and we don't need to change anything about the system btw! Biggest practical issues I saw in that article were that she doesn't have healthcare and she walks away from 2 weeks of work with only $215, something is very wrong there.)
It is funny that the dog whistle for conservatism these days are the immigrants whom are supposedly taking peoples jobs.
When the Reagan administration changed the regulations around meatpacking to break the unions and ship the industry back to 1910 standards to rural places, none of the principled conservatives were complaining about cheap meat packing and illegal workers who didn’t collect workers compensation or have pesky demands for health insurance.
Likewise, none of the large apple growers around me were too concerned about guest worker visas when they were able to hire on Jamaicans for a few months, house them in onsite dormitories and pay below market rates. They love to bitch about Mexican construction guys though.
When I worked in the mall in the 90s, the struggle of unskilled workers was obvious and sad. At that time, most workers made $4.25, and the barrier to moving up for folks not in college was a car. Getting a $12/hr job as a line cook at Pizza Uno or $15/hr job cleaning offices meant freedom for those people.
If labor standards didn’t allow the abysmal working conditions that only desperate Latin American or other immigrants are willing to take, the market would take care of that problem. Instead of shipping in Apple pickers from 4,000 miles away, you could hire folks 10 miles away and bus them in.
> It is funny that the dog whistle for conservatism these days are the immigrants whom are supposedly taking peoples jobs.
You have this backwards. My point wasn't that immigrants are taking American jobs, it was that Americans are giving them these jobs because Americans are being lazy, soft and cheap.
The immigrant is not at fault. It seems like you're responding to Fox News talking points, not to me. I would suggest doing that on foxnews.com.
At no point did I suggest that better labor standards are a bad idea, but I did observe that anyone who thinks society will eliminate all the jobs Hacker News perceives as shitty is drinking a lot of kool-aid.
> You have this backwards. My point wasn't that immigrants are taking American jobs, it was that Americans are giving them these jobs because Americans are being lazy, soft and cheap.
Don't blame the American who doesn't want to do back-breaking work for pennies. It's the same everywhere: for example, Finland imports seasonal berry pickers from Thailand.
No sane local wants to work on the rates the market is willing to pay; mechanised agriculture has pushed the prices low enough to make manual agricultural work simply unsustainable. To make local work profitable we'd need to radically raise the product prices or provide subsidies.
To the extent that America is still a representative democracy, Americans are responsible for importing workers who have limited rights and no representation (they can't vote, they can't contact law enforcement for help, etc).
These problems can be solved in other ways. A real world solution probably involves some workers getting paid less than they would like, and some businesses paying higher wages than they want to.
The least moral solution is to develop an illegal underclass and deny them human and political rights. This sort of thing is cancerous for a democracy and bears an unsettling resemblance to one of America's original sins, one which I'm sure I don't need to name directly, but which we knew was wrong from day one, and which we spent a lot of blood and treasure to abolish.
On this I agree. In Finland the seasonal workers do have strong protections, and recently some witnesses were flown in from Thailand to testify in a court case against one of the exploiting employers. The rules and regulations are thankfully strong and enforced in most of Europe; they definitely can contact the police.
I'm not sure how to react to cases where this is true but the seasonal workers still see it as a good source of income. Would the market bear the increased cost? Likely not. Avocados would be imported in the US, and in Finland berries would disappear as an industry ingredient as there are no low-cost countries with climate suitable for cultivation.
I'm suspecting that you're picking up the wrong attitude here. We're not saying that all jobs should be chill and easy and "great forever". We're saying that they should be compensated properly. As a CS engineer, I'm fine with my salary being close to that of a less educated person, if his job is really hard and physically taxing.
You might be disappointed. Sometimes the least sympathetic people are the ones that have been there before. Shared experiences don't necessarily translate into compassion.
It is the hazing mentality. "I had to survive through it and so should you." In the end, some people are just unsympathetic assholes regardless of their experience.
As someone who spent years working service jobs, it's more like - I know that you don't have to be an incompetent asshole just because you're running a cash register or whatever.
I bring this up often with friends. I believe everyone should have to work a food service/retail job. It puts a lot of things in perspective. I feel like I am a better human, having worked many.
Fewer jobs for teens, fewer parents willing to 'allow' their kids to take a part-time job rather than participate in that additional extracurricular to give them a "leg up" in college admissions, school that's too expensive to afford on a part time income, all probably creates a feedback loop here. Nobody wants their kid working a crap job for life, so they do everything they can to keep them from that life, including any opportunity to even have a taste of it.
This could be part of highschool. Large swathes of content are ultimately useless and forgotten, there's room to force an off campus job at a dominoes or elsewhere. The main downside would be that these students would be competing against people who actually need the money.
On the other hand Sony Japan apparently has a policy where new employees fresh out of college (vs employees with previous work experience) are made to work 2 weeks in retail at an electronic store to get a taste of what it's like for actual customers. I ask some employees if they got any thing useful out of the experience. Most said no, it was just like getting hazed.
Perhaps you have some interesting friends, but to me this sounds like it is based in no real-life experience.
It's a very stressful job for little reward that leaves you completely depleted at the end of the day to do anything to dig yourself out.
From their perspective, my job is the stressful job. Sure that physically my job is easy but to them my job is stressful because it requires a lot of thinking, not to mention a lot of learning and studying. Its a different kind of stress.
Plenty of people have no desire to apply creative thought or take further responsibility at their workplace. My best friend's boyfriend, for example. Has a university degree, works at a gas station. Was a manager at that gas station, didn't enjoy it, went back to being a team member. Leaves his work at work, checks off the boxes on the checklist while he's there.
He does have the relative security that comes with having a long term partner that does make a professional salary, but I don't think that diminishes the motivational piece. Not everyone is as ambitious as every one else. Of those that are, not everyone's ambition is pointed in the same direction. Some people just want to rock up at work for 8 hours a day, go home, watch some shit TV that they enjoy and then go to bed. Frankly, that's ok. There's not enough programmer/marketing professional/CEO/Founder roles for everyone to have them.
Having worked several years in both retail and waiting/busing tables (full-time, not just as a part-time college job), I have a great deal of empathy for folks stuck in these minimum wage jobs.
That said, if I could get a retail job that paid what I make as a dev, I’d definitely consider it. Retail was grueling, but at the same time much less psychological pressure, and much less mentally exhausting.
I always say I’m not going to let my next dev job take over my life, and maintain work/life balance, and things always start out well. But inevitably, pressure builds, I cave, and things get bad again. I realize that I share the blame for this situation, but at the same time, this situation seems to be more common than not among software devs.
I never faced this kind of pressure in retail jobs. Work was grueling and at time abusive, but when the work day was over, I was 100% able to relax and forget about work. I struggle to do that with a software job.
But at the same time, my compensation is considerably higher than most other jobs. So I’m both grateful for my job and yet still wish there were another way. Like a part-time software development job, which seem to be unusually rare.
I share this view myself, neat to see someone else feels the same way.
I'm a CS student and I've been working at a Panera for about a year now. I love my particular store and the work environment is great; I genuinely look forward to going to work every day. I'll miss my coworkers when I have to quit soon to start my programming career.
That being said, I understand why those jobs could never realistically pay anything near what a good software dev job can. If you could make the same amount of money working a job like that, why would anyone put in the effort to get stressed out as a programmer? It wouldn't make sense.
The solution is to fix dev jobs so they're more balanced and less stressful :)
I work in cybersecurity now, but worked retail for 7 years, fast food (Subway) for 6 years, and a ride op at a major theme park (Cedar Point) for 2 summers.
If I could work the ride op or fast food jobs at my current salary, I'd take them in a heart beat. Hell, I might even take the ride op job for half the salary because the job could sometimes be a lot of fun.
But retail? Hell no. You could offer me double my salary and I'd still hesitate before accepting it. People treat retail employees like utter garbage. We once had a customer berate a cashier to tears, yelling at her and literally calling her an "incompetent stupid bitch", because his credit card was being declined and he was insisting she was just entering his card wrong.
I worked for a mom and pop hot dog/Italian beef joint in the Chicago suburbs in the 90s and that’s exactly what it was. A totally un-PC Italian family that didn’t take any shit and insisted you didn’t take any shit either.
It seems like the struggle for people in these jobs is mostly around the consistency in hours, and the miserly low pay. Both of which are deliberate choices by the firms that employ them.
To some degree, serving the "customer" by cutting labour costs to the bare minimum (as a way to minimize the cost of everything), means we create an awful existence for the people who depend on these jobs for a living. The tyranny of their lives is dictated by a consumer base who constantly demand lower prices and will shop elsewhere to save a dollar or two.
I worked in a supermarket for four years, but it was part time, while I was in High School and in my first year of University. I didn't need the money in the way someone working full time needed it. I was given consistent hours every week.
Working retail for a modest wage (say $25 an hour), with consistent hours would be a really great career for a huge swathe of the population. Lots of people (myself included) enjoy interacting with people all day.
A lot of more traditional professions have a better balance between physical work and mental work (skilled crafts, engineering in the traditional sense, or being a doctor all come to mind). Modern knowledge work doesn't have enough physical movement involved.
I wouldn't like to do it full time, but sometimes I wish I could spend 20% of my time doing something enjoyable but menial like stacking shelves. I think I'd hate doing it full time, but one day a week? Practically sounds like fun!
* not having to cut labor to the minimum as a basic value
* sooo many jobs would be unobjectionable at 8 hours per week. Almost any job.
* professions should be designed to balance physical and mental labor, particularly to offer breaks from painful standing.
I am not with you on:
* Giving people 167% of the average hourly wage for an easy job like retail. As a society, we do not _want_ retail to be a great career. You don't develop the job skills or provide the same value as jobs that are more challenging, and the more valuable things you could have produced are lost. Retail should pay less than other jobs, _because_ it's more fun to interact with people all day than to work at a hot grill.
I'm not advocating for any specific policy change (although I think minimum wage should be raised and indexed to inflation), but rather am talking about cultural changes that need to be addressed.
Broadly, as a society, we want people to have jobs that pay them enough to survive, and with enough margin to do other stuff. Not everything can (or should) tie back to economic value. Otherwise we end up cutting off our noses to spite our own faces, as we focus on the short term rather than the long term health of a wider community.
More than anything, we want to reward diligence, professionalism and effort, in whatever form that might take.
I'm increasingly of the view that we should have brakes on economic efficiency. The basic human values - friendliness, compassion, fairness, kindness, justice - they all wither and die when a business gets too efficient. They get optimized away in pursuit of that little extra margin.
Part of the reason software jobs are nice and comfortable is of course the pay and the agency, both coming from demand exceeding supply. But a big part of it is also, IMO, that it's impossible to tell how much contribution to the bottomline a developer has on a day-to-day, or hour-to-hour basis. When my coworker and I start talking shit on the job, does that contribute positively or negatively to the ultimate productivity? By how much? Nobody can tell, which is why we can get away with it.
Conversely, in retail or fast-food joints, you can track people's contribution to the bottom line at minute resolution. Which is why they're being treated like slave labor.
A poverty wage like the one company's pay many people keeps people trapped in jobs like cashier at mcdonalds.
When you are that poor, you need every hour of work you can get to make rent, buy food etc. You can't take time off to interview for a better job, or to study for a new career. You are stressed from a thousand extra decisions about money that the cushion of a little extra cash could save you. Also you are one emergency or injury or illness away from losing your apartment, or going hungry.
That's why advocates call for a living wage, a wage that people can make enough to live on. If they have the capability to do more, then that gives them a better chance to achieve it.
Though there will still need to be people working retail.
As for how fun it is to interact with people... that definitely depends on who you are and who you are interacting with. If you know someone working retail, ask them how it is.
100%. One of the things you that happens when you have an emergency fund is that emergencies don't happen so often. This isn't the case when you're trying to get $3.50 to last till payday.
Actually, we do want retail to be a great career. Lots of great careers pay little: Pre-K teachers usually make just over minimum wage in the US, despite needing a 2-year degree to do the job. But it is rewarding and fufilling.
And everyone needs to shop. Retail isn't just interacting with people all day: You are filing shelves. Sometimes you are a pharmacist or a pharmacy tech. Sometimes you are doing payroll or managing. Sometimes you are ordering product.
You are also cleaning up the shit someone smeared on the wall of the bathroom and the puke the kid left in the isle. There is no real way around that.
Not everyone thinks it is more fun to interact with people all day long. I'd argue that most factory work - lots of which is paid fairly well, comparatively - takes no more intelligence or training or knowledge than retail. In both, once you have experience, you can get another job. Same for call centers... which again, are usually paid better than retail or fast food (yet still treated poorly). I don't know why retail should pay less than these sorts of jobs. Most folks just wind up with retail jobs because that's what they started with and it is hard to get out of the cycle.
I do want retail to be rewarding and fulfilling, just not a smart career move that makes you lots of money. I want ambitious, motivated people becoming my coworkers and bosses, not doing retail for fun.
I don't like interacting with people but it is way more cushy than the factory work I did for fifteen years. I guess you're right about not taking more intelligence or training, but it takes so much more physical stamina and risk of accident.
No, it doesn't take more or less physical stamina. Like factory work, it varies depending on location and the job for the day. Factory work is hardly ambitious either - most folks know that is a dead end job that isn't going to go anywhere. I've found more chances for this stuff in retail.
Most folks don't do retail for fun. Those that do will also do a number of other part-time jobs for fun or whatever reason. Most folks working retail, though, are doing it to eat and pay rent. Sometimes having a flexible schedule is necessary. A great number of places have chances to move into management, sometimes moving out of poverty wages.
None of this means the folks aren't ambitious or motivated. You simply don't recognise it as such because they are doing what you consider to be a "lower" job or not doing enough to meet your personal criteria.
I didn't work in an assembly-line kind of factory, I worked in light manufacturing. That builds a ton of interpersonal and "conflict-with-reality" type skills, such as disagreements over quality and wrangling cranky machines. Retail was not nearly as challenging.
I will grant you that selling garden soil might be as physically demanding as working in a factory, and miles walked could add up too. But I never woke up in retail wondering if I'd be physically able to continue working my job much longer because of the wear and tear.
There's a reason every rich country got there by manufacturing and not retail, and in part it's that you don't build human capital by sitting in a chair scanning price tags. Manufacturing productivity increases steadily so workers have to become steadily more skillful to keep up. It's also far from a dead-end job, as productivity is easily measured and the cream can rise.
People in retail can be ambitious and talented, but their talents are wasted there. We can't get every ambitious, motivated person out of retail and into the job where they would do the most good just by offering them money, because money isn't everything. But we can avoid screwing things up by _pushing_ those people into jobs where their talents are wasted, by offering them too much money. I've worked lots of mandatory overtime because people wouldn't come work for my employer, so I feel the pain of jobs that need good people but can't get them.
> ...an easy job like retail....Retail should pay less than other jobs, _because_ it's more fun to interact with people all day than to work at a hot grill.
Your response screams, "I've never worked a retail job in my life!!". There's nothing easy about working retail in the United States, and interacting with the majority of retail customers is far from "fun".
My favorite job ever was when I made glasses at LensCrafters. So much so I’ve considered leaving my software job and going back. It was like stacking shelves but just a bit more involved and pretty interesting. Most prescriptions you can just knock out in your sleep but you also get some unusual ones that take more thought. You’d get in a zen like groove and next thing you know your shift is over. Paid better than traditional retail to boot.
working in heat, whether from ovens/fryer, engines, or something else is so incredibly draining that its hard for people to understand unless they've done it.
At the end of the day you just want a room temperature shower and a cold drink, the mental capacity isn't really there for much else.
This is why I feel so much for those building the stadiums for the next football(/soccer) world cup. What's even worse is they're being worked to death as slaves in all but name.
If you don't have enough downtime/nutrition to recover between shifts you slowly fall apart.
I worked as a welder in a shipyard for a couple of years after the .com crash.
No complaints, I actually enjoyed the work, but it was exhausting in a way that no office job can compare.
The experience also makes me want to throttle folks who have never lifted anything heavier than a pen as I hear them whine about utter trivial things.
I don't, because it is considered rude to throttle one's co-workers.
Can we stop acting like work is a competition? People with shittier jobs don’t have a monopoly on complaining. Otherwise, I could say “oh yeah? What about people who worked with asbestos and died? You think welding is hard? What about dying from lung cancer, HMMM?”
Just because your work isn’t as grueling as someone else’s doesn’t mean you don’t get to be unhappy or dissatisfied with it.
That's not the point I'm after. I liked my welding job. A lot, actually. I never felt it was a 'shitty job'. But I also like not dying by industrial accident or poisoning my body with metal fume. And the stresses of a career in tech are much more tolerable when you have other work to compare it to.
Having a wider perspective leads to a greater appreciation for what one has, after all. And that is a good thing.
My first job was working in a supermarket, on the register and collecting the trolleys. You got a break roughly 90-120 minutes. You REALLY miss one / notice when you're running late.
Now I work in an office. It's nothing to go 4-6 hours without stopping. But of course I can stop and pop out for a coffee or a snack, or lunch whenever I want.
$4 extra an hour would change this woman's life (and a lot of other people like her). $4 extra an hour.. I don't think I'd notice it.
Many of us are SO SO fortunate, we can't even begin to imagine how good we have it.
When I was 14 I worked as a busboy at a BBQ place. For like 2 weeks, before they found out I was underaged and fired me. I was never so exhausted in my entire life, before or after. And I was a strong swimmer when I started that job, and was quite fit.
I worked at gas stations after that, before college, and while it was tiring, nothing at the same level.
I can totally imagine a pizza job would be draining.
I think this is the biggest problem America has as a country now. People dying in the streets due to lack of healthcare/homelessness, and being stuck delivering pizza with no real routes to get out other than to “learn to code”...
Agreed. Plus so many opportunities for people bypass the working poor. Sure, a full time bootcamp might be tuition free or offer a scholarship, but it doesn't pay rent or buy food.
This is exactly my thoughts when I hear people complaining that they pay more tax as high earners because they're "worked hard" for the money and to get there.
Hard work is relative and people are working very hard at all salary levels. There are many other constructs which are the true reasons behind how much people earn.
I started my career working the night shift stocking shelves at Home Depot and riding the bus. I now own a 180 full time employee agency and am on the other side. The solution here must come from the government... McDonald's and no other single employer can raise wages as their competitors will not and they will go out of business due to being too expensive.
I agree with the Fight for $15... But I think they need to attach this to inflation or somehow as a percentage of the highest incomes in the economy. Otherwise Trump will just keep pressuring the Fed to print more money and $15 will only be worth $5 in today's money.
This is why I get annoyed when people praise the successes of the economy (aka artificially manipulated stock market) and our low unemployment rate. $9, $10, $11 may be a _survivable_ wage in Durham, SC, but prices and costs of living keep going up, and wages remain stagnant. In real wages this woman is probably bringing home only $6-$7 an hour, effectively making _less_ than she would have in, say, 2005 or 2010. I don't have any charts or tables to back this up, but I sure pay a lot of attention to prices at the grocery store.
Probably under the table. I made $4/Hr in 1988 as a bus boy, etc. The entire kitchen staff, but one, was paid directly from the cash register at the end of the night.
The couple that owned that restaurant sold it for several $M.
Busy restaurant next to an amusement park (Hersheypark). They couldn't keep anyone in the job. I didn't even want it because I was "bad at doing my taxes" and could make more as a busser making $5.50/hour plus cash tips. But they worked out a deal where I would bus tables and do just enough dishes to keep things moving, then when it died down I'd clock in as a dishwasher at the higher rate and close down.
Housing in town I guess was relatively expensive (not as much as now). And it wasn't under the table, though I was responsible for claiming tips and they didn't follow child labor laws. Built a studio with that money!
The people who do ok with these jobs are people with tight nit families who live 12 people to an apartment and share all expenses. For some reason, that kind of living arrangement never works in America. Zoning can cause that to be a problem, but there are other reasons it doesn't work.
I was reading a blog by an American who took a job at a hair cutter in China and 12 people lived in 3 rooms in bunk beds in the back of the store and they never fought. He commented that this living situation would never work in America.
That living situation describes migrant farm workers and day workers across America, probably any industry that use illegal immigrants for most of their labor.
In the old days middle class kids all had real service/manual jobs as teenagers & college students. Its scary that now the new generation has to read about what it is like.
Some of the middle class teenage kids I know would love to have service or manual jobs - earn some cash around school and over the holidays - but those jobs are now occupied by grown adults. It is scary, but not because middle class teenagers miss out on them.
McDonald's was my first job in high school. I took it because I wanted to get away from being slave labor to my parents who owned a liquor store.
I worked there for a year with a rotating cast of characters including those from first generation immigrant /low income backgrounds such as myself. One thing that year taught me? I needed to get into a good college and learn something useful.
Everybody seems to be latching on to the McDonald's part of her story, the author included. But it's the hospital part I find mortifying. McDonald's is pinching pennies left and right, it's their key to success. The hospital is not. How much would you guess they're charging per day for the average patient to stay there? I bet it's enough money to cover full-time employment and benefits for their food service workers.
Hopefully Trump's new federal policy of requiring hospital groups to disclose prices will help answer these questions and put pressure on that industry.
"Hospitals could be fined $300 a day by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services if they don’t comply with the new disclosure rule, officials said."
I find it very interesting that most people assume it should be the employer's responsibility to provide for the employee's wellbeing. Call me naive, but I think it should be society's responsibility. What about Hedge Funds, Technology companies, Law Firms and every other company that hires primarily 6-figure white collar employees. Should they be completely off the hook, just because their business model only requires small numbers of white collar workers? What about yuppies and millionaires who eat at nice restaurants, shop at Whole Foods and cook our own meals, instead of buying from McDonalds. Should we be immune from minimum wage increases just because we can afford to pay for the finer things in life?
Minimum wage laws are fundamentally a tax on low-margin businesses and the low-wage workers who frequent them. There's a better option available. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). It can ensure that workers take home $15/hour, while also ensuring that the cost is borne by the entire society. Not just a few specific industries and the specific demographics that rely on them.
Corporations are a part and a result of our society. The government should not be in the business of subsidizing companies who aren't profitable enough to pay a living wage, it should just mandate a living wage and companies who aren't able to meet it go out of business. 'Creative destruction' and all that.
I don't think access to capital is a mitigating factor. It doesn't really matter why you can't pay a wage that a worker can live on. If you can't do it you should go out of business.
So now people who are trying to make a living with a small business don’t deserve to be in business but tech bro’s who can convince people to invest billions in companies that will probably never be profitable should stay in business?
Especially since we know that most venture funding goes to people who “pattern match” with Zuckerburg not the people who are running small businesses.
Yeah that’s going to make the poor better off while people in tech shake their finger at them - or in other words let them eat cake!
If low margin companies don’t deserve to be in business then why do money losing companies deserve to be in business? What if we made it against the law for public pensions to invest in VC funds or made it illegal for companies that don’t show that they can be profitable to be listed on the public market?
This is whataboutism. Believing that businesses who can’t afford to pay their staff a living wage shouldn’t exist doesn’t entail any position on the issue of unprofitable tech companies.
Why not? Left to their own devices they couldn’t afford to pay their employees anything.
The mom and pop shop can’t get millions of dollars thrown at them because they “pattern match” what a successful founder “looks like” without a business plan. They actually have to be profitable.
Suppose that this was fixed, and tech companies had to be profitable to stay in business, like mom and pop shops. Would that do anything to improve the circumstances of the McDonald’s worker described in this article?
Would it do the worker or the franchise owner (who on average makes between $65K and $150K a year) any good if the company was out of business?
What if capital wasn’t chasing after money losing startups where the VC partners take 20% management fees no matter how badly the fund performs - much of that money coming from public pensions?
Yes, it should be society's responsibility, but until we all accept it as a group the onus remains on employers.
I haven't qualified for the Earned Income Credit in quite a few years, but I have nonetheless claimed it a number of times. I experienced none of the magical properties you seem to think it has.
The only "magical property" I claimed, is cash in your wallet, funded by taxes. I'm not sure what other magical properties you were expecting. My proposal is that instead of increasing the minimum wage, we beef up the amount of support provided by EITC
You suggested that this existing tax credit that we've all been accustomed to since the '70s was a suitable replacement for a decent wage. Completely aside from the SUBSTANTIAL increase in cost it would take to make the numbers fit, what leads you to believe that an annual tax refund is an appropriate substitute for a regular paycheck? Do you expect them all to save it all in a bank account and only spend a set weekly amount? If they were in a financially stable enough position to pull that off, they wouldn't be working at McDonald's.
He stated that it _could_ give workers $15/hour, not that it does. (It maxes out adding a little over $3/hour.)
You can get a Notice of Withholding to get the credit in your paychecks instead of at the end of the year. I don't know how well it works.
It's clearly possible in theory to get $15,000 on April 15 and $15,000 from McDonald's and live the same lifestyle as someone who makes $30,000 from paychecks. I could manage it easily, it's basic consumption smoothing. Should be able to borrow against the credit if necessary, too, since it's guaranteed.
It doesn't have to take the form of an annual tax refund. It could take the form of lower, or negative, paycheck withholdings. The hard part is making sure that people don't end up owing a bunch of money at tax time, of course, because they're not going to have it lying around.
There's a difference between UBI and something like EITC, in that UBI applies to all adults, whether working or not, whereas EITC is explicitly targeted at people who are employed but do not make what one would consider a "living wage" based on their situation (number of kids, etc).
Depending on the structure of the rest of the tax system and on whether the UBI phases out or not, the effective marginal tax rates can also be quite different, though this part can be massaged to make the two options look identical, I suspect.
But the core of the difference is whether employment is explicitly encouraged (EITC) or not (UBI).
A quick google will show you that farm workers are well below the $15/hour goal most progressives are touting.
The argument that "society should carry the cost" is based on your opinion that is in error. Society carries the cost of minimum wage increases because we all have to eat. We all have to patronize low margin businesses to some degree (even if it is indirect).
You can argue the EITC is a better "solution" than a minimum wage but if you are trying to ensure $15/hour for people paid $10/hour, you are really talking a negative income tax or UBI. At which point, you are probably better off supporting those proposals instead of pushing the EITC.
Personally, I'm not a fan of subsidizing low margin businesses that from a Capitalist perspective should probably be allowed to die if their workers can't afford to live on what they pay.
You're right that the "trickle down" effects of minimum wage laws will impact everyone in society to some extent. But it seems like a fairly obvious conclusion that people eating at McDonalds and shopping at Walmart, will be impacted more than someone who only buys premium organic food and spends the majority of his income on other luxuries.
> you are really talking a negative income tax or UBI. At which point, you are probably better off supporting those proposals instead of pushing the EITC.
I do support UBI too but it seems like an extreme stretch to say that is easier to sell than EITC. Especially when you consider that EITC already exists today as a federal law, and UBI does not.
> Personally, I'm not a fan of subsidizing low margin businesses that from a Capitalist perspective should probably be allowed to die if their workers can't afford to live on what they pay.
Allowing McDonalds to hire workers at wages set by supply-and-demand, is the very opposite of a subsidy. Killing off profitable low-margin businesses, will by definition, lower the nation's GDP and tax base. Everyone, especially the workers like the one featured in the article, will be far better off in a world where profitable low-margin businesses aren't killed off by government regulation. It's far more effective to tax McDonalds, as well as every other profitable company, in order to fund the safety net that every citizen deserves.
> I do support UBI too but it seems like an extreme stretch to say that is easier to sell than EITC. Especially when you consider that EITC already exists today as a federal law, and UBI does not.
To do what the person I'm replying to wants, it would be on the scale of UBI/negative income tax. Otherwise, its not the equivalent to $15/hour when they are being paid $10/hour.
So if you aren’t a fan of subsidizing low margin businesses - like the mom and pop shops - are you also not willing to allow public pensions to invest in VC funds that subsidize money losing tech companies?
I think it’s kind of rich that the same people who are probably working for money losing companies backed by VCs think that small low margin businesses owners don’t deserve to make a living.
Low margin businesses fundamentally operate by exploiting low paid workers. What's wrong with making the playing field even by taxing them? The prices of food will go up, but that's okay. We do it here in Australia and nobody is crying over having to pay 12 AUD for McDonald's vs 9 AUD in the US.
You think the countries with minimum wages don't have these mom and pop shops? Hint: I live in such a country, and they're doing just fine. The prices are higher across the board, including the prices they sell their products for. The margin shifts, it doesn't disappear.
Sure, and there's nothing stopping your country from doing the same. I mean healthcare is basically irrelevant since minimum wage workers can't afford to look after health conditions regardless of whether or not they have a job. Regardless, there's no observed correlation between minimum wage and unemployment if that's what you're getting at.
What about all the many years before 2014 that the US unemployment rate was significantly more than almost all of the European countries? Did the lack of minimum wage help in 2010 when the unemployment rate was 10%?
Also, that's a flat out lie. Greece, Spain, and Italy are pulling up the average with their huge unemployment rates, and the vast majority of unemployment rates besides that are almost the same as the US and in some cases lower.
I'm assuming you mean than the US. The Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Malta, Germany and Czech Republic aren't in the EU? Last time I checked they were.
Germany and the Netherlands have some of the highest minimum wages in the world, and yet they have unemployment rates that are lower than the US.
Moreover, your claim was that most of the countries have twice the unemployment rate of the US. Your very own source shows that only 5 of the 28 nations have double or more, and less than half have an unemployment rate 50% greater than the US. Are you going to admit to your lie or are you going to change the story?
Yes according to classical economics it'd result in a decrease in demand. But the reality is that these shops need the workers regardless. Moreover with a minimum wage people have more disposable income to spend at these shops, which can sometimes create more jobs than the increased salary destroyed.
Most studies that have been done on minimum wage found no correlation to unemployment rate. The economics you learned in high school can rarely be applied perfectly to reality. There are plenty of countries with minimum wages with no significantly different unemployment rates in the service industries.
Pretty much all changes in minimum wages are small.
This makes it very hard to measure the effect with any precision. You have to remember that wages are not 100% of the compensation for employees. So if MW increases from $10 to $10:50, fringe benefits may be cut from $2 to $1:50, and you end up with no measurable effect.
> But the reality is that these shops need the workers regardless.
If their expenses become higher than their earnings, the shops will close. Maybe that at least is an economic fact we can agree on?
Then why not implement it that way? Make the minimum wage small and bump it up a bit ahead of inflation every year. If things go south (this hasn't happened in any other country that has done it) it can always be reversed.
For what it's worth, here in Australia there's only around 10% less McDonald's stores per capita to the US, despite a $20 minimum wage. All these workers can afford to eat and live in some of the most expensive cities in the world and the country isn't collapsing under unemployment.
You might miss my point. I'm saying MW does hurt low skilled workers quite a lot, but adjusting it for inflation every few years doesn't make it worse.
If I was emperor, abolishing MW would be my first and most obvious reform to help the poor.
> All these workers can afford to eat and live...
But the problem is the people who can't get work because on MW!
>I'm saying MW does hurt low skilled workers quite a lot
Citation needed. In fact, I did a quick Google search and found out that several US cities/states have increased minimum wage this year and they've seen NO significant job losses. In fact, in some cases these states have seen more growth in low-income jobs than states with lower minimum wages.
Minimum wage takes money out of the pockets of the rich and puts it in the pockets of the poor. Half the time the rich people would have spent this money on luxury goods instead of spending this money on everyday things anyway. As such, in many cases you end up seeing increases (or at least no impact) in the numbers of low wage jobs because of the increase in demand of the products of said workers.
> If their expenses become higher than their earnings, the shops will close. Maybe that at least is an economic fact we can agree on?
Or they could raise their prices. That’s what normally happens in my experience when a small business faces an unavoidable and significant increase in one of its input costs.
I'm fascinated that people honestly think that increasing the minimum wage will result in a large amount of job loss. Here's a thread from last month on a story about why this isn't true. A comment from jjoonathan links to an interesting study about how jobs negatively affected by minimum wage increases are disproportionately reported on when compared to jobs benefited by minimum wage increases.
If the society will carry the individuals, can it require they not reproduce? While not necessarily germane to this report, many in poverty make it worse by having children. Can require those on the government programs be temporarily sterilized? If not, we will only continue the cycle of poverty.
McDonalds franchise owners make 3x that. The average is dragged down by low rent chains like Subway or Wendy’s
Keep in mind that the owners make that after leasing the building from McDonalds. It’s a turnkey business and there are many, many people who have gotten pretty rich on operating these places.
From the cited article. So after investing $1-$3 million dollars, a McDonalds franchise owner makes about the same as a software engineer in a major US city and the software engineer didn’t have to spend $1 to $3 million and has a lot less risk.
Most franchise owners aren’t “starting a business” they are “buying a job”.
But a 2013 report from Franchise Business Review dug down into the numbers and came up with a net profit of $66,000 per franchise. McDonald's did much better with an average of around $150,000 per restaurant. But when you consider that a McDonald's franchise costs more than $1 million and can easily run more than $2 million, even McDonald's doesn't generate excellent average returns on investment. The fast-food franchise business is tough, and success doesn't come easy.
Remember with a global system, average doesn’t mean major city. It’s apples and oranges to compare to a SWE.
With Chick-Fil-A, operators just get one store. They are buying a job. McDonalds franchisees usually own multiple stores and have different business interests.
And wouldn’t a McDonalds store in the middle of nowhere also make less money than a major city? But even at $150K net income, there isn’t much room to raise salaries.
McDonalds is the place where you can get something like a cheeseburger for a dollar without getting food poisoning. McDonalds was a high quality product at one time.
There’s no regulatory environment that prevents exploitation of the workforce, so doing so is the low risk choice. The company chose a low quality bar and competitive pressure forces them to mercilessly attack cost.
Back of the napkin math. If we assume that a McDonalds is open 16 hours a day and they have an average of 4 people every hour.
16 hours x 4 people x 7 days x 52 weeks Equals about 2400 hours a year.
How much could they raise the hourly rate of their employees and raise prices before the demand went down and still be profitable if they are only making $150K now? At what point does it not make sense to invest $1 - $3 million a year to make meager returns?
They may need to look at the business and franchise model. They have a fubar business with hundreds of SKUs. 5 Guys is able to make money on a freshly cooked burger, higher standards for quality and higher cost. Make a "McDonald's Classic" concept that cooks real food at higher prices.
Again, McDonald's makes a business decision to have a system that encourages franchisees to utilize labor at the lowest cost possible because it is the lowest risk decision for them. For the larger company, the profitability struggles of the operators aren't a world-ending problem -- they own the real estate assets, and get to be an exclusive supplier and pull their percentage of gross sales first.
From my POV, I don't care a whit about McDonald's -- as a human it's awful that people are treated the way that they are, and as a taxpayer it's awful that society as a whole gets to pick up the pieces when hard working people fail and end up dependent on social services for survival. If McDonald's business can't deliver, that's their problem. The demand for food isn't going anywhere and a competitor will fill the void.
So the people working for minimum wage would be better off if they didn’t have a job at all? If all of McDonalds employees all of the sudden were out of work - taxpayers would pay more.
What’s the percentage of people that work at McDonalds are working there as a primary income?
Isn’t kind of hypocritical that you criticize McDonald’s profitable business model but you’re okay with all of the startups - including ones that are backed by YC who are losing millions of dollars but are able to access capital?
Five Guys also costs a lot more. The people who eat at McDonalds every day couldn’t afford Five Guys.
And if the magical competitor becomes available, are they going to be able to sell food as cheaply as McDonalds?
I didn't criticize the business model. I said that I'm opposed to exploiting workers, and that addressing that problem is more important to me than preserving McDonald's present business model.
If their business model is not compatible with humane treatment and fair compensation of workers, why should we subsidize it? If the quality of McDonald's food is such that a small marginal cost increase will destroy the business, is it a good business?
Competition in the fast food space is intense, and market forces will drive prices. Perhaps the people who cannot afford a hamburger at Five Guys would be able to do so if paid a decent wage.
The only reason that money losing startups “business model” works is because they don’t have to worry about silly things like profits. They are also being subsidized by VCs who are being subsidized in part by public pensions.
Maybe if we didn’t give special treatment to VCs Capital gains, many of the tech bro’s would also be out of a job. If we want to stop subsidizing bad business models let’s start with not allowing public pensions and tax free endowments the ability to invest in VC.
Just a reminder that revenue != profit. McDonald's net income for 2017 was US$698.7 million [EDIT] which is only 13% the number cited in the above post.
Don't be misled by people unintentionally (we hope) citing revenue numbers to bolster their case.
> I find it very interesting that most people assume it should be the employer's responsibility to provide for the employee's wellbeing. Call me naive, but I think it should be society's responsibility.
You're right, but then we have the employer class generally lobbying against society actually providing these things.
I'm baffled that no one has suggested that an individual is responsible for himself. Corporate health insurance, for instance, started due to wage & price controls. This shielded consumers from direct price increases. Instead of increasing wages, employers silently absorbed most of the costs, as evinced by the data [0] [1] [2].
Consumers almost certainly have more elastic purchasing preferences for insurance as a group, as they are much more granular. Insurance companies love negotiating with companies, because fewer, larger customers with greater inertia and specially-negotiated deals enable greater price discrimination than a mass-market product compared directly to others. This has further enabled the rise in prices.
I firmly believe that the individual is better-equipped to make his own decisions than any central planner or procurement department. We've messed things up enough with centralization; it's time to shift back to letting consumers make their own choices. Rather than taking even more choice by further centralizing from an oligopoly to a government monopoly, give people a chance to make their own decisions. I picked health insurance as it is a particularly hot topic, but this reasoning applies to many other areas.
Wow reading some of these comments makes me sad. Some of you have no idea how sad and hopeless situations can be. Before working as a dev I worked in fast food for 5 year, full time and while going to college. I worked with some people who were so trapped, I feel guilty at times.
Weird, in reader mode (Safari on MacOS), this is the text (other than the title, nothing at all about McDonalds cashiers, other than a letter about collecting receipts)...
How I Get By: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier
Cierra Brown is trying to do all she can on her own, but it rarely feels like she’s doing enough. By Maxwell Strachan Dec 5 2019, 11:11amShareTweetSnap
Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. Your letters:
Eric:
My dear 80-something year old dad is normal in every respect. Except, he collects McDonald's receipts. Yes, that McDonald's.
Even though it seems like she lives in an urban area (or urban enough to be squeezed by rising home prices), the public transit is so poor that she spends 3-5x more time getting to work without a car than with one. Sometimes she can't even get home. That's crazy, the car dependence of America means that you need to pay for insurance + a car to even function in society. That is the opposite of freedom
> you need to pay for insurance + a car to even function in society. That is the opposite of freedom
I’m not sure what “freedom” is supposed to mean in that context. How is being dependent on paying for public transportation better? In countries where public transportation is amazing enough to obviate the need for cars, you just trade in the freedom to go wherever you want whenever you want.
There are some countries where public transport is free for citizens, I'm pretty sure. And even if you have to pay for public transport... gas isn't free either. And car maintenance gets pricey. And insurance. Meanwhile, public transport is a known quantity. Pay this much for a ticket/monthly pass and ride wherever you need in city limits.
>127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on. For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support-systems. When motor vehicles were introduced, they appeared to increase man's freedom. They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn't want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man. But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man's freedom of locomotion. When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively. In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one's own pace one's movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws. One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price. Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional. Since the introduction of motorized transport, the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they HAVE TO depend on the automobile for transportation. Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car. Even the walker's freedom is now greatly restricted. In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic. In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway. (Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport: When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily REMAIN optional. In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves FORCED to use it.)
The economics of public transit essentially ask for government involvement: operational costs are almost never paid for by fare prices, but instead are essentially subsidized. If the bus/train lines are doing well, you often get huge clusters of malls/retail/commercial buildings surrounding them, and they of course reap the benefits without paying any extra costs.
However, there are things like the Dollar Vans in New York that do actually fulfill the niche. They're also sometimes illegal.
It’s pretty awful. I ride light rail to university because the parking costs are insane. Choosing to ride the train doubles my commute time and often leaves me in a terrible mood because of the trains awful service. It’s even worse because they recently increased the cost significantly with no improvement in quality.
752 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 391 ms ] threadHow would you suggest a typical American HN reader go about effecting change?
I don't expect this to happen, though. A lot of engineers are comfy with the top-tier healthcare provided by their employers, so they're likely not willing to leave America. (There are a lot of other perks of our country too, I'm just highlighting this one dimension. I'm certainly not going to leave over this even though I also feel my efforts to affect change are futile.)
I suspect that there are even people who believe healthcare isn't a right.
Their two flagship projects (GetCalFresh and Criminal Justice) reform both started off as simple web forms to make it easier to file for SNAP (food stamps) and sealing eligible marijuana convictions respectively. However as they gained traction they were able to engage state and local governments as collaborators and significantly improve the outcomes.
For the criminal justice work that meant fully automating sealing convictions in San Francisco, that then provided the “proof” for a state bill that passed to require all California counties to do the same over then next few years.
So while it seems like getting money out of politics is impossible I’d suggest working on stuff you care about at your state level, and providing working proofs will help people trying to support sensible legislation for reform.
You can't fix everything with a website.
Or pre-wrote everything one needs to complain to the regulator about a bull-shit charge and get their $ back.
It certainly takes a certain mindset to take advantage of the above, but making it easier encourages it.
The above are two things I’ll be publishing tonight. There’s a few hundred thousand people in my mom’s town that suddenly have a decent internet option.
If you really want change, then you need to somehow climb the ladder of power and enact the changes yourself. Unfortunately, if you take the political or corporate path, you will most likely be so disillusioned by the time you get anywhere that you will join the other side.
You can also become a revolutionary of sorts, by leading others through your charisma or prose.
Of course none of these are anything a "typical" person can do, but in fact, a "typical" person really has no power whatsoever unless someone atypical manages to organize them together.
If you're not sure where to start, try researching local candidates that share your views and find out which organizations endorsed them.
Healthcare is mentioned exactly one time in the article.
> At 29, Brown works approximately 40 hours a week, splitting her time between a McDonald’s in Durham, North Carolina, and a food-service gig a local hospital. “It’s still not enough,” she said. Both jobs are part-time, and she doesn’t receive health insurance through either employer. She can’t afford insurance on her own, either. That’s a problem since Brown is diabetic, and she has to pay for her medical expenses out of pocket. She’s trying to do all she can on her own—she receives no food stamps or other assistance, she notes—but it rarely feels like she’s doing enough.
Seems affordable. What am I missing here?
So that isn't it. Any other guesses?
https://www.irs.gov/affordable-care-act/individuals-and-fami...
40 * 4 * 9.50 = $1520
370/1520 = 25% of your GROSS income to stay alive. She doesn't pay $370 a month in taxes, and the tax credit doesn't come out of Social Security tax, which is her largest tax.
As other posters have said, bronze doesn't buy you much - but I can't understand why she can't afford it if it is $0 out of pocket.
I know people who have been in this position: just because you read something on a website doesn't make it necessarily true.
Sadly, I think the most cost effective approach is often not to use insurance at all but instead go to the free / community clinics which could provide a subset of care at a lower price.
What you're saying is true, but that's not what everyone believes. If you watch any episode of My 600 Pound Life, you will realize just how unwilling some of these people are to help themselves because it's hard work (and many people featured on the show die as a result). Yes, those are obviously extreme examples, but they're all extremely well documented.
I absolutely agree we should focus on taking care of ourselves before it leads to enormous health issues, but weirdly it doesn't seem the US healthcare system is designed for that.
Please don't use point-and-gawk trash TV shows to make generalizations about the world.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9al-mpqXjc
[1] The network of "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo" fame
Anyway, I concede it's a bad talking point for the point I was making.
EDIT: On second thought, my original comment is such a tangent I probably should not have made it. While I may disagree with some of the details of your reasoning, I agree with your overall point.
That's true. Your average interaction with a physician in the US to a 20 minute conversation while they fill out some forms in Epic, barely paying attention, then kick you out of their office as quickly as possible. A month or more later the bureaucratic machines of both hospital and insurance finally get around to sending you a bill for $250+.
Doctors should be paid for how healthy their patients are, not for continuing treatments of the chronically ill.
So my rheumatologist gets nothing for continuing to monitor and advise and prescribe treatment for my arthritis? Which isn't exactly something I can willpower away...
I don't like you.
In truth the change I was hoping for would happen at a slightly higher level than an individual doctor. More "health system" or municipal healthcare group.
I wasn't suggesting "willpower", nor making claims about your particular situation. I have observed cases where doctors are more willing to prescribe ongoing medications for chronic conditions, rather than investigating more holistic solutions to help alleviate symptoms. Arthritis symptoms can often be greatly reduced by diet or lifestyle changes. If your doctor helps you test and implement those – great! I've seen many cases where they don't, and my point is that they're not incentivized to do so.
It's also as much portion size and controlling intake of fries and soda as it is about the food items themselves. Adding a large coke to any meal is probably worse than the food itself. 80g of sugar with no nutrition or fiber.
I'll give you that its a low source of nuts and unbreaded fish. But if we are talking about working at McDonalds and not having meal prep time, that could be supplemented by bags of almonds, pistachios, peanuts, cashews, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds, and cans of tuna, salmon, and sardines at home.
That leaves dark veggies. Their bacon ranch salad says its "romaine, baby spinach, baby kale, red leaf lettuce, ribbon-cut carrots and grape tomatoes." Youd probably want to supplement some cooked greens at home.
Being able to buy the above food at 50% off would, imho, be a great foundation to a healthy diet, if you can control portion and avoid temptation.
This is severely lacking in empathy.
You know WHY they are obese, especially including the woman featured here? Junk food is dirt cheap. When you work your ass off for two weeks and have all of $200 dollars to show for it, you are not going to be cooking healthy foods and free range Chicken eggs. You are going to get the cheap stuff, the highly caloric, highly processed stuff. And guess what, she works at McDonalds, which gives employees some food every 5 hours worked.
Or if you don't work there, you can hit a Taco Bell and fullfill your hunger with $5. $5 may be enough to get ingredients to cook a better meal, but again, this person works her ass off in multiple jobs and has a long commute by bus.
If you work there, it is. But I was talking about Taco Bell for non McDonalds workers, which IS cheap.
Your groceries list again is assuming there is enough time(and energy) to prepare the food.
Which includes: 1) Owning a pan 2) Owning a cooking surface 3) Selecting, cleaning, and cutting vegetables 4) Dishes, or owning a dishwasher
vs 1) access to food 2) access to disposal of wrapping material
> Which includes: 1) Owning a pan 2) Owning a cooking surface 3) Selecting, cleaning, and cutting vegetables 4) Dishes, or owning a dishwasher
It's also worth noting that food deserts are a thing, and they make it much more difficult to eat healthily.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_desert
Not everyone has the same boundaries for that situation.
Can you use the cracked pepper that someone else bought? People have different opinions on that.
If economics and policy actually worked, there would be regulatory feedbacks, but not in 'murica
Now imagine an anorexic woman who recovers, but she overcorrects and ends up overweight in the eyes of her anorexic friends. They shame her for overeating and she tries to eat less, which puts her adipose cells under stress. Is it possible that she'd keep gaining weight from the stress of undereating? If it's impossible, how do you know? If it's not impossible, should we blame anorexics the same way we blame people with habits that you think are bad?
Or is that just a Canada trial thing?
This is tech fantasy, like Musk promising that Teslas will be fully self-driving any minute now.
Similarly, sometimes when I see a restaurant use Yelp for check-in, reservations, and queue management, I imagine that's a sizable fraction of a job.
No, we're talking about the making and packaging diverse types of food to order. That's why people go to McDonalds, and it's something that's surprisingly difficult to automate. McDonalds workers will be able to strike effectively as long as that's true.
Also, I don't consider ordering kiosks a value add for a customer. I've used them, they've been little to no benefit over ordering in person. It's just futzing around with yet another flaky touch screen, and who knows if the last person who used it had a cold or something. Their handling of process exceptions is like Google's customer support: non-existant. They're just a cost saving measure for business owners. It's not about "providing a value-add to customers" at all.
Remote ordering is a small value add, since it does permit some level of customer multi-tasking.
The Australian minimum wage is AU$19.49.
A burger and fries doesn't cost you $20.
https://www.aussieprices.com.au/mcdonalds-prices/
The cost for this meal appears to be US$5.99 in the US - quite similar.
That's not close to $15 (or $20) by any stretch of the imagination.
Either way, I think that the assertion of “this thing worked over there so it will work the same way here” is overly optimistic. But ultimately I don’t much care - I rarely eat there, so if McDonald’s got very expensive or went out of business, it wouldn’t have much impact on my life. If they want to unionize, more power to them.
I’m not a fan of unions overall. I recognize that they’ve done some good things, but the people I’ve known who were in unions or worked in union shops don’t describe places that I’d want to work in.
If unionization and a near doubling in minimum wage makes a hamburger, fries, and Coke cost $0.71 more, I think I can accept that.
He cited this as a reason to not give his employees health insurance
Sounds like a recipe for business closures en masse and ballooning unemployment, which I don't think is something anyone wants.
Or are you just arguing that the franchisees are also getting rich by paying people as little as possible?
Cannot she ask them to pay for a taxi then? Also I didn't understand why she lives so far away from work.
1) Its unlikely the 30$ she's worth closing or whatever is worth hirind the taxi about.
2) Moving is expensive, and moving to a more desirable location even moreso. She may not be able to afford the time to seek out a space, the credit to be approved, the deposit, etc.
She might not live that far from work. It might be a 20 minute drive, but with the bus system in most towns in the US it's not crazy for that to take a couple of hours on a bus with walking (the closest bus stop to her is a 30 minute walk it said). I'm sure if she could get a job closer that pays as well she would've by now.
Not considering how far she works. And there are of course no shower facilities.
We don't know how far she works. We only know how long her commute takes. Bus routes in cities without good bus infrastructure are often circuitous and don't represent the fastest way to get to any particular place on the route.
Regardless, it's getting better, but even 3 miles gets me sweaty and I have to take a shower. We can safely assume this person's commute to be longer. Now she has to go to work all sweaty – at a customer facing role. This won't be well-received.
https://godurhamtransit.org/sites/default/files/godurham-sys...
Even if only 50% of days are suitable for cycling, if it saves her an hour a day then, at her hourly rate, a decent bike will return it's investment in less than half a year. And that's assuming her bus rides are free. She/a person similarly situated would have to judge for themselves whether it is a useful tool.
Should could ask...
> Also I didn't understand why she lives so far away from work.
Because when you earn so little, you really don't have much choice where you live.
This is pretty amazing delusion.
I don't think this narrative was actually written by the person they are discussing even though it's in first person.
Seems to me the goal should be to get a wage where you can afford to go back to school. I don't think it's fair to argue that the kiosks are replacing the cashiers only because they want a $15/hr wage - that's coming whether they want to or not. The only thing that the cashier can do is do their best to collect the resources right now to get out of that situation, and one of those is more earnings.
There are places in the world where you can make a living without any particular skill set, but I don’t think the US, or any other first-world country, should really be among them.
The US needs immigration reform to bring more high-skilled people into the country, but it also needs emigration reform to find new homes for people who can’t necessarily make a reasonable living in a first-world country.
Seriously though, countries with labor shortages will allow unskilled people to visit and work for awhile at least (eg Australia).
I don't even want to think of the new suicide rate in that world.
Study visas are virtually unrestricted. But there are more being issued than immigration pathway seats (which are restricted).
The USA has a labour shortage problem. There aren't enough people that want to spend their lives picking fruit, doing maid services, working fast food, and just generally taking care of all the problems that wealthier people pay to have taken care of.
You can pay immigrants rock bottom wages to do this work, which is the status quo in the USA today. They accept it because it comes with the promise of a better life one day. If not for them, then for their children.
If you want to send all those people packing, then get ready to pay $10 for a tomato. No, robots aren't going to help, either.
In a poorer country they would have a decreased cost of living but a decreased earnings and fewer family and friends.
I cannot comprehend the thought process that leads you to come to this conclusion.
Example my wife is disabled we live on my very modest income due to costs of life and medical care we have zero wealth of any kind and a well maintained 2004 car. I think I have $13 in the bank right now.
Where ought I move to increase my fortunes and who would let me who would also pay for my wife's medicine.
Poverty often follows medical issues which then wouldnt see any help. Compare total mortality with projected mortality and you can figure out how many exactly you are murdering.
To facilitate the operation you will have to gut civil rights setting precedents with horrible implications for everyone's freedom.
If you can send someone to a foreign land because they are poor, lame, or merely unsuccessful removing all of their rights merely because their fellow citizens will be richer for it then what rights do YOU have left that are inalienable?
Presumably your rules don't apply to all those who have no wealth or income who depend on others so now dependants are slaves who need fear losing their status if they fall out of favor.
We can apply the same logic to the working poor who now must fear deportation as a result of losing their asses when terminated.
Spousal abuse and labor mistreatment will rise substantially.
Then we must ask what nation would willingly serve as our ashtray of undesirables.
Your idea is like an endless cornacopua of horrible implications. The last time I read a blueprint for a worse outcome it was written by George Orwell.
Here, too. But usually half of them are broken in one way or another, like the touch screen doesn't respond or the receipt printer is out of paper, or something I saw in a TV commercial isn't in the menu structure, or the pricing isn't the same as in an ad, etc... These are things a cashier is still needed for.
As an aside, I find it curious that my local McD only got the kiosks maybe two years ago, but I used them in Germany almost 20 years ago. They are fantastic for when you can't speak the local language.
Edit:
Is the answer to fight for $15/hr or is the answer to go back to school, apply to more jobs, and/or go into a trade?
The vast majority of McD cashiers I see are in no position to go back to school or change jobs. They're too old, low-skilled, physically constrained, or low-education to do that.
I work in an organization that deals with the poor a lot. If you're 50 years old and only have a fifth-grade education and need to survive, you don't have the time to go to school. You're probably working two or three jobs just to have a place to live.
Is a cashier needed, or just an on call tech who oversees a dozen restaurants? I would imagine working on the kinks in the kiosks and improving their reliability to be doable.
And while the store waits a couple of days for the $75/hour tech to show up, $10,000 walks out the door. Better to pay for a $15 cashier.
Without money ? My girlfriend was a cashier. Now she's studying law because my job can provide for us and we have free healtcare in belgium. Otherwise it would be impossible !
> apply to more jobs
That basically mean more slavery since she will apply for job that pay like McDonalds. It wont solve any problem.
> and/or go into a trade
I don't understand what your mean here.
Is it a real thing ? Or just something they do to have a good image ?
He thinks poor people could be electricians helpers tomorrow instead of mcds cashiers if they only applied themselves.
https://www.hln.be/geld/consument/wat-gebeurt-er-met-uw-100-...
For example plumbers.
On the residential side, you have more solderless fittings, YT videos and even pre-fab bathrooms in a box.
The plumbers themselves will be fine as they’ll just reduce training seats, but that makes it harder to become one.
But of course it's kind of convenient if people at least think that their job can be automated tomorrow: that makes it easier to make them sell their workforce for peanuts today. You just need to hope that they don't realize that it doesn't make a difference once the day comes on which they can be automated away - it won't matter then whether they get $9.50 or $15 an hour, the automation will be cheaper regardless. But by demanding $15 now they will at least have earned a lot more during the decades until that day finally arrives.
I used to work in a kitchen, so maintaining food service grade of cleanliness on robots, sounds frighteningly expensive to me.
Maybe everything won't be automated all at once, but if the economic incentive is there, it will happen. Pizza making robots are already a thing. There's no reason the shake machine can't measure its output to the cup instead of pulling a lever; drink machines in many places already do this. Dispensing the cup too is not a big step.
French fry hoppers automatically filling baskets from a frozen mini-closet. Out comes fresh fries.
Same for the cups that they can use in drive-throughs.
I think it’s up to the franchises to buy/install them. Depends on volume/space whether its worthwhile/possible.
Or they just push it to the customer to do it.
That machine is, like, 5 machines including an oil moat. With all of them together it makes up something like half the entire store's footprint. It's only remotely viable because that shop mostly only makes one thing. No breakfast sandwiches in the morning, no burgers at lunch time, just donuts.
Plenty of employees are still required just to make the different types of donuts and donut-adjacent items (and also presumably to be there in case a monumental grease fire starts, or the dough machine blows a gasket starts spewing dough all over).
> Pizza making robots are already a thing
Presumably making the frozen ones sold at grocery stores, which might be a meaningful percentage of all pizza sold, but effectively 0% of any other pizzas?
This is an entirely different thing than a McDonalds.
Yes, I could trivially make an automation machine to cook meat, we have them, they're called a charbroiler, similarly, toasting buns is pretty easy. The hard an expensive part is assembling all the parts into a package.
For argument's sake, let's assume that no jobs can be automated. The cost to the franchise owner to operate goes up, and in response they raise prices -- but at some prices they're going to really start losing business, so they also have to lower costs elsewhere or simply get lower profits. How does it all shake out? The fact is that it has to be paid by someone, and it'll likely mean fewer McDonalds are opened because it'll just be harder to make them profitable.
Maybe you're OK with that trade-off, but it IS a tradeoff that will happen, and it means fewer jobs.
Your analysis presumes that the business owners can and will absorb anything without reacting, as if more value can be extracted but there won't be a new equilibrium. I assume that the franchise owners aren't making the kinds of profits where that is true, I assume they're mostly bumping along on fairly low margins.
But for the sake of it: yes, in a time of practically full employment, I do indeed prefer less workers to make more if this trade-off you assume is even a realistic model of reality (which is a big if, in my opinion).
With a McDonalds restaurant, you can control your environment almost perfectly. If you throw away the kitchen that was designed to be used by humans, and then develop a kitchen never intended to be used by humans, you can drop a lot of environmental constraints in terms of the automation concerns. Trying to fully-automate the existing kitchen layout will certainly end in disaster.
As you reach 100% automation, it actually starts to get easier because the system is now all oriented in this direction, and you have standardized specifications/interfaces across the board. Also, once you fully-automate a single McD restaurant, the next one becomes trivial because it's simply another copy of the exact same thing.
And I think it’s more than that before we have no humans behind the wheel of cars!
DOM Pizza Checker (Domino's camera 'AI' that checks the pizza toppings are correct) could be used for other things, other than it's 'other' current use of store tracking. https://www.itnews.com.au/news/dominos-turns-its-pizza-check... Stores now get updates ;)
Designing food so it's optimised for cooking has been going on for a while but I suspect there gains there. Even if you can design more food variety for fast food that can be cooked or created efficiency, it can cut out labour at other food outlets as they close and society moves to highly efficient food outlets like McDonald's.
Automation in processes is where it's at. Designing food and processes for mostly automated machines and schedulers.
But you are correct, so far the threat of automation to keep wages low seems to have had more impact than automation.
So if everybody in this situation goes back into school, applies for more jobs, and/or goes into a trade, what do you think will happen? Do you think minimum wage jobs are only being offered because people aren't trying to get higher paid jobs?
I agree the kiosks are a bit harder for a customer to use, I accidentally ordered something like 80 chicken nuggets the first time I used one, simply because I tried to add extra sauce.
I still prefer them because it's easy to have a bunch of kiosks which means there are shorter lines.
I prefer the kiosks, much in the same way I prefer self checkout at grocery stores.
My local McD just got them, as part of an extensive remodel. By "extensive", I mean that early this year they tore the whole place down and built a new one there, which opened near the end of October.
I've used the kiosks when I can, but for most of November I had to use the human cashiers. Why? Because the kiosks insisted on applying a "discount" that actually raised the price! The cash registers used by the human cashiers would also apply that discount, but the interface there allows the cashier to remove it. The kiosks (and the mobile app which also applies it) do not allow removal.
On the one hand, I am impressed that their software is automatically applying discounts instead of making the customer manually ask for it. I've seen at other places things like a parent order a burger and a drink and their child order fries and a drink, and unless the cashier notices that this is cheaper as a combo (burger, fries, drink) plus another drink, it will be rung up at full price.
On the other hand, come on! It's pretty obvious that if you are going to be looking for discounts to apply, the software needs to have a check to make sure that the total with the discount is not more than the undiscounted price and if it is not apply the discount.
This situation came about at my local McD because to celebrate being at the same location for 40 years, they rolled back prices on several items to '80s level for the month of November. Among the items rolled back were Sausage McMuffins, to $0.79.
Sausage McMuffins and Sausage Burritos are part of the "any 2 for $3" discount. So if your order included two Sausage McMuffins, or included one Sausage McMuffin with one Sausage Burrito, it would decide to apply the 2 for $3. In both cases that raised the price.
A couple times that month I wanted two Sausage McMuffins and a Sausage Burrito. To order that at the kiosk or on the app and get the correct discount ($0.79 for the McMuffins, regular price for the Burrito) could only be done by doing it is 3 separate orders! (Well, I suppose it could be done on one order and then selecting cash payment...that prints a receipt that you take to a human cashier, who can then recall the order at their register and collect payment. I assume that they can modify the order at that point to remove the 2 for $3).
What retail stores have this in place for cashiers?
https://www.cnbc.com/2016/06/22/jimmy-johns-drops-non-compet...
> The bus stops running at 10 p.m. on Sunday, but McDonald's asked me to stay until close at 1 a.m. They asked me to stay because they need my help.
Thats not a job, that's an abusive relationship.
When I was 18 (many years ago), I remember having a job that did the same "we need you to stay later" BS. The buses stopped running at 8PM in the suburbs and I had to regularly walk 5-6 miles back home. Cabs and Lyft/Uber aren't much of an option when it would significantly eat into your paycheck. Most people get tired of giving you rides because you cannot afford a car.
Using a bicycle was more dangerous than walking; some people would throw things out their window at you or swerve/yell to scare you.
Factor in how managers "reward" certain employees with better shifts or punish by cutting hours. I could see why many people switch to the dole or dealing.
The USA really is a strange place.
The really strange one was 5 AM on a 4 lane street, no other cars around, and a single car comes up behind me and starts honking, about hitting my rear tire.
A more humane and less distorting way to help poor people is to just give them money.
She likely can't move. It's expensive to move, no matter who you are, and since she has two jobs, it seems like she's going to spend a lot of time on the bus no matter what.
She definitely can't demand McDonald's pay for a taxi, or she can ask, be turned down, and have her hours cut for next week. They'll cut her hours if she just leaves at the end of her shift, and they ask her to stay.
She's already doing something that could ultimately have a positive material impact on her life, organizing with her coworkers. It's just that the many interlocking systems around her life all work against her; bad public transit, bad pay for physically exhausting work, and having to fight so hard for something as basic as a union at her workplace.
This is a situation that calls for compassion, understanding, and working alongside her to change the systems that keep her in this situation, not suggesting "why doesn't she".
Typically VAT tax is unpopular because it is regressive. But the UBI more than compensates for the extra tax burden.
Example:
Now:
$12,000 a year + $12,000 in benefits = $24,000
$50,000 a year + $0 in benefits = $50,000
UBI:
$12,000 a year + $12,000 in UBI = $24,000
$50,000 a year + $12,000 in UBI = $62,000
The poorer person receiving benefits is actually poorer then before, relatively.
Someone let me know if I'm missing something.
$1000 poorer relative to other person but not actually poorer in terms of my purchasing power.
On net the only people who come off worse are unmarried individuals receiving ssdi who are too young for social security retirement income.
Average ssdi income is around 1200 10 million people are on ssdi aprox 6 million under 65 45% in the overall US population are unmarried.
One could reasonably suppose at least 2-3 million out of 327 million will make no more money and will see slightly to somewhat higher costs. This could be corrected by cola.
In comparison the bottom 25% is 82 million strong and will benefit substantially as will the next quartile to a lesser extent another 82 millions
Now:
$12,000 a year + $12,000 in benefits = $24,000
$24,000 a year + $0 in benefits = $24,000
$50,000 a year + $0 in benefits = $50,000
UBI:
$12,000 a year + $12,000 in UBI = $24,000
$24,000 a year + $12,000 in benefits = $36,000
$50,000 a year + $12,000 in UBI = $62,000
Also keep in mind that the more well off people will end up paying more VAT because they spend more. VAT can also be tweaked to not tax on necessities like basic groceries/etc.
And many don't get it because they don't meet a threshold. And those who get it, have to not work (aka not make money), in order to keep getting it.
Second, the average benefit isn't $1,000 a month and in almost all cases the $1k per month is an increase on existing benefit numbers.
Third, since it doesn't come with strings, you don't have to worry about losing your benefits when you get a job or a kid leaves the home, when you relapse or when you get sick and can't manage the tangled web of government red tape.
This might be true for you personally, but it is not true in general; whether people are dissatisfied with their level of wealth/poverty has a great deal to do with how it compares to others.
It's perfectly possible to get by with rice and lentils and a few vegetables, and if that's the common lifestyle of everyone in the community/country, many people are well satisfied with it. I've lived in such places.
But if you see the people around you enjoying an endless variety of steak and sushi and lobster and so on, and you're working all hours yet still only able to stretch to rice & lentils, your satisfaction may be less.
An illogical reaction? Maybe. A human one? I think so.
Sure, but even people with benefits are struggling to get by. To not be poor absolutely we should be giving them $1000 a month on top of current benefits. Just $1000 a month will leave many absolutely poor. Also, I'm not an economist, but I don't think we can really predict what will happen with inflation, rent prices, etc, when the vast majority of people become $1000 richer. I find it hard to believe it won't cause increases in prices in at least some things. If that happens you aren't just poorer relatively.
> Second, the average benefit isn't $1,000 a month and in almost all cases the $1k per month is an increase on existing benefit numbers.
It doesn't really matter just changes the amounts a bit. Even if you assume benefits are $100 a month only, you still only gain $900 a month from the UBI(because you lose the $100). Everyone else is gaining $100 more then you.
> Third, since it doesn't come with strings, you don't have to worry about losing your benefits when you get a job or a kid leaves the home, when you relapse or when you get sick and can't manage the tangled web of government red tape.
Yeah fair enough, I'm not against UBI. I'm only against Yang's implementation. I think we should add it on top of existing benefits. I also think it is only a band-aid or should be a small part of the overall solution.
But even if not, I think there's a case that giving everyone else UBI has ancillary benefits:
- More cash in the hand of your neighbors means more customers, which means more economic activity, which potentially means better employment prospects, in a virtuous cycle [0].
- Strain on existing benefit-granting institutions is greatly reduced, as those who opt for cash exit the system, meaning faster response times and more assistance with forms/approvals/etc.
- The working class tend to be more economically interdependent by necessity; someone who declines UBI still comes ahead from a spouse, relative, grown child, etc. who requires less economic support.
- Yang has spoken at length about the effects of economic anxiety; even someone who declines UBI may experience less anxiety (and therefore greater executive function and capacity for long-term planning), simply from knowing they have a "Plan B" for basic necessities.
In addition to offsetting costs, I think one of the motivations for the "either/or" strategy is political viability with libertarians and moderate Republicans, whose exaggerated fears of "socialism" can be assuaged by the opportunity to shrink bloated federal bureaucracies. (I'm somewhat sympathetic here: the most efficient charity is usually to write a check to the poor [1], and I suspect UBI or negative income tax has greater efficacy than most means-tested federal programs, with possibly the exception of health care.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand-side_economics
[1] https://www.givewell.org/charities/give-directly
The McDonalds cashier is likely getting subsidized housing and food stamp benefits.
Yang's plan would require that the cashier has to choose between the "UBI" or her existing benefits.
I asked his campaign why they designed it this way and they did not have an answer, I was told to ask the candidate directly, which was disappointing.
I'm neutral on Yang's campaign, but I like the idea of a UBI because administering it will be much cheaper than running existing benefits. Means-testing has a real and very sizeable cost.
What will happen to all the guvment workers who will get laid off once existing benefits have been supplanted by the UBI? They will go home to merrily enjoy their new UBI checks.
Which might be cheaper for the government than paying them to do their current jobs.
Cutting back existing benefit programs saves money in bureaucracy and empowers individuals to spend in ways that most benefit them.
Most people under the poverty line do not receive over $1k in means tested benefits.
Also, millions of Americans living in poverty receive no benefits at all.[1]
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/13-million-p...
(ugh, this sounds like a commercial...)
My biggest concern with UBI specifically is that it will be absorbed by landlords and other societal rent-seekers. My personal opinion is that we should democratize workplaces, through unions in the short-term and co-ops in the long term. McDonalds cashiers should have a say in their working conditions beyond the bare minimum employment regulations (that are so often ignored in retail and food services).
i think the crux has always been separating the unfortunate from the lazy. i don't think anyone would have serious a problem with supporting the former if the latter could be sieved.
There will always be lazy people in society, and we have a lot of evidence that lazy people are a burden no matter how hard we try to make their lives. I'm happier giving people enough to get by unconditionally than having them steal or cheat enough to get by.
Trapping people in poverty means if they decided to not be lazy at some point, it's incredibly hard for them to get out of their situation and it's much more likely for them to fail. Furthermore, poverty only affects poor lazy people. Rich lazy people (those that got lucky or were born into wealth) can live on dividends their whole lives with no 'punishment'.
Lastly, attempts to distinguish lazy people from non-lazy people are easily corrupted by monied interests that don't want to pay as much into society. See the 'welfare queen' narrative that was popular under Reagan.
Society would be better off if lazy people were excused from the workforce. The weird obsession with forcing everyone to run on a treadmill has got to go.
Some people are beaten down, discouraged, unexcited at doing hard manual labour for just enough money to get them through to the next day. And some, even if you get them to work, are not going to be much use there.
I know in my own career (have worked for decades with no sabbaticals or more than 3 weeks off at a time), I'm really lucky to do a job that I find interesting. That allows me to really dig in and work long and hard.
If I was doing a shitty manual labour job I think I'd revert from being an apparently extremely hard working person to one of the laziest ones around.
Hell, I generally enjoy my job but go though legitimately lazy periods. These are well-contrasted by productive periods, but 9-5 work is a strange thing and people aren't machines.
My point was mostly that even if these imaginary lazy people exist, it doesn't invalidate the need for real economic freedom where you can choose not to work. You were fair to call that out as a lame take though, and I appreciate the perspective.
I whole heartedly support people who organise to ensure a more equitable split for people like them, I got out the trap but for every me there is a dozen who didn’t, never will.
I was fortunate to be born in the U.K. and for the last 39 years at least have never had to worry about health insurance care, that’s just the final cherry on the shit sundae isn’t it.
She works full time hours but because it’s split over two jobs neither corp provides medical insurance, what an insane inhumane system.
I envision an open-source disk image (likely a NOOBS) with learning materials, support resources, and community tools built-in. One could sell pre-loaded SD cards and/or full hardware packages to make it turnkey, or as turnkey as RPi gets, further reducing the barrier to entry. Perhaps even donations and grant money could subsidize hardware.
Has something like this been done? Is web dev a good fit? Thoughts?
In the end the workers will be as fucked as they were before UBI. The problem is modern capitalism itself. Ford-era capitalism where capital owners were proud in paying employees a wage they could live on... that could possibly work for a long time, but many equate even this level with outright "communism".
Tech jobs are just mentally stressful sometimes. I can totally see a good amount of people not wanting to switch places honestly.
They do it with human cashier's and are insanely popular and low-cost.
No one truelly cares about self-service, it's just hype.
( Personal opinion)
My grocery store recently instituted scan-as-you-go via a smartphone app, and I love it. I bag as I go along, precisely the way I want everything bagged (no crushed bread, no meat juice dripping on the candy) and basically walk out the door.
https://www.wegmans.com/service/wegmans-scan.html
I wish they had a proper barcode scanner to carry around instead of using the phone to scan though.
What I also like is that it helps me keep the cold-chain better sustained.
I'm not sure what stores you go to, but just about every (bagger/cashier who bags) that I have ever interacted with has done their job quite well, and much faster than I would.
They have incentive to do so, because when they fuck up, or are too slow, they get chewed out by their manager. They also have 8 hours a day to practice.
Combined with the shit-show[1] of the self-service checkout station UIs (I haven't memorized every one of the 50+ produce codes - the cashiers have), and there is no universe where I get a better service in the self-serve checkout aisle.
Unfortunately, most of the full-service aisles have been eliminated, because it's cheaper to make customers waste their time struggling with the machines, than to employ cashiers. To the grocery, my time is free.
[1] To add insult to injury, the bagging area for the self-service machines is tiny - you can barely fit two shopping bags on it, so you end up playing a game of Tetris, as you try to scan your items. F* everything about self-service checkout machines. I still use them, because, thanks to the shortages, the full-service aisle lines are always too long.
The system I'm talking about is scan-as-you-go. No issue with the size of the bagging area. You're just putting things into your reusable bags directly in the cart.
Produce codes are simple - every produce display is labeled with a four or five digit code, and there are scales with label printers scattered throughout. These scales also display a bar code for use with the scanning app so you can forgo the label entirely. Even the folks going to a human cashier use these.
I've also been fairly impressed with their self-service UI when my phone's been too low on battery. Several years ago when they tried it out the UI was abysmal - it's clear they've made serious improvements in that realm and I've found it fast and user-friendly.
I like being able to decide how I organize my stuff. I can forgo bags for cases of soda, I can make the bags heavier than a cashier might, I can load them up based on how I'm going to unload at home.
Wegmans has kept the human cashiers, incidentally, with no noticeable increase in lines. Self-service is thus far an option, but one I prefer.
And the cycle repeats. I know it's a cold, impersonal take, but when life sucks, having a child is going to make it worse and most likely just lead to a new generation of suffering.
As much as a $15 minimum wage might help, even at $12 in Colorado, McDonald's already has touchscreen machines you can order from instead of at the counter - which might already not be manned all the time (it seems that now they often have a single person taking orders at the front counter and the drive through). So I'm skeptical if $15 minimum wage would work. It might work for the hospital job, at least the margin's there are higher and they are less able to automate the job away.
She could've had the child when her economics were in a better place. She could've been assaulted. She could've been denied the education to prevent the pregnancy. There are a bajillion and one reasons why a child might exist and she is responsible for it.
It's possible but not probable when you consider that 42.3% of births are paid for via Medicaid [1].
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr68/nvsr68_13-508.pdf
This is very much a class thing. Well-educated middle class and higher simply can't comprehend why a single mother or even married couple would even think about having children when they can't provide the basics, let alone a solid education in good schools that aren't feeders for prison.
The folks who make that decision do so because they see it as a part of life and don't see any change in their circumstances for the foreseeable future. No light at the end of the tunnel, so just get on with living.
- McDonald's offers college tuition reimbursement, when you're low income this is one of the best ROI you have available to you.
- McDonald's offers a 401k plan with up to 7% match. Even if you took the 10% early withdrawal penalty this is money in your pocket.
I don't think the best use of her time is lobbying for a $15/hr minimum wage that will more quickly move her to a $0/hr wage. Gain knowledge, skills, and have a good work ethic and it is not that hard to get ahead in America.
It can be hard to put money in a 401(k) when you're already living paycheck-to-paycheck, especially if you're trying your college idea.
If someone says "c'mon, it's not that hard" they don't mean it's difficult, and I suspect you know that.
My point is that's frequently false.
It reminds me of when one of the more well-off kids at college is shocked to find out that his/her colleagues are taking out student loans, and suggests "why don't you just ask your parents to pay for it?"
This woman is literally living paycheck to paycheck, and your suggestion is to... put money into a 401k? That simply isn't an option for people living in poverty like this.
> Gain knowledge, skills, and have a good work ethic and it is not that hard to get ahead in America.
This is a really out-of-touch perspective. One's ability to gain knowledge and skills is determined by the amount of free time they have when not working, and when you're only earning $9.50/hr, you have to spend a _lot_ of your time just earning enough to scrape by. It _is_ hard to get ahead in America when you're poor. Lifting oneself out of poverty is not easy to do here (or anywhere). If it were, we wouldn't have nearly 30% of our country's inhabitants living in or very near to poverty levels.
It's not that out of touch. She doesn't have to work at McDonald's. I know there's opportunities out there that pay better and are in LCOL areas, but they have to be pursued.
I'm sorry, but I can't empathize when I read through an article and the only thing she is doing to better her situation is use the power of government to force someone to pay her more. I gave actionable advice that she herself has the power to act on to improve her situation.
If you opt to take a loan against your 401K, then you will be required to re-pay back the loaned amount through regular paycheck deductions until it is paid back, and you aren't permitted to take another loan until this first loan is repaid in full. Furthermore, a number of 401K plans that have employer matching typically have some form vesting requirements before those funds can be accessed; often a year or more.
Regardless, in this scheme withdrawing any amount (i.e. making a loan and not repaying that loan, or withdrawing funds and closing the account) will end up losing her money in the end given that McDonald's is only matching up to 7% while withdrawing early from the account incurs a mandatory 10% early withdrawal fee that 401K administrators are required to levy and report to the IRS.
I literally can’t see how this tactic helps her in any way.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/63908/00011931251820...
She spends something like 4 hours a day on most days on the bus. That's plenty of time to read.
>Lifting oneself out of poverty is not easy to do here
My family came from poverty. It's easy to do if you come from a culture which values self improvement. I know it's unpopular to say, but most poor people are poor for reasons related to their genes, personality and upbringing, not because of the system. Just as cream rises, the lower end of the bell curve tends to fall, and no amount of education or financial assistance is going to change the distribution of achievement in society.
That doesn't mean we shouldn't have a safety net to help those who are in need, but our expectations should be grounded when we consider allocation of scarce resources.
Some kind of implied false dichotomy here. Is upbringing unrelated to the system?
> This woman is literally living paycheck to paycheck, and your suggestion is to... put money into a 401k? That simply isn't an option for people living in poverty like this.
Another optimization she could make is to save the money she spends on food for herself and her family. It won't be easy, but after a few years of not eating she could probably save up enough learn to code and pull herself up by her bootstraps. /s
– Transportation. The US is very unfriendly to forms of transportation that are not cars. There are a few exceptions, but these are exceptions. Good public transport or even bike lanes would massively improve conditions for a lot of people.
– Health care. Private companies are overcharging people and have made health care(hospitals and medication) unreachable if you don't have your costs subsidized by your employer.
– Education. Higher education would likely help this person. But how could she afford it?
Bring up public transit or bicycling to people in nearly every non-urban part of the United States and you'll get a million reasons why it won't work.
Car culture is so engrained in America that people have convinced themselves there is no alternative. "I'd get sweaty", "Oh but I have to carry...", "Walking to the stop would take...", "My kids...", "I don't want to sit next to people..." . Even the rare people who actually have to drive refuse to understand why they should be among the strongest proponents of alternative and public transit.
It's amazing to think that he was the first generation of the ubiquitous automobile in the US and now can't comprehend how the generation before him got around.
The generation before him _didn’t_ get around, relatively speaking. Widespread use of the automobile changed transportation patterns dramatically.
http://myplace.frontier.com/~trolley503/HistMaps.html
Also remember San Francisco to Yosemite was I think 6-7 hours by train at one time.
I feel this is most pronounced when I go to the mountains 2 hours North; which was a popular summer destination at the turn of the 20th century to the mid century. Now it's a long drive away and no longer has the visitors it used to have.
Ripped out 60 years ago and only now are the same right of ways being reconstructed at the cost of billions.
Medicare for all is one of the most important policies to alleviate pressure on lower-income people. Even for the middle class, the freedom to change jobs or take time off without fear of disaster will take such a load off of society.
Alternatively, the Canadian system does not require any sort of insurance-like payment to access all but a few parts of the healthcare system. While wait times are a bit of a problem for non-emergency care, Canada pays ~1/3rd of what America pays for healthcare. That leaves significant funding available to improve on that system simply through more doctors and and better equipment availability, while still being much more cost-effective than the current system. It should also be extended to dental and drug insurance, but again, there is ample funding available to accomplish that and still remain cheaper than the current system.
Medicare For All is most similar to the Canadian 'insurance', and the best candidate for healthcare reform. There are some important conditions for it's success however---the restrictions on price negotiation must be removed; equivalent private insurance must not be allowed; and taxes must be increased to appropriately fund the system. Ignoring any of these will allow the system to be corrupted by wealthy interests (of HN includes many), and could result in a system deliberately designed to fail. Rich people _must_ use the same healthcare service as poor people, aligning incentives among all socio-economic classes, ensuring the system remains effective and well-funded.
http://www.archwaystoopportunity.com/tuition_assistance.html
Seems like giving up your best employees who are motivated to improve themselves.
Unfortunately the women in this article probably lacks the free hours to pursue this benefit.
I've been overworked at many professional technical jobs in different roles before.
I'm paid a great deal more now, and yet I was never more tired or worn out or found it hard to study than when I worked the ovens at the pizza place.
I often work with people who have never worked such jobs. They're upset that they're 'overworked' and spend their time in the fancy break room with all the perks. Many I suspect have no clue.
To get more money you have to pry it from people's hands. You have to have something they can't resist not paying you for. That's it.
The suffering of low minimum wage is supposed to "encourage" people to move up the value chain, as the conservative doctrine goes, but it just doesn't work when all your time and energy is spent surviving.
Honestly, I only made it out (I was probabbly not going to make it through college due to all the work and my own personality when I was young was NOT ready for college) because I got lucky, had some mild technical skills and the .com era came along and companies wanted warm bodies.
I picked some aged old company and they hired me. That company stuck around for a long enough time to establish a career.
Working pizza ... could easily have kept me down due to that and other challenges.
Another bad thing about those types of jobs is that they can start to warp your mind after a while, to the effect that you start unconsciously considering your superiors / managers as role models, and start trying to 'move up the ladder' because the pay is marginally better, when in reality most of the time the _top_ of the "ladder" at such organizations are compensated less than entry-level positions for in-demand skilled workers --
I've been continuously employed [out of what I _thought_ was necessity] since I was 16, and until I was about 26 the majority of my jobs were in the foodservice / warehouse / gofer / etc hard-work-long-hours-very-low-pay category. If I had to do over again, I would have stayed away from those situations by any means available and used that time to build valuable skills [as I later did], which would almost certainly have resulted in better outcomes, sooner.
Hard work leads to prosperity. That's not the same as equating prosperity to hard work.
Most prosperous people achieved prosperity due to earlier hard work and sacrifice of themselves (or their immediate ancestors.)
Clearly, the 'value chain', as you put it, exists as evidenced by the numerous posts on this thread of describing the previous fast-food-type jobs they held that led them to more 'prosperous' positions (at least, affording enough prosperity to spend time posting messages to the internet instead of digging ditches or flipping burgers.)
Sometimes it does. Other times, it's barely enough to achieve survival.
> Most prosperous people achieved prosperity due to earlier hard work and sacrifice of themselves (or their immediate ancestors.)
Or their distant ancestors. Or due to their -- or their ancestors' -- criminal activities or exploitative behavior or sheer luck.
Every single office job I've had, except my first (which was a data entry job, not programming), has been a lot more stressful a lot more often, and I'm including the job where the first thing my coworkers and I did each morning was play a video game to determine who was going to go pick up coffee (Carcassonne on Xbox Live Arcade, if you're curious, took about 20 minutes).
Any guesses on when the people working hard at a fast food restaurant will have prosperity arrive?
And this is true whether your folks won the lottery or earned their money through hard work.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/29/study-to-succeed-in-america-...
This part wasn't in your link, I don't believe this is true.
Not that it's a realistic idea but damn if everyone had experiencing working in the demanding, underpaid, crappy jobs in the service industry, we might be more empathetic and better off as a whole.
My local store had a good sale on 12-packs of soda and so I decided to stock up with a dozen packs (I like a variety). I loaded them into my cart upside-down so the barcodes were facing up. The cashier just had to take the hand scanner and zap each one super easy and didn't have to lift any of them. It saved both of us time and effort and the cashier was extremely appreciative.
Agreed. When I worked retail and waiting jobs, I got grief from both out-of-touch wealthy people, and bitter poor people (although there were also kind people from both of those categories).
Myself, and I suspect most people, I got grief from everyone.
Poor.
Middle Class.
Wealthy.
Those with accents.
Those without accents.
White.
Black.
Tall.
Short.
You name it. It's brutal if you have to work such jobs for a long time. (Like say, throughout high school and college.) A lot of people out there turn terrible as soon as they interact someone of lower status providing them a service. Even if you never make a mistake, you can't escape it. I remember a girl spilled a drink on the dress of some woman. Apparently the table was already bad, and it turned worse. Manager made me take the table. (Not proud about it, but I was the best doormat he had.) I don't even remember the rest of the night, but I remember that table. Remember every face. They didn't even look like bad people either. That's what was so surprising. Man, that has stayed with me.
So if you only got grief from a few people, then you should thank your lucky stars. You got off easy.
- "you were lucky."
- "thank your lucky stars"
- "You got off easy"
- "It's brutal if you have to work such jobs for a long time"
I worked retail, bused tables, and waited for almost 3 years full-time, and I'm certainly not claiming to have only gotten grief from a few people. I never said anything even remotely close to "few people" in my comment. I suggested that there was a trend to the people I got grief from, in agreement to the GP comment. Note: a trend, not an absolute cut-off.
In addition to the comment I was responding to, there are other comments in this thread making similar assertions, so I'm not the outlier here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21717225
Walmart does something interesting for their software development process. Say a developer is working on a warehouse automation system -- that dev. is then trained and works in the warehouse for a month. Same goes for checkout/cashier, or customer service, or whatever. You WORK that job for a month and you'll understand just how trying it can be to struggle with lousy software on top of a sometimes difficult public. You'll know the trouble spots and the workarounds, and can take that education back to a nice safe quiet desk where you can then go on to help solve the problems.
That probabbly explains why there are such great free development tools out there too ;)
I simply look at eBay and see the $200-$400 price tags to replace my current machine (10-year old ThinkPad T400) and try not to cry. (This one was given to me by a friend)
I found an 800MHz AMD Duron with 128MB RAM on the side of the road in 2013. Browsing the web on that box was fun, even after maxing out the RAM with everything in the house and getting it up to 320MB.
In 2005 I was running a 66MHz 486DX2 with 8MB of free diskspace (oh and 4MB RAM).
The outlier was the Pentium 4 I used for a bit in 2006 - it had a crippled motherboard that couldn't do DMA to the HDD, only PIO, so the cursor would freeze if anything was accessing the HDD even for a fraction of a second. This was the Firefox 2.x era, so with 512MB of RAM I was mostly staring at "Task Manager (Not Responding)" instead of doing anything useful.
My point with all this: it has taken me about 20 years to realize that my general lack of success at mastering computer science wasn't entirely due to the learning difficulties and other mental health issues preventing me from holding down a traditional job - it was access to sane equipment.
I have had the ABSOLUTE HARDEST TIME EVER (emphasis appropriate and necessary) to FORCE myself to do ANYTHING with computers beyond what I'd describe "theoretical learning". "But what if I start this project and the computer dies tomorrow?????" is what a part of my head sort of screams/cries out anytime I have a new idea (with that many anxious questionmarks).
Unresolvable problem, currently. And an interesting one, too, since if I _could_ start a project, and hold it together, I might actually be able to get somewhere and move up.
...Except for the fact that the disability support I'm currently eligible for only recognizes casual/part time work payment structures, not bulk post-payment consulting/bug-bounty up-front types of remuneration, which is the type of thing I have any confidence in my abilities with. (Since I can cram and do the work in a sprint, then run away and have a break for a million years afterwards.)
So yeah, I am practically disabled because of how my mental health issues are classified, not directly because of the issues themselves (which have an impact but do leave me with some level of functionality which I am unable to effectively use).
I was constantly asking our designers and PMs to try using our product as a user might. I'd write up little scenarios that I knew our users struggled with and invite people to try them out with our product.
Sadly, I found it impossible to persuade anybody to design for anything except what looks good on a presentation of UX mocks.
But I'll be able to understand their job better and what the software really needs to do to make than more efficient and productive. They'll appreciate that and be more likely to buy in and adapt to the product they'll be using.
That's not your job. Your job is to implement the features you're told to implement.
But the users saw those features and said that is not what they asked for.
So? Why do you care if the project fails? It's not on you if it fails. Just do what the BA's said to do.
Boss, they aren't translating the business needs correctly. We have to rebuild features 2 or 3 or 4 times. Is we could see what they do and talk to them it'd only take once. That's happened a couple times during user acceptance. They said that's not what what we asked for. I said what did you ask for? I coded it right there on the spot and they signed off on the user story.
Go back to work. I'm busy. This isn't a productive conversation.
Same should apply for software as well imo.
* empathy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy
* sympathy - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathy
Imho that's trying to solve a symptom, not the actual problem.
Why does society tolerate &^%$ jobs in the first place? Why not strive to make jobs non-&^%$?
Instead, it somehow has become completely normalized that these kinds of jobs exist, and anybody who doesn't want to work them is considered "too entitled", which all goes back to this notion of "work as a virtue".
And while the idea that this experience might help change something from the desk job, the reality is most people will just be glad to be having their desk job, with a lot having a mindset of "I went through the &^%$ jobs to get here, everybody else should have to suffer like I did!".
They can be low / lower pay and still be a fairly reasonable place to work with fairly reasonable people to work with.
But, if we accept that work conditions fit some kind of natural distribution / bell curve, it's probably unrealistic to believe there will be no shit jobs.
We do strive, which is why we have non-shit jobs now. After the advent of agriculture, overwhelming majority of people has worked mundane, tiring, repetitive and straining jobs. It’s only recent increases in technology allowed us to produce immense amounts of wealth, finally allowing huge swaths of population to enjoy light, interesting and fun jobs. We still have lots of shit jobs out there, but don’t worry, we’re working on that.
Service and social jobs are usually those "closest to the base", being in constant contact with people from all walks of life, while at the same time usually the least well paid.
That's a lot of exposure compared to many other jobs, in particular, desk jobs and pretty much most management and executive positions.
Imho the importance of such real in flesh contact to other people, across peer groups, is vastly underestimated these days.
The ever-present social media gives digitally affine people often the misleading idea they can find everybody, with all their issues and opinions, online but from my experience that just holds not true.
There's plenty of people out there that don't even know what Facebook is, as unbelievable as that might sound.
Slowly the org transitions to much higher paid people in these roles across the board.
I think part of it is mgmt types think they save money reducing wages for the most numerous type of employee and it creates a black hole race to the bottom.
High end restaurants have very well paid front of house because they have a financial incentive to perform. Cashiers don't.
Can you point to any point in human history (since the invention of farming) in which a smaller fraction of people worked menial jobs than now?
There are tons and tons of bullshit jobs that don't produce anything valuable, don't fulfill anyones need to have a meaningful life, but somehow keep butts in seats often at keyboards getting paid to justify someone elses jobs existence.
There is a reason why job satisfaction is abysmal, why depression and opioid abuse is rampant, and why those weren't as large problems two centuries ago when people were almost universally subsistence farmers. The labor wasn't easy but it always justified itself to those doing the work (assuming it was your own farm, growing your own food, which was and has always been pretty rare). You knew why it had to be done, something lacking in many modern careers.
E.g. flipping burgers at McDonald's isn't a shitty job because you're flipping burgers; it's a shitty job because you are paid badly, made to work much faster than it's healthy, and the management is shitty to you both personally and structurally, in how they plan the shifts, etc.
I'd argue that any shitty job could have a non-shitty variant with mostly the same tasks and responsibilities, and only the conditions changed. Which leads me to the answer to your question: anywhere between invention of agriculture and the industrial revolution, or perhaps even up to XIX century. Even when people toiled on farms, to then give most of it away to some nobles with swords, at least they weren't micromanaged day-in, day-out by said nobles.
One step up, the corporate managers putting the pressure on the local managers are themselves pressured by market conditions to cut cost and drive efficiency. And who drives those market conditions? You and I, my friend. We like cheap stuff. The consequence is that others suffer.
I worked on a farm throwing hay. It’s literally backbreaking work, but I had an awesome employer who thought about safety and making for a better workplace. If Amazon were running that farm, I’d be crippled by debilitating pain today.
It seems to me like it used to be a lot more common for people to take up a "shitty" (e.g., low paying, menial, and hard) job when they were young, to help pay their way through school, for some extra pocket money, etc. You would do this during the summers, or part-time, or both. This was just considered an ordinary part of life and a character building experience.
It seems like this experience is a lot less common now. In part because we're coddling our children and our young adults (hard work increasingly seems to be a dirty word and something no one should ever have to do), in part because we're handing off all the worst jobs to illegal immigrant labor.
I'm sure this will prompt some "ok boomer" type responses (I'm not that old btw) but that's just how it was when and where I grew up. I was expected to work and make money as soon as I was able, because my family wasn't rich. They were also super clear with me that there was no free rent after I turned 18, and that if I wanted to go to college I needed to pay for it myself. So this fantasy land "we'll have only perfect jobs for everyone and work will always be a fulfilling endeavor" crap does not connect with me and I suspect does not connect with 90% of Americans. It is popular with techno-fantasists who went to Stanford and work in SV and drink the kool-aid from their employer about how they are changing the world by optimizing the profitability of some billionaire's advertising inventory.
(None of this is to suggest that Cierra Brown's situation is fine and we don't need to change anything about the system btw! Biggest practical issues I saw in that article were that she doesn't have healthcare and she walks away from 2 weeks of work with only $215, something is very wrong there.)
When the Reagan administration changed the regulations around meatpacking to break the unions and ship the industry back to 1910 standards to rural places, none of the principled conservatives were complaining about cheap meat packing and illegal workers who didn’t collect workers compensation or have pesky demands for health insurance.
Likewise, none of the large apple growers around me were too concerned about guest worker visas when they were able to hire on Jamaicans for a few months, house them in onsite dormitories and pay below market rates. They love to bitch about Mexican construction guys though.
When I worked in the mall in the 90s, the struggle of unskilled workers was obvious and sad. At that time, most workers made $4.25, and the barrier to moving up for folks not in college was a car. Getting a $12/hr job as a line cook at Pizza Uno or $15/hr job cleaning offices meant freedom for those people.
If labor standards didn’t allow the abysmal working conditions that only desperate Latin American or other immigrants are willing to take, the market would take care of that problem. Instead of shipping in Apple pickers from 4,000 miles away, you could hire folks 10 miles away and bus them in.
You have this backwards. My point wasn't that immigrants are taking American jobs, it was that Americans are giving them these jobs because Americans are being lazy, soft and cheap.
The immigrant is not at fault. It seems like you're responding to Fox News talking points, not to me. I would suggest doing that on foxnews.com.
At no point did I suggest that better labor standards are a bad idea, but I did observe that anyone who thinks society will eliminate all the jobs Hacker News perceives as shitty is drinking a lot of kool-aid.
Don't blame the American who doesn't want to do back-breaking work for pennies. It's the same everywhere: for example, Finland imports seasonal berry pickers from Thailand.
No sane local wants to work on the rates the market is willing to pay; mechanised agriculture has pushed the prices low enough to make manual agricultural work simply unsustainable. To make local work profitable we'd need to radically raise the product prices or provide subsidies.
These problems can be solved in other ways. A real world solution probably involves some workers getting paid less than they would like, and some businesses paying higher wages than they want to.
The least moral solution is to develop an illegal underclass and deny them human and political rights. This sort of thing is cancerous for a democracy and bears an unsettling resemblance to one of America's original sins, one which I'm sure I don't need to name directly, but which we knew was wrong from day one, and which we spent a lot of blood and treasure to abolish.
I'm not sure how to react to cases where this is true but the seasonal workers still see it as a good source of income. Would the market bear the increased cost? Likely not. Avocados would be imported in the US, and in Finland berries would disappear as an industry ingredient as there are no low-cost countries with climate suitable for cultivation.
Good point, it explains why well-traveled people often end up being insufferable racists.
On the other hand Sony Japan apparently has a policy where new employees fresh out of college (vs employees with previous work experience) are made to work 2 weeks in retail at an electronic store to get a taste of what it's like for actual customers. I ask some employees if they got any thing useful out of the experience. Most said no, it was just like getting hazed.
He does have the relative security that comes with having a long term partner that does make a professional salary, but I don't think that diminishes the motivational piece. Not everyone is as ambitious as every one else. Of those that are, not everyone's ambition is pointed in the same direction. Some people just want to rock up at work for 8 hours a day, go home, watch some shit TV that they enjoy and then go to bed. Frankly, that's ok. There's not enough programmer/marketing professional/CEO/Founder roles for everyone to have them.
That said, if I could get a retail job that paid what I make as a dev, I’d definitely consider it. Retail was grueling, but at the same time much less psychological pressure, and much less mentally exhausting.
I always say I’m not going to let my next dev job take over my life, and maintain work/life balance, and things always start out well. But inevitably, pressure builds, I cave, and things get bad again. I realize that I share the blame for this situation, but at the same time, this situation seems to be more common than not among software devs.
I never faced this kind of pressure in retail jobs. Work was grueling and at time abusive, but when the work day was over, I was 100% able to relax and forget about work. I struggle to do that with a software job.
But at the same time, my compensation is considerably higher than most other jobs. So I’m both grateful for my job and yet still wish there were another way. Like a part-time software development job, which seem to be unusually rare.
I'm a CS student and I've been working at a Panera for about a year now. I love my particular store and the work environment is great; I genuinely look forward to going to work every day. I'll miss my coworkers when I have to quit soon to start my programming career.
That being said, I understand why those jobs could never realistically pay anything near what a good software dev job can. If you could make the same amount of money working a job like that, why would anyone put in the effort to get stressed out as a programmer? It wouldn't make sense.
The solution is to fix dev jobs so they're more balanced and less stressful :)
If I could work the ride op or fast food jobs at my current salary, I'd take them in a heart beat. Hell, I might even take the ride op job for half the salary because the job could sometimes be a lot of fun.
But retail? Hell no. You could offer me double my salary and I'd still hesitate before accepting it. People treat retail employees like utter garbage. We once had a customer berate a cashier to tears, yelling at her and literally calling her an "incompetent stupid bitch", because his credit card was being declined and he was insisting she was just entering his card wrong.
It was a blast.
To some degree, serving the "customer" by cutting labour costs to the bare minimum (as a way to minimize the cost of everything), means we create an awful existence for the people who depend on these jobs for a living. The tyranny of their lives is dictated by a consumer base who constantly demand lower prices and will shop elsewhere to save a dollar or two.
I worked in a supermarket for four years, but it was part time, while I was in High School and in my first year of University. I didn't need the money in the way someone working full time needed it. I was given consistent hours every week.
Working retail for a modest wage (say $25 an hour), with consistent hours would be a really great career for a huge swathe of the population. Lots of people (myself included) enjoy interacting with people all day.
A lot of more traditional professions have a better balance between physical work and mental work (skilled crafts, engineering in the traditional sense, or being a doctor all come to mind). Modern knowledge work doesn't have enough physical movement involved.
I wouldn't like to do it full time, but sometimes I wish I could spend 20% of my time doing something enjoyable but menial like stacking shelves. I think I'd hate doing it full time, but one day a week? Practically sounds like fun!
* not having to cut labor to the minimum as a basic value
* sooo many jobs would be unobjectionable at 8 hours per week. Almost any job.
* professions should be designed to balance physical and mental labor, particularly to offer breaks from painful standing.
I am not with you on:
* Giving people 167% of the average hourly wage for an easy job like retail. As a society, we do not _want_ retail to be a great career. You don't develop the job skills or provide the same value as jobs that are more challenging, and the more valuable things you could have produced are lost. Retail should pay less than other jobs, _because_ it's more fun to interact with people all day than to work at a hot grill.
Broadly, as a society, we want people to have jobs that pay them enough to survive, and with enough margin to do other stuff. Not everything can (or should) tie back to economic value. Otherwise we end up cutting off our noses to spite our own faces, as we focus on the short term rather than the long term health of a wider community.
More than anything, we want to reward diligence, professionalism and effort, in whatever form that might take.
Part of the reason software jobs are nice and comfortable is of course the pay and the agency, both coming from demand exceeding supply. But a big part of it is also, IMO, that it's impossible to tell how much contribution to the bottomline a developer has on a day-to-day, or hour-to-hour basis. When my coworker and I start talking shit on the job, does that contribute positively or negatively to the ultimate productivity? By how much? Nobody can tell, which is why we can get away with it.
Conversely, in retail or fast-food joints, you can track people's contribution to the bottom line at minute resolution. Which is why they're being treated like slave labor.
When you are that poor, you need every hour of work you can get to make rent, buy food etc. You can't take time off to interview for a better job, or to study for a new career. You are stressed from a thousand extra decisions about money that the cushion of a little extra cash could save you. Also you are one emergency or injury or illness away from losing your apartment, or going hungry.
That's why advocates call for a living wage, a wage that people can make enough to live on. If they have the capability to do more, then that gives them a better chance to achieve it.
Though there will still need to be people working retail.
As for how fun it is to interact with people... that definitely depends on who you are and who you are interacting with. If you know someone working retail, ask them how it is.
And everyone needs to shop. Retail isn't just interacting with people all day: You are filing shelves. Sometimes you are a pharmacist or a pharmacy tech. Sometimes you are doing payroll or managing. Sometimes you are ordering product.
You are also cleaning up the shit someone smeared on the wall of the bathroom and the puke the kid left in the isle. There is no real way around that.
Not everyone thinks it is more fun to interact with people all day long. I'd argue that most factory work - lots of which is paid fairly well, comparatively - takes no more intelligence or training or knowledge than retail. In both, once you have experience, you can get another job. Same for call centers... which again, are usually paid better than retail or fast food (yet still treated poorly). I don't know why retail should pay less than these sorts of jobs. Most folks just wind up with retail jobs because that's what they started with and it is hard to get out of the cycle.
I don't like interacting with people but it is way more cushy than the factory work I did for fifteen years. I guess you're right about not taking more intelligence or training, but it takes so much more physical stamina and risk of accident.
Most folks don't do retail for fun. Those that do will also do a number of other part-time jobs for fun or whatever reason. Most folks working retail, though, are doing it to eat and pay rent. Sometimes having a flexible schedule is necessary. A great number of places have chances to move into management, sometimes moving out of poverty wages.
None of this means the folks aren't ambitious or motivated. You simply don't recognise it as such because they are doing what you consider to be a "lower" job or not doing enough to meet your personal criteria.
I will grant you that selling garden soil might be as physically demanding as working in a factory, and miles walked could add up too. But I never woke up in retail wondering if I'd be physically able to continue working my job much longer because of the wear and tear.
There's a reason every rich country got there by manufacturing and not retail, and in part it's that you don't build human capital by sitting in a chair scanning price tags. Manufacturing productivity increases steadily so workers have to become steadily more skillful to keep up. It's also far from a dead-end job, as productivity is easily measured and the cream can rise.
People in retail can be ambitious and talented, but their talents are wasted there. We can't get every ambitious, motivated person out of retail and into the job where they would do the most good just by offering them money, because money isn't everything. But we can avoid screwing things up by _pushing_ those people into jobs where their talents are wasted, by offering them too much money. I've worked lots of mandatory overtime because people wouldn't come work for my employer, so I feel the pain of jobs that need good people but can't get them.
Your response screams, "I've never worked a retail job in my life!!". There's nothing easy about working retail in the United States, and interacting with the majority of retail customers is far from "fun".
At the end of the day you just want a room temperature shower and a cold drink, the mental capacity isn't really there for much else.
This is why I feel so much for those building the stadiums for the next football(/soccer) world cup. What's even worse is they're being worked to death as slaves in all but name.
If you don't have enough downtime/nutrition to recover between shifts you slowly fall apart.
No complaints, I actually enjoyed the work, but it was exhausting in a way that no office job can compare. The experience also makes me want to throttle folks who have never lifted anything heavier than a pen as I hear them whine about utter trivial things.
I don't, because it is considered rude to throttle one's co-workers.
The urge remains.
Just because your work isn’t as grueling as someone else’s doesn’t mean you don’t get to be unhappy or dissatisfied with it.
Having a wider perspective leads to a greater appreciation for what one has, after all. And that is a good thing.
Now I work in an office. It's nothing to go 4-6 hours without stopping. But of course I can stop and pop out for a coffee or a snack, or lunch whenever I want.
$4 extra an hour would change this woman's life (and a lot of other people like her). $4 extra an hour.. I don't think I'd notice it.
Many of us are SO SO fortunate, we can't even begin to imagine how good we have it.
I worked at gas stations after that, before college, and while it was tiring, nothing at the same level.
I can totally imagine a pizza job would be draining.
Hard work is relative and people are working very hard at all salary levels. There are many other constructs which are the true reasons behind how much people earn.
I agree with the Fight for $15... But I think they need to attach this to inflation or somehow as a percentage of the highest incomes in the economy. Otherwise Trump will just keep pressuring the Fed to print more money and $15 will only be worth $5 in today's money.
I started working in 1998 at 16-years-old. I could make $9.50/hr washing dishes or more as a bus boy on a busy night. Shit's whack.
Of course as a suburban kid I had reliable transportation. The constantly rotating cast of dishwashers virtually never had this access.
The couple that owned that restaurant sold it for several $M.
Housing in town I guess was relatively expensive (not as much as now). And it wasn't under the table, though I was responsible for claiming tips and they didn't follow child labor laws. Built a studio with that money!
I was reading a blog by an American who took a job at a hair cutter in China and 12 people lived in 3 rooms in bunk beds in the back of the store and they never fought. He commented that this living situation would never work in America.
I worked there for a year with a rotating cast of characters including those from first generation immigrant /low income backgrounds such as myself. One thing that year taught me? I needed to get into a good college and learn something useful.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/15/trump-releases-rule-requirin...
The stick is not big enough.
A massive amount is about to be spent on lawyers, so clearly they see this as a huge threat.
[0] - https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2019/12/04/55...
Minimum wage laws are fundamentally a tax on low-margin businesses and the low-wage workers who frequent them. There's a better option available. The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). It can ensure that workers take home $15/hour, while also ensuring that the cost is borne by the entire society. Not just a few specific industries and the specific demographics that rely on them.
Small businesses outside of the tech sector don’t have the access to capital that tech bro’s have.
Especially since we know that most venture funding goes to people who “pattern match” with Zuckerburg not the people who are running small businesses.
Yeah that’s going to make the poor better off while people in tech shake their finger at them - or in other words let them eat cake!
If low margin companies don’t deserve to be in business then why do money losing companies deserve to be in business? What if we made it against the law for public pensions to invest in VC funds or made it illegal for companies that don’t show that they can be profitable to be listed on the public market?
The mom and pop shop can’t get millions of dollars thrown at them because they “pattern match” what a successful founder “looks like” without a business plan. They actually have to be profitable.
What if capital wasn’t chasing after money losing startups where the VC partners take 20% management fees no matter how badly the fund performs - much of that money coming from public pensions?
I haven't qualified for the Earned Income Credit in quite a few years, but I have nonetheless claimed it a number of times. I experienced none of the magical properties you seem to think it has.
You can get a Notice of Withholding to get the credit in your paychecks instead of at the end of the year. I don't know how well it works.
It's clearly possible in theory to get $15,000 on April 15 and $15,000 from McDonald's and live the same lifestyle as someone who makes $30,000 from paychecks. I could manage it easily, it's basic consumption smoothing. Should be able to borrow against the credit if necessary, too, since it's guaranteed.
Depending on the structure of the rest of the tax system and on whether the UBI phases out or not, the effective marginal tax rates can also be quite different, though this part can be massaged to make the two options look identical, I suspect.
But the core of the difference is whether employment is explicitly encouraged (EITC) or not (UBI).
You aren't immune.
Minimum wage laws impact the supply chain that feeds Whole Foods and nice restaurants by increasing the cost of rural labor.
https://www.indeed.com/salaries/farm-worker-Salaries
A quick google will show you that farm workers are well below the $15/hour goal most progressives are touting.
The argument that "society should carry the cost" is based on your opinion that is in error. Society carries the cost of minimum wage increases because we all have to eat. We all have to patronize low margin businesses to some degree (even if it is indirect).
You can argue the EITC is a better "solution" than a minimum wage but if you are trying to ensure $15/hour for people paid $10/hour, you are really talking a negative income tax or UBI. At which point, you are probably better off supporting those proposals instead of pushing the EITC.
Personally, I'm not a fan of subsidizing low margin businesses that from a Capitalist perspective should probably be allowed to die if their workers can't afford to live on what they pay.
> you are really talking a negative income tax or UBI. At which point, you are probably better off supporting those proposals instead of pushing the EITC.
I do support UBI too but it seems like an extreme stretch to say that is easier to sell than EITC. Especially when you consider that EITC already exists today as a federal law, and UBI does not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earned_income_tax_credit
> Personally, I'm not a fan of subsidizing low margin businesses that from a Capitalist perspective should probably be allowed to die if their workers can't afford to live on what they pay.
Allowing McDonalds to hire workers at wages set by supply-and-demand, is the very opposite of a subsidy. Killing off profitable low-margin businesses, will by definition, lower the nation's GDP and tax base. Everyone, especially the workers like the one featured in the article, will be far better off in a world where profitable low-margin businesses aren't killed off by government regulation. It's far more effective to tax McDonalds, as well as every other profitable company, in order to fund the safety net that every citizen deserves.
To do what the person I'm replying to wants, it would be on the scale of UBI/negative income tax. Otherwise, its not the equivalent to $15/hour when they are being paid $10/hour.
I think it’s kind of rich that the same people who are probably working for money losing companies backed by VCs think that small low margin businesses owners don’t deserve to make a living.
Also, that's a flat out lie. Greece, Spain, and Italy are pulling up the average with their huge unemployment rates, and the vast majority of unemployment rates besides that are almost the same as the US and in some cases lower.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/268830/unemployment-rate...
Germany and the Netherlands have some of the highest minimum wages in the world, and yet they have unemployment rates that are lower than the US.
Moreover, your claim was that most of the countries have twice the unemployment rate of the US. Your very own source shows that only 5 of the 28 nations have double or more, and less than half have an unemployment rate 50% greater than the US. Are you going to admit to your lie or are you going to change the story?
This turns the low paid workers into unemployed workers.
I'm fascinated that people honestly think it's better that people make $0/h than $10/h while "exploited".
Most studies that have been done on minimum wage found no correlation to unemployment rate. The economics you learned in high school can rarely be applied perfectly to reality. There are plenty of countries with minimum wages with no significantly different unemployment rates in the service industries.
This makes it very hard to measure the effect with any precision. You have to remember that wages are not 100% of the compensation for employees. So if MW increases from $10 to $10:50, fringe benefits may be cut from $2 to $1:50, and you end up with no measurable effect.
> But the reality is that these shops need the workers regardless.
If their expenses become higher than their earnings, the shops will close. Maybe that at least is an economic fact we can agree on?
For what it's worth, here in Australia there's only around 10% less McDonald's stores per capita to the US, despite a $20 minimum wage. All these workers can afford to eat and live in some of the most expensive cities in the world and the country isn't collapsing under unemployment.
If I was emperor, abolishing MW would be my first and most obvious reform to help the poor.
> All these workers can afford to eat and live...
But the problem is the people who can't get work because on MW!
Citation needed. In fact, I did a quick Google search and found out that several US cities/states have increased minimum wage this year and they've seen NO significant job losses. In fact, in some cases these states have seen more growth in low-income jobs than states with lower minimum wages.
Minimum wage takes money out of the pockets of the rich and puts it in the pockets of the poor. Half the time the rich people would have spent this money on luxury goods instead of spending this money on everyday things anyway. As such, in many cases you end up seeing increases (or at least no impact) in the numbers of low wage jobs because of the increase in demand of the products of said workers.
Or they could raise their prices. That’s what normally happens in my experience when a small business faces an unavoidable and significant increase in one of its input costs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21630679
"For the fiscal year 2017, McDonalds reported earnings of US$5.2 billion"
Why are you making this sound like a bad thing? What's with the EITC drum-beating in this thread?
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/mcdonalds-reports-f...
Their net income was less than $700 million and it’s not corporate McDonalds that pays the employees in the stores - it’s the franchise owners.
Franchise owners make less than $70K a year per store.
https://work.chron.com/average-income-fast-food-franchise-ow...
Keep in mind that the owners make that after leasing the building from McDonalds. It’s a turnkey business and there are many, many people who have gotten pretty rich on operating these places.
Most franchise owners aren’t “starting a business” they are “buying a job”.
But a 2013 report from Franchise Business Review dug down into the numbers and came up with a net profit of $66,000 per franchise. McDonald's did much better with an average of around $150,000 per restaurant. But when you consider that a McDonald's franchise costs more than $1 million and can easily run more than $2 million, even McDonald's doesn't generate excellent average returns on investment. The fast-food franchise business is tough, and success doesn't come easy.
With Chick-Fil-A, operators just get one store. They are buying a job. McDonalds franchisees usually own multiple stores and have different business interests.
There’s no regulatory environment that prevents exploitation of the workforce, so doing so is the low risk choice. The company chose a low quality bar and competitive pressure forces them to mercilessly attack cost.
16 hours x 4 people x 7 days x 52 weeks Equals about 2400 hours a year.
How much could they raise the hourly rate of their employees and raise prices before the demand went down and still be profitable if they are only making $150K now? At what point does it not make sense to invest $1 - $3 million a year to make meager returns?
They may need to look at the business and franchise model. They have a fubar business with hundreds of SKUs. 5 Guys is able to make money on a freshly cooked burger, higher standards for quality and higher cost. Make a "McDonald's Classic" concept that cooks real food at higher prices.
Again, McDonald's makes a business decision to have a system that encourages franchisees to utilize labor at the lowest cost possible because it is the lowest risk decision for them. For the larger company, the profitability struggles of the operators aren't a world-ending problem -- they own the real estate assets, and get to be an exclusive supplier and pull their percentage of gross sales first.
From my POV, I don't care a whit about McDonald's -- as a human it's awful that people are treated the way that they are, and as a taxpayer it's awful that society as a whole gets to pick up the pieces when hard working people fail and end up dependent on social services for survival. If McDonald's business can't deliver, that's their problem. The demand for food isn't going anywhere and a competitor will fill the void.
What’s the percentage of people that work at McDonalds are working there as a primary income?
Isn’t kind of hypocritical that you criticize McDonald’s profitable business model but you’re okay with all of the startups - including ones that are backed by YC who are losing millions of dollars but are able to access capital?
Five Guys also costs a lot more. The people who eat at McDonalds every day couldn’t afford Five Guys.
And if the magical competitor becomes available, are they going to be able to sell food as cheaply as McDonalds?
If their business model is not compatible with humane treatment and fair compensation of workers, why should we subsidize it? If the quality of McDonald's food is such that a small marginal cost increase will destroy the business, is it a good business?
Competition in the fast food space is intense, and market forces will drive prices. Perhaps the people who cannot afford a hamburger at Five Guys would be able to do so if paid a decent wage.
Maybe if we didn’t give special treatment to VCs Capital gains, many of the tech bro’s would also be out of a job. If we want to stop subsidizing bad business models let’s start with not allowing public pensions and tax free endowments the ability to invest in VC.
Don't be misled by people unintentionally (we hope) citing revenue numbers to bolster their case.
You're right, but then we have the employer class generally lobbying against society actually providing these things.
Consumers almost certainly have more elastic purchasing preferences for insurance as a group, as they are much more granular. Insurance companies love negotiating with companies, because fewer, larger customers with greater inertia and specially-negotiated deals enable greater price discrimination than a mass-market product compared directly to others. This has further enabled the rise in prices.
I firmly believe that the individual is better-equipped to make his own decisions than any central planner or procurement department. We've messed things up enough with centralization; it's time to shift back to letting consumers make their own choices. Rather than taking even more choice by further centralizing from an oligopoly to a government monopoly, give people a chance to make their own decisions. I picked health insurance as it is a particularly hot topic, but this reasoning applies to many other areas.
[0]: https://fm-static.cnbc.com/awsmedia/chart/2019/8/19/image%20...
[1]: https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2018/10/08/50...
[2]: https://www.insurancejournal.com/app/uploads/2018/10/2018-eh...
Criminal.
How I Get By: A Week in the Life of a McDonald’s Cashier Cierra Brown is trying to do all she can on her own, but it rarely feels like she’s doing enough. By Maxwell Strachan Dec 5 2019, 11:11amShareTweetSnap
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Eric:
My dear 80-something year old dad is normal in every respect. Except, he collects McDonald's receipts. Yes, that McDonald's.
I’m not sure what “freedom” is supposed to mean in that context. How is being dependent on paying for public transportation better? In countries where public transportation is amazing enough to obviate the need for cars, you just trade in the freedom to go wherever you want whenever you want.
However, there are things like the Dollar Vans in New York that do actually fulfill the niche. They're also sometimes illegal.