Why are we talking about whether paying fast food workers a better wage will drive up the cost of a Big Mac instead of asking how much McDonald's CEO's $19.2 million salary is driving up the cost? Hello?
@rbreich probably a better question is how much of a Big Mac is labor anyway? Surely the cows are the losers here, but that aside, if 20% is labor, doubling wages doubles wages but we’d only expect a 20% price increase. All and all, if everyone did this, we’d all win out and the economy would get a nice stimulus. Slowly starving workers until all the costs are raw materials just leads to no customers.
Obviously it isn’t quite that simple. Companies will want to protect their margins, so if cost go up, profit will have to too! They won’t complain about that part, to be sure.
@rbreich I'm not arguing against the wage rise, but the maths is simple: the ratio of kitchen staff to burgers is orders of magnitudes lower than CEOs to burgers, so rather more influential on the individual price.
@rbreich Because McDonald's sells ~550 Million Bic Macs and employs ~1,3 Million people in the US alone.
The CEO's pay comes to ~0.035$ per Big Mac. Assuming a pay raise for every employee of just 1000$/year (0.5$/h at 8h/d, 250d/y), amounts to 1,3 bn$/year or ~2,3$/Big Mac.
Don't get me wrong. I am all for raising the wage of workers. It's just that 19,2M$/y is surprisingly low, e.g. compared to Elons ridiculous 56bn$ bonus.
@rbreich that is also the wrong question, the better question is why should taxpayers supplement the income of low-paid McDonalds workers with government-provided benefits? Why allow jobs that don’t pay people enough to live at even poverty levels?
@rbreich probably because they sell like 900 million Big Macs every year, so even if the CEO's pay was solely funded by Big Mac sales, it would still only be 2.3 cents per burger. Put another way the CEO's salary was .14% of McDonalds operating costs for 2023.
What's noteworthy is that they had a net income of over $8bn with a 33% margin. They can afford to pay more and still be profitable without raising prices. The CEO's pay doesn't really matter to the people cooking the food.
@rbreich why aren’t we talking about the fact McDonald’s food isn’t real food, that as a backwards society we are nearing self destruction through global warming and the loss of our eco system, and that the amount of plastic people eat each day in their foods is nauseating. But yeah, hey, go eat that Big Mac. 🤮
@rbreich
Or how much the CEO/owner of In-n-Out gets per year. She's whining about paying people minimum wage under California law - it's $20 an hour, which, while good, is still barely average, at $40K per 2000-hour year.
@rbreich
Personally, I’m sure that I could easily squeak by on $10 million a year, pay living wages to all my employees and lower the cost of a big mac.
Because raising pay for someone who makes less than me sounds like giving someone else something while giving me nothing. Capping the pay of someone who makes more than me sounds like lowering the ceiling above me.
Never mind that I am never getting anywhere near that ceiling, and would be much better off if the other guy's floor got raised instead. A true free-market idiot accepts the risk of having nothing if there is no limit to how rich he could be.