Not McDonald's, but a burger. Real food from a real restaurant. I'm not being facetious or (especially) anti-corporate here: McDonald's vertically integrates an

Not McDonald's, but a burger. Real food from a real restaurant. I'm not being facetious or (especially) anti-corporate here: McDonald's vertically integrates and owns their supply chain, meaning that they don't actually have to pay market prices for their food. In fact, it's worse than that; their actions in the food market are so massive that they distort prices for everybody else [0]. To pick a local burger chain: Burgerville opened in 1961 in Vancouver, WA. Their cheapest burger was 19¢, and the "Colossal" burger was 39¢ [1]. Today their cheapest is the "Original", at $1.75, and the "Colossal" is still on the menu but is now $3.99 [2]. And if I look at your sources, but look at Wendy's or Burger King, then suddenly the same price increases manifest. So McDonald's really is an outlier, as might be expected from the second-largest employer in the world [3]. The reason why "only 2.3% of hourly workers earned [federal] minimum wage in 2017" is because of my editorial addition; most workers in the USA are covered by better state-level minimum wage laws. If we spend a few minutes totalling up the number of folks who live in areas where they are effectively covered by federal minimum wage [4][5]... I get that about 40.0874% of the country is either covered by federal minimum wage, or by state minimum wage which is coincidentally the same. These folks rely upon the federal minimum wage to climb, when it hasn't been climbing. Applying Bayes' rule, and using the newer number of 2.1% from [6], I get about 2.8mil people who live in situations, either as employees or as dependents, where federal minimum wage is the only thing keeping them going. (I was going to say "out of poverty", but of course that's not true.) Improvements to either the state or federal minimum wages would improve their lives. Worse, I get that about 7.4201% of the country is only covered by federal minimum wage. I would expect that these folks are disproportionately earning federal minimum wage, because if one doesn't live in these areas, then one cannot earn such low wages. Applying Bayes again, that's only about 517k people. These folks are genuinely marginalized; see American Samoa for a good microcosm of the difficulties involved in getting folks paid decent wages [7]. The conclusion I draw isn't that people are doing so well that the federal minimum wage is increasingly useless; instead, I think that the federal minimum wage has been neglected for so long that people are either changing local laws, or moving to places where the laws have been changed for the better. [0] https://www.theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspiracy-of-hogs-the-mcrib-as-arbitrage/ https://www.theawl.com/2011/11/a-conspiracy-of-hogs-the-mcri... [1] https://www.historylink.org/File/8792 https://www.historylink.org/File/8792 [2] https://thefoodxp.com/burgerville-menu-prices/ https://thefoodxp.com/burgerville-menu-prices/ or just go into Burgerville and see for yourself [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories_of_the_United_States_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_territories... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_States#/media/File:US_minimum_wage_map.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta... [6] https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2018/home.htm https://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/minimum-wage/2018/home.htm [7] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/american-samoa https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/american...