7 ms·

It'll be interesting to watch this play out. As someone who eats way more fast food than he should(once a week on avg), I've noticed this big time. I was in S

It'll be interesting to watch this play out. As someone who eats way more fast food than he should(once a week on avg), I've noticed this big time. I was in Savannah this summer and had to go to 3 different places to find one even serving. So many places had one employee taking orders and cooking, both. Even Chik Fil A only had 2 people working, and a 45 minute wait. The BK near me, open til 12, has totally random hours, and is often closed by 7. The Arby's is staffed by people who give food first and act weird when you stare because you need to pay still. Corporate? They don't care. I've tried to contact BK twice about a gross overbilling - they just don't care and don't respond. The credit card company said they never even replied to their inquiries. It's all cheap food, and I don't blame the workers at all. Fast food work is awful. I'm just curious how all of this is going to end. People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac, and people aren't going to work at McD for minimum wage.

nradov 5y ago
There's no big mystery. In the short term this will will all end with higher employee wages, higher fast food prices, reduced customer demand (more home cooking), and closure of some marginally profitable restaurants. In the long term more restaurant jobs will be automated, and more of the food prep work will be moved to high volume regional plants.
Mikeb85 5y ago
> People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac They will. Grocery prices are getting out of hand. I live in a particularly expensive part of Canada, but a single steak is $25 at the grocery store. A pound of ground beef is around $10-15. A single beet is like $2-3. A pound of potatoes is $5. 12 eggs is $8. I'm spending $30-40 to cook dinner for two typically. Restaurants seem like pretty decent value right now.
- GhostVII 5y ago
  Those prices are not at all representative of what an average Canadian will be spending though, so probably not relevant to the overall trend. Very few Canadians are going to be spending $40 on cooking dinner for two people unless you want to have steak every day.
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    I did say the prices where I live are a tad extreme. However rising grocery prices are near the #1 concern of most Canadians right now. There's literally articles written about it on every single news outlet right now. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/food-costs-calgary-vibrant-communities-bill-1.6230120 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/food-costs-calgary-vi... https://torontosun.com/news/national/cost-of-food-rising-across-canada https://torontosun.com/news/national/cost-of-food-rising-acr...
- ac29 5y ago
  Are you living way out in the Northwest Territories or something? Those prices would be way high even in the most expensive parts of the US, even at high end grocers, and I am taking into account the CAD->USD conversion.
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    Just north-ish Alberta. Like I said, expensive even for Canada, but it's pretty easy to see both inflation's effects as well as the effect of supply chain shortages on our food prices as we import most consumer food items.
VoodooJuJu 5y ago
>People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac And this is what's wrong with people. It doesn't matter how much suffering and misery and other negative externalities went into something, it doesn't matter that they're confronted with the truth of these externalities, they will do whatever they can to save a literal dollar. True, some people are "forced" into consooming only the cheapest things to survive, but many more people really do have an option to free themselves of Big Corpo, they'd rather just submit in order to save that dollar.
- pythonaut_16 5y ago
  > It doesn't matter how much suffering and misery and other negative externalities went into something This is uncharitable. It could be as simple as an $8 Big Mac changes the value proposition (quality/cost) enough that people move elsewhere. If the main selling point of your product is that it's cheap are people wrong to not buy it if it's no longer cheap?
thrower123 5y ago
McDonalds in particular is becoming very poor value. I've noticed something very odd lately with their pricing as well. The value menu meals are advertised as $X on the drive through menu. You order one, and they ask you what you want for a drink, and the POS rings it up as $X meal + $1 drink. If you don't want the drink, they scrub the meal and enter it as $Y sandwich plus $Z french fries, and $Y+$Z = $X + ~$3. I do not know the incantation required to get a value meal at McDonalds for the advertised price.
- dayofthedaleks 5y ago
  Order through the app, probably.
- gruez 5y ago
  >The value menu meals are advertised as $X on the drive through menu. You order one, and they ask you what you want for a drink, and the POS rings it up as $X meal + $1 drink. why not just call them out on it? ie. "the menu says the value meal should be $x, why am I being charged $x + $1?"
  - thrower123 5y ago
    It doesn't ever do any good. The managers can't ever explain how it's supposed to work.
authed 5y ago
There's one fast food restaurant around me that doesn't lack employees and its Chik Fil A... I'm not sure why but it almost feels like they have too many of them.
ravenstine 5y ago
Even the 7-Elevens near me are no longer open 24/7. The closest one to me closes around 12 and doesn't open until sometime between 5 and 7 am when someone happens to show up. I was surprised the first time I got there at 4 am (couldn't sleep, needed something to eat) and there was a piece of paper on the door saying they were closed because of short staffing.
twobitshifter 5y ago
We have a Taco Bell / KFC combo restaurant in the area. I went to the drive-thru several months back and was told that I could only order from the KFC menu because all of the Taco Bell people had just picked up their stimulus checks and decided to leave. Similarly I was in DC and my Uber driver told me that he had been living illegally in a friends house he knew was empty but up for sale. When the house sold he had to sleep in his car which was not Uber worthy. When he got the stimulus check he was able to buy a used police car and converted it to an Uber himself by replacing the seats, dashboard, etc. Both these stories show me how valuable those stimulus checks were to others. I would definitely support direct income relief in the future and those types of programs may be the easiest and most direct way to help those in poverty.
magila 5y ago
You don't need a crystal ball to see where this goes. Several European countries have labor policies which set a high floor on the cost of labor compared to the US. What you see there is pretty much what you would expect: Fast food restaurants are more upscale than their American counterparts and restaurant food in general is less popular due to the higher prices.
actually_a_dog 5y ago
There's no reason the price of a Big Mac need increase much at all. In Denmark, your McDonalds meal is made by workers being paid $22/hour, and prices are fairly similar: https://www.newsweek.com/minimum-wage-15-denmark-big-mac-mcdonalds-1573414 https://www.newsweek.com/minimum-wage-15-denmark-big-mac-mcd...
OldHand2018 5y ago
This article is about a small town in Pennsylvania that is literally 1 mile from the New York border. In New York, the workers are being paid $15 an hour while these guys and gals are <$10. You could easily compare prices with a short drive. I'm up here in northern Illinois where, based on advertisements, fast food workers are getting $13+ for starting wages. They are all hiring, for sure, but all through this summer and fall you would not have guessed that there was a Great Resignation going on. They all have enough staff to make shifts, there is no unusual wait times, etc. And prices are not crazy, either. You just have to pay the people! And here's an interesting thing that probably also helps: > The Fair Workweek Ordinance requires certain employers to provide workers with predictable work schedules and compensation for changes. https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/bacp/supp_info/fairworkweek.html https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/bacp/supp_info/fairwor...
ghaff 5y ago
A lot of services used by middle class and even upper middle class people essentially depend on wage differentials. Compare the level of home personal services that people in the US have compared to Southeast Asia for example. American do use gig services and tradespeople, but even lawn services, housecleaners, etc. aren't all that common. I use the latter two as lightly as possible and I view them as something of a luxury/indulgence. And certainly people mostly don't have personal chefs and that sort of thing. It's not that hard to imagine even fast food becoming more of a luxury good--although something like my local pizza place that I maybe go to every few weeks seems to be mostly high schoolers so maybe there's still a lower wage demographic that seems reasonable to be lower. But, yeah, I mostly get takeout there because I'm lazy and if prices doubled, I'd just make more at home.
- silisili 5y ago
  It's definitely in a weird place. People used to do fast food, expecting not much, for not much money. But plenty of premium options exist. A burger from a steakhouse is like 7 bucks. My local food truck, 6 bucks. And that dude makes it fresh in front of you, and puts tiny fries on it(Venezuelan style, apparently). That Wendy's charges 5.19 for a single is almost an insult, when 80 cents gets you something worlds better. So does fast food just disappear? It simply doesn't compete with more premium offerings today. Or do they compete with the steakhouse/foodtruck, and eliminate the fast/cheap aspects?
  - ghaff 5y ago
    I've gotten back to traveling over the past month and a half or so and the restaurant business is a complete sh-tshow even outside of fast food (which I rarely eat--at least at the big chains). Have eaten at a place the past couple of days that was only operating at about 50% capacity outside seating (I assume lack of staffing) and still had about a 20 minute wait. A couple weeks ago was at a place in a different city. Arrived and just got a seat at the bar shortly before 3pm closing because the place was packed. Wasn't opening again until Thursday. Personally I wouldn't care if McDs went away tomorrow but obviously a lot of people depend on or at least think they depend on stereotypical fast food. (And a lot of "fast casual" at places like Five Guys is a fair bit more expensive. Non-chains are often cheaper.)
n8cpdx 5y ago
> People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac I think people used to say this about Starbucks, where you might pay close to $8 for just the drink. Fast food can probably save itself by going premium (as Starbucks did, although I don’t know if they are still considered premium) and raising prices and quality. McDonald’s has made that play in the past with the pivot to McCafé and the nicer restaurant design that is now predominant. What may have to go away is the idea of fast food as something that is attainable for just about everyone. I remember when I was much younger and McDonald’s was a treat - we didn’t have much spare money but my parents could make McDonald’s happen occasionally. Nowadays I’m totally price insensitive and happy to pay for DoorDash to deliver McDonald’s and tip handsomely. The people who don’t have software jobs or a similar tier probably can’t. Big business will be fine regardless, and if they can’t make it work, the leadership is not worthy of their overpriced MBAs. I worry about the lower classes though. An under appreciated (for the wealthy HN reader) aspect of the relative success of American development is the broad accessibility of luxuries to the masses. Even the poor masses. If you (dear reader) don’t recognize a fast food meal as a luxury, you are blind to the real consequences of what is unfolding. I understand the desire to cater to labor, but ultimately there are far more consumers than laborers (by definition - all human laborers are also consumers). The grand economic experiment of yanking away the _one_ aspect of the American project (abundance) that has until now been continuing to succeed will have consequences. Not for me, but for the people you think of when you think of labor.
- jjav 5y ago
  > Fast food can probably save itself by going premium Here (California) it seems fast food has priced itself into premium territory already but the food is the usual lowest possible quality. I used to eat lunch at fast food chains way too often for the usual reasons: fast, consistent, cheap. These days it is pretty slow (for the issues covered in the article) and nowhere near cheap, so they have priced themselves out of relevance to me. I used to get a handful of tacos as Taco Bell for $5 but now it is $11. Right across the parking lot there is an authentic taqueria with better quality food, happier service and the owner works the counter (so not some chain) and the price is the same. So now I go to the taqueria every time. Same with sandwiches. There's a very nice local sandwich shop but I didn't go very often since it was somewhat expensive. So I'd go to Subway or Togos for a $6 sandwich. Last time I went to Togos I paid $12 for my usual! But the much higher quality local sandwich shop is $11. So now I go there every time instead. A burger combo at the various drive throughs is also up to the $11-$12 range. So if I want a burger I'd rather go to one of the many semi-upscale local burger places for a far higher quality burger for around the same price of just a bit more. Aside from the large cost increase of my lunches, I'm fairly happy with the decline of the fast food convenience. It has driven me to higher quality food and supporting the local businesses instead of the big chains.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
heavyset_go 5y ago
> I'm just curious how all of this is going to end. People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac, and people aren't going to work at McD for minimum wage. Research on the effect that raising minimum wages has on prices, specifically fast food prices, found that for every 10% increase in wages, some prices increase by 0.36% and other prices decrease[1]. [1] https://research.upjohn.org/up_workingpapers/260/ https://research.upjohn.org/up_workingpapers/260/
- twofornone 5y ago
  I wouldn't trust any minimum wage research in today's politicized academic climate. These are all models of a complex nonlinear system, it's trivially easy to build a model that will back fit your selection of target data while simultaneously outputting any future results that the modelers want (intentionally or otherwise).
  - Kye 5y ago
    What are you on about? The linked study is from over half a decade ago, and it's not from academia.
    - twofornone 5y ago
      So... right around Trump's election? This politicization is older than 5 years. But you're right its from an allegedly independent organization.
      - Kye 5y ago
        You didn't set a time bound on "today's politicized academic climate," so I had to guess. There's always a new conservative bugaboo with some aspect focused on schools, and it tends to come on 5-10 year cycles. It's CRT today, teaching about gay people existing around then (post-Obergefell v. Hodges), Sharia law allegedly taking over communities not that long ago. It seems the merits and hazards of paying people enough to live is next with this new labor movement frustrating people who are used to abusing lopsided power relationships.
KennyBlanken 5y ago
> People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac, 1)The price of a Big Mac isn't just facilities, labor, material, and marketing. It's also profits. 2)So? McDonalds doesn't have a right to sell a product a particular price point. Someone's unsustainable-for-society business model is not society's problem. 3)That big mac is costing us all money because McDonalds, like other starvation-wage employers, is relying on government assistance programs to keep their workers fed, housed, and healthy. Wallyworld hires people to help their employees file for welfare. Wallyworld made $183BN in profits last year. That's roughly $80,000 per employee. Tell me with a straight face that they can't pay people sufficiently that they don't need to be on welfare. Let's say that means a dollar or two more an hour. Two dollars an hour more for every employee (I don't know how many of Walmart's workers are minimum-wage retail, but it's certainly not all of them) would mean taking $4,000 out of that $80,000. A five percent profit loss. For an employee making federal minimum wage at $7.50/hour, a two dollar raise would be 27% pay increase.
- throwaway9870 5y ago
  The conviction of your opinion seems out of line with your understanding of numbers behind it.
- Jiro 5y ago
  This is nonsense. It's not 183, it's 138 (see https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/gross-profit https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/gross-... ), but that's not the error. The big error is that the $138B they make is gross profit. To quote Wikipedia: >For a firm, gross income (also gross profit, sales profit, or credit sales) is the difference between revenue and the cost of making a product or providing a service, before deducting overheads, payroll, taxation, and interest payments. Profit after deducting all expenses is net profit. Wal-mart's net profit in 2021 was 13.51 billion: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-in.... If $183 billion gross profit is $80000 per employee, you're talking about $5900 net profit per employee. Two dollars per employee wouldn't be a 5% profit loss, it would be an 85% profit loss.
  - 5y ago

nradov 5y ago

There's no big mystery. In the short term this will will all end with higher employee wages, higher fast food prices, reduced customer demand (more home cooking), and closure of some marginally profitable restaurants. In the long term more restaurant jobs will be automated, and more of the food prep work will be moved to high volume regional plants.

Mikeb85 5y ago

> People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac They will. Grocery prices are getting out of hand. I live in a particularly expensive part of Canada, but a single steak is $25 at the grocery store. A pound of ground beef is around $10-15. A single beet is like $2-3. A pound of potatoes is $5. 12 eggs is $8. I'm spending $30-40 to cook dinner for two typically. Restaurants seem like pretty decent value right now.

GhostVII 5y ago
Those prices are not at all representative of what an average Canadian will be spending though, so probably not relevant to the overall trend. Very few Canadians are going to be spending $40 on cooking dinner for two people unless you want to have steak every day.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  I did say the prices where I live are a tad extreme. However rising grocery prices are near the #1 concern of most Canadians right now. There's literally articles written about it on every single news outlet right now. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/food-costs-calgary-vibrant-communities-bill-1.6230120 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/food-costs-calgary-vi... https://torontosun.com/news/national/cost-of-food-rising-across-canada https://torontosun.com/news/national/cost-of-food-rising-acr...
ac29 5y ago
Are you living way out in the Northwest Territories or something? Those prices would be way high even in the most expensive parts of the US, even at high end grocers, and I am taking into account the CAD->USD conversion.
- Mikeb85 5y ago
  Just north-ish Alberta. Like I said, expensive even for Canada, but it's pretty easy to see both inflation's effects as well as the effect of supply chain shortages on our food prices as we import most consumer food items.

VoodooJuJu 5y ago

>People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac And this is what's wrong with people. It doesn't matter how much suffering and misery and other negative externalities went into something, it doesn't matter that they're confronted with the truth of these externalities, they will do whatever they can to save a literal dollar. True, some people are "forced" into consooming only the cheapest things to survive, but many more people really do have an option to free themselves of Big Corpo, they'd rather just submit in order to save that dollar.

pythonaut_16 5y ago
> It doesn't matter how much suffering and misery and other negative externalities went into something This is uncharitable. It could be as simple as an $8 Big Mac changes the value proposition (quality/cost) enough that people move elsewhere. If the main selling point of your product is that it's cheap are people wrong to not buy it if it's no longer cheap?

thrower123 5y ago

McDonalds in particular is becoming very poor value. I've noticed something very odd lately with their pricing as well. The value menu meals are advertised as $X on the drive through menu. You order one, and they ask you what you want for a drink, and the POS rings it up as $X meal + $1 drink. If you don't want the drink, they scrub the meal and enter it as $Y sandwich plus $Z french fries, and $Y+$Z = $X + ~$3. I do not know the incantation required to get a value meal at McDonalds for the advertised price.

dayofthedaleks 5y ago
Order through the app, probably.
gruez 5y ago
>The value menu meals are advertised as $X on the drive through menu. You order one, and they ask you what you want for a drink, and the POS rings it up as $X meal + $1 drink. why not just call them out on it? ie. "the menu says the value meal should be $x, why am I being charged $x + $1?"
- thrower123 5y ago
  It doesn't ever do any good. The managers can't ever explain how it's supposed to work.

authed 5y ago

There's one fast food restaurant around me that doesn't lack employees and its Chik Fil A... I'm not sure why but it almost feels like they have too many of them.

ravenstine 5y ago

Even the 7-Elevens near me are no longer open 24/7. The closest one to me closes around 12 and doesn't open until sometime between 5 and 7 am when someone happens to show up. I was surprised the first time I got there at 4 am (couldn't sleep, needed something to eat) and there was a piece of paper on the door saying they were closed because of short staffing.

twobitshifter 5y ago

We have a Taco Bell / KFC combo restaurant in the area. I went to the drive-thru several months back and was told that I could only order from the KFC menu because all of the Taco Bell people had just picked up their stimulus checks and decided to leave. Similarly I was in DC and my Uber driver told me that he had been living illegally in a friends house he knew was empty but up for sale. When the house sold he had to sleep in his car which was not Uber worthy. When he got the stimulus check he was able to buy a used police car and converted it to an Uber himself by replacing the seats, dashboard, etc. Both these stories show me how valuable those stimulus checks were to others. I would definitely support direct income relief in the future and those types of programs may be the easiest and most direct way to help those in poverty.

magila 5y ago

You don't need a crystal ball to see where this goes. Several European countries have labor policies which set a high floor on the cost of labor compared to the US. What you see there is pretty much what you would expect: Fast food restaurants are more upscale than their American counterparts and restaurant food in general is less popular due to the higher prices.

actually_a_dog 5y ago

There's no reason the price of a Big Mac need increase much at all. In Denmark, your McDonalds meal is made by workers being paid $22/hour, and prices are fairly similar: https://www.newsweek.com/minimum-wage-15-denmark-big-mac-mcdonalds-1573414 https://www.newsweek.com/minimum-wage-15-denmark-big-mac-mcd...

OldHand2018 5y ago

This article is about a small town in Pennsylvania that is literally 1 mile from the New York border. In New York, the workers are being paid $15 an hour while these guys and gals are <$10. You could easily compare prices with a short drive. I'm up here in northern Illinois where, based on advertisements, fast food workers are getting $13+ for starting wages. They are all hiring, for sure, but all through this summer and fall you would not have guessed that there was a Great Resignation going on. They all have enough staff to make shifts, there is no unusual wait times, etc. And prices are not crazy, either. You just have to pay the people! And here's an interesting thing that probably also helps: > The Fair Workweek Ordinance requires certain employers to provide workers with predictable work schedules and compensation for changes. https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/bacp/supp_info/fairworkweek.html https://www.chicago.gov/city/en/depts/bacp/supp_info/fairwor...

ghaff 5y ago

A lot of services used by middle class and even upper middle class people essentially depend on wage differentials. Compare the level of home personal services that people in the US have compared to Southeast Asia for example. American do use gig services and tradespeople, but even lawn services, housecleaners, etc. aren't all that common. I use the latter two as lightly as possible and I view them as something of a luxury/indulgence. And certainly people mostly don't have personal chefs and that sort of thing. It's not that hard to imagine even fast food becoming more of a luxury good--although something like my local pizza place that I maybe go to every few weeks seems to be mostly high schoolers so maybe there's still a lower wage demographic that seems reasonable to be lower. But, yeah, I mostly get takeout there because I'm lazy and if prices doubled, I'd just make more at home.

silisili 5y ago
It's definitely in a weird place. People used to do fast food, expecting not much, for not much money. But plenty of premium options exist. A burger from a steakhouse is like 7 bucks. My local food truck, 6 bucks. And that dude makes it fresh in front of you, and puts tiny fries on it(Venezuelan style, apparently). That Wendy's charges 5.19 for a single is almost an insult, when 80 cents gets you something worlds better. So does fast food just disappear? It simply doesn't compete with more premium offerings today. Or do they compete with the steakhouse/foodtruck, and eliminate the fast/cheap aspects?
- ghaff 5y ago
  I've gotten back to traveling over the past month and a half or so and the restaurant business is a complete sh-tshow even outside of fast food (which I rarely eat--at least at the big chains). Have eaten at a place the past couple of days that was only operating at about 50% capacity outside seating (I assume lack of staffing) and still had about a 20 minute wait. A couple weeks ago was at a place in a different city. Arrived and just got a seat at the bar shortly before 3pm closing because the place was packed. Wasn't opening again until Thursday. Personally I wouldn't care if McDs went away tomorrow but obviously a lot of people depend on or at least think they depend on stereotypical fast food. (And a lot of "fast casual" at places like Five Guys is a fair bit more expensive. Non-chains are often cheaper.)

n8cpdx 5y ago

> People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac I think people used to say this about Starbucks, where you might pay close to $8 for just the drink. Fast food can probably save itself by going premium (as Starbucks did, although I don’t know if they are still considered premium) and raising prices and quality. McDonald’s has made that play in the past with the pivot to McCafé and the nicer restaurant design that is now predominant. What may have to go away is the idea of fast food as something that is attainable for just about everyone. I remember when I was much younger and McDonald’s was a treat - we didn’t have much spare money but my parents could make McDonald’s happen occasionally. Nowadays I’m totally price insensitive and happy to pay for DoorDash to deliver McDonald’s and tip handsomely. The people who don’t have software jobs or a similar tier probably can’t. Big business will be fine regardless, and if they can’t make it work, the leadership is not worthy of their overpriced MBAs. I worry about the lower classes though. An under appreciated (for the wealthy HN reader) aspect of the relative success of American development is the broad accessibility of luxuries to the masses. Even the poor masses. If you (dear reader) don’t recognize a fast food meal as a luxury, you are blind to the real consequences of what is unfolding. I understand the desire to cater to labor, but ultimately there are far more consumers than laborers (by definition - all human laborers are also consumers). The grand economic experiment of yanking away the _one_ aspect of the American project (abundance) that has until now been continuing to succeed will have consequences. Not for me, but for the people you think of when you think of labor.

jjav 5y ago
> Fast food can probably save itself by going premium Here (California) it seems fast food has priced itself into premium territory already but the food is the usual lowest possible quality. I used to eat lunch at fast food chains way too often for the usual reasons: fast, consistent, cheap. These days it is pretty slow (for the issues covered in the article) and nowhere near cheap, so they have priced themselves out of relevance to me. I used to get a handful of tacos as Taco Bell for $5 but now it is $11. Right across the parking lot there is an authentic taqueria with better quality food, happier service and the owner works the counter (so not some chain) and the price is the same. So now I go to the taqueria every time. Same with sandwiches. There's a very nice local sandwich shop but I didn't go very often since it was somewhat expensive. So I'd go to Subway or Togos for a $6 sandwich. Last time I went to Togos I paid $12 for my usual! But the much higher quality local sandwich shop is $11. So now I go there every time instead. A burger combo at the various drive throughs is also up to the $11-$12 range. So if I want a burger I'd rather go to one of the many semi-upscale local burger places for a far higher quality burger for around the same price of just a bit more. Aside from the large cost increase of my lunches, I'm fairly happy with the decline of the fast food convenience. It has driven me to higher quality food and supporting the local businesses instead of the big chains.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

heavyset_go 5y ago

> I'm just curious how all of this is going to end. People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac, and people aren't going to work at McD for minimum wage. Research on the effect that raising minimum wages has on prices, specifically fast food prices, found that for every 10% increase in wages, some prices increase by 0.36% and other prices decrease[1]. [1] https://research.upjohn.org/up_workingpapers/260/ https://research.upjohn.org/up_workingpapers/260/

twofornone 5y ago
I wouldn't trust any minimum wage research in today's politicized academic climate. These are all models of a complex nonlinear system, it's trivially easy to build a model that will back fit your selection of target data while simultaneously outputting any future results that the modelers want (intentionally or otherwise).
- Kye 5y ago
  What are you on about? The linked study is from over half a decade ago, and it's not from academia.
  - twofornone 5y ago
    So... right around Trump's election? This politicization is older than 5 years. But you're right its from an allegedly independent organization.
    - Kye 5y ago
      You didn't set a time bound on "today's politicized academic climate," so I had to guess. There's always a new conservative bugaboo with some aspect focused on schools, and it tends to come on 5-10 year cycles. It's CRT today, teaching about gay people existing around then (post-Obergefell v. Hodges), Sharia law allegedly taking over communities not that long ago. It seems the merits and hazards of paying people enough to live is next with this new labor movement frustrating people who are used to abusing lopsided power relationships.

KennyBlanken 5y ago

> People aren't going to pay 8 dollars for a big mac, 1)The price of a Big Mac isn't just facilities, labor, material, and marketing. It's also profits. 2)So? McDonalds doesn't have a right to sell a product a particular price point. Someone's unsustainable-for-society business model is not society's problem. 3)That big mac is costing us all money because McDonalds, like other starvation-wage employers, is relying on government assistance programs to keep their workers fed, housed, and healthy. Wallyworld hires people to help their employees file for welfare. Wallyworld made $183BN in profits last year. That's roughly $80,000 per employee. Tell me with a straight face that they can't pay people sufficiently that they don't need to be on welfare. Let's say that means a dollar or two more an hour. Two dollars an hour more for every employee (I don't know how many of Walmart's workers are minimum-wage retail, but it's certainly not all of them) would mean taking $4,000 out of that $80,000. A five percent profit loss. For an employee making federal minimum wage at $7.50/hour, a two dollar raise would be 27% pay increase.

throwaway9870 5y ago
The conviction of your opinion seems out of line with your understanding of numbers behind it.
Jiro 5y ago
This is nonsense. It's not 183, it's 138 (see https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/gross-profit https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/gross-... ), but that's not the error. The big error is that the $138B they make is gross profit. To quote Wikipedia: >For a firm, gross income (also gross profit, sales profit, or credit sales) is the difference between revenue and the cost of making a product or providing a service, before deducting overheads, payroll, taxation, and interest payments. Profit after deducting all expenses is net profit. Wal-mart's net profit in 2021 was 13.51 billion: https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-income https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/WMT/walmart/net-in.... If $183 billion gross profit is $80000 per employee, you're talking about $5900 net profit per employee. Two dollars per employee wouldn't be a 5% profit loss, it would be an 85% profit loss.
- 5y ago