6 ms·

Yes, but I think some of this is also the increase in food worker minimum wage in California.

• martinky24 9mo ago
  Which is a good thing!
  • beastman82 9mo ago
    Inflation is a good thing?
    • martinky24 9mo ago
      Paying people a livable wage is a good thing.
      • baggy_trough 9mo ago
        More unemployment is a bad thing.
      • Ray20 9mo ago
        For most poor people, raising the minimum wage doesn't mean increasing their income, but rather reducing it to zero. It literally prohibits workers from working for low wages, effectively putting them out of job.
        • throwaway132448 9mo ago
          Just because you like to be trodden on doesn’t mean everyone does.
      • Aloisius 9mo ago
        After inflation, is it a livable wage?
  • trentnix 9mo ago
    Minimum wage goes up and buying power goes down as a result. This is the exact spiral that was predicted and dismissed as wrongthink. It has turned into another example of the Law of Salutary Contradiction: The Law of Salutary Contradiction states that when an event or policy is initially dismissed as impossible or a conspiracy theory, it is later acknowledged as occurring—but framed as beneficial and morally justified.
    • throwaway132448 9mo ago
      That’s just a way for sulking conspiracy theorists to say “I told you so” after they’ve moved their own goalposts 50 times and have broken-clocked their way into validating their own genius. P.S. There are way too many variables for you to draw that kind of causation from the correlation, and you’re very naive to think you could.
    • PaulDavisThe1st 9mo ago
      This is false. When making a prediction like "X goes up and thus Y goes down", it matters what the relative changes are. The naysayers of increases in minimum wage say things like "if minimum wage goes up by $2.50, the cost of a fast food burger will become out of reach". In fact, the labor cost component of a fast food burger is minimal, and its price need only go up by a couple of cents in response (if, indeed, given the parent corporation's profits, it needs to go up at all). Most serious studies of minumum wage effects conclude that while it does create upward price pressure, the results are small changes. It is essentially a redistributive, rather than inflationary, mechanism.
      • trentnix 9mo ago
        > In fact, the labor cost component of a fast food burger is minimal Only if you are considering the wages of the employees at the fast food restaurant. But when it extends to employees involved in the logistics, processing, and farming its no longer minimal. Tangentially, calling the rise in wages a "living wage" in SF/DC/NYC/etc. is folly to begin with and reveals minimum wage laws are based on sloganeering and not an economic analysis.
• BugsJustFindMe 9mo ago
  You might think that, but pretty much all studies show that minimum wage increases do not meaningfully impact prices. If you want you can read more about it at https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_minwage/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/wiki/faq_minwage/ which includes inline references.
• dangus 9mo ago
  It’s this already debunked by the famous Danish McDonald’s example? This is also debunked simple napkin math, even if the napkin math is generous to skeptics. Let’s say you buy a product for $100 with these example costs: $30 of the price goes to labor $30 of the price goes to rent/utilities/“keeping the lights on” $30 of the price goes to inputs (materials) $10 of the price goes to profit. Let’s say wages go up by 20%. Labor goes up to $36, now your price is $106. Wages went up by 20% but your price went up by 6%. Maybe we have to add the labor of the input materials, but a lot of input materials have low labor costs than finished products in the restaurant industry. E.g., a tortilla from a tortilla factory doesn’t have 30% of its price represented by labor cost, since it’s made on an automated assembly line. Still, for ease, let’s just say our input materials went up by ~6% to $32 At the end of the day your total cost of your product went up 8% but all the employees got a massive 20% raise with net positive income.
  • add-sub-mul-div 9mo ago
    This is really disingenuous and doesn't debunk anything. Who claimed that wages going up 20% would raise the overall price of the product 20%? I'm sure you can find someone on Twitter who said that because you can find any dumb thing on Twitter, but it's not a main argument. It's obvious to everyone that labor is just one cost to the seller. People only care that the price went up $6, not how that $6 happens to break down for the seller.
    • dangus 9mo ago
      I disagree with your last paragraph. This math is not obvious to most laypeople. Many people think that if a McDonald’s worker’s salary goes from $10 to $20 that their Big Mac will go from $4 to $8. My napkin math is extremely generous to minimum wage haters. It assumes that everyone is getting a raise and therefore all costs of all goods are going up. It also assumes basically a worst case scenario restaurant industry wage breakdown. For example, the S&P 500’s average labor cost as a percentage of revenue is only 12%. I haven’t even brought up the fact that people making wages that are too low to survive on already use government benefit programs, like how Walmart is the largest employer consumer of food stamps in the country. Minimum wage could be one mechanism among others to reduce corporate welfare. Walmart doesn’t deserve to have its labor costs be subsidized by the taxpayer.
• rconti 9mo ago
  Of course that's a factor. The article doesn't get into causes much, but this anecdote provides a bit of color and gives a vague sense of the scale of a few factors: > Onions that cost $9 a sack before COVID now run $80. Beef is up more than $2 a pound, adding $6,000 to his monthly costs. Labor adds another $3,000.
• empath75 9mo ago
  Literally no one in the article said it had to do with wages.