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> As an American you might think "$10 for a single scoop of vanilla, that's nothing. A minimum wage worker packing groceries earn twice that in an hour back hom
by throwaway894345 5mo ago
> As an American you might think "$10 for a single scoop of vanilla, that's nothing. A minimum wage worker packing groceries earn twice that in an hour back home".
Is this a joke? $10 for a single scoop of ice cream in the US is a lot of money and also the US minimum wage is only $7.25/hour. You can barely feed yourself with the US minimum wage and you definitely can't pay for shelter or healthcare or anything else you would need to survive here, but that's a story for another time.
- jhbadger 5mo agoThe current US minimum wage is so way below market wages in most places to be meaningless, though. I'm sure McDonald's would like to hire people at $7.25/hr (or better yet have robots that they don't have to pay after acquiring). But currently, they have to advertise that their starting salary for workers near me is $14/hr because if they don't they won't get anyone. Politicians like to talk about raising the minimum wage to $15/hr or whatever as if that would suddenly give working class people a huge raise, but it would simply reflect the existing reality.
- apelapan 5mo agoMinimum wage is set by the states, 7.25 is just the national minimum. California has 16.90, Washington 17.13 etc. If I'll update the icecone example to a single vanilla scoop costing $8.45 it still stands for a Californian. By the way, USD 16.9/hr is on the low end of normal pay level for a IT technician or junior nurse in Sweden. Tax is highly progressive, so at that point they'd only be paying about ~18% total income tax though, perhaps that would be higher in most US states?