I initially got the numbers from the right-side box here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald's The larger number I

I initially got the numbers from the right-side box here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald's The larger number I used includes as "employees" people who work for non-company-owned franchises and licensees; I believe your smaller number is only counting workers at the company-owned outlets (not franchises or licensees), so your number should be about 19% of mine, give or take (source for that 19% number is the last line on this page: http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/investors/company_profile.html http://www.aboutmcdonalds.com/mcd/investors/company_profile.... ) (Incidentally McDonald's suggests it has 761,000 "employees" here - I suspect that's a US-only number: http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/careers.html http://www.mcdonalds.com/us/en/careers.html ) > another point is flat out ignored - prices can be increased Actually they can't. I assume prices currently are set at levels that roughly maximize the firm's profits. If McDonalds could earn significantly more money by charging more they would have already raised the price to do that. They serve a price-sensitive customer base; raising prices would indeed earn more per meal served but would sell fewer meals for overall less profit. (If you think McDonald's could make billions more by raising prices, you have to explain why they've been voluntarily charging less than they could all these years. Are they just being magnanimous, charging less out of the goodness of their hearts? :-) ) If you really want to nitpick, though: if McDonalds spent their entire worldwide profit margin raising salaries just in the US they could do a bit better than my calculation, but that would involve "exploiting" their foreign licensees and helping the relatively-rich US employees entirely at the expense of relatively-poor foreign ones. Whereas if anything, it would be more ethically just to only raise wages abroad and not do so here.)