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You probably remember Subway's famous "five-dollar footlong" promotion as much for the obnoxiously catchy jingle as for the sandwiches themselves. (Sorry for getting that stuck in your head all day.)
The sandwich chain recently resurrected the promotion in a national advertising campaign promising foot-long subs for just $4.99—but the special deal won't fly at one Subway restaurant in Seattle, where owner David Jones posted a sign this week giving customers the bad news.
Sadly, the consequences of high minimum wages, excessive taxation, and mandate-happy public policy are not limited to the death of cheap sandwiches. The cost of doing business in Seattle is higher than the Space Needle, and the unintended consequences of those policies are piling up too.
The biggest cost driver, as Jones' sign mentions, is Seattle's highest-in-the-nation minimum wage. It went from $9.47 to $11 per hour in 2015, then to $13 per hour in 2016, with a further increase to $15 per hour planned.
The result? According to researchers at the University of Washington's School of Public Policy and Governance, the number of hours worked in low-wage jobs has declined by around 9 percent since the start of 2016 "while hourly wages in such jobs increased by around 3 percent." The net outcome: In 2016, the "higher" minimum wage actually lowered low-wage workers' earnings by an average of $125 a month.
And now those same employees will have to pay more for sandwiches from Subway—and everything else too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @09:39AM (4 children)
A lot of that seems obvious. That doesn't make it true. Those arguments give us modern Venezuela, with a population that is literally starving. Failure to understand basic economics has killed well over a hundred million people in the past century.
You talk of minimum wage being "a career wage for employees of all ages and skill levels". If I were satisfied with that wage, which would be the case if it were much higher, then I might choose a different career. I could put my high-skill valuable profession aside for something that would help me lose weight. Instead of hacking all day, I could be a gym teacher. This kind of decision, replicated millions of times over, would crash our economy.
My son has a minimum wage job at Ace Hardware. He got it at age 14 so that he would come to understand a work environment, get a reference, and gain a better understanding of why he must do well in school. The money is a bonus. Your ideas would deny all that to him, because he wasn't worth a high wage.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @11:11AM (1 child)
> My son has a minimum wage job at Ace Hardware. He got it at age 14 so that he would come to understand a work environment, get a reference, and gain a better understanding of why he must do well in school. The money is a bonus. Your ideas would deny all that to him, because he wasn't worth a high wage.
That works for a 14 year old, but try the argument on a 35 year old single mother of two or whatever. Times change, and unlike in the 80s, most minimum wage jobs are no longer occupied by teenagers trying to get some work experience and pocket money.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 13 2018, @06:39PM
The 14-year-old needs to job. It helps train him for a productive future.
The 35-year-old single mother of two is already a failure. She shouldn't be taking jobs from children.
I think "single mother" is part of the problem. A mother should be supported by her husband, the father of 100% of her children. Anything else is fucked up. Abandoning the traditional family is a huge source of poverty.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedBear on Saturday January 13 2018, @12:23PM
Venezuela? What?
You seem to be imagining a scenario in which the minimum wage just keeps uncontrollably climbing until it rivals wages for specialized jobs. Yet that is not what anyone actually wants. The $15 people are asking for is just a realignment of the minimum wage with the buying power it had decades ago when it was $2 in the '60s, or $5 in the '80s. Nobody wants the minimum wage right now to be $50/hr (at least not until 2075 or so when that might make sense), nor has anyone ever requested a minimum wage of $100,000/hr as they hyperbolically talked about on Faux Noose one day a few years ago. The fear so many conservatives seem to have that a $15 minimum wage by 2020 or 2025 will collapse the economy is in my opinion nonsensical. If you're getting anywhere close to $15 for a specialization like programming, yeah, we have a problem.
As to the other thing, I don't believe that any person doing the same job as someone else should be paid a drastically lower wage. If you work, you should get paid. Period. What you aren't remembering clearly is that the same job you might have had as a teen would have given you much more relative buying power. I think teaching your children that you should be forced to rely on a corporation "doing you a favor" by employing you is a terrible idea. The favors go both ways. You work for them and help them make money, and they share the wealth in a reasonable manner. I think your son is worth a reasonable wage that might give him a chance to build up some savings, buy a car, find a place to live, get more education and in general find his own path in the world as soon as he graduates. A job at $7.55 ain't gonna cut it.
You're also assuming that the people above him at Ace are making much more. In all too many areas, that isn't true. People of all ages in our workforce have been stuck in dead-end jobs at minimum wage for years. Do you want your son to still be making that same minimal "starter" wage five years from now? Because that's what's happened to millions of workers in this country, as their employers are in turn making record profits. If you don't think there's something wrong with that, well...
Let me see if I can say this even more clearly. Corporations in America, in recent decades, have taken to abusing the minimum wage simply because they can. People all over America are stuck in jobs where nobody ever gets a raise and nobody ever gets promoted no matter how good they are at their job. They can keep people in those jobs because so many other companies are doing the same thing. And inflation gives them all a pay cut every year. It's time for the backward slide to stop. That's all that is being fought for here. The idea that this will turn us into Venezuela is silly. Besides, Venezuela is collapsing because of bizarre artificial controls on trade, from what I understand.
Imagine for a second that you had to try and support your family by working at your son's job. That's exactly what millions of Americans are doing, quite literally.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 14 2018, @02:51AM
OMG Socialism! Hitler! Stalin! Mao! Pol Pot! Venezuela!