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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: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Sunday January 14 2018, @09:40AM
We won the evangelicals. We won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated!
I want to create jobs so that you don’t have to worry about the minimum wage. They’ll do a great job that they’re making much more than the minimum wage. But I think having a low minimum wage is not a bad thing for this country. I want to keep the minimum wage pretty much where it is right now, because of the fact that we have a country that is now competing more than ever before because of airplanes and transportation and the Internet.
I want to COMPETE with the rest of the world. What I do want to do is bring in jobs so much so that people don’t have to live on minimum wage. But we are going to have to compete with the rest of the world.
Our taxes are too high, our wages are too high. Everything is too high. We’re not going to be able to compete against the world. I hate to say it, but we have to leave it the way it is. People have to go out, they have to work really hard and have to get into that upper stratum. But we cannot do this if we are going to compete with the rest of the world. We just can’t do it.
What’s going to happen is now people are going to start firing people. You know, the old story. It’s happened a hundred times. It’s always happening. But I’m not even saying from that standpoint. We have got to do something to compete with the rest of the world. Our country is not competitive any more. Should we increase the minimum wage? I’m saying that if we’re going to compete with other countries, we can’t do that because the wages would be too high.
I’m going to make sure that people are making much more money because we’re going to bring so many jobs back that we’re not going to have to be worrying about minimum wage so much. We’re going to be bringing the jobs back where people can really make a good living, not just a minimum wage living. I’m going to be bringing so many jobs back. We’re bringing jobs back so that people can really get out there and make a tremendous living again. You look at wages, they effectively haven’t gone up in close to 20 years. We’re going to bring so much competition back and so many jobs back that people are going to make a far better living than anything you can even talk about with respect to minimum wage.
You know, the minimum wage is a very, very complex situation, because we are a noncompetitive country. If you look at what’s going on throughout the world, one of the big problems we have are wages. I am going to make our country so competitive that people at minimum wage are going to escape the minimum wage. They’re going to go up and they’re going to make a lot of money and they’re going to have companies and be involved with companies that are really successful, where they can be paid more and more money. But if you start raising that minimum wage, you’re going to make a lot of our companies even more noncompetitive. And it would be a big, big problem.
I’m very different from most Republicans. You have to have something you can live on. Now, if you start playing around too much with the lower number, you’re not going to be competitive. I’ll say raise the minimum wage to $15. Raise the minimum wage to whatever it might be. But the problem we have is that our country is losing businesses. You look at corporate inversions and all the things that are happening. We have to COMPETE with the rest of the world. The middle-class has worked so hard, are not getting the kind of jobs that they have long dreamed of -- and no effective raise in years. BAD!!!!