Fun facts:
- fast food margins are really thin. Not razor thin, but very thin
- the biggest single outlay is labour. It’s a huge percentage, and I remember it to be like 35% of costs
- a 25% bump is not insignificant to the biggest cost with margins so thin
I invite someone with more recent time in fast food who knows better to correct me. My experience is 25 years old and I only got as high as shift manager before I got a better job related to my field.
Fun facts: The rest of the west figured out how to survive it, while also offering employees more.
He should probably just close his stores, saving the public from ever accidentally ingesting his disgusting food.
Two Pizza Hut franchisees, who own hundreds of stores in California, are eliminating their in-house delivery fleets. The labor-gutting strategy has left 1,200 drivers without jobs
Sooo…are they going to rely on Doordash and Uber Eats exclusively? Doesn’t that come with significant uncertainty? Isn’t this guaranteed to result in fewer orders being fulfilled?
Yup. Lots of people being hurt by this new minimum wage.
An insignificant number compared to how many will benefit from this new minimum wage.
So we’re willing to hurt a few people badly in order to help many more?
Yes? What kind of question is that.
Are you sort of person who picks the group in the Trolley problem?
I’m the type of person who doesn’t see the world as a textbook problem, but rather a place full of real people with rights.
Me standing there next to the trolleys, I don’t know what I’d do. I’ve been through enough scary shit to know that about myself: that I don’t know what I’d do in a situation where people are going to die in front of me. I know it’s probably not what I’d say I’d do based on some kind of moral math I figure out in a breakout discussion group on a breezy spring afternoon in college.
Why do I say “full of people with rights”? Because when you flip that switch in the trolley problem, you’re killing someone. That’s a violation of their rights and therefore it is wrong as a policy even if the math seems to work out.
Those are real people, who are now really jobless. It’s a real problem, and it was actually, truly caused by this new policy. Being willing to just dismiss that because you think the numbers work out makes someone at least a tiny bit monster.
The new California law doesn’t apply to employees at full-service chains such as Chili’s or Cheesecake Factory.
That’s really strange. A minimum wage for just fast food?
That’s because they have a joke of a governor. They didn’t raise the minimum wage, just for fast food.
yeah fuck baby steps. and fuck the governor because other governors are doing better, right?
right?
Oh no! What will those poor employees do now that they can work at literally any fast food chain for $20/hr!
If a business cannot survive paying its employees a liveable wage then it should not exist. Businesses that do not pay a livable wage but can afford to are exploiting its employees.
Imagine thinking the employees are the entitled ones when running a business and feeling entitled to their labor at your price.
I’m sorry, who’s the entitled one? Those businesses should 100% not exist. It’s called having a shitty business model.
I hear this all the time but the reality is probably a third of us work at places that are barely surviving. Imagine if all of those people were suddenly unemployed.
If companies stealing the value of people’s labor shut down, opening the way for new employee owned companies, that would be fantastic
This is great in theory but there are plenty of companies that struggle to succeed in the current realities of real estate costs, labor costs, regulatory compliance expenses etc. Not every organization has people leeching all of the profits, and even many good ones are struggling to stay afloat right now. Just because a company is employee owned doesn’t guarantee profits to share.
If you’re in L.A. Make sure to boycott Fatburger.
Yeah fuck all those employees not just the ones who lost their jobs.
Oh no!
Probably shouldn’t have gotten rid of slavery as now the slaves don’t have a job anymore either.
Won’t somebody think of upholding the problem?!
Notice how he wouldn’t be tightening his belt so that workers can have a better wage.
He should try pulling harder on his bootstraps.
And cut out the avocado toast.
That’s what he’s doing though isn’t he?
He’s mistaking the bootstraps of his workers for his own.
Where does the owners say that the owner is making sacrifices? I read the article, but the title actually tells most of it, for once: I’m a California restaurant operator preparing for the $20-an-hour fast-food wage by trimming hours, eliminating employee vacation, and raising menu prices.
Nothing in there about the owner trying harder or making sacrifices, just passing the cost to his workers (eliminating PTO) or customers (increasing menu prices). Who knows, maybe he is…but the article does not say it.
He’s pulling himself up by the bootstraps, how he’s doing it is irelevant.
I like how you said “the bootstraps” because it sure ain’t his bootstraps that he’s pulling lol
You can look at his picture and the background to get a sense of the REAL problem.
How much you think there is to tighten? Restaurants run on thin margins. Let’s play with numbers.
Say this guy profits $1,000,000/yr., ALL profit. And he gives up every penny of that to make payroll. Let’s say his labor and risk are worth nothing. I’m OK with that. Hell, you’re lucky to take a loss, for years, starting a business, let alone break even.
At $20/hr., that’s 50,000 manhours he can employ. But not really. An employee pocketing $20 probably costs his employer $40. OK, 25,000 manhours. That’s about 480 hours of work per week he’s able to use. So 12 employees? Spread over 4 restaurants?
And notice the part where he said $20 was rock-bottom? And higher-level employees will need more to keep them on?
So instead of saying fuck it and pulling the plug and selling his assets, he’s trying to tighten up, keep those people on the payroll. And gets demonized for it.
Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. In our next Talk we’ll be bitching about sky-high fast-food prices.
tl;dr: Y’all seeing billionaires and megacorps raiding the economy and conflating them with guys like this.
IIT: Buncha people who have never worked payroll and have no clue how it works.
You have just calculated that he can hire 12 more people from the current profits (with made up numbers). That’s not what’s in question here. He’s already got the people and needs to pay them marginally more.
Your numbers are wildly off. The raise amounts to 4$, your going from 20$ and jumping to 40$ is irrelevant because the employees are already employees, the only cost increase here is the 4$ extra per hour.
So you’re looking at closer to 200k manhours based off your calculations or around 100 employees.
He runs 4 restaurants, and with that million dollars in profit he could cover the raises of 100 employees, and I highly highly doubt he’s running anywhere near 25 employees per restaurant.
If he had left it at “I’m raising prices”, then no one would have an issue with what he said.
The rest of it is just him being a giant asshole
Everyone except dumbasses with no critical thinking skills understands that in order to pay people a living wage, prices have to adjust accordingly
Oh boo fucking hoo. I think OP just posted this to piss people off. Worked, at least a little, on me.
If I cry harder I will be the real victim mentality.
Mark owns fatburger franchises and he and his family are BARELY scraping by… They only took two European vacations last year and their kid that just turned 16 had to get a tesla instead of electric Porsche? It’s just not sustainable and this ASSAULT needs to stop or hard working vampires like Mark and his loved ones suffer.
Edit: oh, that’s weird… Autocorrect formed “families” into “vampires”.
I think it works
“Eliminating employee vacation”
His workers had an average 48 hours of yearly vacation time. That is not vacation time.
I’m shocked they had any vacation time at all! I’ve never heard of anyone in the food industry (besides managers) that get any PTO. I’m also surprised how much PTO they get! Teachers only get 40 hours a year.
At $20 that’s less than a thousand dollars a year.
The beatings will continue until moral improves!
“how will I buy my next four franchises if I have to pay my employees a living wage?”
Somehow his employees were living before this wage increase. So what exactly does “living wage” mean to you?
I doubt $20 is a living wage, but the idea is that you can support yourself working full time.
You should change your username to intensely_stupid@jackass.me
eliminating employee vacation
Man shut the fuck up, the only employee that got a vacation was you numbnuts
Walberg said he used to offer paid time off to eligible workers. The average worker earned about 48 hours of paid time off, capped at 72 hours a year, he said.
Jesus fucking Christ. Shit like that has been illegal for a century where I live
The paid vacation he’s eliminating was capped at 72hrs per year. He warns that high schoolers will have a tough time competing with more valuable employees, but this is due to the wage increase only applying to fast food. Also, the big layoffs in in-house delivery are similarly due to the narrow scope of the law which excludes gig workers.
“Landlords won’t lower their rents”-- these things take time.
“Landlords won’t lower their rents”-- these things take time.
For sure. A market correction on landlords require businesses leaving the property and then the landlords defaulting their loans to the bank. But no matter what that still needs to happen, because an economy where we value parasitic capital over paying labor a living wage is fundementally broken.
A market correction on landlords require businesses leaving the property and then the landlords defaulting their loans to the bank.
Or, it requires landlords who can see that coming and adjust preemptively.
If everyone wasn’t leveraged out of their ass, that would be fine. Unfortunately, that’s a feature of our late stage capitalism. I don’t hold much sympathy for them. though. In the end, the lenders are just another parasite on top of a parasite.
I agree, but it takes a strong stomach in local government to not step in and prop up “market rates” for the benefit of banks and landowners.
