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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
Those aren’t bootstraps, they’re the backs of those less fortunate.
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.
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
Everyone except dumbasses with no critical thinking skills understands that in order to pay people a living wage, prices have to adjust accordingly
Except not really. Businesses have much wider profit margins than they pretend to.
For example, in Denmark the McDonald’s entry-level wage is the equivalent of $22 and a Big Mac costs LESS than in most of the US.
If McDonald’s couldn’t make a profit doing that, they’d simply stop doing business in Denmark. They don’t.
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.
Restaurants run on thin margins.
Not anywhere near as thin as you think. The official numbers are AFTER artificially deflating their profits for tax avoidance reasons.
he gives up every penny of that to make payroll.
Ridiculously unrealistic.
An employee pocketing $20 probably costs his employer $40
What have you been smoking?? In the real world, workers produce a hell of a lot more value than they’re given in return. That’s how companies profit.
he’s trying to tighten up, keep those people on the payroll.
No, he’s trying to recoup the profits lost from paying his workers a living wage by making it less livable for them. He’s protecting his profits, not workers.
And gets demonized for it.
And rightly so. He’s acting like the put upon victim when in reality he’s complaining about having to pull other exploitation levers now that one is fixed at a lower setting.
Your numbers are wildly off. The raise amounts to 4$, 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.
They really offered 2 possible outcomes:
- Increase prices
- Fire people
Why not just . . . make less money?
The increase was $4. The article kept using percentages to make it seem like some big scary change, but the increase is 1 meal per hour per worker. I’m pretty sure any half decent restaurant can handle that extra $4 per worker hourly.
But no, the solution is clearly to just nuke your vacation policy so you can save $1000 per worker per year. Yeah okay.
American notions of profit and loss are fucked up.
It doesn’t matter if you’re profitable. Let me say that again. It does not matter if you’re profitable.
You have to be making MORE profit than you did same time last year, last quarter, last month.
If you don’t keep making more profit, you are somehow “losing money”. Money that’s “rightfully owed” to you. Money that should and would have otherwise been yours.
And if you’re a publicly held company and you miss that profit goal, the stock market will PUNISH you.
Hell, you could make more profit and STILL get punished if you didn’t “beat expectations”.
That’s because investors only make money when the value goes up. The pressure to always make more money than before is baked into the public ownership system we created. I think we should make all companies employee owned instead of investor owned and then you’d fix the broken incentive structure.
You bring up a great point. Once I applied for a mortgage and showed that I had a part time job and a small business. I had made some changes in my financial structure so it looked like on paper that year my company was failing even tho personally I made more money consistently over the years. Didn’t matter, my loan got rejected cuz technically the business was making less money.
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It’s reflected in stories like this:
Simon sinek is a leadership coach and has some people centric views on corporations, profit and leadership. He’s a hard critic of Jack Welch as a symbol of late stage capitalism.
Started on Adam Smith “the customer is the goal” and got it got to trickle down economics and shareholder supremacy at the cost of employees, customers and environment.
In this video you can see his shortest summary on historic views on capitalism.
Every video I see from him he’s brutal when mentioning Jack Welch, the thought leader of GE in the 80s, that turned things from a generation of loyalty to a company over 50y to massive layoffs season at Xmas because shareholders are unhappy.
I think this is neat. I prompted chatGPT-4 with your question about the above comment. This was the result:
Your perspective on the issues with the current focus on continual profit growth in American businesses is indeed echoed in various discussions and criticisms in the business and academic world.
A significant point of critique is the heavy emphasis on shareholder value, often at the expense of other stakeholders. This shareholder-centric view has been dominant for some time, with the primary objective seen as maximizing profits for shareholders. However, this perspective often disregards the broader responsibilities and long-term vision of companies. Recently, there has been a shift towards “stakeholder capitalism,” where companies are increasingly recognizing the importance of considering the interests of all stakeholders, including society at large, and not just focusing on short-term financial performance. This approach aims to foster a more sustainable balance between short-term pressures and long-term value creation, and helps restore trust in companies as vital contributors to society [❞].
The pursuit of continual growth and the pressure to exceed previous profit margins has also been critiqued for leading to other detrimental effects. For instance, unchecked business growth can result in increased workload, higher competition, a deviation from the original business vision, lower-quality customer relationships, and faster team member turnover. These factors can contribute to a loss of the unique qualities that made a business successful in the first place and may ultimately lead to less success in the long term [❞].
Furthermore, in the realm of stock prices and corporate valuation, the relationship between growth expectations and stock performance is more complex than often portrayed. Research suggests that growth expectations might have less impact on asset prices than traditional models suggest. This indicates that the market’s demand doesn’t react strongly to changes in expected returns, challenging the common belief that consistently higher profits directly lead to higher stock prices [❞].
These critiques highlight the complexities and potential pitfalls of the current American business model, which prioritizes constant profit growth and shareholder value, often at the expense of broader, long-term goals and responsibilities.
You know how I know it hallucinated part of that answer? It said companies are now considering their affect on society. Lol yeah, ok.
They claim to do that every few years, just to get a percentage of angry folks to quiet back down a bit.
1 meal per hour per worker
Fat Burger in LA is charging $17.29 for their most basic meal. That comes out to one extra meal per hour, per every 4 employees.
That franchise owner is really just a cheapskate asshole.
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Could? Yeah. Will? Unlikely. If other restaurants are getting away with a certain level of exploitation then there’s not a significant monetary incentive for a newcomer to exploit less.
That’s part of the issue.
The only incentive that apparently matters to most people is monetary.
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Why do so many fast food places only pay minimum wage and throw a hissy fit whenever someone proposes raising it? Why don’t they simply pay their workers more?
Cause the workers are expendable and their exploitation has been normalized to the point that there is no monetary incentive to pay more. Yes, there are restaurants that do pay more, but it’s often driven from some other ideology, not just trying to make the most money, and most consumers honestly don’t care. The same consumer will sometimes visit McDonald’s, Chik fil a, or In n Out regardless of workers pay, hell I even know a few gay people that turn a blind eye to owner politics when visiting restaurants. 'Cause at the end of the day people are turning up for convenience or to satiate a particular craving, not because one company pays more.
There’s a difference between economic theory and economic reality. People aren’t exactly rational when it comes to emotional things like “I’m earning less right now.” Even if the end result could be more income later, they refuse to accept that and say “well they’re charging x and paying y so I can get away with that too! Leaving money on the table is stupid!”
I think a not insignificant portion of business owners/CEOs all fail the marshmallow test.
“Eliminating employee vacation”
His workers had an average 48 hours of yearly vacation time. That is not vacation time.
What trash
At $20 that’s less than a thousand dollars a year.
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.
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
Never once crossed his mind to take less from the top. American businesses should fail more often.
Something like 90% of restaraunts fail in 3 years or something like that. It’s a famously competitive industry.
The unfortunate thing here is that small businesses fail often, there should be improved regulations to prevent predatory capitalism so small one offs can thrive. But I lose my sympathy for a franchisee or corporation that can’t skim as much cream so the soulless bastards make life worse for the workers instead of taking a slightly smaller top cut.
“how will I buy my next four franchises if I have to pay my employees a living wage?”
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Somehow his employees were living before this wage increase.
So your definition of a living wage is a wage that someone earns and hasn’t died, thus they’re alive, aka living? So do living homeless people make a living non-wage (not getting paid) since they aren’t dead yet? But I subscribe to the typical definition of: “A living wage is what one full-time worker must earn on an hourly basis to help cover the cost of their family’s minimum basic needs where they live while still being self-sufficient.”
How many of those fast food workers live with their parents because they can’t afford rent? Or have a second job to support thenselves? Or skipping meals or utilizing credit cards to afford food? If they are doing so to get by, then they aren’t being paid a living wage. And I didn’t dive too deep into it, but a living wage for LA, CA (where the restaurant is) is $21.22 for a single adult with no kids.
You should change your username to [email protected]
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Boohoo, a capitalist that owns 4 restaurants is passing the costs of labor on to their customers and is still blaming us for it. Sounds like the playbook of an abuser.
If paying people what they are worth causes businesses to fail, then that is just Daddy Capitalism working right?
For sure, record breaking profits never get passed on to the customer, if anything it pushes companies to see how much they can squeeze from nothing.
But hard times always fall on the customer.
Greed is evil.
The older I get the more I think that capitalism is incompatible with a moral society. I dont know what could replace it, but chasing “profit” has caused so much harm to our society.
In fact the opposite is often true, such as when Huggies Diapers recently cut production costs and raised prices several years in a row.
Imagine this guy, Marcus Walberg, having the sales volume that comes with operating 4 restaurants in LA and saying “doing business in California has never been more strained” LMFAO.
Sell the properties cheap, then, I’ll take a loan for that lot no problem! I’d open a Bakery that sells Yeast Donuts and my specialty Meal in a Focaccia (Vegan Options Available).
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.
Profit by definition is leeching off the labor value of workers
This is a very, very, very antiquated notion of commerce and puts everything into a binary that was already outdated when posited in the mid 19th century. Not all profit is bad and not all labor is good. As an employer, safe profit allows me to hire more employees, increasing the people I can help. As an employee, safe profit that gets reinvested improves equity in my peers or provides me new opportunities to grow.
Here’s a great example that shows the cracks in this model. We’ve got a sales person, a couple of junior software devs, and an architect. Individually, the sales person has nothing to sell, the junior devs are not experienced enough to have or build good tech, and the architect does not have enough time to build everything themselves. Together, they are able to build a product that materially helps some workflow and the sales person gets money coming in. Assuming equitable pay, possibly even equal, if the software can be sold at a profit, whose labor value was stolen? The sales person can’t exist without the code, the devs can’t sell the code, and the architect needs help to implement. Did we steal the labor value of sales? Should they make more because they went out into the market and found customers? Did we steal the labor value of the junior devs? Should they make more because they built most of the software? Did we steal the labor value of the architect? Should they make more because they had the idea and trained folks to get it done?
Kk, cool. I wanna hear the defense for 350-1.
Why would I do that? OP said all profit is stolen labor value. I didn’t even mention grossly overcompensated employees who contribute nothing. You’re gonna have to find someone else for that.
In your simplistic example, the profits would be split between the workers. You’re also pretending businesses don’t have useless owners.
But nice try bootlicker.
The problem you’re describing is capitalism, not profit or commerce.
In my real-world example, who pays for travel? If profit is just stolen labor value, clearly everyone gets all the money for hours worked, right? So who pays for travel? And wait, it actually takes longer for the juniorest dev to write some code because they’re still learning. Do they get a larger slice of the pie? They have the least experience and contributed the least overall. If we go by hourly wages then suddenly Goodhart’s Law kicks in.
This isn’t some hypothetical. This is a real problem real devs go through regularly and something I’ve been a part of off and on for a long time. You can call me a bootlicker all you want; I don’t really think that’s a good faith conversation so you’re not worth my time.
It’s possible for companies to lose money and still stay in business in the short term. I have run a number of small businesses and I have taken pay cuts multiple times, ran at a loss multiple years, and also put up strong profits. I run a nonprofit now and it’s tough. Business isn’t uninterrupted profit continually being stolen from workers. Sometimes investing in good people comes at a loss for awhile.
More resources for better places. It’s not like laid off people just suddenly die.
Lol, 48 hours of paid time off. I don’t even work full time and get 120 hours, by law. Fuck the US.
Do you mind sharing roughly where that is? Obviously don’t dox yourself completely lol
I’ve been at my company for 7 years this August and will just now hit that 120 hours vacation time, naturally just as I’m looking to quit lol
Companies here start at 0 hours vacation for the first year, and then slightly increase it for the 2nd year. I’m considered “lucky” for the time I get now…
In civilized nations 120 hours would be far below the legal minimum for a full time position. Here in the Netherlands the legal minimum is 4 weeks (20 days or 160 hours) but pretty much every company offers at least 25.
In a previous job I had 57 paid days off.
Australia has 20 days annual leave for full time employees mandated by law, and it carries over year on year so you can build up a significant chunk of time if you work somewhere for a long time. Also those hours belong to you, not the company, so you get it paid out if you quit.
We also have a Long Service Leave program where if you work somewhere for 7 year you get roughly a week off for every year of employment with a company, it does vary slightly state by state.
The construction industry has made an arrangment that as long as you are working construction in some way, your long service leave entitlement carry over between employers and jobs.Lot of companies also add carers leave on top of this, which may not carry over year on year, and sick leave can be fairly variable between everywhere I’ve ever worked has been pretty casual about it, if you call in sick a day here or there then they don’t hassle you, but for longer periods you might need a doctor’s certificate.
It’s pretty good.
TLDR: “Hey, everybody. I’m a stupid moron with an ugly face and a big butt and my butt smells, and I like to kiss my own butt.”
Thank you, Bart.
It’s good that Bart did that. It’s very good.
If you’re in L.A. Make sure to boycott Fatburger.
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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?!
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.
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.
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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.
In N Out in California pays $20 or more an hour starting wages, their burgers are (IIRC) less than $5, and they still make a shit ton of money.
If you can’t do business in CA, then don’t. OR treat your employees like shit. Sure.
Not one fucking word in this article about what the ratfuck owner clears every year from his four franchises. Nobody bothers to ask the question, because wage increases are a sin borne only by the consumer, so sayeth supply-side Jesus.
A building full of well paid employees serving high quality food can pay for the building, the livelihood of all its employees and all of the quality food used to make its offerings. But it can’t pay for all that PLUS the guy sitting on top of it all skimming off $100K every year while literally doing nothing. HUH. Well, fuck 'em.
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I think a non-profit fast-food place is an awesome idea, myself.
Eliminating employee vacation, as though he was already offering them some extravagant amount of paid time off. And what does he think cutting hours will accomplish? You either have enough people working the store, or you don’t. Running a skeleton crew and overworking your people isn’t going to be sustainable, not when literally every other fast food place is paying at least as much as you and they have choices.
Especially when they can go earn the "extraordinary " minimum wage literally anywhere else.
