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No it isn't immoral. Paying people not enough money to live is immoral! And no, paying someone $3/hr when it costs $1,000/month to rent a room (not even an apartment with a roommate, but just a room) is not enough to live; unless you think working homeless is moral. The point of a job is to not be homeless. If you are going to work and still be homeless, where's the motivation?
Forcing people at gunpoint to pay up is called armed robbery!
I’m sorry but if can’t afford to pay your employees a decent wage then you shouldn’t be in the business at all
Spoken like a person who has never owned or managed a restaurant. Let me help break this down for everyone here who has an opinion on this subject, but absolutely no real experience. Here is how you can break down the cost of running a restaurant, in order to see how much profit the owner of the restaurant is actually making. Currently, my restaurant is netting around $10,000/week. That's net mind you, not gross. Gross would be something like $10,800, but of course that $800 is sales tax, which the owner gets no benefit from.
Okay, so we have $10,000/week coming into our restaurant. Now, the first and largest expense we must mention here is food cost. Food cost varies a little from restaurant to restaurant, depending on what they serve, but generally costs range from 35 to 40% per week. So, out of the 10k, we have spent $3500-$4000 on food. Keep in mind, these are absolutely real numbers. I manage a restaurant, and I take care of all orders, and record costs. So now, after food purchases for the week, we have around $6000 to $6500 left. Now we move on to the next largest expense. Labor. My restaurant employs 10 people. Weekly payroll varies, depending on how many hours different employees work in a week, but payroll stays in the general range of $3000 to $3500/week. So now, we have taken care of food and labor, and we are left with around $3000. Now, lets figure in other expenses. Rent on the property the restaurant is on is quite good, only $3200/month. So if we divide that by 4, or sometimes 5 weeks in a month, we are looking at around $650/week of our profits going towards the rent. So now, we have around $2300 left in the bank. Now, we also have to think about electricity and gas. Our electric runs about 2k a month, and the gas runs about $600 a month. So there we have another $2600/month in bills. Divide that up, and we are looking at about another $500 -$600/week for the electric/gas bills. So now, we have roughly $1700-$1800 left in the bank.
Now, we have covered all the major expenses, but there are other smaller expenses yet to be explained. First, we have the cable/internet/phone bill. We have Spectrum, and the bill runs around $200/month. We also have weekly towel/apron/rug cleaning and delivery. This also runs around $200-$250/month. We also have the beer vendor who comes once a week, usually hitting us for around $80/week. And we have a man who brings us fresh breads twice a week, at around $50/week. The bread man doesn't get tallied up in the primary food cost, we list it in the log as a secondary expense, along with any trips to the grocery store we might have to make during the course of a week. We also have trash pickup, which runs about $60/week, and a man who takes care of the grounds for $30/week. We have a pretty small amount of grass and shrubs so the cost of maintaining the property is pretty low. And, I'd say that about covers the costs of running my restaurant. So now, after we have all the expenses listed, we can see that the owner of the restaurant I manage only brings home about $1500/week in profit.
Now I'm sure a lot of you might think that's a lot of money. That's roughly $80,000 a year the owner of my restaurant gets to bring home. That is, until you find out that this number is in no way guaranteed, and that there are hidden costs which pop up almost every week in a restaurant. Last summer alone, we spent $15,000 on 2 brand new AC units. There was also a problem with water leaking into one of the bathrooms when it rained hard, so we had a new roof put on. There went another $3k. Also, pretty much every piece of cooling equipment in the store went down at least once over the course of the year, and probably cost close to another $3000. There are also new equipment, dishes, silverware, etc. costs which after a year can really add up. All in all, in a good year, my employer only profits around forty to fifty thousand dollars. To put that into context, that's about what a guy making $20/hour, 40/hours per week, 52 weeks a year would make. Yet somehow some people think these restaurant owners can afford to fork over even more of the money they make so that each of their employees can make $15/hour. I'm sorry, but that's insane and all it will do is either drive your dining prices up or drive restaurants out of business. It's as simple as that. I mean, in my restaurant, I have one employee that actually makes minimum wage. That employee is my daughter, she is 16, and she helps wash dishes 2 nights a week. After her the lowest paid employees makes $9.50. Then I have 5 that range between $10 and $12.50/hour. If we were forced to raise everyone to $15/hour, it would nearly eat up all the profits my restaurant makes in a week. There would be no point in running the place, because in the end the owner would barely make anything. And that's just the truth, given to you using real math and very real numbers. Now you think about that, and see if you still think these restaurant owners are just greedy and can afford to pay their employees more. That may be true of those big corporate chain restaurants out there, but doing this to small restaurant owners would be devastating.
So Democrats support slave masters by supporting higher minimum wage?
Bingo. Instead of telling the poor to get educated, they want the poor to slowly think they actually have a good job with minimum wage hikes, knowing damn well poor people blow money recklessly, inflation will eat that hike, and the cost of living increase will also eat that hike.
Fast forward a few years when the poor are still poor, Democrats will simply ask for re-election/support and say “Rome wasn’t built in a day” or “we need to throw more money at the problem, vote for me.”
It’s said but it’s the easiest trick in the book, Democrats exploiting the poor.
When you interfere with the free market, that’s what happens.
Businesses can not afford to pay employees with minimum wage hikes.
Nobody should be forced to pay for any product that they don’t want to buy.
Minimum wage is forcing the business to pay for the labor at above market rate.
It also forces the workers to accept above market rate.
Neither is moral by any measure.
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