I REALLY want to see the last few years of profit margins that these asshats are earning that are so vital to maintain that they are “forced” to pass the financial hit on to their workers (who are doing ALL the actual work). “If the minimum wage goes up, they either have to increase prices so that they can cover the increased expenses for labor, or they’re going to have to consolidate their labor and let people go,” Lederman told BI. Thanks Lederman, you tone deaf douchnozzle. Why can’t they earn slightly less profits so everyone can, I dunno, live their fucking lives?
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I would buy a Sonic franchise in a heartbeat. Unfortunately Sonic requires anyone buying in to have a net worth of at least 1 million dollars. Sadly I am just shy of meeting the mark. And yes, I would be the change if I could. I only need enough money. I don’t need ‘fuck you’ money.
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Why don’t you run a restaurant, yourself
This is all making sense now, you’ve been emotionally triggered by this post and the opinions here because you’ve likely had personal experience with owning and/or operating an eatery.
How long did you last? A year?
The is a poor excuse and will cause lost of business because this guy wants all the money, not just some.
Hey everyone, look at me! I’m a total piece of shit!
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.
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.
More resources for better places. It’s not like laid off people just suddenly die.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Oh boo fucking hoo. I think OP just posted this to piss people off. Worked, at least a little, on 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
Wait, what?
Americans only get 3 days off a year? What?
A lot of Americans get 3-4 weeks. Few get more, some get less. Vacation isn’t a guaranteed benefit many places.
Many get none. This is why you see so much “capitalism bad” on Lemmy.
48 hrs / 8 hrs/day = 6 days Americans get what their employees give them, in this case he is saying it is going to be zero.
I myself get ~~8.3 hrs / pay period (2x month) so around 24 days per year. That is considered high. Would be even better if I could really use them without feeling guilty.
Lmao 24 days over here is mandated by law, and some people get even more.
America is a dystopia unlike any other, where we smile and fuck each other over and then say “hey this is just the way it is!”
I hate it here.
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.
Don’t you think that if someone else could come in and undercut this restaurant by just taking home less money they would have already?
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.
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”.
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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.
It’s reflected in stories like this:
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.
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.
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.
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.
an help manage labor expenses, while raising menu Click here may offset increased costs. However, eliminating employee vacations could impact morale and retention, so exploring efficiency improvements, automation, or menu adjustments might provide additional relief.
That name, tho.
"Marky Mark needs ALL of his money to buy Calvin Klein underwear >:( "
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 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.
Good, pay a livable wage and ditch tips
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.
Cool. Counterpoint: thin margins is not a good excuse to pay someone poverty wages.
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…
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.
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.
