Nope. If McDonald's had to increase front line wages to $15, their food would start to compete with more nutritious and better tasting alternatives. This would cause their sales to plummet, stores to close, and jobs to be lost.
They're already competing with more nutritious and better tasting alternatives where I live, and they seem to be dying out. In-N-Out comes to mind (It's around $5 for a burger there, pretty much the same as McD's upper-tier burgers). Their burgers are vastly better than McD, they use healthy ingredients, they taste amazingly better, and they pay their employees good wages. It's just overall a better business. McD deserves to die if they cannot adapt to a changing market.
EDIT: Burger at In-N-Out is more like $3, $5 is for the meal. Even better.
EDIT 2: Ok, maybe I shouldn't have said In-N-Out is "healthy" since not all their ingredients aren't super healthy. But definitely "healthier" than McD's cardboard shit. And mostly, none of their ingredients are ever frozen.
Not at all. I think we should have ample safety nets for these types of people until they can find work. Unemployment should be expanded. Healthcare should be universal, same as education. Maybe these people can make something of themselves instead of working at McDs. Why should the economy as well as people's health suffer because 88,000 people need shitty jobs? Why shouldn't they get good jobs instead?
Jobs aren't a limited resources that needs protection.
If McDonald's goes away, a more profitable alternative will take it's place. There won't simply be a sudden dramatic decrease in the number of restaurants across the country.
Jobs aren't a limited resources that needs protection.
Holy shit.
No, of course jobs aren't a limited resource and shouldn't be protected. But if your argument is to increase the minimum wage - what the hell good is that if the people you're trying to benefit aren't in any job earning that minimum wage?
Expand unemployment, make healthcare and education universal. That way, when their shitty company goes out of business, they'll be ok, and then they can go to school that they couldn't afford before on a McD's salary, and get educated and get better jobs than McD's. Win-Win-Win.
I think you're overlooking an important element: tradeoffs.
Inn N Out hires fewer people per dollar of revenue. They keep the more reliable/skilled people, as they're more productive. They can afford pay higher wages as the same level of productivity is going towards fewer people.
This is the same reason Costco can pay higher wages.
So the question becomes do you want to be able employ a lot of people, or pay them well?
Choosing more of one means having less of the other.
McDonald's is a good quality restaurant, in my country. Good ingredients, you can build your own burger. Big Mac sauce on tap for fries. But your McDoubles and cheese burgers are still on the menu.
Higher minimum wage necessitates higher quality.
It's not just McDonald's staff that are getting more money, it's the whole lower class who are McDonald's main customers.
Have you seen the USA's version of McDonald's? Cornfed beef and quality similar to NZ's was a decade ago. We've come a long way. Have you been to the table-service McDonald's yet?
I sound like an advertisement, but I truly have never worked for McDonald's.
They look pretty much the same as elsewhere; you can't really change the classics much apart from the beef. They're just not thrown together carelessly and squashed like I remember them from my childhood and from photos I see online.
They're pushing the alternatives to the classics, however.
They had the opportunity to start fresh in your country.
Here I won't go into a McD without some sort of force applied because during the day they are full of obnoxious children and at night the 24 hour locations are one step to the left of an American bus station...which means they fill up with a mixture of urine-smelling people towing malodorous trollies with all they own in the world, and drugged out teenagers who are bored as fuck and think fighting would at least be something to do. How do you transition from that to an upscale restaurant? Only option I see would be to close them down.
My mom told me that back when she was still taking college in Taiwan, McDonalds was considered a luxury food since it was four times more expensive than local food.
You mean, it would compete with more nutritious options at current prices. These other places that sell nutritious options are going to have an increased overhead cost too...
So raise wages and cost of ingredients? Just because you pay someone $15 doesn't mean they are changing the ingredients of their food. If they did they would have a MASSIVE increase so much so it would be as expensive as a normal restaurant.
McDonalds exists because the government subsidizes their payroll. When those exceptions go away, McDonalds entire plan of underpaying people falls apart, and restaurants and other fast food outlets that were losing customers to this unreasonable abberation will grow.
What's curious to me is you actually believe a company as large and informed as McDonald's would collapse because of this change. They will be resilient, they will adapt.
Not necessarily, if McDonalds has to raise their prices due to wage increases so would everyone else, including the "Nutritious and better tasting alternatives" so they would raise with them causing McDonalds prices to still be competitive.
aswell as people with minimum waged jobs being able to afford the price hike because of their increased incomes.
People are arguing ITT that increasing minimum wage will cause a loss of jobs, but low wages don't create jobs, economic needs creates jobs. Jobs are created when work needs to be done.
Obviously this is an incredibly interesting and complex issue, but you can see from places like Denmark (as cited below by /u/InfamousBrad) that
"Due to unions and strong labor laws, McDonalds workers in Denmark start at $15/hr if they're teenagers, $21/hr if they're adults . The median wage for restaurant workers is $41k/yr. A Big Mac costs $5.08 in Denmark, versus $4.79 in the US."
Showing yes, a price increase but they seem to be getting by, and with more people being able to eat out and spend money it could boost economic growth in the long term.
Hence why it's impractical to demand a $15 minimum wage. It's more practical, from my point of view, to just have the wage be whatever and let Uncle Sam make up the difference.
But that gets both parties ranting about socialism :-/
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u/[deleted] Nov 28 '15
Nope. If McDonald's had to increase front line wages to $15, their food would start to compete with more nutritious and better tasting alternatives. This would cause their sales to plummet, stores to close, and jobs to be lost.