Actually Jen,
If minimum wage was raised to $12 an hour where I live, 25% of all supermarket jobs would disappear—totally, gone.
25% of grocery clerk hours are scheduled for "fluff and shine" simple appearance, in order to encourage slightly more customer commitment, or sales. If the minimum wage goes up significantly the small retailers will have to unload as much help as possible and adopt labor saving inventory management systems in favor of presentation and customer service oriented models. Big retailers like Wal-Mart will weather the storm and gain an even larger slice of the market as small outfits and older chains fold.
In case of a 25% mandatory wage increase for your least productive staff, than one should switch systems, invoking the single biggest threat to the poor, eventual universal automation.
The warehouse my orders are shipped from now, a warehouse which used to employ 60 Amish order pickers, now employs an engineer to maintain the robotic devices that pack the orders. Not a human hand touches that freight, I am told.
Minimum wage eliminates a training wage that offsets the lack of productivity of new employees and permits workers to develop skills at a low wage store and then move up to the big leagues [Wegmans, etc.,] and earn more.
If I were still managing a store that did $300k a month [only $1,500 of which is profit] and minimum wage went up to $10 an hour, I would lay off half of the staff immediately and go to a box store format. You have to lay off more than the 25% because your unemployment premiums are going to skyrocket.
It's reality, baby and reality is hard. Liberal politics is dedicated to shielding voters from reality and fostering delusion through emotive response to painful stimuli, while conservative politics is bad in another way, as it uses a limited view of reality to inform a delusion. The exchange of power between these two factions builds the collective delusion, which serves as a wall to blind and divide us, for the profit of our masters.
Look, if wages go up, jobs go overseas,
End of economy.
When Your Job Sucks
link › jameslafond.blogspot.com
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Rents have become so disconnected from reality that the middle class, that 2 percent of it left, would have to travel back 30 years to be able to buy a little bungalow on the east or west coast for 150k. They are over 1mil now. Likewise, go back 30 years to when college was semi-affordable. This system is bullshit. Fixable? Not by any kind of political move. I doubt Americans have the cojones to do what is necessary to live freely and with prosperity. We'll all be homeless in about twenty years. It won't be pretty. One solution that I can't advocate is to burn down unaffordable housing until prices come down. I think they would. Even the super wealthy are having trouble with their super mega loans for a two bedroom fixer in Beverly Hills. I'm pretty much already offgrid. I live a mobile lifestyle. I think like Patton in the sense that a fixed domicile is a thing of the past. Technomadics is the way but that is a temp fix. The lights are going off at some point and then we'll all party like it 1899. Don't look for the politicos and rich that got us into their fix. They will be living elsewhere.
Or, until quite recently, a mandated rise in the minimum wage would see law-conformant employees fired to replaced by illegal foreign workers. The demographic replacement so keenly desired by the big end of town. Trump's arrival seems to have slowed this markedly.