Your Starbucks will be $10 cup if Baristas on strike win and make $80,000/yr

Maybe she is going there for something else.

You think doing homework is NOT loitering? It is just as much loitering as anything I do.

There are many nice McD away from the homeless scum.

I guess it depends on how you define loitering. But that was not the point.

My point was that nobody who is normal would sit for an hour in a McDonald's in a yellow plastic booth under florescent lights while smell of burger grease wafted through the air.

Normal people do go to Starbucks and work on their laptops or talk to a friend for an hour.

A lot of people find that paying $4.75 for coffee is worth it if they can work on their laptops and send some emails. Would you do that at an Carl's Junior or a Dairy Queen? That would be weird.

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Ok. Simple math.

Somebody with no qualifications, no skills, no degree makes $20 an hour.

So how much more does a shift supervisor make? A manager?

How is this sustainable for any business to effectively staff?

Why does somebody with no skillset deserve $20 an hour?

I agree with you on McDonalds, but all kinds of people actually do “loiter” at Starbucks for a very long time. I don’t go there anymore because I think their coffee sucks and it’s expensive, but I would never hang out for more than 20 min or so because I would feel like I’m taking someone else’s seat.

Some people absolutely cannot do without their Starbucks, as it’s one of the iconic liberal brands, but the good news for those of us who don’t like it is we can go to any number of other cafes in town that aren’t under constant threat of unionizing and that don’t just make commoditized crappy seasonal drinks.

Most baristas are neither bread winners for the family nor are they trying to earn a living. It’s a good college or high school job that pays $20/hr+ with tips. The people who truly work there for a career (5%) will eventually move up to be assistant managers, managers, regional managers, or franchisees.

I worked at McDonalds actually as a sixteen year old (best thing that could’ve ever happened to me) and then delivered pizzas all through college and even after to help pay for school. Never demanded a “livable wage.” People who aren’t cut out for traditional school can make enormous money as plumbers, electricians, medical sonographers, etc. Or working for UPS. I just had a young looking 55-year old come out the other day to replace my garage door. He told me it was his second to last day, that he had been with the company since age 18 and was retiring with a fat pension.

There are all kinds of situations like this. One of my kids works at a pizza place right now making $19/hr with tips, but it’s an extra money job. It’s not a career. And I would completely discourage her from ever being part of a union in such a low skilled and not dangerous position. Ludicrous.

Jobs in my area typically pay $20 an hour. If they can meet all their staffing needs on that kind of money, then they keep paying $20 an hour.

The kinds of jobs that pay $20 an hour, are often the grunt work that allows those higher on the earning pyramid to earn much more. So, in the hotel business, the housekeepers might earn $20 an hour.

Would people want to come on vacation if they were not given a clean room to stay in? Would they be willing to pay $275 a night if there were no housekeepers to put sheets on the bed or wipe urine off the toilet?

If housekeepers cannot walk to work, then they have to have a car, or get a ride. Cars are not free.

Housekeepers are not invincible — they often look to be in poor health, same health probs as the rest of us. Their pay needs to cover medical costs, whether they choose to go out of pocket ones, or do health insurance.

That’s the pragmatic answer.

You bring up good points, that are of course millenia old, but the problem has always been, who decides how much the wages should be and for what jobs and where?

It would be perfectly just and ethical that a janitor is paid say 40 grand a year with benefits and a pension. But if his employer, say a hospital, is coerced to pay him that much, the employer will make cuts to let's say medical equipment and beds. So the patient or consumer loses. The employer wants to make as much money as possible and will only make less if he is forced by the government with higher wages for his employees. The employer will do anything possible to maintain profit margins.

So your choices are these:

to allow a robust free market where firms and employees can pay what they want and whereby the low wage employees will work for them or go to another firm to improve wages and working conditions. Normally the consumer wins because the firm can direct more revenue to product and service quality at a cheaper price.

Or

The government regulates employee compensation through a minimum wage regardless of the employer's budget or goals. The employee gets paid more but the customer loses out because the firm has to now make cuts in product and service quality.

That’s not a refutable question without a precise definition of “poor”. I’d say the answer is Yes for what in my mind is poor. Baristas can live on what they make. Some people in any society have to be poor because people’s abilities and luck are not the same.

Fair enough but, by way of example, the McDonalds where I live is offering $19 per hour to start (I don’t live in a HCOL city but a suburb which is growing rapidly and whose costs are rising). That is the market setting the minimum wage. Inside a year, that same employee is making, what, $21-22 per hour? That’s what they have to pay to attract employees. No government regulation needed for that. These baristas aren’t working at a nuclear facility or window washing the outside of skyscrapers for crying out loud. That’s a different situation.

By the way, if you’re a reasonable person like me, you leave nice tips in your hotel room for the maids and you hire maids for your own house at about $60 per hour plus. But I’m a conservative and I believe in being charitable, not tithing to the government as much as is arbitrarily demanded and then them “being charitable” with my tax dollars after they waste 50% of it on bureaucratic constipation.

In your McDonalds example, that is not really the market setting a minimum wage. That is the firm realizing that employees in that area will not work those jobs for less than 19 bucks per hour. McDonalds could choose to pay as low as the state minimum wage, but McDonalds clearly sees in this case that doing so will lead to staffing shortages, high turnover, higher training costs, and lost sales revenue. It’s a decision based on local information the firm is using to maintain a staff at the lowest wage they can pay, in this case 19 bucks an hour. This is profit maximization strategy, not the same thing as paying a compulsory wage.

Exactly. The costs add up quickly.

This is another issue that cascades from the one at hand, but since you mentioned hotels...

I was just in a hotel. Speaking of housekeepers, my hotel room (major chain that you've heard of) had handprints all over the mirror, a dirty table, an unclean bathroom, and my kid found old French fries under the desk.

Many people want to "go" to work and collect that 20, but they're not working for it.

I can tell twenty similar stories about retail experiences, but so could everyone here most likely.

The reason I don't like Starbucks is because it's the quintessential bastion of all things woke and liberal. The baristas are all purple haired gender fluid-ers, who somehow believe it works out financially for them to get paid more than the managers and the executives/franchisees. The only way I will ever step foot into a Starbucks is if a robot will make my coffee. A robot won't strike, and it won't leave its phone number and a heart smiley face on my coffee cup like all the so called male baristas do.

I already frequent Starbucks far less frequently. Their prices are nutty.

This is what the Japanese were doing 20 years ago. I wonder if human beer dispensers went on strike in Japan 21 years ago?

Can’t wait for all the entitled administrators and secretaries to be replaced by AI. They could’ve been replaced years ago

If they start making 80K i'm applying. Braindead easy and don't take any work stress home with you from the office. I'd gladly take a 50k pay decrease for that for a while.