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

Also, serious question, do you leave $20-40 in your hotel room for the maids when you travel? If not, why not? Serious question. Be truthful. I do and so do all of my “Boomer” “M.A.G.A. friends. Why don’t you? Because we all know you absolutely do not do that.

It's a hard question how much Starbucks workers should make. There should be jobs out there for high school and college part time works that don't pay a living wage. I don't think ALL jobs should pay a living wage. However, it's true that some people just don't have the skills to compete and those people do need to live also. So I guess I think Starbucks should pay a living wage - but by a living wage, I mean that it should pay enough that you can afford to share a 2 or 3 bedroom apartment with one or two other people.

I live in a HCOLA. The cheapest 3 bedroom apartments around here run $3000 / month or $1000 / person / month. If our worker spends 28% of income on housing, they need $3571 / month, or $830 / week, or $21 / hour. Barista jobs here locally are listed at $20 - 30 per hour. So I think wages are fairly well aligned with a "living wage" here.

The problems start when our worker is a single mom trying to pay for daycare. Then she's going to have a hard time getting roommates, needs more rooms, and is generally screwed. But that's where government assistance comes in. It's not reasonable for menial jobs to pay enough for a single parent trying to cover accommodation for 2+ people and daycare costs. The government should step in and fill the gap in those cases with food stamps, housing assistance, childcare assistance, and legal assistance chasing down deadbeat dads not paying child support.

I love that the assumption is that there is no circumstance where it’s acceptable to say “management needs to share the profits with workers”. We start from the assumption that the CEO needs to make billions, because he’s deserving, but the workers need to make below a living wage.
So obviously “if wages go up, then prices will,too”… not that this is a negotiation between workers and management over how to split the exorbitant profits.

I care about both. And I care about living in reality.

Point to where I said that employees don’t matter. You cannot.

Never said there was no circumstance where management should take a pay cut. I pointed out there is no practical way to accomplish doubling Starbucks barista’s salaries. If you disagree, explain how it would be accomplished. I’m all ears.

Yours is a good and reasonable post. And I agree with it.

There are companies out there absolutely paying a living wage for below average folks to borrow from Ruxton Towers. Costco for one. Plenty of companies like that where if you’re willing to put in the time and be adaptable, you’ll be making that $40 per hour in a short period of time. My nephew and his wife, never cut out for school, do exactly that.

Raise their wages. Simple as that.
Management will want to raise the price to $20 a cup? Sure… let them do that. Guess what happens then?

People stop buying their overpriced coffee until they charge what it’s actually worth. Business owners always threaten to “raise prices sky high if we raise wages!!!” But that’s an empty threat because they know all their customers will abandon them. We should dare them to.

When they raised the minimum wage to $15 in a few states, everyone said the apocalypse was coming and the economy would tank. Didn’t happen. Economy did fine, workers got paid better.

equitablegrowth.org

Minimum wage effects and monopsony explanations

Maria Monroe

This causal analysis finds that hourly minimum wage increases to $15 or more improved wages for fast food workers without lowering employment.

Open link

equitablegrowth.org

New research finds $15 minimum wages raise pay and increase employment for low-wage workers

Emilie Openchowski

New research finds that implementing a $15 minimum wage boosts pay for low-wage workers and increases employment.

Open link

But "in reality" is a Starbucks that made billions of dollars last year. So the only real question is what Starbucks should do with that money.

A capitalist would say, "invest it back into the company to ensure that it grows and makes more next year." That is using profit as new capital.

A communist would say, "just give it to the workers and who cares about next year! If we go downhill, so be it!"

But the people on this thread (who love plutocracy) seem to have found a third option where the oligarchs can skim billions and billions and billions out of the system and hoard it for themselves neither bringing value to the company nor allowing American workers to have a financial buffer between their jobs and abject ruin of poverty. Allowing people to build up that nest egg would be "giving too much."

It seems like the American system in 2024 needs people living check-to-check and to be stressed out or they might not be willing to work for such low wages. Without the poor, who would do these kinds of jobs all day?*

* And please don't say "high school kids" because I don't think high schoolers should be working during school hours, working 40 hours a week, or working in bars and hotels all around the clock.

“Raise their wages” - who is doing so in your example?

Technically, a communist would say the government should seize the company and own it outright instead… otherwise your post is pretty spot on.

You are acting as if I am celebrating the disparity. I am merely pointing out that publicly traded companies have a board of directors that have expectations for how a company is run. “We are going to double barista wages because they don’t earn a living wage” is a nonstarter and I believe you know that.

Except that's not how it works at all. You realize only 1/4 of adults have a bachelors degree, right? College isn't for most people. Now add in how corporatized every sector is. A handful of businesses dominate each sector. Competition is gone. Mom & pop shops are gone. Those companies make a lot of money, employ a lot of people, but pay very little, even when they don't have to. You're telling people to go get skills but you probably use Amazon, go to Walmart, go to Target, go to Starbucks, etc. It's unavoidable & people wouldn't know what to do if those services didn't exist. & the people working those jobs work hard. You want to come it low level work, or whatever, that's on you. I honestly just don't get why go after the workers instead of the CEOs. People will make these posts & stay silent on how middle class share of income was highest in this country when unions were at their peak. People will make these posts & stay silent about CEO to front line worker pay gap, which has skyrocketed. It's greed &, instead of calling that out, it's such a lazy argument to say go work harder & learn some skills. We rely on those jobs. I'd rather pay a little more if someone was better taken care of but I also reject the premise of this thread. OP started it & said prices will double. Imagine if we just trust workers to find out what's actually available to them & don't side with their bosses who have way more money to try to sway our opinions? What if this thread title said Baristas are on strike & will make more money & prices can stay the same. The CEO of Starbucks can make a little less & give up a few yachts. It's like the CEO is supposed to have worked so much harder in life than the front line worker who does everything to serve you. You're closer to that front line worker, whether you want to admit it or not.

Solution to price conundrum - charge democrats $5 for coffee and Republican losers $10 🤣🤣🤣

Median homes are expensive.

Average rent is expensive.

Health insurance is a scam, as is most of the medical industry.

Taxes are a scam that mainly benefit monopolists, killers, and other cronies.

Colleges, both private and government are a scam.

Starbucks is a scam, too.

Cut out the scam stuff where possible, get the tax hogs out if government, and you’re left with food tent and utilities, all if which would be cheaper and better without the tax hogs driving up prices and meddling.

All of which to say, it does get hard to live comfortably on $40,000 per year if you’re committed to participating in a bunch of scams, many of which are voluntary.

“Public cost” means using threat of violence to extract an even larger amount of money from hardworking people.

It is often said that such a system has positive societal externalities, but it seems hard to justify taking so much from hardworking folks when some large portion of the kids in a lot of these “top” government schools are borderline illiterate (according to a history professor at UCLA) and getting degrees in nonsense like sociology.

Seems like a dick move to participate in such a system.

New cars are for idiots. No clue why people buy them, apart from laziness.

“We” lol. The oligarch takeover happened in the 19th century, if not earlier, not with Ronald Regan.

Then they slaughtered millions in planned wars put all the mothers into offices, the kids into government camps, and everyone into a taxed, fake, system of property ownership.

The problems will exist as long as they control the money and weapons. The solution is organizing, not for more fake money and slavery to medical corporations, but to END THE FED and send the slaving tax hogs packing.

The goal posts have shifted.

I worked retail in the late-1980s and early 1990s and we made $3.35 per hour. Most of the full time workers made a bit more than me, but either had a spouse who made more money, or they lived with friends or co-workers. No one lived alone on that wage. A cheap apartment was $400/mo, representing more than 100 hours of work.

Today the expectation is that you should be able to afford a 2-bedroom apartment, alone, on what one can make at Starbucks, fast food, etc. There's a sense that this was possible in the "old days", but that's far from true.

Why would she judge the college value by looking at the salary of her first job out of college? That barista is probably maxed out while she is just starting on her career.

It's a very disingenuous comparison.