August 21, 2008

• Why increasing the minimum wage sucked.

  
      Disclosure:  This post will be written not even taking into account the argument of inflation.  Additionally, it will focus entirely on one perspective.

      Here’s a complete breakdown of how minimum wage increases cause more problems than they solve as seen through the eyes of a fast food manager.

      The problem all starts off with this notion by the employees that all of a sudden they are going to be getting more money, because sadly, this isn’t true.  The amount of money that the hourly employees who were affected by minimum wage receive in their paychecks will effectively remain the same.  In fact, employees who were already above the new minimum wage increase are actually now receiving less money than they did in the first place.  In layman’s terms, I will give you my prognosis as to why.
      First of all, the amount of money that the employees gets depends entirely on how much money our store earns in a shift.  Seeing as how their money comes off of our store’s earnings for that shift, if we aren’t making money, we can’t afford to have them clocked in.  There is a number that I have to keep track of on a minute-by-minute basis that is called “labor”.  This number is a percentage of how much of our incoming profit will be going directly to the employees who are working that hour’s paychecks.  If that number is above 18, meaning that more than 18% of the money we are making is going to the hourlies, I have to send people home.  Just because minimum wage is going up doesn’t mean more people are going to come and buy our food, therefor, since we are paying the employees more now than we were before, the labor number is more likley to go up, which means the employees are more likely to go home.  This of course means, they are getting less hours.
      That is just the first problem.  The second problem is a direct result of the first.  Since the employees are getting less hours, that means we have fewer employees on the clock at a time than we did before the minimum wage.  We used to have 8-9 employees clocked in at a time, and now that number has been reduced to 6 if barely.  However, the number of customers we get remains fairly constant, we still receive just  as many orders per shift.  This means that the people on the shift have to actually work harder than they did before.  The short of this is that THE EMPLOYEES ARE WORKING HARDER AND ACTUALLY GETTING LESS MONEY.  To say that this hurts morale is un understatement.  Six employees have walked out (that’s walked out not quit) in the short one month that has passed since minimum wage went up.
      This brings us to the third problem, which is actually a direct result of the second problem (see how this all kind of snowballs).  The fact that the workers are having to work harder, get less money, and not be as enthusiastic about working for a company that doesn’t seem to care about them has a direct impact on quality of service.  Even if the employees were all balls-to-the-wall about getting their work done, the fact that there are less employees simply means the food won’t be getting out as quickly.  When the food doesn’t get out as quickly, and even when it does get out, it appears to have been made sloppily, we begin to lose customers.  When we begin to lose customers, the store begins to lose money, because if there aren’t as many customers per shift, then we don’t make as much per shift.  I’m sure you have probably guessed what comes next.  If we start making less money per shift, then that pesky labor number is going to start to climb again, and we start our whole problem back over.
      In conclusion, minimum wage has begun a downward spiral that may cause problems for many businesses.

      I hope this is one storm we can weather otherwise these grapes are gonna start to get a little wrath-y.

   

      Until next time, good luck with life.

   

  • 8:53 pm
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