[Brian Swartz]

Originally Posted by RainMaker

What's your solution to this? Force people to work for $8/hour? Because my solution of cutting the dividend payouts to shareholders a tad and dropping ridiculous executive compensation packages seem a much better solution. And that's assuming that a bump in wages actually hurts the company financially which isn't always the case.

It usually is the case. As I've mentioned, a lot of the companies I'm talking about don't have ridiculous executive packages.

I don't disagree with you that businesses that are run incompetently can fail. That's just the marketplace, though I do find it absurd that this same logic is not applied to people. We go out of our way to protect people from the consequences of their bad decisions. Why are companies different? I don't think we should be overly protecting anyone.

The fact that people keep bringing up the $8/hr. price point etc. shows that there's a big disconnect here. I'm not talking about businesses hiring at the minimum wage. If it was only the cheapskates getting hit, I would say 'pay up or get out'. Those companies have *always* had trouble finding enough workers, even in a great economy with no other issues.

Originally Posted by thesloppy

I really only take umbrage with the suggestion that there's a whole class of unemployed people are sitting around collecting unemployment, turning down jobs and living high-on-the-hog, doing nothing & 'wasting' those benefits and our tax dollars by extension.

I don't know how many there are, but these people *do* exist. They are not a myth. All I can verify is my own anecdotal experience from two decades in the food service industry, where I would peg the number of people who take this approach when it's available to them as being between a third and a half of the relevant group of employees. This is hard issue to study accurately on the larger scale one way or another, but it's rather amusing to hear people on this forum constantly tell me what I observed daily for years doesn't exist.

If your proving what a great worker you are because you could be on unemployment but your not. That dont make you loyal that makes you stupid

This is from somebody I worked with a couple of years ago, on my Facebook feed. It's a common attitude and didn't surprise me in the least. This is not someone who was working at anything close to minimium wage. I know for a fact they made at least $12 an hour, and I think it was more because wages for what they did (line cook) were rising in our area. An area which has lower cost of living than much of the country, I'm in the midwest. $12-$13 an hour here is more purchasing power than the oft-suggested $15/hour minimum wage in a lot of places. Many others are tipped employees who make quite a bit more than that.

These are the kinds of people who are choosing to stay on unemployment as long as it's available instead of work. They are largely not looking for other jobs, partly out of choice but partly because there's little out for them. They don't have other marketable skills. Most live paycheck-to-paycheck, and it makes a lot more sense to theme to just keep their money rather than use it to try to improve their value to an employer.

The retail business I don't know nearly as much about, but I know more than most do and I'm not hearing anything substantively different there other than there are fewer of the long-term employees choosing not to work. That's probably because they weren't shut down as much in the pandemic. They aren;'t having any more luck on the hiring front though.

Point is, this simply isn't a 'they're all just paying crap wages' problem.

Originally Posted by GrantDawg

Chick-fil-a seems to hire competent employees, tend to over-staff shifts instead of under-staff, and serves good food at a reasonable price. It must be magic.

I don't know enough about Chick-fil-a to comment intelligently much here. I do know their average wage for entry level is about $9.50, quite a bit less than what I mentioned above. But let's assume they are doing something super-smart that allows them to escape any labor crunch. Let's assume most of the rest of the business, and retail, and whatever other sector of the economy are all a bunch of incompetent morons. We still have a problem, because a whole heck of a lot of people work in and depend on those sectors.