California set to hike wages for fast-food workers to industry-leading $20 per hour

100k w/four housemates is enough to eat, have fun, and save a wee bit in SF!

:) heh yeah wildly expensive. No accident the place is in high demand though 🌁🌉* And that’s in spite of parts of downtown feeling like they must be the fentanyl capital of the world. Western half of the city lives a different life than those stuck in e.g. the Tenderloin, very sad whether working class or homeless.

*emoji depict the Golden Gate Bridge at least on Apple devices

You should have taken it. You don't need to live in SF. Plus lots of those jobs are work from home at least part of the time.

You can rent for a few years and then get a better job at a higher level. It's worth it to set a new pay level that all other jobs have to beat.

In some parts of California, making less than $104k as a single person is considered low income.

Honestly, I'll take it. It's better than nothing. Hopefully this will plant a seed when people have a taste of a somewhat better wage and start demanding more. Fuck this slavery we live in called capitalism.

Not just reduce the barrier but also stop these companies form buying up all the houses. If someone can dictate how much rent we pay then the problem will never truly be solved. These companies can afford to just sit on an empty property while it just gains value over time, they don't have an incentive to reduce prices to get people in. The incentives should be punishments not gains for these companies. It's the only real way to fix stuff.

Our government is so god damn weak. Corporations run this country with a jungle grip. Some people rag on Europe a lot, but they sure have much better governments than us by a long shot.

Yeah the last couple of times I've been in a pinch and went through a fast food place for a basic burger value meal it was $11-$12, and I got the usual half-assed burger slopped together without the proper amount of toppings.

Bitches I can hop into a Cheddars and get a half pound monster that I can barely get into my mouth for $11.

Don't give these assholes your money. Make your own food. That way you save a ton of money and not support these fuckers. Society will still thrive without shitdonald and the likes if they disappear.

Western Bacon Cheeseburger combo in the Los Angeles area now...

Just think... if all the produce we bought was 20 cents more at retail, we'd have to spend... well I don't know exactly, but at least an additional $3. Can anyone afford that?!

That math is just a little lie that makes up a part of the Big Lie. The truth is that increasing workers' wages does not tend to lead to price inflation in most markets. It simply reduces profits and C-level bonuses.

Funny how nobody ever talks about the labor cost of CEO pay driving up prices 🤔

Imagine not having to use illegal immigrants as an option yet you guys would rather pay $.20 less.

My assumption is that it's only $0.20 because the assumption is that the C-suite of whoever is selling the strawberries is expected to lower their profit margins.

And we know that's never going to happen.

As per the CEIC, Denmark has significantly higher incomes on average than the US at large, but still around half of Californian incomes.

(US/DK)

Yeah, I don't want to be in their database so opt to have my name called, but often miss them calling from the pickup counter now. It is definitely obnoxious.

Come to think of it, I wonder if anyone has built a database linking phone numbers to Bluetooth UUIDs? I assume that software on a cell phone can obtain the phone number and the Bluetooth UUID and the full name of the user, so probably free-to-play games and the like will sell it.

And if that's the case, if you correlate with that data, you can identify customers from the Bluetooth UUIDs.

Sorry to hear that Togo’s has been enshittified.

I think that Doctorow was referring not to just something undesirable happening at a company with that, but specifically the transition of a consumer-facing Internet company from the growth phase to the monetization phase.

I don't think that Togo's was trying to rapidly grow while losing money and then shifted to try to make money, a la what he was talking about. I would guess that there are one of three things going on:

• They (and other food places) have minimum-wage labor as a major chunk of their costs, and so they're preparing for the imminent increase by cutting how much labor they need and automating what they can. My guess is that this is probably the dominant factor, given the change that California is about to see.

• There's been a lot of inflation. My understanding is that wages tend to be more sticky than inflation -- this guy who started chatting with me at the counter in my above comment said that he only saw a 5% raise last time around, whereas last year saw something like 10% inflation -- so I'm guessing that if inflation spikes, you tend to have a period where people are spending less, and it may be that prepared food is an easy thing to reduce spending on. That'd mean that they'd have a rough time in an inflationary environment. Although...hmm. If it's an inexpensive restaurant, it might benefit, because one might see more people shift from more-expensive options to inexpensive options. Giffen goods aren't exactly the same thing, but work on that sort of principle -- an increase in cost can increase consumption because of substitution effect for a more-expensive alternative dominating.

• Automation has just been getting cheaper/better, and has finally reached the point of working well enough that it can replace human workers at point-of-sale. I remember when supermarket automated checkouts were just a complete disaster, took way longer to slog through than a human checker. Now, while I'll take a human checker if available, I don't avoid automated checkouts like the plague any more.

My go-to was an egg salad hero with tabbouleh on it.

Thanks for the recommendation. I'll already grabbed my food this time, but give it a shot next time around.

EDIT: Nah, apparently it's gone. I asked a worker, and they said that they did offer it at one point, but egg salad was discontinued. Ah, well. I guess it might relate to the very-elevated prices for eggs during the avian flu problems recently. Maybe if egg prices come back down...

Atkins.

It's widely reported that Panera does not qualify as a bakery under this law.

It didn't get scratched out. It was never true in the first place. I don't know why the bakery exemption was in there -- apparently no one who isn't on a confidentiality agreement does -- but Panera apparently never would've qualified as one under it. The disinfo game from the right on this was on point.