[ineedasername]

I'm honestly not sure what you mean by this comment. I used a real world example of businesses with high customer-facing labor costs relative to their net profit margins.

If you're getting into the everyone-deserves-a-living-wage side of things, that's a different conversation, one I tend to agree with, but is much more complex than the current discussion about whether current business could manage this if they operate with low margins and moderate customer-facing labor costs.

[JetSpiegel]

If the business is not sustainable without living wages, it doesn't deserve to exist, just like there's no more chattel slaves picking cotton.

I'm sure the economics of paying for work on plantations also did not add up.

[ineedasername]

Then roughly 4,500,000 fast food workers lose their jobs and have no income. As relatively low-skilled workers flooding the labor market, their job prospects are not very good. Many go from poorly paid and over worked to penniless and homeless.

I think these are useful conversations to have, but this is not a problem that submits to easy one-size-fits-all solutions. I'm all for a living wage, but simply raising minimum wages without doing anything else is a short term solution that will bring things back to roughly where they are now over a period of time as prices for people with newly increased hourly pay rise to the point where it is, once again, no longer a living wage. Sure, go ahead and do that anyway, but only if you have other plans in the works to stop that cycle.

As a side not, emotional appeals to slavery do not help promote a reasonable conversation either. Having to work two jobs to make ends meet is a far cry from slavery. We don't need to look far in the world to find people living in conditions that are actually identical to or not far different from actual slavery. A person in the US working a low paying job 60 hours a week that can barely pay there rent or afford unexpected expenses is nowhere close to those conditions, especially when "barely getting by" in the US still mostly includes the bare bones amenities of living in a modern western country that are significantly better than conditions in many developing nations. Comparisons of this sort simply inflame tensions instead of conversation.

[arcturus17]

Excellent retort, I didn’t read anything else from your original comment.

The amount of low-effort populistic comments on HN starts to be worrying.