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by throwaway894345 43 days ago
> As an American you might think "$10 for a single scoop of vanilla, that's nothing. A minimum wage worker packing groceries earn twice that in an hour back home".

Is this a joke? $10 for a single scoop of ice cream in the US is a lot of money and also the US minimum wage is only $7.25/hour. You can barely feed yourself with the US minimum wage and you definitely can't pay for shelter or healthcare or anything else you would need to survive here, but that's a story for another time.
2 comments
jhbadger 43 days ago
The current US minimum wage is so way below market wages in most places to be meaningless, though. I'm sure McDonald's would like to hire people at $7.25/hr (or better yet have robots that they don't have to pay after acquiring). But currently, they have to advertise that their starting salary for workers near me is $14/hr because if they don't they won't get anyone. Politicians like to talk about raising the minimum wage to $15/hr or whatever as if that would suddenly give working class people a huge raise, but it would simply reflect the existing reality.
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apelapan 43 days ago
Minimum wage is set by the states, 7.25 is just the national minimum. California has 16.90, Washington 17.13 etc.

If I'll update the icecone example to a single vanilla scoop costing $8.45 it still stands for a Californian.

By the way, USD 16.9/hr is on the low end of normal pay level for a IT technician or junior nurse in Sweden. Tax is highly progressive, so at that point they'd only be paying about ~18% total income tax though, perhaps that would be higher in most US states?

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