McDonald’s USA
— Employee: $15/hr, no benefits
— Big Mac: $5.79
McDonald’s Denmark
— Employee: $22/hr, 6 weeks vacation, 1 year paid maternity leave, life insurance, pension
— Big Mac: $5.49
Tell us more about how raising the minimum wage would affect the cost of hamburgers.
@klappspatack @clive1 @Heartofcoyote @Strandjunker To be clear, workers *ARE* a part of the cost of the product. Generally something of a fixed cost if their hours handling is done right. It's like how it costs to have a building or the basic machines needed to do business.
That *DOES* have an effect on product costs. The product cost is an aggregate of all the costs going into producing and selling it + profit margin.
However, the effect of labor costs on that total is probably a penny.
@klappspatack @clive1 @Heartofcoyote @Strandjunker inb4, no that's not an exact number. I don't have the inside info to do the math anyway. They *must* cover costs.
They have to make back enough to have a profit while covering all the operational costs beyond just the physical materials going into it, so this is part of the overall costs added on top of the base.
But the effect of paying employees half a living wage still doesn't add much at all.
They just want us to think it's big.
@lepaggoth @nazokiyoubinbou @klappspatack @clive1 @Strandjunker Thank you. I think the idea that a person is somehow helping workers by making unnecessary work for them is just rationalization by people who don’t actually think about other people.
In Bridgerton spin-off Queen Charlotte, as a new Queen, Charlotte learns the lesson that as royalty, allowing people to do tasks for her that she could do for herself is a way of supporting her subjects by ensuring that they have stable employment. (After she tells someone not to pick her oranges for her, that person disappears, and she learns that having lost his position serving her in the orangery, he was out on his ass, basically.) But we have no royalty here, no matter what a certain fascist grifter would like to believe, so people trying to apply that lesson to their own lives are just delusional. 🙄
It’s just basic respect for other people to not make their work harder than it has to be. 🤷🏻♀️
@klappspatack no just decent human behavior to leave a place the way you would like to find it.
@klappspatack @clive1 @Heartofcoyote @Strandjunker
This is part of a pattern of passing off a selfish disregard for "living in a society" as some kind of virtue.
The point is easily expanded to highway cleaning crews. Just throw your trash out the window as you drive and they will hire more people to cover your disregard for others.
Even the Bible covered this one.
"What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace might increase? Far from it!"
@klappspatack @Heartofcoyote @Strandjunker oh. I'm swiss. I live in switzerland.
I really try to figure out if there is irony or not.
Everybody tidies up their table, puts the trays back and the trash into the bin. You can leave the trash on the tray if you put it in the tray rack, but it's a bit rude.
Leaving everything on the table would be very rude behaviour in a self service restaurant.
I really can't imagine leaving everything on my table and leave.
Better quality meat in Denmark too.
@Strandjunker McD's is a weird beast.
They have corporate-owned stores and franchises. Prices vary regionally based on location within the US but, I suspect, also vary between corporate and franchises. Pay *may* vary between corporate and franchises. Can't say based on my employment there 37 years ago.
I *suspect* the govt of Denmark subsidizes some of those benefits though I am speculating here.
What's not said, almost certainly, is that McD's shareholders would not tolerate absorbing this. They'd respond to the reduction in profit by annihilating the stock price. The current CEO and board would likely all be sacked. And we wouldn't want that, would we? /s
@Kierkegaanks @Strandjunker Supposedly the VAT is already included?
These look to be really old numbers though. It might look better on paper now, but it's definitely worse if you take into account the current near crash point ultra-inflation economy in America.
In this comparison, the fluctuating currencies do not matter. It is about the ratio between salary of costs.
If currency fluctuation increases the price of the Danish Big Mac in US$, the hourly income in Denmark goes up by the same factor.
The ratio of salary vs costs stays the same.
@Strandjunker Supposedly, it's $6.50 now, but it doesn't make your point any less valid. $6.50 is pretty close to what I saw in Chicago before I left the states in August. I'd also be curious to see what it is in poorer parts of the EU and how all those factors compare in those countries to some of the poorest states in the US. Like, how do the wages, benefits, and cost of a Big Mac compare between Alabama and Bulgaria?
More to your point, McDonalds also has to comply with regulations and pay taxes that they don't in the States.
california
"Fast Food Minimum Wage Effective April 1, 2024
Starting April 1, 2024, all “fast food restaurant employees” who are covered by the new law must be paid at least $20.00 per hour. "
https://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/minimum_wage.htm
i have no idea what the cost is of a bigmac here (i haven't been in a mickey d's in a long time and i won't get the app just to check the price).
@Strandjunker Actual starting pay in the USA is $16. All McDonald's employees get various benefits including health insurance, sick time, and vacation. The benefits are presumably worse than in Denmark, but that's partly because things are government mandated or government-supplied (like health care). That's corporate restaurants, franchises may vary.
I agree about minimum wage, but I am a facts person.
@nitpicking @Strandjunker So... A $1 difference.
And that's it.
I imagine that actually differs *greatly* by location though. The actual federal minimum wage is still $7.25.
(They get benefits there too. They just don't have to rely on the corporation to give them physical access to unaffordable healthcare.)
These are probably just older numbers though. A lot of corporations went in on $15 as the magic number a while back. This likely also doesn't adjust for recent ultra-inflation...
@Strandjunker is this brutto or net salary in Denmark, if brutto, you need to substract state tax, municipality tax, labour market contributions and optional church tax. But in this case majority those taxes will be zero because of allowances except labour market contributions. With the life insurance you most likely mean statutory occupational injury insurance and/or eventual optional health scheme.
Welcome to our European standard, however maternity leave and pension is paid by gov, which get money for it from taxes. You need to understand we Europeans pay significantly higher taxes that Americans, and so we do have these you would call benefits (we call it normal things) btw about the maternity leave this varies significantly between European countries eg. From 16 weeks in France to up to 3 years in Czech Republic.
Vacations are prescribed by law (typically 20-25 days depending on country, in case of Denmark, the law says 25 days, so either McDonalds is giving one week more or you have it wrong, can’t tell)
@janantos
In the Danish system, the government generally tries to leave much of the work condition negotiations to unions and employer orgs.
Five weeks of holiday is required by law, a sixth week is often included in union agreements. It is quite plausible that this includes McDonald's but I don't know.
@Strandjunker
The U.S. has a minimum wage comparable to Bolivia, Egypt or Malaysia according this map:
@stekopf @Strandjunker And even so, the UK Minimum Wage is not actually a Living Wage - no matter what the government claim.
First: you are right, but for the wrong reasons, I'm afraid
Second: Sources missing
Third: the price of one of dozens of products McDonald's sells does not necessarily equate to the higher or lower capacity for the employer to pay higher wages
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