About minimum wage

[johan]

Excellent, so then you understand that paying a driver 10 an hour, as opposed to 8 an hour.......wouldn't put you or anyone else out of fucking business, and wouldn't necessitate a price hike for the service.  

True, it would not necessitate a price hike the current market. 

That would be a 20% increase from the -current- minimum (which I'm guessing is where your internal math went horribly awry, thinking about that 20% as a floating variable instead of applying it to the minimum wage).  In fact, I bet you pay your drivers better than the minimum, yeah?

 Correct. I do pay above minimum and that's kind of my point. Finding driver applicants is hard. Very hard. Keeping them once you hire them them is even harder. So we pay currently pay about $10/hour above minimum which is about the going rate for our segment of the industry in the area we're in. My drivers don't work at Subway because they can make about $10/hour more working for me. IOW about $10/hour OVER minimum is where I have to be in order to keep drivers. 

So now let's say raise the minimum wage to a number that has been floated around often in these discussions. That number being $15/hour. How do I keep drivers when they can go do just about any entry level job anywhere and make about the same as I'm paying them? Obviously I'm going to have to increase what I pay them. And if minimum goes from $7.50/hour to $15/hour, paying my guys an extra $2/hour as you've suggested ain't gonna get it done. I sincerely believe I'm going to have to end up at $8-$10 more per hour in order to maintain the same driver base I have now. And an extra $10/hour in wages will most definitely impact prices to my customers.


Just about every bit of that $10 increase in wages in fact will go to our customers. Because lets not forget, I won't just be paying more for driver wages, I'll be paying more for everything. Diesel mechanics are going to need to be paid more too lest they just go get minimum wage jobs where they don't get so dirty for the same money they're making now. So the price of maintaining my fleet will go up. Tires will be more expensive. Road service calls will be more expensive. Towing will be more expensive. Replacement rental trucks will be more expensive. I've got to pay health insurance on my drivers and the cost of that will most definitely go up too. And we haven't even mentioned what could happen to the price of fuel yet. 

So yeah, even though we don't pay anyone minimum wage, almost every cost we currently have will most definitely go up and we will most definitely pass every one of those increases along to our customer. Nothing personal, its just business. 

 

The truth of the matter, however, is that no ones going to pay 6 dollars for a 5 dollar footlong, regardless of the labor being paid the minimum, or 33% over it.  

You sure about that? Subway did away the $5 footlong earlier this year and raised it to $6 and sales don't seem to be suffering any from what I can see.