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While checking out Reddit today, I stumbled across a breakdown of McDonald’s budget. With all the debate on raising the minimum wage, someone compared McDonalds’ sales to their labor costs. Headlining the paper full of figures, the user, MdotBooth, headlined their work:

“Okay, maybe not $15.00 an hour, but come on McDonalds.”

In the comments, the user stated he got the numbers off of the McDonald’s’ website.

    Basically, McDonald’s makes a ton of money weekly ($2 billion to $3 billion).
    Their weekly labor costs range from $326 million to $408 million at $8.00/hour.
    So that gives McDonald’s a weekly income of $2 to 3 billion a week with labor only ringing in at around $382 million. According to the math, that’s 8.9% of the weekly sales.

The poster then wrote this below which really brings it home:

“All labor expenses for the entire company are made within the first 6 hours of the work week.”



Now after asking my husband to do some math following the user’s logic, my husband came to this conclusion: if correct, the minimum wage at $12/hour would still only account for 15 percent of weekly sales. Pretty sure it won’t break the bank to raise the wages of McDonald’s employees.

http://www.liberalamerica.org/2014/09/23/shocking-breakdown-of-mcdonalds-budget-will-make-you-really-angry/

Yep that sounds about right, you have to take into account though if a law is introduced it will be inevitable that small businesses etc. will be dragged into this as well and they'll definitely not be able to afford it as easily, I suspect that's also what they're counting on. The problem is making sure that the people who aren't being assholes and screwing over their own employees aren't brought into it, but the corporations will claim that it's persecution etc. if they're taxed or forced to obey different rules seperately.

I've read/saw somewhere that a considerable percentage of McDonalds employees receive food coupons, one can say their wages are being subsidize by taxes payers.

I've worked for Mcdonalds for 7 years, I know they pay as little as they can to employees, while I started working there as teenager and stayed through college, I saw the age of my fellow employees getting higher as time passed, and many people depended on that job.

Basically, they like to employ teenagers, teenagers are not very demanding and work quite well, as the economy went down they started employing older people and they continue paying a miserable salary because people don't have any other choice.

For the owners of the restaurants it's pretty much a get rich quick scheme, because they do get filthy rich!

Actually labor at McDonald's runs somewhere between 18 and 21% per hour… Then you have food cost which would be somewhere around 30 to 40% then you have all their taxes, utilities, payments for the buildings, maintenance, advertising…

Of any business, the restaurant is the most likely to fail.

But it reminds me of when I managed restaurants, we would have these idiots That would see the money coming in and wonder why we didn't pay them more… I would just take them back to the office and let them do the books, some of them realized some of them got fired…

Managers also receive a miserable salary and they have a lot more responsibility and work more hours...

If I remember correctly, it was McDonald’s who first created the system where a person was used for one very simple task, and they would repeat this all day. In this way, their staff became easily replaceable and can therefore be paid a pittance.

They have pretty much the same philosophy when it comes to their meat.

I haven't eaten there in many years thankfully.

Said another way, McDonald's figured out how to create a very simple to learn and do job, and created tons of new jobs that people without skills were finally able to get.

To make matters worse, most fast-food and retail work is part time

Yes fastfood = part time. Usually have also a bad pay.
Anyway this news of breakdown of the McDonald budget is shocking.

Is there any evidence to suggest these people were unemployable before McDonald's came up with this plan, like you seem to be suggesting, or that they'd be incapable of learning several roles within the "restaurant"?

And what evidence is there that this work-plan created more jobs than would have been available with people doing various roles?

Also is there something wrong with training people without skills and then giving them a decent wage? I'm sure most people could manage a few simple roles rather than just one (with a little more training, which has to be given in both scenarios anyway).


So, same amount of training and the same number of jobs. Only difference is that in one scenario the staff are highly expendable.

Just the fact that they are working at McDonald's doing the very basic simple stuff, instead of doing something more complex. Remember, there weren't very many menial labor jobs before. You could dig ditches, paint stuff... Used to be you could do those menial repetitive  jobs at a factory, but robots replaced a lot of that. And I think even retail is more complex than making burgers.



Self evidence again, just the fact that so many of these fast food jobs exist that wouldn't have otherwise. But, I guess no concrete evidence. It's impossible to predict what kinds of jobs would have existed if fast food never came about.



Of course not. McDonald's even has their own college, called Hamburger University, just outside of Chicago, and training is mandatory for owners, and available for managers. But most people just aren't interested in learning. Plus there's not much to learn with just making burgers. Those employees would be better off taking the free time of their part time employment learning something else. Also, if we train everyone do to more complex things, who will be left to make the burgers? (Probably the same people who don't care about training now, since those who want extra training are already seeking it out)



Said another way, in one scenario, the job is so simple anyone can do it, and dozens of people are on the sidelines hoping for that job.

The job wouldn't be expendable if there weren't many other people looking to get it too. That's what determines if the job is expendable or not: how complex it is and how many other people are available to do it. Want a job that's not expendable? Learn a skill that can't be replicated by every single person who walks off the street.

I don't get what you're crying over guys, i'm from EU and in my state salary for hard work is like 2-2,50 euros per hour. You have to be lucky to get more than that, also minimum wage is around 300 euros per month.

That's the McDonals corporation and not each individually owned franchise and you can bet that the corp employees are paid far more than the burger flippers at each store, so whoever made up the numbers has no fricken clue what they're talking about.

Actually this kind of reminds me when my son was about three years old… He wanted something and I told him we didn't have the money to get that, so he told me to go to the grocery store because they always give me money… He just didn't realize I had given them more money than they gave me back…

But you can't argue with idiots and change their mind…

And sadly probably the person who did the writing, isn't even worth being paid minimum wage… They have no work ethic