Comparing fast food prices in California and a neighboring state, Arizona, is an eye-opener.
The recent minimum wage hike in California has sparked a debate on its impact on consumer prices. Critics of the wage increase have argued that it would not lead to higher costs for consumers. However, a comparison of prices at a popular fast food chain, @Arbys, reveals a stark reality.
A classic roast beef sandwich, a staple item on the menu, is priced at $5.59 in Arizona. The same sandwich costs a hefty $9.24 in California. This significant price difference clearly demonstrates the effect of the minimum wage increase on consumer wallets.
. . .
To verify the price difference, one can simply download the @Arbys app and start an online order, then switch locations from Arizona to California. The stark contrast in prices is undeniable and raises concerns about the affordability of goods in the state.
There's more at the link.
Here's a selection of headlines from just one newspaper over the past couple of weeks about how the minimum wage hike in California is affecting fast food outlets.
Do you get the impression that California's legislators and administrators don't actually give a damn about the impact of their decisions and policies on the lives of ordinary Californians? I sure do!
The question is, when will ordinary Californians do something about it? I hope it's soon, for their sake . . . otherwise their state is going to have slid so far down the slippery slope to failure that there may be no climbing back up again.
Peter
20 comments:
The common thread between all of the psycopathys that infect the left, and their members, is this very disconnect from reality. They have been insulated from the results of their actions (until now), and have never had to 'pay the piper' in their entire lives! This is the generation that threw a temper tantrum in the cereal aisle, and GOT the lucky charms. When their team LOST the tournament, they got a shitty little trophy anyways. They have never learned to lose gracefully, in their entire life, and it shows.
It’s already too late for California. The courts there 20 years ago drove the nail in the coffin. The voters voted to restrict funds to illegal aliens, voted against gay marriage and plenty of other measures. The courts time and time again have ruled against the citizens. The citizens of California gathered enough signatures to put out a vote to split the state and the courts stopped the vote as they deemed it to dangerous to let the people vote.
All due respect, but it should be obvious that there are other factors in play besides minimum wage laws, considering that prices were higher even before this law was passed, and while many of them have to do with progressive policies, like higher business taxes, some of them have to do with the consequences of housing NIMBYism and general supply and demand laws for real estate.
The problem is not only of replacing the current crop of politicians, but also finding ones willing to actually (rather than just promise to) repeal the laws that caused the situation in the first place.
The voters can't do anything about it. The Democrat legislators setup political machine politics with voting corruption that has removed any possibility of someone not approved by the machine being 'elected'. And I don't disagree with that assessment. As a member being 'elected' by the machine, you'll support and take your orders from the machine, or be replaced.
As has been noted before, "you can vote your way into Socialism, but you have to fight your way out."
they all make enough money (not from their salaries, but from their investments) that they don't feel the pain from this
and when they do see it, they just blame it on the greed of the business owner. What Democrat politician has ever run a business? (especially here in California)
We left California 7 years ago and never looked back. I was born there and have watched the decline since the Liberals (insert political party of choice) took over the State Legislature. It will be a sad end to a once great state.
[quote="Anonymous said"] The voters voted to restrict funds to illegal aliens, voted against gay marriage and plenty of other measures. The courts time and time again have ruled against the citizens. The citizens of California gathered enough signatures to put out a vote to split the state and the courts stopped the vote as they deemed it to dangerous to let the people vote.[/quote]
I was there for some of this. Voted in favor and then watched the courts take the cases and just sit on them. Can't remember which proposition it was but a liberal judge waited seven years to release a ruling. Meanwhile, the proposition was enjoined from going into effect pending the ruling.
Nobody votes in California, they just whine and beg. This weakness and self-loathing attracts bullies who feed off it and demonstrate contempt for voters. Politicians are tiny in number, and voters actually have all the power. Talking like voters are powerless is more of the codependency; voters could on any day form a grand jury to direct prosecution of obvious violations of law.
coda.org
What is codependence?
Somewhere along the line, we learned to doubt our perception, discount our feelings, and overlook our needs. We looked to others to tell us what to think, feel, and behave. Other people supplied us with information about who we were and should be. It became more important to be compliant or avoidant rather than to be authentic, and we adopted rigid beliefs about what "should be." We believed that if we could just "get it right," things would be okay. When we "got it wrong," our sense of security and self-worth evaporated.
The $25 McNnugget meal for 4 (drinks are your problem...) is astounding to me. When I was a kid in the late 60's / early 70's one of McDonalds advertisements was that you could feed a family of 4 for $5 and get change back (not alot mind you maybe 50 cents :-) ). That was a hamburger or cheeseburger (no big Macs yet) a fries (cooked in glorious beef tallow one size only) and a Soda or shake each (more change with the Sodas they were 120z I think) per person. Neither is particularly filling, or nutritious (though the fries were yummy sufficiently so that Julia Child used to send people out around the corner when they were filming on her cooking shows to the McDonalds) and Dad might want an extra burger (that would set you back 23 cents with cheese 19 without) in the 60's variant.
Finding a handy dandy (likely underestimating) CPI calculator $5 in 1972 is $38 in 2024 so less of a deal than it felt like. Certainly that matched what I remembered fast food when found was a treat maybe once a month when Mom and I were out running errands or we were traveling on rare vacations. A sit down jooint (Like Howard Johnson's) might run $10-15 with tip for 3 like dropping $70-100 now.
Other commenters have already addressed the futility of voting here in CA. Last Sunday I spoke with the former mayor of our town here in So Cal. TPTB have great plans for my neighborhood. They want to build massive 6 story tennament/retail complexes on both sides of the boulevard along a two mile section not a block away from where I live. He explained that under CA regulations if there is a "transportation hub" (bus stop) within, (iirc) three miles, then all the building codes regarding trafiic, parking, building height etc. are thrown out the window. All these new citizens will be using public transportation, don't you know? I've been to city council meetings. The citizens complain, sometimes protest, but these plans go forward as if we don't exist.
I'll bring up another instance that I've commented on, but nobody seems to care about: Plastic bags. Some years back there was an "initiative" on the ballot to ban grocery stores from giving away free plastic shopping bags. Of course, it "passed." Initiatives take effect after they are voted on. The day after the election all the free bags were gone, the new ten-cent apiece bags were all printed up, in place and ready to sell. The old bags and the little racks the baggers used were already changed over.
Gosh. How did all these huge retail chains know how that vote would go? It's a mystery.
JWM
In 5 years the Ca min wage for fast food workers has basically doubled:
https://www.latimes.com/visuals/graphics/la-me-g-timeline-minimum-wage-increases-20160328-htmlstory.html
I’m so glad I don’t have employees anymore.
Me and my wife are from California born in the late 50s. My sons were born in the 80s. We saw after Reagan left as Governor and Brown came in that most of the environmental moves that Reagan did such as use logging companies in the forests to clean up areas and dead wood, allow for taxes, jobs, and cut down on forest fires stopped because brown listened to the wackos. Same thing happened with oil and energy producing.
CA SUPREME COURT stopped several Citizen Approved Props that was against libs. Brown was the start of the decline. Lucky for me and my family in 96 my company moved me out of the state to one of our other divisions. Many of our family have moved out of state or over time our Parents, Aunts, and Uncles are no longer alive. Some of our family still live in state spread out.
There are too few normal Californians. They are outnumbered by the usurpations of illegals and carpetbaggers.
There is but one political party in CA; that is the socialists. They neither abide by nor respect the U.S. Constitution. That's not hyperbole. They have literally said the same. The actions of the legislature prove it. There's is largely not a representative government.
In every instance when the people of CA have risen up, say by ballot initiative, they are knocked down either by corrupt courts or legislative fraud.
One brother is a resident of that state. I had warned him the move away before the state requestors his financials or, enact an exit tax. Lo, there is now an exit tax. I suppose even if he were to leave CA, the state would place some dubious claim on his financial investments.
I landed my aircraft in CA to refuel. Gotten from the fuel receipt, the state figured I owed a use tax. The tax bill arrived in the mail marked as a lien. It was a lien. The onus is in the owner to prove he is not liable to the state.
The same happened to a friend delivering his vessel from WA State to Tahiti. CA place a lien plus fees against the vessel arguing the vessel was not properly registered in CA. He hired a lawyer to fight in his stead. Being in transit upon the seas, he did not know if the lien until his insurance agent notified him of impending cancellation due to negligence.
Two anecdotes, sure. But they are legion. The state is hemorrhaging money due to corrupted politicians. They become ever more clever in their machinations.
Army brat, Navy officer, started living in SOCAL in 84, moved to Bay Area for 5 years and then back to SOCAL and left in 2010. There are half a dozen honest people in California. All the rest left the state years ago. As previous commenters noted, the change was sudden and overwhelming after Pete Wilson and rapidly downhill after that. It will take something along the lines of the Khmer Rouge to change and the funny part is that the Californian coastal elites are so left and so ignorant, they will all vote for the khmer rouge and wail about it afterwards, the few that survive.
In 1983, if you were making $30,000 a year, you were doing pretty well. You could afford a house, a decent car, etc. Today? Using the government's estimate of inflation, you'd be making $93,000 a year. For equivalent purchasing power and living standards, it'd be necessary to make more like $165,000 a year.
Blame Fiat currency based on debt. Wages haven't significantly increased in 40 years. Meanwhile the currency has plummeted in value.
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On a related note? McDonald's workers in Denmark make a minimum pay of $21, and get 6 weeks vacation. They also qualify for the pension plan. Somehow McDonald's has survived in Denmark. Google it. Corporations cannot raise prices higher than people are willing to pay. And if a job isn't worth paying enough for a man to live on, that job doesn't need to exist. The Catholic Church has taught that, as long as it's possible to do so, paying a man a living wage is a moral necessity for over a thousand years. Arguably two thousand. California sucks, but the rhetoric that mandating a living wage destroys jobs... it's insane. If the jobs weren't paying enough to live on, good riddance to them.
@Anonymous at 6:33PM: That's an excellent summary of an ideal situation. However, the US economy is not an ideal situation - very far from it. It's all very well saying that "if a job isn't worth paying enough for a man to live on, that job doesn't need to exist" - but in the real world, there are many, many such jobs, and without them there would be an awful lot of people starving to death. In fact, it's been the condition of the poor since the dawn of time that they don't earn enough to live on, and are constantly in a state of deprivation. I wish it wasn't so, but it is, and probably the majority of people in the world are more or less in that situation (depending on one's definition of what makes "enough to live on").
If one tries to force businesses to pay more, the owners of those businesses are going to ask what maximizes their income, and how can they reinforce those aspects of their business. If paying forced higher wages doesn't do that, they're not going to pay those wages. That's why robots are increasingly taking over the fast food business: they never get sick, never go on leave, never complain about working conditions. There are even workers in third world countries operating New York restaurants via Zoom connections, for about $3 per hour instead of the local wage. See:
https://nypost.com/2024/04/09/us-news/nyc-restaurants-use-zoom-cashiers-from-philippines/
I don't like that, but it's the way of the world, and our likes and dislikes aren't going to change reality.
@Anonymous April 10 6:33
> And if a job isn't worth paying enough for a man to live on, that job doesn't need to exist
Absolutely incorrect.
First off, how do you define "for a man to live on"?
does it mean a single income family of 4 in a house?
does it mean a person sharing an apartment with 4 other people who also have the same type of job?
does it mean a teen looking for pocket money?
does it mean a college student trying to pay tuition from a part time job?
there need to be entry level jobs that people can get that they then move on from, not every job should be something someone can get an keep for the rest of their life.
fast food used to be this sort of entry-level job. something that the employer could take a risk on an unknown with no track record because there would be enough people that if one person is out, the work can continue. low commitment on both sides.
There's also the problem about where you live.
Even in California there are some places that are far more expensive to live in than others. At my last job, if you lived in the Bay area or New York City, you could get 100% of the 'rated salary' for the position. If you lived elsewhere in California or New York you could get 90% of that, if you lived in most other states you could get 80% of that (and just before I left they announced that they were adding a 4th tier, at 70% of the 'rated salary' for some cheaper places to live)
so are you setting the pay for the entire state based on what it costs for a house in San Francisco? or should it be possible that Los Angeles (where things are considerably cheaper than the Bay area, but still expensive) could pay less, and Fresno where prices are cheaper still could pay still less??
The bible says that a worker is worth their hire, in other words, pay a fair amount for the work that is getting done.
David Lang
Worse=Better.
Califrutopia cannot print its way out of debt.
That means, inevitably, socialism here will, in fact, run out of other people's money, exactly as Margaret Thatcher's Theorem foretold for all such idiotic experiments.
The sooner it all falls apart, the sooner we can get rid of the Uniparty grifters.
Bummer for all y'all: your toothless banjo-playing kinfolk hereabouts will be moving back home soon, and bringing their illegal alien gardeners and nannies with them.
Brace yourselves. Those of us here are going to see how funny it is when the shoe gets moved back to your feet, as is already happening with illegal aliens. :P
I wired seven McDonald's in and around San Antonio thirty-plus years ago. A franchise then was almost certainly a guarantee of eventual wealth. The corporate business model wasn't going to allow a franchise owner-operator to fail or even come anywhere near close to failing. The McBosses at corporate in Morton Grove IL knew how much money a restaurant would make long before we built it. So there's not much flexibility in such a business model, and knowing McDonald's they won't allow their brand to be sullied with bad rundown physical plant optics, say like a Taco Bell, they'll tighten up inspections and close a few stores, pour encourager les autres. The weak hands will fold with less profit. There's going to be less pie for the owner-operator , and you gotta wonder where they will get the workers. The owner-operators I knew had loyal hardworking managers or they would have been out of business quickly. McDonald's in Munich sells Ayingerbräu beer, maybe the California stores can add the devil's lettuce to the menu.
rickm
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