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| Busy Commercial Kitchen |
- $10 an hour
- times 10 people
- times 16 hours a day
- times 30 days a month
- comes to $48,000 a month for wages
Rent / lease / mortgage on a prime location might be as much as half of that. Figure another $25,000 for food and supplies and you are looking at $100,000 a month. That's a heck of a lot of hamburgers.
Opinions differ on minimum wage laws. If our economy was booming, and booming so much that there was a shortage of workers, we wouldn't need such laws. But American industry has become so productive that we don't need very many workers to to keep us supplied with all we need. So we need minimum wage laws to keep people from getting trapped in working poverty. But that also means we have more people unemployed, which is another problem.
What we need is more people willing to step up and start a business. Not everyone has what it takes to start a business, and that might be what the problem is. Starting a business requires an idea, which isn't too hard to come by, but it also takes drive, commitment and a thick enough skin to deal with all the petty bullshit you are going to run into. So the next time you are offended by an obnoxious bull headed person charging through the public plaza, remember, that is exactly the kind of person we need because they are the ones who get things going. (You might ask why they can't be nice about it, but that might just be the straw that breaks that camel's back. Step back, give them some room. You don't want to get any on you.)
P.S. $15 is the hourly rate showing up on help wanted signs around here.
1 comment:
Chuck:
Every entrepreneur can relate countless examples of "petty bullshit". One trend however is that the bullshit is getting to be less petty and more onerous. Just cause I was curious, I signed up to receive an email every time the state legislature introduced a new tax bill. Holy shit! I had to shut it off the next day because my inbox was flooded. It seems that every one of those parasites was busily dreaming up another ten ways a day to screw us.
If you want to build a spec house in Bellingham, you must first cough up $45,000 in permit fees, which includes a direct transfer of $5000 to the parks department. In Blaine, it's $22,500. That's bullshit, but it's not what I would call petty. And it's certainly not a path to affordable housing. A local entrepreneur is trying to open a restaurant. He bought the building and spent five months renovating it. He is ready to open. Then he finds out that the county drone who has to do his final inspection is on vacation for six weeks. When you consider that this burg is a summer-only tourist destination, he's already lost a big chunk of his first year's income. But hey, we got us a new four-acre beachfront county park and a new beachfront county public library. For free! But still no sidewalks. Oh, and the beach road is washed out and nobody knows when it will be fixed. This county is run by people who couldn't operate a lemonade stand. But they tell the rest of us how to live our lives. And tax us endlessly in the process.
Thanks for the great blog.
Your Pal James
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