I had a coworker who was a cook at WaffleHouse a few nights a week as a side job. He started out making something a little more then $10 an hour. This was back in 2008/2009 so not sure if it has gone up or down since then.

 

Over $10

Store managers make $50k annually if they don't suck but they have to cook on the grill.

 

Most restaurant managers (not assistants) actually make pretty good money annually. But if you break it down per hour, it's not as enticing. They work ALL THE TIME.

 

Its not even just the total hours worked but when those hours are worked. Lots of late evenings and nights, weekends, and holidays. **** that.

 

Yep my old roommate/best friend since high school has been in the restaurant business since high school. Has an HRAD degree as well as one from Le Cordon Bleu, has run steakhouses etc. He and his buddy just opened a new Texas Roadhouse in Tulsa. He typically works 60-70 hours per week, and the 5-6 weeks leading up to opening he worked every day 16-18 hours per day straight.

It's nuts. I could never do that.

 

When I entered the workforce as a teenager, I promised myself that I would avoid ever working in the food service industry, if at all possible. So far, I have managed to avoid it.

 

I promised myself this also, and I too have been successful at avoiding the food service industry.

 

Thats fine.. dont be a burger flipper for career.

 

Not sure if this has been posted here:

Minimum Wages and Employment: A Review of Evidence from the New Minimum Wage Research

"We review the burgeoning literature on the employment effects of minimum wages - in the United States and other countries - that was spurred by the new minimum wage research beginning in the early 1990s. Our review indicates that there is a wide range of existing estimates and, accordingly, a lack of consensus about the overall effects on low-wage employment of an increase in the minimum wage. However, the oft-stated assertion that recent research fails to support the traditional view that the minimum wage reduces the employment of low-wage workers is clearly incorrect. A sizable majority of the studies surveyed in this monograph give a relatively consistent (although not always statistically significant) indication of negative employment effects of minimum wages. In addition, among the papers we view as providing the most credible evidence, almost all point to negative employment effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries. Two other important conclusions emerge from our review. First, we see very few - if any - studies that provide convincing evidence of positive employment effects of minimum wages, especially from those studies that focus on the broader groups (rather than a narrow industry) for which the competitive model predicts disemployment effects. Second, the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups."

The Minimum Wage and the Great Recession: Evidence of Effects on the Employment and Income Trajectories of Low-Skilled Workers

"We estimate the minimum wage's effects on low-skilled workers' employment and income trajectories. Our approach exploits two dimensions of the data we analyze. First, we compare workers in states that were bound by recent increases in the federal minimum wage to workers in states that were not. Second, we use 12 months of baseline data to divide low-skilled workers into a "target" group, whose baseline wage rates were directly affected, and a "within-state control" group with slightly higher baseline wage rates. Over three subsequent years, we find that binding minimum wage increases had significant, negative effects on the employment and income growth of targeted workers. Lost income reflects contributions from employment declines, increased probabilities of working without pay (i.e., an "internship" effect), and lost wage growth associated with reductions in experience accumulation. Methodologically, we show that our approach identifies targeted workers more precisely than the demographic and industrial proxies used regularly in the literature. Additionally, because we identify targeted workers on a population-wide basis, our approach is relatively well suited for extrapolating to estimates of the minimum wage's effects on aggregate employment. Over the late 2000s, the average effective minimum wage rose by 30 percent across the United States. We estimate that these minimum wage increases reduced the national employment-to-population ratio by 0.7 percentage point."

I support the minimum wage increase in theory, but I don't think it makes economic sense in practice. I think it should be tied to inflation at the very least.

There are far better ways to implement something like this than by targeting an arbitrary wage increase.

 

exactly.

 

I worked at Sonic one summer in college for some extra spending cash.

It was terrible. Even getting stoned before and during work.

 

Increasing the minimum wage creates inflation.

 

I did it as a teenager and it was pretty great. I got to take home pizza and cheesesteaks pretty often. Folks would prank call and order food all the time hahha.

 

There is quite a bit of evidence that this is not the case with increases below a certain level.

https://www.dol.gov/featured/minimum

 

Says "page not found" but I'll take your word for it. But I recall from school that an increase in the price of production for goods generally increases inflation specifically.

 

Sorry, that link was incomplete. Here are some direct links to studies.

The Effect of Minimum Wage on Prices

This is a very recent update study by the same author.

Are local minimum wages absorbed by price increases?

There are others but these are the easiest to find.

 

I've worked precisely three jobs for minimum wage. All were while in was in high-school / college.

Two were mentorship-style positions within the field I'd eventually make a career of, and I'd have happily done those for free given the value of what I knew I was learning and what the connections I made would eventually result in. The third was at Wendy's, because I needed money while in college.

Three months after graduation, largely as a result of the first and second jobs mentioned above, I got my first "real" job, making $50k a year. And this was in '99, when $50k was worth something. And I wonder whether I'd have even gotten those first two jobs if my labor had been valued at $15 an hour rather than $4.25. That first radio station (a 5kw AM station in a little hick-town) really was a low-margin operation. The owner was also the chief engineer, the janitor, and the sales manager.

Now, I realize that not everyone was born with a natural talent for electronics and problem-solving. And I also realize that a number of factors mean that not everyone is a good fit for going to college and studying engineering.

That said, I work alongside quite a number of people everyday who don't have any formal education beyond high school, and who earn a hell of a lot more than minimum wage. There's George, the building superintendent, who keeps my mechanical & electrical plant running like a literal well-oiled machine. There's Mike, Friday, Alice and Tom who work building security; it's not glamorous work but we pay reasonably well. Rolando who works in shipping and receiving, I think he's actually mentally handicapped (not joking), but he's a hell of a hard worker. There's a whole ton of stagehands, carpenters, camera operators, drivers, production assistants, researchers, and so on, none of whom are college graduates, but all of whom possess the following qualities:

• Show up for work, on time, every day.
• Be sober while on the clock.
• Don't be a dick.
• Give a ****, or at least pretend convincingly.
• Actually do the thing we're paying you for, rather just just surfing Twitbook/ Pinstagram for hours.

You think this wouldn't be hard, and yet we have a surprisingly hard time finding people who fit these requirements. The reason that people who earn minimum wage are earning minimum wage is that they haven't done anything to justify anything more. That isn't elitism, that's just real-world observation.

 

Ate at the Waffle House the other day. First time in a long time. It was lots of fun watching the short order cook enjoying what he did, and the camaraderie of the wait staff (see how I used the gender neutral there, even though they were all ladies?) Side note, there were even a mother / daughter set of waitresses.

Anyway it caused me to google typical wage for short order cook. Yes well over minimum wage.

 

 

I have never actually knowingly met someone who makes minimum wage besides a server. Even when I worked in Winn-dixie in high school we all made more than minimum wage even if just barely. When I worked in the Deli at Publix during college the veteran employees who had been deli clerks for years with no promotions were making something like $14/hr. Keep in mind that these are workers that have been working the bottom rung job for 10 years without promotion. They obviously either lack any marketable skills or ambition what so ever or they would have advanced at least modestly over the duration of their careers. Even they made well over minimum wage.