Minimum Wage? Minimum Effort.
Paying your employees to do their job well is less expensive than not doing that.
Hey, did you know that Joe Biden is considering pushing for a $15 minimum wage? This will—depending on who you ask—create one (or more) of the following conditions:
Companies will stop hiring people because they won’t be able to afford labor costs
Workers will finally have an opportunity to dig themselves out of holes
Nothing will change because the time for a $15 minimum wage has long passed and it would need to be even higher today to keep up with inflation.
Here’s the thing: I am not the policy-informed person to sift through all the potential issues and benefits of a $15 minimum wage. Smarter people than me have delved into this issue and come up with YouTube videos to explain the benefits (and costs) of such a wage increase. There are countless policy papers about it, both for and against, and it’s not going to do me a damn bit of good to rehash them here.
What I can do, however, is tell you about my experiences with the minimum wage, both as someone who worked as a minimum wage employee and as manager who had to take pay into consideration when trying to operate a business as a de facto store manager.
When I started my working life all the way back in 2004, I was an eighteen-year-old kid who got hired at a small, family-owned video store. Those don’t really exist anymore, but at the time it was a pretty big deal. We weren’t like, hugely profitable, but we fulfilled a need in the community and as I’ve said elsewhere, I got paid to sit behind a counter and do homework for three hours and ring people up and—occasionally—offer informed decisions about what kinds of movies people might enjoy.
I did all this for the princely sum of $5.15 an hour, which was the minimum wage. On average I worked two shifts a week, four hours and change each time, and ended up being able to buy the occasional CD, video game, or new pair of jeans. And it worked for me.
It would not have worked for an adult with kids, rent, and/or a mortgage, and it definitely would not have been a good fit for anyone who wanted advancement opportunities. There were four employees, not counting the owners, and although they were very nice people it’s not like they could schedule us for full eight-hour shifts. One, two of us were in high school, and two, we were only open between the hours of 4:30 and 8:30 each weekday and from noon to 8:30 PM on Saturdays.
Not a lot of hours to give.
If there’s one thing I hated about working there—and there were a few things, but this was the worst—it was the time spent alone. Don’t get me wrong, the ability to read or study or (occasionally) write was great, but working a shift on your own without even the minor relief of someone to watch the counter during a bathroom break is not. Especially when you need to grab something fast from McDonald’s for dinner. The only option is to hang a sign that says you’re sorry, lock the doors, and rush to the back to take care of business as quickly as possible.
Thus, I take this time to offer a brief confession: Movie Madness, during my tenure, was probably closed for a grand total of one hour so I could go hide in the back and poop.
The thing about Movie Madness, though, is that it was a small business. You could be charitable about paying low wages to high school kids who weren’t 100% committed to the future of the company.
You can be less enthusiastic about stores like Walmart or even my beloved Express, both of which paid me close to minimum wage but expected so much more. Walmart fights unionization tooth and nail from the very first hour of your shift, and at one point even offered associates tips on how to apply for government assistance to supplement its (then) meager wages. Express, meanwhile, would schedule associates for regular shifts as well as “on-call” shifts, only to cut their hours if sales for the day or week weren’t where they needed to be.
What makes the on-call system so onerous (and why so many stores haven gotten rid of it), is that you can’t budget for your life with shifts that may not happen. And if you don’t have associates with a regular schedule, you don’t give them the opportunity to develop the skills that are necessary to drive the sales volume they need to justify their presence.
In this way, a store or company will give birth to an insidious ouroboros that prevents a person from growing in their role; so much of the complaint about raising minimum wage is dependent upon the idea that minimum wage work is predicated on minimal skills. I would suppose that anyone who thinks this should sit through even a week of training at any fast fashion retail store. You will learn, in no particular order:
A selling model that may or may not be consistent with other companies
Visual standards for at least 50 different products
An emphasis on multitasking
Customer service skills
Cashiering and point-of-sale systems
A whole bunch of other rules
You know what makes employees a lot more likely to push themselves to do well and to succeed at making your business run better? Paying them enough to care.
Working as a retail associate—even on the bottom rung of the ladder—is not an easy job. And that doesn’t even factor in the added wrinkle of suddenly needing to “look the part,” which is a concept called Associate Projection and which can be, depending on your closet’s contents, a real nightmare.
Fashion companies will — and do — argue that this low wage is offset by the gift of the employee discount, which for many of the companies I’ve worked for has ranged from 30 to 40%. Some companies have been more generous than others (one accessory brand gave its employees a 50% discount on all product), but 30% tends to be the normal amount for part-time employees. And while that works out great for typical college students whose expenses are generally covered by other money, what about the adults who want to either climb the corporate ladder or — more accurately — work multiple part-time jobs to carve out a full-time work schedule?
In fact, while I was working at Express after college, I made $7.25 an hour for the first six months of my tenure and had to work a second job at Office Depot to make a full-time work schedule. I would often change clothes from one job to the next in order to work a full eight or nine hours over the course of a day. Office Depot paid better until I climbed the ladder enough to quit, but even then my first management role was making like $9.00 hourly—offset, of course, by my need to pay for my own health insurance.
Speaking of management, the decisions get more and more complex as you raise in rank. By the time I was an assistant manager at both Express and Fossil, I had to weigh payroll concerns against the store’s sales volume on a sometimes hourly basis. I also had to fight to bring associates on with a higher starting rate based on their experience, which was more of a struggle than it should have been.
I cannot express enough that it is ridiculously stressful trying to live on a minimum wage salary. It is also a nightmare to be both cognizant of that and also to do your job to manage payroll: you must make calculated decisions about who can perform their job well, who is having an off week, what day of the week it is, what promotions you’re running, and—my least favorite—often make these decisions before the doors even open for business that day.
I am not a fortune teller, and as much as it was beaten into me that you cannot control a store’s traffic on any given day (as opposed to everything else, which you can control), not being properly staffed on the weekend because of a slow business day is hard.
Knowing that someone may be missing a rent payment because you had to cut their shift sucks even worse. Not as much as actually missing rent, but it’s not great.
Having been a manager, it’s been a long time since I’ve had to apply for a role that started at minimum wage. Since my tenures at Express and Fossil, I’ve been able to negotiate higher rates for any retail position I’ve interviewed for (admittedly there haven’t been many, because I’m established enough now in my field that I’d be able to find work fairly quickly if something happened).
Here’s the thing: I’m not just in favor of a $15 minimum wage. I’m enthusiastically supportive. I want it to be higher. I want billionaires to pay more taxes or reinvest in their businesses to provide living wages to the people who make them so successful. I want people to be able to pursue their goals and dreams without being shackled to purportedly shit jobs for shit pay, and for less of that pay to go toward expenses like healthcare, childcare, and housing.
If essential workers like grocery store staff, farmhands, and even the people grilling the burgers we order at McDonald’s are paid so poorly, what does that say about what we prioritize? The people we deem most important to our economy? I make more than $15 an hour—although not too much more—and my job, while rewarding, is hardly essential. No one’s going to starve if I don’t write a blog post about storage or banking or pest control.
If you truly want to help people out of poverty—which is what so many people purport to wish for—the most important thing you can do is just give them more money. You cannot budget out of poverty. You cannot overcome substandard wages for people driving themselves to death by working three jobs to put meals on the table.
The best thing you can do to help someone is not worry that your cheeseburger combo is gonna cost you if they get more money. You ought to worry about what not getting paid is going to cost them.
Required Reading
So, mea culpa, I didn’t read as much this week as I would have liked, at least not on the internet. Aside from the regular routine reading list, I ended up being too busy to check out essays. But I did read two books this week!
Night of the Mannequins, by Stephen Graham Jones, was a quick read but I didn’t care for it as much as I wanted to. Maybe it’s because I read a lot of it in bed, but I had some trouble following what was going on in the book’s final 20 pages or so. There’s a tornado and some confusion and a very unreliable narrator. But if you want something you can knock out in a day or two, give it a shot.
I also completed Austin Kleon’s trio of books about being creative yesterday with its third installment, Keep Going. This one has some pretty standard advice, but it’s presented in a visually interesting way. Because I enjoyed the first two books in the “series,” when I read them as eBooks thanks to my local library, I’ll probably pick up their physical versions down the road.
In keeping with the creative inspiration theme, I just started James Victore’s Feck Perfuction last night. It came recommended by Matthew Encina of TheFutur, whose work (and office setup) has been a real inspiration to me over the past few months.
Final Thought(s)
I’ve had a really hard time staying focused on anything over the past few weeks, so I’m hoping and praying that Wednesday is a calm day. So much of my mental bandwidth has been consumed by Donald Trump over the past six years. I am hoping that much like Freddy Kreuger, not having to consume myself with literally every action he takes will cause him to slip away into obscurity.
As always, if you’ve enjoyed this essay or think it’s worth engaging with, please subscribe and share with your friends (or enemies).