If you work at Timmy’s do a count of how many ice caps you make in a day. Multiply that by the cost. I guarantee on ice caps alone you make more value than you get back in your check
Libs learn about the labor theory of value and are like, “so what if people skim a little off the top? The business has overhead.” This is not skimming. Most people lose more than half of their labor value every day.
I've actually seen the numbers at my workplace and I've come to the conclusion there's next to no profit being made. Not because of any good will on the owner's part, no way. No profit is being made because of poor business decisions and the overhead outweighs the income most months. My workplace is something like a vanity project for the owner, who makes the real money through his patents and his real estate projects. He then funnels money through his manufacturing business, sometimes losing hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.
What's actually going on is he's set up a kind of make-work project for his family (his sister, wife, son, and a few others all have high level positions) and the rest of it only exists because he likes feeling important. He likes walking around and lecturing workers. It's his hobby. I work at a multimillion dollar hobby.
Actually in the course of writing this it occurred to me my workplace might also be some kind of tax avoidance scheme.
I remember reading something to the effect that Best Buy was breaking even on their actual merchandise and generating all their profit off of those warranty extensions they always try to sell you.
Lots of businesses just don't make any sense on the service and only end up generating profits when you realize what's actually being sold.
Actually in the course of writing this it occurred to me my workplace might also be some kind of tax avoidance scheme.
Any chance the transactions are cash-heavy?
No, none of that. I meant more that the business gets a lot of "small business incentive" tax breaks and favorable bank loans. Balancing out the taxes that the owner would otherwise get on his real estate investments through his manufacturing business. I don't know enough about finances to know if that's how it works, but the entire thing to me has felt fishy for a while.
A pizza place owner gave his employees the profits he made in a day. Just one day. Guess how much the employees got.
Enough for $78/hr.
That’s how much minimum wage low-skill fast food employees are worth.
Edit - a link .
I agree with the general premise of both the thread and what you're saying here, but it sounds like this guy gave them the sales, not the profits? If so they'd effectively be producing 78/hr minus what ever the cost of ingredients (including shipping), utilities and equipment.
I expect the profit per employee is still pretty high though.
The article says profit while the video says "all the money". Even then, the owner expected to be able to pay them around $50/hr. Compare this to their actual earnings.
Ohio's min. wage is $8.8/hr btw and tipped workers, students, part-timers can be paid even less.
The current minimum wage in Ohio is $8.80 per hour. The tipped wage is $4.40. “Tipped Employees” includes any employee who engages in an occupation in which he/she customarily and regularly receives more than thirty dollars ($30.00) per month in tips...Employees under 16 years old, and any employees who work for companies grossing under $314,000 yer year, may be paid $7.25 per hour
Ohio Under 20 Minimum Wage - $4.25 - Federal law allows any employer in Ohio to pay a new employee who is under 20 years of age a training wage of $4.25 per hour for the first 90 days of employment.
Ohio Student Minimum Wage - $7.48 - Full-time high school or college students who work part-time may be paid 85% of the Ohio minimum wage (as little as $7.48 per hour) for up to 20 hours of work per week at certain employers (such as work-study programs at universities).
The article says profit while the video says “all the money”.
Did you mean the reverse? Didn't watch any videos, but the article states they were given "sales and tips"
There's a Facebook video linked in the article. And there was discrepancy b/w the article title and content (profit vs revenue) so I checked it out.
Eh, well in any case this is all splitting hairs I guess, sorry for starting the hairsplitting for no reason (personal flaw).
Point is that the workers are generating a bunch of wealth and living in poverty of course.
No problem, I've seen that point about it being revenue and not profit brought up a couple of times, so it's a valid concern. At least, putting a number makes it tough for libs and cons to say employers are only "skimming a bit from the top".
Yeah, I think the biggest actual cost beyond restaurant employee labor is probably just paying agricultural and logistics workers to get you ingredients.
It's been a long time but I remember working at McDonald's a long time ago and finding out what labor vs other overhead was and doing some napkin math on how many McChicken™ sandwiches I was making an hour and being kind of astounded at how much income was been generated off of my labor.
Worth noting the crazy high franchise fees for opening a McDs. And yet there's one on every corner.
I had to make an effort to stop doing the math about a year ago, cause I was noticeably getting more pissed off as the day went on
What sucks is a lot of the jobs that are easiest to do the math for are the ones where unionizing would be a fight against a multinational corporation
When my mate worked in a busy bar he worked out that he personally put £180,000 a year through the till, all while barely scraping by on just over £12,000 a year. Of course the bar was also chronically understaffed and none of the managers would stand up to head office when they demanded the sacrifice of more worker hours. The value of this consistent and genuinely dangerous betrayal? Managers made about £4,000 a year more.
:ukkk:
Jesus christ, when bars have head offices, you know your economic system exists purely to make pointless jobs.
My wife did this when she worked retail and actually switched stores at some point which was great proof.
She singlehandedly made the company over a million dollars a year, and they stopped giving her raises past $13/hr
Libs love to talk about overhead when you bring this up. But the profit minus overhead is still absolutely massive. Also, what gives business owners the right to skim off the top? “They took the initial financial risk.” How did they get the capital together to take that risk in the first place? Almost all of them were born rich. And besides, you think workers aren’t taking a risk coming in to work? Jaysus.
They take the risk at the beginning because they are the only owner and are therefore will lose a larger amount if the business goes under. The longer the business exist, the more people you’ve brought on and the higher chance you have of having recouped your investment, at which point the only thing you’ve lost is time. If that time involved labor, then that portion of your time you were a worker the same as anyone.
The logic on worker ownership really isn’t complicated. Owners just don’t wanna see it.
Yeah, net profit/divided by employees is still a ton compared the what workers are used to if the business isn't a total shit show.
Yooooo my old company literally kept track of how much each person made a month (sort of, value of all the stuff that you handled and like 6 different people would handle stuff in its time at our company) and stored it on the public ally accessible shared computer storage. I could literally log in from home and poke around our financials. The month before I quit about 250k work of stuff passed through my hands, divided by six or seven for everyone else who also touched that stuff was about 40k a month. My pay was like 3k.
The most egregious one of these I ever heard was this young girl sold contracts for some company and they were high value and she probably made like 40k let’s say a year.
Anyway last year she landed some contracts that literally generated millions of dollars for her company and they gave her a $250 card or something like that as a bonus lmao.
My gf’s job used to give them “ bonuses” and then it became a Christmas dinner they paid for and then it became uh, nothing. Lol they slowly pull the plug on all that shit. Meanwhile the companies are paying these employees like a couple bucks on every 1000 dollars they generate. A
My department brings in 4.6 million a year. About 500k in profit. There are 5 of us, max payrate is 17 an hour, minimum is 9.50
Serious Question : How do you calculate these values in occupations that aren't purely transactional like this?
So say like imagine a Software Programmer, or even more specific and limited something like Tech Support or Customer Service.
Without seeing the numbers at the top I'm struggling to figure out a way for a worker at like a tech support call center to actually figure out how much value they're providing the multi-national corporation they're doing support for.
If there are specific service contracts in your industry: If you don't know the prices that your employer charges for the service contracts and the profits they make, you could instead refer to industry standards. Chances are you'll be pretty close with that. That information is sometimes made public by certain organizations (sometimes corporations themselves, maybe unions, maybe independent economic research departments etc... at least in my part of the world). If you're a bit more bold you might be able to act like an interested customer with another similar company and just ask about prices via phone call or e-mail. If there aren't generally service contracts, it would probably be included in the product price, so you would have to find out how much profit is made from each sale, and how much of the work that goes into it overall is just for support (like 2% or 5% or whatever), which is probably tricky. On the other hand, sometimes it's enough to know how much profit a corp made, and how many employees it has. How much more money would everyone have if the profit was equally distributed to each employee? Not that that would necessarily be practical, but it's also a good way to paint a picture imho
See how much they charge for tech support as a line item. If they won’t tell you what the standard price is now you know why because the sales department definitely has one. If you work at a tech company as a programmer there’s a good chance the value you create is the majority of the company’s value as the core product so just take the company’s profits for that year, cut in half, and divide by the number of programmers for a low ball
You can look at what professional service companies charge for consultant. For engineers, it's $100-$150 an hour in the US, sometimes more for software or really specialized work. Tech support and customer service are lower than that, but it's hard to say because there's a big difference between tech support for niche scientific software or lab equipment vs tech support for your iPhone.
Compare that to how much you make in wages and benefits, and remember that if your company doesn't actually bill time to customers, your labor is more valuable than whatever the charge-out rate is for a consultant because you can do things faster (you know the place you work, your co-workers, etc).
as a web dev, at the furniture company i worked for, we would make around 75,000 a day (before taxes, paying people, etc) on an average day...and well over 2-3 million on the first day black friday/boxing day sales. the lead web dev on the team was working 2 jobs. someone else, i think it was one of the designers, casually mentioned that they would qualify for low income discounts, like for bus passes and stuff.
it was such a head scratcher. do they not recognize that they are getting ripped off? me, it was my first full time, non retail/fast food, job, so i was happy to get a slightly better paycheck. but for the other designers and web devs, this wasn't their first job at all? so i'm sitting there like...confused.
we could easily pay each member on the web dev team 75k a year, AND pay for the employees involved in furniture delivery, like the truck drivers or warehouse employees stuffing the furniture into the truck. 2-3 million on day 1 of black friday/boxing day is amazing, but it'd also be another 1-2 million each day until the sale was over. we had the money!! (at least i think so) it was just going...to the bosses i guess
Oh boy did I learn my value after finding out I brought my company $18k in a day.
It’s called rent seeking for a reason. Value is not being created. It’s being siphoned. The value can only appreciate in value so much compared to inflation (in a lot of areas, the land value actually depreciates once inflation is taken into account). You’re basically paying the landlord to spend your money on stuff that you would have had to spend your money on anyway. If they have a property manager, they’re not even doing that much.