One of my biggest pet peeves in fandoms is the rampant mischaracterization everywhere. Not only that but the blatant ignorance too. It’s all well and good to have headcanons, but a lot of people need to remember their internal biases as well.
oh no guys, oh no! my cheeseburger price was once 3 dollars and 95 cents, and now it is 4 dollars and 10 cents. what am I going to do now that it costs 15 extra cents... what am I going to do guys?!?!
So this article obviously exists to play into the whole conservative talking point that "we can't raise the minimum wage because then prices would go through the roof!", which is a point I've always just found really silly.
While it is true that a minimum wage increase would cause prices to go up, pointing that out as if it's unique to this issue is a blatant obfuscation of the truth of how these corporations operate.
These types of arguments force us to imagine a world wherein fast food chains offer us delicious and tasty burgers at very low and affordable prices, and the glue holding this entire operation together are the low wages they pay their employees. After all, they have to cut costs somewhere, and at the end of the day, these jobs are just paid summer camp for teens, right? Who wouldn't want to get paid to flip burgers and have fun with other cool teens!? but this just isn't the case.
The reality is that the relationship between fast food prices and fast food workers isn't nearly as linear as these arguments make them out to be.
If you look at this graph, you can see that fast food prices have skyrocketed over the past decade, outpacing even the rate of inflation by an extremely hefty margin.
Meanwhile, the state average minimum wage from 2014 to 2024, when adjusted for inflation, has only increased from $9.54 to $10.69.
While I'm not trying to make any claims as bold as "10 dollars is not more money than 9 dollars", I do believe it's fair to say that it's not enough more dollars to warrant having to increase your prices by 100%. I uh- I think that's a pretty agreeable thing to say, probably.
So all that is to say that reality just doesn't align with the claims made those who use this talking point, but that leads to the question of if the people who say it really even care?
I can sit here and point out the flaws in these paper thin arguments all day, and I'd have a fantastic time to doing so, but I don't honestly think it would matter to a conservative at all. I think there's a sort of blunt and simple logic to their reasoning that seems really appealing.
"Fast food prices are low because wages are low, and it's ok that wages are low because the people who work at these jobs are high schoolers who don't have to worry about bills. Why do they need a living wage, if they're not even responsible for their own well being?"
It's that gut feeling, that "and that's just how things aught to be" mentality that conservatives revel in, and I'm truly not confident there's any amount of statistical evidence to convince someone who thinks that way to try and look at something in a new light.
