So numbers are good. They help us better understand things and have more informed opinions. I personally love having a general knowledge of hot button topics. It means when you hear people talking you can separate the people who have an informed opinion from those that have objective ones. So because I love numbers and I love you all so much I went ahead and looked up some numbers on one of this week’s big internet topics: Fast Food Wages. I understand we don’t all have engineering degrees but that is totally okay (those are totally overrated) and we can all understand the simple math used here!
So let’s assume fast food workers make $7.50 an hour and works full time.
I learned from a simple online search that the average fast food store has 15.6 employees. Pretty gruesome hiring 0.6 of an employee if you ask me but I guess that’s why we always see pick up window attendees sticking the bottom half of their legs out the window.
So how much will it cost a store to increase wages from $7.50 to $15.00?
$15.00 - $7.50 = $7.50.
$7.50 x 40 hours x 15.6 = $4,680.00 a week
4,680 $/week x 52 week/year = $243,360.00 a year.
STOP WHAT YOU ARE THINKING RIGHT NOW. It is really important to me that everybody reading this understands that the 243,360 a year number should mean absolutely nothing to you without more information. We need a better understanding of the revenue brought in by individual stores for this number to have any meaning to us whatsoever. BUT DON’T WORRY I looked up some more numbers for you.
In 2010 US McDonalds sales on hamburgers alone was 32.395 billion dollars. That is revenue not profit obviously. In 2010 there were 14,027 units (slightly different than a franchise I guess but there were about 12,000 of those I guess).
32,395,000,000 / 14,027 = $2,309,474 hamburger sales per unit (which I think is like a store).
So on hamburger sales a McDonalds store takes in an average (with a decent amount of uncertainty I’m sure) of 2.3 million dollars annually.
243,360 / 2,300,000 = 10.6%
So at least for McDonalds it will take about 10.6 % of their hamburger sales to afford the purposed wage hike. So now you can go have more informed conversations about the discussion. Here I will even give you some example statements to make regardless of your opinion on the subject.
For conservative opinions
“Doubling the wage of fast food workers is totally absurd it would take like a WHOLE 10.6% of McDonald hamburger sales (NOT PROFIT) to fund that wage hike. That’ll be like changing the dollar menu to the dollar ten menu.”
“It really is totally plausible for the franchises to give the purposed wage hike. 10.6% of hamburger sales ALONE could fund it. That is just like changing the dollar menu to the dollar ten menu. Who wouldn’t spare a dime so people can have a comfortable living?”
“All I know is that 10.6% of hamburger sales would fund the purposed wage hike for McDonalds I would probably have to look at more numbers to really decide what that means to me.”
