I think you'll find most large chain retailers only pay minimum wage. I don't see that as a problem, since the skill set required to clerk in a store is minimal.

Here in Washington, the minimum wage is $8.55. I believe that is about twice as much as some jobs are worth nowadays.

Note: minimum wage is not a living wage, it is a minimum threshold set by the government for doing any type of work. Some jobs simply do not contribute enough to the economy to merit a living wage. However, the market is required to pay no less than a certain rate no matter what the value of the work really is.

I know business owners who made less than minimum wage for a number of years. When the husband and wife are each putting in 80 to 100 hours a week to build their business, how would that be quantified? Commission sales work can be just as tough in a sagging economy.

Anytime the government has to step in to artifically inflate the value of a product or service, it devalues the rest of the market and you get inflation. In the 47 years I've been around, the minimum wage has never gone down. I wonder why?

Ummm ... the cost of living has been going up. Would you work for what you did 47 years ago?

If and when the COL goes down a significant amount and for a significant amount of time you might have an argument.

It also has to be noted that while labor is constantly subjected to what amounts to a reverse auction, who will work for the least amount of money, the higher paying jobs are never subject to the same pressures. They get to claim that if you pay CEOs less money you get "less skill and talent". Common sense would tell you that the janitor could do better than some of those CEOs, the ones who lose billions, but the compensation packages seldom go down.

It also has to be noted that while a person building a business may work 100 hours a week and their income might, for a time, amount to less than minimum wage the simple fact is that the lower pay is, presumably, compensated for by ownership of the company. Hourly workers get a minimum wage but enjoy no potential payoff from ownership.

I hate where this thread is headed. I am a person of long term unemployment and inspite of access to the Internet and a cell phone and a place to live, I am still pissed at my inability to find suitable work and see my skilled wife work part time for only minimum wage with no benefits. From a survival stand point and being past the better part of my life, I wonder if it is time to Break-Bad and go Dillinger, and to hell with anyone who gets in my way. I would rather go out shooting than to die slowly of starvation and exposure.

I wonder if a lot of people aren't getting to the same point.

Stay strong, if not for yourself, then family!

IMO the simple, and inevitable, fact is that demographics are on a collision course with technology and industrialization, and the industrial model of employment. Bottom line is that computerization, automation and industrial design all point toward far more being produced in less time by fewer people.

The question is: What do you do with excess populations?


Combine all this with the cultural contempt for manual labor, which keep people out of menial jobs, even as illegal aliens take them, and a cost of living that is so high a low wage job is simply not practical if you're not willing to sleep a dozen in a walk-up efficiency and working off the books.

Even education can be a dead end because you just don't need that many PhDs. At least three of my friends with PhDs, have had long stretches of unemployment. All three have told me they don't report their education simply because it keeps them from getting lower level jobs. It is a recipe for frustration and anger.

This rings so true.

Currently where I'm working the management have decided to ensure that everyone is to get an NVQ Qualification (UK National Vocational Qualification which is aimed at basic literacy and numeracy) simply because the management (Business Studies Graduates again, from the old school boy network upper classes i.e. the natural leaders ) feel that all their internal memo's circulated via email are not being implemented (yes apparently simple email memo's will get everyone singing to the same hymnsheet) and the business, which is a direct customer communications orientated business, will become efficient and successful. The fact is that many who have to read and decipher their management speak email rantings (the company Acronym Server has been down for a few week now, so its now much more difficult) have undeclared postgraduate qualification and any feedback to improve business processes is completely ignored (the technically illiterate management have a difficult time understanding what these undeclared Masters and Phds in Computing and Engineering are telling them). The business is a communications company, whose management cannot even effectively communicate to its workforce and resent any positive feedback as to where they are going wrong to improve business efficiency, i.e. the IT systems are appalling and unworkable and have to rely on the skills of those the management feel are not even literate!! to make the business processes work and function even in a basic sense.

An example of the incompetence of the management is that I have not even been issued a PIN number for my security pass to allow access to the building even after 4 months working there, after being reassigned to this different company address (apparently I don't exist on the company security server). The management are very strict on building security, according to their email memos, as to who can access the building.

I hope this is not too much of a thread hi-jack, but my observation in my job is that sending e-mails is now considered an acceptable substitute for actual, productive action. Our company is now turning into a self-spamming operation, where managers are sending each other and employees so many emails that they have little or no time to actually do their work.

My manager actually is trying to do his job, and told me the other day that he deleted 1000+ unread corporate generated e-mails that had accumulated in less than 2 days.

The drag on corporate productivity and costs must be enormous.

If I recall my history, our British friends managed to build and administer an Empire on which the sun never set without having either e-mail or cell phones.

This probably had more to do with Messrs Enfield and Vickers and no health and safety legislation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H7rrIlPu-Ao

But anyway I digress. Here are a few examples of the plainly stupid levels of management leadership I have come across. Extremely well paid business leaders and executives who really just don't have a clue.

1) An IT executive manager of a well known merchant bank (the one that went bankrupt and precipated the whole financial crisis) who didn't know what an IP address was.

2) An executive for a one of the largest communication companies in the world, who screamed at me to get her Internet working. Yep she hadn't had her router turned on the previous 3 days, 'Try turning it on'.

3) A systems developer executive who had lost all of his emails from his web mail. 'Try looking in your Outlook client'.

So it doesn't really surprise me that the Chief Executive of the RBS (Fred the Shred, who had no banking qualifications. If only someone had let him take up Lion Taming instead ) didn't know that his bank was effectively insolvent. I really wouldn't be surprised if he had been reading the accounts and not realising that the entries were for thousands and not the actual amount. i.e. a Billion pound entry was in fact a Trillion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0uE1qi2A68

High levels of renumeration and actual ability or competence are not necessarily mutually inclusive.

BTW Jack Bauer always calling his IT support at OCU is so far fetched as to be laughable.

I wonder who exactly did the SEC executives/employees called when the porn stopped working on their computers.

I can confirm this directly. They aren't "seconds"- they are specifically designed and sold to the big-box stores.

I had a relative who was a salesman for a maker of power tools. There were too versions of what appeared to be the identical tool - but if you opened one up, you would find lower cost components (plastic gears, lower torque motors, thinner housings) as compared to the versions you might buy from a place like Grainger or Mc Master.

The model numbers are identical, but the serial numbers give it away - things like an "H" at the beginning or end of the serial number for "Home Depot".

Stihl will not change their tooling to meet big-box pricing, which is why you only see brands like Poulan and Black and Decker at WalMart - but you'll never see the pro version of Black and Decker (Dewalt). But even brands like Milwaukee are suspect - if you buy a Sawzall from a hardware store vs. a Home Depot, there's almost no way to tell - until you look at the warranty.

Martin touched on one explanation--that stores like Wal-Mart sell so much volume that they can actually force manufacturers to make their products cheapers (usually inferior quality).

But I don't believe Wal-Mart actually sells "seconds" although there are stores with such business models--selling discontinued models, production overruns, products with a tiny labeling defect, etc. I can't think of the names of supermarket-type stores like this off the top of my head, but Big Lots is an example of a general merchandise company like this.