Up Too Early for a Saturday

Cathy is on her way to the ATX. Whee! It's not Vegas, but it'll do in a pinch. We're going to Gavin DeGraw/Train tomorrow and we're both taking off Monday. So YAAAAY!

I thought of my mom when I was making up the guest bed with fresh sheets this morning. Mom was an army brat and she taught me that when you want to make a bed really fast, you don't walk back and forth from side to side, like we all do, tucking and straightening each layer on each side. You pull and tuck and make up one side and then do the other. It actually works!

While I have a few minutes, I have to talk about this minimum wage thing. People who work at fast food restaurants as a career do not make minimum wage. Sorry, but they just don't. They start at minimum wage and then they get raises and promotions, just like the rest of the free world. There is an evolution to working. You don't make $7.25 an hour for 50 years until you retire from McDonald's.

If someone has a family, and can't get a job that requires training or education, and wants to work in fast food or any of the other places that start at $7.25 an hour, that is their choice. There are other jobs that pay more. It may be night shifts or physical work or some other less desirable environment than McDonald's, but there are choices, if money is the prime concern. There are also other industries (healthcare for example) that have positions that start at minimum wage, but who promote into far better paying positions or whose benefit packages may even pay for employees to go to college. It's all about choices in life.

If people made $15 an hour as a newbie working at Burger King (that's $30,000 per year for a 40-hour work week), who would ever go to school or train to take a $15 an hour first job as a programmer or a plumber? What a waste of time.

There is monetary value to acquiring a skill or advanced education. There is also monetary value to staying at a fast food or retail job started without any time or money or stress invested in acquiring experience or education beforehand, and then working one's way up to supervisor, manager, etc. There should be monetary value to all of those things.

Raise minimum wage to $15 per hour and all other industries/jobs will have to raise pay accordingly. The costs of everything we buy as consumers will go up as well. Not that I would mind the raise, but the country will go broke doing that.

Just my two cents. That'll getcha about one piece of salt water taffy from the bulk bin.

Avoid banana.