The guy who runs Dunkin’ Donuts seems to think coffee is not important:
Travis said he supports governments making “reasonable increases” to the minimum wage, but a hike to $15 per hour represents a 71% increase over the current state minimum.
“It’s going to affect small businesses and franchises,” Travis said in an interview with CNN’s Poppy Harlow. He said it would prevent his multi-billion dollar company from hiring new people.
“I don’t want to sound threatening about that,” he added, saying it probably wouldn’t force Dunkin’ to lay off workers.
Coffee is actually one of the first words Kick learned. When she gets up, sometimes at 5:30 a.m. but never later than 7 a.m., the first thing we do is go into the kitchen and get our respective beverages. She gets a sippy cup full of milk, and I get a travel mug full of coffee. Without at least two of those, I’m not capable of doing much in the mornings, and she knows it. Now, whenever she sees me with something to drink in my hand, she points and says “Coffee?”
Kid gets me. She really gets me.
The point is, coffee is special enough to me that my 18-month-old knows about our relationship, and I don’t want the guy making my coffee to be making poverty wages.
I want the guy who is responsible for my (sometimes thrice) daily caffeine to be paid MASSIVELY. I want that guy lugging bags of solid gold ducats home with him every night. I want him to make more than I do, because what he does is more important than what I do. He makes the COFFEE. At most, I schedule the meetings for which people need coffee to show up.
I do not get the impulse to poorly pay people who feed you. I do not get the way people dick their nannies and babysitters around. I don’t understand cheating the people who clean houses and office buildings or saying that the people who bake bread don’t deserve the hard-earned cash of the American Taxpayer. For fuck’s sake, do you want the earth to cave in beneath you? Sometimes the only thing holding the world UP is a large latte with sugar, and the person who takes the garbage out is critical to the functioning of society.
You want those people on the cheap? We’d be better off paying Mr. Donuts up there in Doge Coin and making sure his baristas are kept in foot rubs.
A.
This is something that comes up any time I have a discussion about a universal basic income – you eliminate minimum wage entirely and instead a living wage check comes to them from the government, and then you suddenly upend the current pay structure of our society to be actually proportionate to the necessity and/or unpleasantness of the job performed.
When your baristas all quit because who the hell wants to do an essential job for free (because you know in that in the absence of a minimum wage assholes like Mr Donuts would initially try to make their employees work for nothing), and the world fucking RIOTS because COFFEE YOU FUCKERS and WHY IS MY GARBAGE NOT GOING AWAY and no we don’t need people to do the Wall Street shit we need someone to mop the damn FLOORS?
Athenae, I think I love you.
… of course, that could just be the caffeine talking.
I love Kick even more than I did before. I also love it when guys from big companies talk about small businesses as if they care. Yeah, right.
I love the idea that, since wages are so low, that companies now just hire people to stand around and do nothing.
What? They don’t? Then how can they have to hire less people if the wage is increased?
They hire the absolute minimum to get the work done, and no more. The wage does not factor into the judgement. Especially not at that level.