Reply to post: Minimum wage actually means $0 in the US

Yelp minimum wage row shines spotlight on … broke, fired employee

MrZoolook
Mushroom

Minimum wage actually means $0 in the US

I bet there are people on far less than her minimum wage job too. Americans have an odd relationship with some words and phrases.

I was involved in a debte recently on Quora, where I eventually questioned why someone (say a tourist) should be made to feel guilty or given worse service because they didn't tip waiting staff. The backlash I recieved was an eye opener.

Apparently, the minimum wage in the US accounts for gratuities. Thus, by not tipping staff, the customer is (according to some posters) responsible for them not having enough to live on.

In other words, the minimum cost for a employer to employ someone, aka the minimum wage, in the US is $0.00... so long as they work hard enough to get more generous customers than the other staff, and get them to pay above the advertised prices.

My suggestion that restaurants and bars should just increase the prices by a few % and pay the staff a decent wage, was met with posts arguing that restaurants 'overcharging' customers this way would lead to customers going to other restaurants or just staying home, putting outlets out of buisiness, mass unemployment, the ruination of an entire buisiness sector, the collapse of the US economy, global warming, the collapse of our sun, the eventual heat-death of the Earth...

Yeah, I'm the bad guy in this argument...

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