Prices would go up fractionally, not exponentially, child. And when people have a higher disposable income, they're going to spend it. I'll just put math on the list of things you don't understand.
Ok let's do some math, math is fun.
Using my Subway store as an example, using some general statistics with what subway has reported.
Subway sells 7.6 million sandwiches a day across over 41,000 location. They don't have an exact number of locations because they are always opening more, so let's use a little bit of general rounding.
8 million sandwiches per day / 41,000 is about 195 sandwiches made per store everyday.
Now the average sandwich costs between $4-9.50 on average. So let's round up and say $10 average.
195 sandwiches a day times 10 bucks a sandwich, means the store is making $1950 per day. (they aren't this is a WIDE swinging number so remember that)
1950 per day over 365 days a year means that ONE subway location brings in about $730K a year. Let's say you need 8 total employee's making a "livable" wage of 50K/year to work every day spliting the day into two separate shifts, four people per shift. That's immediately $400K out of that $730K, which means you have $330k to pay for your bills, the business rent, the food supplies, etc. Which according to what I could find a subway restaurant costs between 162-307k per year to operate.
So I how much using this theoretically example would a subway need to increase sandwich prices? Considering my example is extremely understaffed, and very generalized. According to
https://www.eposnow.com/us/resources/how-much-do-franchise-owners-make/ with the actually income of a subway store only being about $400k/year which is 330k LESS than even my averaging out example and the OWNER of a subway restaurant only makes about $40k per year. Which is considerably less than your general "livable" wage estimate.
Ok so we have to reverse the math now right? So let's say we need the customer to give us $330K more per year in order to come close to supporting the wages of the employees you want (remember we are under staffing the restaurant).
So we can do this in two ways. We can either increase the number of sandwiches per day. So to do that we $330K/365 which means we have to make an additional $905 a day, or tack on another 91 sandwiches per day. Now that we know that we have to take 905 and divide that by 195 sandwiches per day to get $4.64 price increase for every sandwich.
Now you can scoff and go, "Pfft that's just 5 bucks more, no big deal." But that is HUGE. It's an increase of nearly 50%! Now increase the price of EVERYTHING 50% and look what happens. Think about it this way. you go from making $30k/year to $50K that's an overall increase of 66% which is nice that's a nice jump isn't it. But in order to compensate for the increase in wages, the value of those wages goes down because the cost of everything goes up. And then you are left with MAYBE a 16% jump. Effectively making that increase look crazy good, to only equaling an extra $4800 bucks in your pocket, which last I checked isn't enough to pay rent for 6 months.
Don't you think we'd be better served by simply making housing and healthcare needs affordable for everyone instead of trying to balloon an economy artificially?
And you still didn't answer my question as to who decides what's a livable wage in the first fucking place. Because all you people wanna do is call me an asshole and say "Just give people money!" which aint an answer not a solution to a goddamn thing.
