San Fran comic book store owner and his loyal lefty customers are
shocked at the impact on his shop:
77 percent of San Franciscans voted for Proposition J, which will gradually raise the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour over a four-year span. May 1st marked the first of the four gradual increments.
I’m hearing from a lot of customers, ‘I voted for that, and I didn’t realize it would affect you,” Brian Hibbs, owner of the iconic comic book store Comix Experience, said.
By law, Hibbs is now required to pay each employee a minimum of $12.25 an hour, and he’s not sure if his business will be able to hang on, especially when the final hike is implemented. In the end, to cover the final cost, his business would need to rake in an extra $80,000 a year alone.
“I was appalled!” he says. “My jaw dropped. Eighty-thousand a year! I didn’t know that. I thought we were talking a small amount of money, something I could absorb.”
But boy, he thought wrong.
Despite being a progressive living in San Francisco, I do believe in capitalism. I’d like to have the market solve this problem.”
That applies not just to his plight, but to the question of the minimum wage: “We’re for a living wage, for a minimum wage, in principle. . . . But I think any law that doesn’t look at whether people can pay may not be the best way to go.”
Isn't that rich? "I didn't think it would affect you?"
Also, "I thought we were talking about a small amount of money." Dude, do you not have a calculator on your desk? Do you not run expense-and-income spreadsheets?
How many cities in post-America will try this nonsense before the Freedom-Haters start to get a collective clue?
The way you fight the jack boots is to do or not do what they say, as their dictates may be. Civil disobedience works! But then your ilk carps about it being late in the day, instead of affirming the peoples' right to do what they will if they do not cause others' ill. Don't like it, do it anyway. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER GIVE UP!
ReplyDeleteRobot pricing will be coming down, so if the comic store owner can just wait it out he won't have to deal with any personnel or cash flow problems related to wages and salaries. He can go internet. Come on, let's get creative here. Plenty of book and comic book stores have been run out of business because of the internet. You know what? The internet is a robot.
ReplyDelete"Warnings of the coming robot economy – when the machines will take over our jobs – are everywhere. The idea took centre stage at the World Economic Forum this year: “Most Davos delegates expected barcodes and robots to replace humans at an accelerating rate”. Even an expert survey last year was split 50:50 between those arguing that the robots will create more jobs than they displace, and others worrying that they could lead to income inequality. Exactly how a robot economy will change everyday life is still up for grabs."
Read more at http://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2015/feb/12/the-real-robot-economy-and-the-bus-ticket-inspector
"Mike Osborne and Carl Benedikt Frey from Oxford University have studied the risk of automation in the US economy, concluding that 47 per cent of jobs in the current workforce are at high risk of computerisation. They come to this conclusion by looking for jobs that can’t be automated; the 47 per cent is what’s left over. In their model, there are three bottlenecks that prevent automation:
ReplyDelete…occupations that involve complex perception and manipulation tasks, creative intelligence tasks, and social intelligence tasks are unlikely to be substituted by computer capital over the next decade or two.
These are bottlenecks which technological advances will find it hard to overcome. The authors predict that the next decade will see steps forward in the algorithms that automate cognitive tasks, including cutting edge techniques like machine learning, artificial intelligence and mobile robotics.
This second wave of the robot economy follows a first wave that automated manufacturing and repetitive manual tasks. So many of the desk jobs that our parents and grandparents would have done, like typing and manual data entry, are now becoming obsolete. And according to Osborne and Frey, some of the jobs that are most at risk of automation, were formerly present in droves at many city offices. This includes the likes of accountants, legal clerks and book keepers - dying breeds, and casualties of the robot economy. But Osborne and Frey think that tasks like navigating complex environments, creative thinking and social influence and persuasion will not be automated as part of these advances.
Some of my colleagues are interested in the second kind of task – creativity. They are working with Osborne and Frey to understand how resistant the creative economy is to automation: how many jobs in the creative economy involve truly creative tasks (if that’s not tautologous). Preliminary results look pretty good for creative occupations. 87 per cent are at low or no risk of automation."
Ibid
Be a winner, not a whiner and if you're tough, you just get going, right. In this situation, going out of business. I guess he joins the crowd of bookstore owners preceding him. There are other reasons too for his low profit margin, most of which can be blamed on the free market. Minimum wage will fail. I don't know what the answer is, but the bull shit and dog vomit coming from the politicians, left and right about the promise of improving the employment outlook for our citizens is just that. I don't believe any of you boobs and liars.
ReplyDeleteCheck out Nick Kristoff's "offering" in today's NYT:
ReplyDeleteWe as a nation have chosen to prioritize tax shelters over minimum wages, subsidies for private jets over robust services for children to break the cycle of poverty. And the political conversation is often not about free rides by corporations, but about free rides by the impoverished.
Kansas’ Legislature is so concerned with this that it recently banned those receiving government assistance from, among other things, spending welfare funds on cruise ships (there is, of course, no indication that this was a problem). Will Kansas next address the risk that food stamps are spent on caviar and truffles? We all know that public money is better used to subsidize tax-deductible business meals by executives at fancy restaurants.
As Stiglitz notes: “Inequality is a matter not so much of capitalism in the 20th century as of democracy in the 20th century.”
Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/03/opinion/sunday/nicholas-kristof-inequality-is-a-choice.html?ref=todayspaper
Would you care to actually address the effect of minimum wage on small business rather than bringing robots into it? It would do a great deal toward making you look like you have a coherent world view.
ReplyDeleteThe Kristof piece is an intentionally deceptive attempt to conflate the wealth redistribution that is the food stamp program with the understanding on the part of those who craft business tax law that the expenses of doing business should not be subject to government confiscation.
K's piece also is full of crap on the grounds that his entire premise is a straw man. We should have no subsidies for anybody - ditto food stamps. What we should have is an overall tax burden about one-tenth of what it now is on anybody and everybody.
And this Atkinson guy he lists bullet-point recommendations for alleviating inequality from is has the odor of freedom-hatred wafting off him big-time. Just plain wacky.
ReplyDeleteInequality is not a problem. It's nobody's business. Sovereign individual X makes A amount. Sovereign individual Y makes B amount. Big deal. If either of them wants to change that wealth or income status, they are free to go for it. But keep the damn government out of it.
Yep, the free market has almost run all the comic book stores out of business. I too regret that it might be the final straw for this store owner. Their profit margins are too low to take the hit. They can't pass it on to us, the consumer, in their pricing. My dad was a small business person. Appliances. Ate up by the big box stores. I don't think we had any health insurance while I was growing up until my mom went to work in corporate America when I was 18. Nor would they have had any retirement funds without the profit sharing stock options and pensions. I never heard my parents or grandparents complain about their social security and Medicare. Guess, like 75 per cent of San Franciscans, they were in favor of government intervention of some sort. That's democracy, ain't it?
ReplyDeletei could be wrong, but more people out there want to work and the market is just not able to accommodate them. According to your ilk there is to be no governmental aid of any sort. So, what do you expect them to do? Whatever it is, they're sure to be mocked in some way by society. Welfare recipients, parents' basement rats, trailer trash, you name it. With increasing technological advances the job outlook looks dimmer and dimmer, not brighter and brighter. Each side says they can do better than the other side. Lots of folk gave up on the empty promises a long time ago. Hence our paltry voter turn-out. And if the wrong side wins, you call all who voted for him/her low info. Well, we got another one coming up in a year and a half. Let's see what happens then and what bull crap is flung beforehand. Gonna be a long lead-up, for sure. You say hello and I say goodbye or vice versa, doesn't matter really, It just is.
ReplyDeleteHow's Christie's vow to clamp down on states which have legalized MJ or MMJ and his call for changing social security into emergency poverty insurance, not what he calls an entitlement, working for him? We ain't that friggin' low info bro.I believe we and our employers paid into this fund. How is that an entitlement?
ReplyDeleteHere's a story that will warm the cockles of your conservative heart:
ReplyDeleteKANSAS CITY, Mo. — Shona Banda says she had a clear choice: Live in misery or use medical marijuana to ease her Crohn's disease and risk going to jail.
Turned out to be an easy call for the Garden City, Kan., woman. She said her symptoms eased to the point where she could return to work and once again play with her young son.
But she didn't count on that same son, now 11, speaking out in school recently about the benefits of medical marijuana, including saying that it had saved his mother's life. School officials contacted police, who searched her house and found marijuana and cannabis oil. That's where her old choice took a new turn. Police didn't take her to jail. Authorities took her son away and put him in protective state custody."The question to Kansans is, 'Are you OK with your tax dollars being spent on this?'" Sublett said. "This woman goes to bed at night without her son because she had some marijuana in her house when it's legal in half the country — are you OK with that?"
http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/after-state-takes-child-kansas-woman-is-at-center-of-national-marijuana-debate/ar-BBiZpIj?ocid=DELLDHP
Trying to figure out what the story about the lady and her weed has to do with the minimum wage.
ReplyDeleteIt just wafted like weed smoke off the previous posting about Chris Christie which pretty much marks him as a neo-Nazi or something and that wafted off a posting that was at least sort of about the minimum wage.
ReplyDeleteChristie, as you might know, announced a total crackdown on MJ states if he gets to become our neo Nixon. Ronnie, though he professed to protect it for future generations, might have pulled a changing OASI to Emergency Poverty Insurance thing but even he was not that hypocritical.
ReplyDeleteRead and see more at http://boldprogressives.org/2012/11/ronald-reagan-in-1984-social-security-has-nothing-to-do-with-the-deficit/