Myths/raising the minimum wage would raise prices/rejected

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An appealing counter-argument is that the CEO of McDonald's tripled his own salary without affecting prices. However, this isn't enough to even raise the price of a burger by one cent given the absolutely enormous volume of business McDonald's conducts.

Numbers

  • Current CEO Thompson's compensation was $4.08m in 2011 and $13.75m in 2013, an increase of $9.67m.[1]
  • Former CEO Skinner's compensation was $8.75m in 2011 and $27.74m in 2013 (he retired in June of that year), an increase of $18.99m.[1]
  • McDonald's "serves 68 million customers each day"[2]. We'll take this to mean that this is how many sales are completed per day, since individual customers are not tracked. This comes to a total of ~25b sales per year.
  • If taken equally from each sale, Thompson's raise would cost about $0.0004 per sale and Skinner's raise about $0.00076 per sale.

Comparison

To give an idea of how employee pay-raises at McDonald's correlate with top-level pay raises:

  • As of 2014, McDonald's has 420,000 employees[3]
  • Thompson's pay raise would have given each employee a raise of $23/year.
  • Skinner's pay raise would have given each employee a raise of $45/year.

Footnotes

  1. 1.0 1.1 2013-04-12 McDonald's CEO Thompson's pay triples to $13.75 million
  2. Wikipedia: McDonald's, citing a dead Yahoo page which also is not available on archive.org
  3. Wikipedia: McDonald's, citing Edgar, which seems to be paywalled