Have you owned a margin strained small business before? Or had any experience working in a margin strained retail environment where your only competitive lever is price?

> Governing to the lowest denominator is just poor management.

Nevertheless, this is what happens. If you're running a low margin store of 50 employees, as a store general manager you notice one bad employee more and complain upwards about it. Hiring/retraining costs money. Granted this is a long time ago but I recall our training/hiring cost per employee at a Best Buy store to be in the thousands of dollars.

If you're Best Buy you can afford to pay people more (they just are also being responsible to their Wall Street numbers), but an independent restaurant can't just turn the price lever without other impacts, and no, in the cases I'm familiar with, the owner is not making high wage. Some of them are lucky to make over $50-60k/yr and correctly re-invest in their business.

> For who? Bob "steals" an hour of overtime worth $25 but he's still in your facility at your disposal. God forbid...

Depending on the company, yes, one employee stealing anything can have more of an impact on your company than you realize. Especially if it goes on awhile without anyone noticing.

> I'm sorry, but if your first location can't sustain itself and create a meaningful work environment maybe nobody needs that second location of yours. Get health coverage for your existing workforce before you go hiring more.

First, health care is expensive. I work for a $4B company and my benefits are not great. My healthcare is expensive per-paycheck in my opinion.

Let's discuss your Bernie example/quote further. Let's say you enforced what you're talking about. Say an independent Pizza shop charges $20 for a large pizza, Pizza Hut/Dominos charges $18. But I can charge $2 more because of my quality, but I still have high food costs because I don't have franchise buying power. But I already have less sales because I don't have brand recognition and/or the marketing power that a national franchise does.

Also, at least in my friend's cases, they also pay their employees more than minimum wage out of the gate. IIRC they get paid fairly well for a pizza place, he also has employees that have been there for years and he pays them accordingly.

OK cool, I'll increase my wage, and I'll buy everyone health insurance. Now I have to charge $22 or $25 for the same pizza. Maybe my customers are loyal and just deal with it, maybe not. What happens if not? Then I close my business, now not only are my employees unemployed but so am I.

Say you make the same change to the big franchise, their costs only go up to $19-$20 for the pizza that cost $18 before. At the extreme still $5 less than I was charging.

Obviously the example gets more complex if everyone gets the same wage increase, right? Then you're just sort of raising the water line.

I think it's super complex, honestly. Especially having managed this on the "Big Business" and small business sides.

That being said:

> This I agree with. You get what you pay for. Period.

Not in all cases is my point, some people are just awful humans. He's had some of his employees (whom he pays well in comparison) steal food and money straight out of the register.