"$1B profit is only for a quarter, not for an entire year,"

Fair. $4/hour then, which is still less than we're talking about. I rather suspect I'm lowballing the labor by about 2x, also, if not more, but I'll stick with my numbers below.

"$15 minimum wage is only in the US, not worldwide. Although McDonalds does pay its workers more than $15 in some parts of the world, and somehow manages to stay in business despite the ruthless efficiency of capitalism "

I very deliberately did not try to calculate the price of raising minimum wage, because I do not have that data. I very deliberately calculated what they even theoretically could pay additionally across the board, because I think even at ~4$/hour, people are still going to be surprised at how small that number is! I do not think that when people think "Oh, big companies are just using people as wage slaves and sucking oodles of value out of everyone's pockets" that they're thinking "McDonalds is making about $4/hour/person." I think people think that McDonalds is making at least $dozens/hour/person, but there's no way that's the case.

Also, McDonalds has a lot of people who get more than minimum wage. They've got stacks of professionals, accountants, managers business people, etc. But, contra what LesZedCB asserts, you can't make up for it by just taking it out of their paycheck, because then those people will on the margins go work for someone else... plus these are still generally speaking middle class people (not even upper middle class here, I'm sure!), not people getting "rich". And if you do just try to take it out of a few execs hands, well, we're back to the problem where even all of McDonalds profits being reallocated back to the workers doesn't do as much as people think.

There is no scenario where McDonalds can pay enough to make a front-line order taker a "middle class" job.

"It's a mistake to talk about profits as a percentage of revenue because the profit is distributed to very few hands."

The board of directors do not just walk off with the profits. That's not how this works, and it's the sort of criticism that makes this sort of argument hard to take seriously. Where it does go is complicated, but theoretically it eventually ends up in the stockholders hands, and "the set of people who own McDonalds stock" is extremely widely distributed. The executives generally get a good chunk of stock and that's how they get the money, but in order to pay the executives "lots" it also means paying out to the rest of the stockholders "lots and lots and lots", and a lot of that stock is also ultimately going to middle class holders via various funds.

And again, my point is to work on recalibrating your understanding of just how much money "$1.5Billion" isn't, rather than argue for or against any particular policy. It isn't anywhere near as impressive as it sounds. It is not an infinite money fountain that can be easily "just" handed out to employees en masse and simply isn't Because Greed. And given the variance we experienced between quarters, it's a money fountain that can in the blink of an eye become Negative $1 Billion Dollars, even with labor costs where they are now. It's way more temperamental and way more fragile than it looks.