Quote:
Originally Posted by Blingy
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We're just outside Seattle but yea, similar pay/economies/COL/etc. Seattle proper is $15/hour. My town only has to follow the state MW but the lowest anybody can get away with is $14/hour and that's for after school high-school kids. If I walked into Walmart they'd start me at $18/hour part time, $21/hour full time.
Be careful about selling the "pay higher wages for more disposable income" thing. If you look at it in a certain light it's true. The working poor around here though isn't buying higher quality goods but rather more cheap crap. Additionally since wages have gone up so has the overall cost of living. We recently had a sound transit initiative go through. It's due to start operations in a little over a year and be completed in 2040. Because of that our car tabs have skyrocketed and property taxes left the solar system a couple years ago. These things of course have hit everybody but the working poor the hardest.
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I mean I think that's going to be a challenge no matter what. The result from what you're saying suggests that there needs to be very poor people to keep prices down? But it sounds like they'd be pretty fucked regardless if they're making better wages or not.
I'd be interested to know how the cost of living interacts with the minimum wage and whether that was causal or if it had anything to do with companies like Amazon introducing high paying jobs in droves.