hello, i did some math today and id like to share it with you
in advance ill disclose that this math is not 100% accurate bc i had to ballpark one variable and the other variables change day-to-day so this exercise was more to get an idea of about how much my labor is being exploited than to get exact figures. forest and trees, please look at the big picture
SO, i repair vending machines and am payed 18 dollars an hour to do so. if anyone thinks this is a good wage and has feelings about it please consider that a livable wage in my state is 25/hr according to MIT
a new vending machine at the cheapest costs around 3000 dollars
a refurbished vending machine at the cheapest costs around 1500 dollars
it takes me on average 1.5 days to get a vending machine back in working order and ready to ship so i make about 216 bucks BEFORE taxes per machine
the gas it takes to ship to our furthest service location is 32 gallons of diesel which at the time of writing costs 178 dollars in my state, and its not like we only ship one machine at a time but for sake of argument lets say they do so the over head for my company is as high as possible. also, WE do the deliveries so there's no extra driver to consider
we very rarely replace parts and the parts that get replaced are cheap (sheets of metal, springs, vinyl , paint, etc,) so i'm going to say a really bad machine takes somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 dollars of new parts, and this is still an overestimation
so this all means that whenever i fix up a machine my company makes at least $1500 selling it (meaning my share of profits would be the highest possible percentage as my wage is fixed so my share would be lower and lower for more and more expensive machines), 1500- (150+178)= 1172
then my pay is to be considered
216/1172=0.18
so in the absolute best scenario for my percentage 82% of what I generate is taken by the company, but even this is a gross underestimation as, like I've pointed out here, the company makes much more than 1500 per machine sold and the over head is on average, also much lower
just thought id share this finding, and encourage you all to do the same: figure out how much money you make for your company in comparison to how much of that they give you