Hey everyone, first time poster, thought about using a throwaway but decided not to because if my boss sees this well maybe you should pay more.

I work in a small(ish) town of about 10k people in Washington state. Minimum wage here is 14.49. Sounds decent enough but currently we are going through this massive transition to trying to be the next big city (about a 30 minute drive from Olympia) so a lot of houses/apartments runs about 1200 for a 2 bedroom 1 bath.

I went to college and got my AAS. Have my CompTIA + and sec+ all of this was paid out of pocket and using grants. I've got two kids and I'm a single dad. Working 40 hours a week and going to school full time. Not trying to use my kids at all, I'd never take those moments back and I don't regret having them.

I started working for my employer while I was finishing my AAS. I told her that I was willing to be her Tech support (small company with about 10 people) for a liquor store and the surrounding businesses (that she owns the properties to) adding up to about 12 different businesses. Mostly retail. Dealing with computer issues mostly upgrading ram, running diagnostics on payment machines and disposing of items in their inventory systems that are invalid. Among a few other things.

She asked if I would be okay with a $17 an hour starting wage and we would talk about bonuses/raises in three months. I agreed, it's now been almost a year. I have finished my college degree and am enrolled in the bachelor's program for comp sci with an application development major. Minor in business.

The other night while closing down one of her stores (due an outage from a credit card processing company) I was going through and printing the dailys for the business so I'd have them the next morning. While doing this I found that I could actually see the entire years net profit, for a single business (and again this is only 1 of 11 or so that she has) and her business made about 950,000 in pure profit. From her products at the liquor store.

So I got curious and asked the store manager how much he made. At first he was unsure to trust me as I'm usually just the tech support guy. But after some bullshitting he frankly said he made 18 an hour. I asked if his other employees made roughly that. He said yeah 16 and 18 are the two hourly wages. So I went home and did some math today. The math (napkin math that is rough to estimate but with the help of the store manager I think it is pretty accurate)

950,000 profit
9 employees who make 16 an hour
1 employee making 18 an hour.
Electricity costs for her business which I've found some estimates that say 2.14 per square foot the business is around 6,000 square feet
Garbage (which I know is 250 monthly)
Internet( 300 monthly)
And phone (included in our internet bill)

950,000

280,800 (assuming all people work 40 hours)
37,440 (manager)
154080 (electricity/power/heat/etc cost)
3000 (garbage)

3600 (internet/phone)

471,080 after all is said and done. This woman makes (absolutely passively) half a million dollars a year on a single business.

So today I called her said I graduated. Got a big congrats from her. The whole works. So after she tells me how proud of me she is, I ask her “so I know last year I told you that once I graduated I would need a raise in order to further my employment here” and before I could even finish the sentence she has the audacity to say “well you are making more than some people there” like to say that getting my degree wasn't worth it?

I just wanted my raise. I was willing to look the other way for her profits. But now I've got a handful of the sheets showing her profits to give to the manager tomorrow so they can all ask for a significant raise.