Let me start with we are child free and not suffering. We both work full time without overtime and we just bought a house. We’re ok.
My husband works for a smaller company in our area. They supply a product internationally but it’s locally owned. The owner frequently checks in on all the employees and takes interest in them.
Recently he found out that the wages he was paying were no longer competitive. Everyone got a $3/hr raise backdated to the beginning of the pay period. This is after my husband had just gotten a $2 raise that hadn’t even been paid out yet. I am shook that he ended up with a $5/hr raise.
I’m also salty. The company I work for claims they can’t afford cost of living increases in addition to merit raises but can donate literal millions to community charity donations and sponsoring a hockey team. All the while the executives are still getting their bonuses and are increasingly out of touch with the people that make the company run.
The takeaway here really is there are still some business owners trying to do good. But they’re hard to find. Cheers to the boomer owner of this company that engages in profit sharing and good benefits.