Mostly a rant, as I'm planning on quitting
I work at a small (5 employees including the manager) franchise that does shipments and a variety of other services. Our busy season is around November – January (due to the Christmas shipping rush), and slows down from April through August. Naturally, our profits take a hit during the summer.
In order to combat this, our owner (who doesn't work at this franchise, and who doesn't even live in the same state) has decided to take all of us down to minimum wage starting in the summer when the minimum wage increases to $12.75 an hour for our region (most of us make over $14 currently). Some of us have been working here for over 5 years, and have taken on extra optional training to provide more services to customers.
My manager (who has access to all the expense and income reports for our branch) and I have run the numbers, and our owner makes over $16k in profit alone a month, even on the slow months. We're understaffed, all the machines we use are broken or on their way out, and our retention rates are incredibly low. If the owner decides to follow through on his threat of lower wages, we've all agreed to walk out. He doesn't think we'll follow through on this threat and has made it known that he thinks we're bluffing.
When we leave, he'll have to spend thousands of dollars finding and training new people and managers, thousands in fees because he doesn't know how to run the store and we have contracted hours that we have to be open for, and massive loss of business as customers flee to competitors in the area. I'm very much looking forward to the fallout.