So my in-laws are super right-wing Trumpers who only watch Fox News, and follow all the typical Republican nonsense, e.g. that the minimum wage is bad for business and thus the economy.
Yesterday my brother-in-law of them posted a picture of a tasty burger they got, and then followed it up with “this burger, fries, and a drink added up to $22! What's going wrong with America?!”
My mother-in-law then responded with “$22?! Wow! I don't think I can afford burgers anymore!”
My father-in-law then responded with “prices reflect the $15 minimum wage”
So…I saw that and just thought to myself wow, yeah, must be rough on the people who only make $15/hr. That's over an hour of work just to eat out! and responded with “oof, over an hour of work to pay for a burger, yikes!”
They haven't responded yet. I think they may have just forgotten to think about who is paid $15/hour, namely the people who made their food, or those peoples' livelihoods, and what these costs are like for them.
Oddly, they are very thrifty, and I know they spreadsheet their finances, so the math of what a $15/mo minimum wage, 32-hour-per-week job (32 because 33 would make their workplace pay for insurance and other benefits) plus a median $800/month rent (before utilities) isn't really out of their mental reach. To give a tl;dr, if you account for those, food, and basic necessities of life, it leaves ~$240/month for everything else, assuming perfect thriftiness, no emergencies, no car, no health insurance, and no public transit costs. So a single burger is almost ten percent of a minimum-wage worker's income.
I hope they think about this, but honestly I doubt they will. No doubt within an hour of reading that post, they had Fox News up, and any mental computations were shoved out of the way by fear of people having basic human rights and anger at the government for infringing on corporate rights. If they were away from that fucking show, they might actually see the reality for what it is: Loads of people work shitty jobs with no tangible world benefits outside of making others feel fancy and entitled, just to scrape by, and it isn't sustainable.