The idea that management positions “produce nothing” is wrong. Yes, the majority of your time may not be directly involved in production of the establishments main products (various food items), but you ARE producing something: you’re working out shift schedules, vetting and hiring employees, handling customer complaints and making sure that the employees are properly trained and following procedures appropriately. That stuff has real value to the franchise, and is fairly essential in succeeding at the organization’s mission.
Oh I didn’t say the work was without value. Quite the contrary, the work has more value to the company than an individual low level laborer.
Largely because again, that manager has 30 people laboring for them or under them, so at least partly for them , partly for the company of course.
And it’s not an issue at all if you are middle-aged with a college degree, and they look at your application and say, “You’re overqualified and we are not going to hire you, and we would appreciate it if you do not reapply in the future.” Ask me how I, and a lot of other people, know that.
Independent businesses are a little better; one of the baristas at a coffee shop where I go to a meetup is a retired pediatrician, and I know of another retired physician who was a cashier at a hole-in-the-wall bookstore for a while. However, they didn’t necessarily need the money, and this was something they chose to do.
So we see that value and production aren’t the same thing.
Dollars measure value, not production.
A competent manager will indeed jump in and run the cash register, drop items into the fryer, make milkshakes, etc. If they won’t, they shouldn’t be doing that. Nurses and schoolteachers definitely have things to say about their version of that - in other words, don’t tell me how to do my job unless you are willing to do it yourself.
When I worked at the grocery store, we had a manager who wouldn’t hesitate to bag groceries, stock shelves, etc. His replacement did not, and her attitude was part of the reason I left that job. I mean, the person who did end up replacing me came in for a scheduled interview, and she refused to see her because she was “too busy.” :smack:
Now if we wanted to make things fair or whatever. Since homes are a basic need, we would just put a cap on the number any one entity could own. Then more would be available, thus prices would drop and competition for landlords would increase.
Then I’d probably make something more in line with a typical ROI on running a service.
20-50 -100 percent maybe instead of 1500-2000 percent. Not accounting for any increase or decrease in property value.
Life’s not fair though, neither is the market, so I play it as it exists.
Yeah true, that’s part of good leadership.
There’s a slight conflict though, many companies would prefer their managers not do that. For reasons like “why the hell am I paying you $20hr to bag groceries, we have people who do that for $7”
Is this a mobile home court where the tenants have to own the home they’re living in, and the lot rent is used to pay for trash and lawn care? I know about this because I have a friend who lived in such a place where she and her first husband got married.
No, I own all of the homes.
One of the tenants does lawn care for money off rent. One collects the rents and puts them in my account.
Well the conversation was about the number of family farms. I’m sorry you don’t think it’s interesting but that’s what the post I was responding to was about. Please don’t call my posts misleading just because you want to talk about something that nobody else was talking about.
Please review:
Perhaps not “salient” to whatever you think is interesting, the rest of us were talking about people who have irregular income, in particular, farmers. The vast majority of farmers are not large producers. And it is those nearly 2 million farmers who are salient to this conversation and this thread. All your discussion of Walmart and Cargill are irrelevant to the fact that there are still nearly two million family farms in this country. And most of those nearly two million family farms are not large business, by revenue or profit.
DesertDog was wrong. You already agreed to this. Your revision that he or she “slightly misspoke” is also wrong.
DesertDog is wrong again in this next post, again having spent more time typing than it would have taken to punch
percentage of contract farms
into Google:
Only 8% of farms produce under contracts, which are about half production contracts (I agree, one small step above tenant farmers) and half marketing contracts (not like tenant farmers).
Production contracts are common on poultry/eggs (nearly all), hogs (~60% by output, not number of farms or farmers), and cattle (~30%), and are uncommon elsewhere, if not unheard of. These farmers usually don’t even own the chickens. Marketing contracts are a price-hedging tool. I suppose there could be something nefarious about them that I don’t know about. I wouldn’t count these as “contract farmers” but even if you do, we’re talking single digit percents of farms (not farming output in case our pinnipeds friend feels we’re lacking salience again – that’s about 17% and 17% for each type if anyone is curious), which is hardly a big chunk.
It’s a matter of appearance.
When you have 88 percent of farms being small family farms but only making 17 percent of production. Then 35 percent of production is from contract farms. That and large family farms certainly look like corporate farms with the modernization and huge tracts, they may even be run more like a corporation, rather than farmer Joe out there doing all the work and taking his yield to market.
The numbers also sort of imply that a lot of the small family farms aren’t really “in business”.
Probably not producing a whole lot more or even as much as they need themselves.
Oh, and it doesn’t even have to be real value, to be measured in dollars, it’s just percieved value which sets the price in dollars… Not production.
This is part of why two people doing the same thing for the same market base can be paid vastly different amounts.
I’m on your side ideologically here, but I do have to say that you do have a few things wrong.
At the levels we are talking about, yes, you do actually probably produce as much value as the resources you extract from your tenants, and in fact, to them, you produce more value, as that is how economic trades work. they value the shelter that you provide them more than they value the hours it took for them to earn the money to give you. You obviously value the money that they give you more than you value the risk that you took, and the work that you put in to run and maintain.
A mcDonalds manager, first of all doesn’t make 3 times what his employees do, at least not in store managers, and especially not when you look at it hourly. As an ex-fast food manager, I can safely say I was not overpaid for the value that I added to my organization. And organization is what I did. You have a bunch of people who have some skills here and there, but you do need someone to orchestrate that labor.
I currently own a small business, and I have people that I pay for their time in helping me to produce what my client want. I value their labor more than I value what I pay them, and they value the pay more than they value the time and effort they put in. In exchange, I provided the capital to have a place to work, the liquidity for them to have a paycheck, and I take a risk taht if things go south, they get unemployment, and I get stuck with hundreds of thousands in liabilities.
Now, where you start getting into people who extract value, rather than add to it and keep some of their value added as compensation, and you start talking about executives who’s only function is to justify their job, or you get investors who are only looking for companies with equity that they can extract, or you are talking about people who have done very well for themselves like your bezos or gates, who, while they certainly added great value to our society, and should certainly be rewarded, also got lucky, in that they were not the only ones who could have been the ones to do what they did. CEOs who get paid tens or millions of hundreds of dollars, even if their company is performing poorly are also people who have a dubious amount of value added for the compensation they demand.
Basically, the higher up the pyramid you are, the more value you extract, and the less you add. You are probably low enough that you should be able to sleep well at night, knowing that you are a net contributor to society. The guy who bought up rights to epi pens and jacked up the price, however, for instance, is nothing but a leech on society, even though he has more money.
I think I basically agree with most of that without needlessly nitpicking things to argue in semantics.
I obviously don’t know enough to talk specifics about fast food management, and I’m sure if anything they are probably underpaid comparing skill and effort to salary. I think that pretty much applies to most of the industry really.
Most of this is simply to try and illustrate my points.
- Dollars don’t correlate directly to production, they correlate to value or perceived value.
- The pyramid in fact exists
- Most of the US is elevated in some manner by the fact there are huge amounts of goods produced overseas by people who are really at the bottom.
The epi pen thing seems to be one of those outliers that are really a product of having complex legal and economic sytems.
Complex systems are the one thing that affords opportunity for people to just leverage capital or manipulate things in such a way that they funnel money to themselves …without production or value.
Basically the whole reason SEC exists.
If it can be done it will be though.
Hell, depending on what the other options are, they probably value it a hell of a lot more and you could raise prices. What are they going to do? Go homeless?
(I really dislike this entire framing of free exchange when it comes to goods where demand is fundamentally inelastic.)
An incompetent manager, on the other hand, might basically do nothing.
A grocery store I worked in had a manager who simply left all store organisation to the deputy (aside from the one disastrous attempt to schedule the rota*) and we later found up he spent the whole time in his office watching the CCTV, having convinced himself that the major issue with the store was staff failing to stop shoplifters. Something we weren’t even allowed to do for liability reasons. Basically, he talked competent, and looked good when the area manager came round, but did no actual work. He got paid at least 30% more than the assistant manager, who basically did his job for him.
*He took down an existing rota done by the deputy, put up as normal on Saturday, completely rewrote it with no knowledge of anyone’s availability and put his new one up Sunday morning. He’d put single parents who only did the lunch shift in during the school run, put students in during classes and me in Monday morning, when I was at my voluntary job. All things we were listed as ‘not available’ for in our contracts.
The Saturday staff saw the deputy’s version (which the manager had destroyed), the Sunday staff saw the manager’s totally different version, and for the whole week we had too many people showing up for some shifts and no-one showing for others. He also phoned multiple people up and threatened to fire them for missing a shift that they were ‘not available’ for according to their contracts. He then sulked and didn’t speak to anyone for a week because no-one appreciated his effort. It was like a sitcom.
I can’t really charge more than the going rate, as they’d just move somewhere else.
But because it is a basic need and because so many people own more than they need while so many own none the going rate is high.
On the other hand asking for too much less makes people think there’s a problem.
2/2 for rent $300mo
" Must be a total s#$thole, in a bad neighborhood"
Well, at least here in Arizona where the weather lets you raise multiple crops per season if you can get the water, there is a viable option of raising vegetables* for high-end restauranteurs. They then brag about it on the menu. It goes well until a sour economy (like 2008) makes a highly optional purchase unattractive. I can’t see that model working well for Kansas wheat farmers, though.
*Heirloom veggies are frequent.