Microblog Memes

You forgot payroll taxes

One thing that isn't on the math side: profit is the money left over after payroll (and all other expenses).

Dollar Tree has about 200,000 employees. Paying each of them $8 an hour for 20 hours a week, 52 weeks a year is ~$1.6 billion. This is just napkin math, taking a guess at where an average hourly employee would be working, hours-wise. Assuming the profit is going straight into company coffers, they could afford to significantly increase pay or hours overall, but the money doesn't stretch as far as our intuition might think. The problem really might not be Dollar Tree specifically, but the system of economy that led to its creation, and the creation of other massive corporations that rest on the back of underpaid workers.

Their only real options as the system stands (not that it wouldn't be moving in the right direction) are to pay less people more money, or increase hours. Their margin is thinner than it looks. Far better to throw the system out than pretend that the $10 million CEO check is anything but a drop in the bucket compared to the crushing reality of shareholder-driven profit margins. Fuck capitalism.

Or you could just raise the minimum wage to a point where employees earning it are earning too much for food stamps. That's how the UK does it. They lower the benefits bill by putting the burden on businesses rather than the state.

McDonald's and Walmart will lobby against that.

Maybe as a punishment. It wouldn't solve the problem in the correct way unless the taxes were MORE than the cost of paying a livable wage. Because the taxes would, at best and very optimistically, go towards programs that then give out money but only for very specific things like Medicaid or SNAP. It would be better for everyone if those employees just got the money as cash to use as they see fit rather than as a benefit that has to be used on certain kinds of food.

Minimum wage nationwide in America is $7.25 an hour. Well below poverty line.

Those “cheater” sizes of cleaning supplies or similar cost more for the same amount of product, it’s just that if you are broke you can only afford the tiny ass bottle of laundry detergent or whatever in the short term.

I didn't notice how different the sizes were until I stopped going for years (between 2020 and 2024) and came back to find products that looked ridiculously tiny compared to what I remembered. The covid inflation fest made it way too obvious.

The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
Men at Arms

-Sir Terry Pratchett

Most of the people who are forced to shop at Dollar Tree are the ones most negatively impacted by Republican policies. It's pretty fucked up.

Is there any large company that does not donate to the Republican Party?

John Oliver did a piece on dollar stores about a year ago, if you're interested https://youtu.be/p4QGOHahiVM

They tried to merge with "Family Dollar" after they were outbid by "Dollar General" but it didn't go through. Just a cheap convenience store.

It's a store in the US that sells most stuff for $1, for context. Or $1.25 now apparently

It's kind of infuriating that if you're wealthy you basically get basic income. You can put some of your money in safe stuff (high yield savings, bonds, whatever) and just get more money without working. But a poor person needs to debase themselves for food.

"Socialise the cost. Privatise the profits" is the motto.