There’s a debate that has sparked several staged protests among fast-food workers in the State of Michigan and elsewhere about the merits of low wages and the Federal minimum wage as a whole.  As it stands, the Federal minimum wage is currently set at $7.25 per hour.  In Michigan, the minimum wage is $7.40 per hour.

The conversation centers around the concept that minimum wage is not a ‘livable wage’, meaning that a person earning such a paycheck will have an extremely difficult time maintaining even the most modest standards of living.  The question most relevant is this: whose problem is this anyway?  More on this later.

There’s a conversation taking place right now on Mlive.com in the comments section of this article.  The comments read just like they do with any other controversial topic – with both sides of the argument being defended along with a healthy dose of trolling.  However, there are a couple points that people seem to be missing – intentionally or otherwise.

Wages in a fair market economy are determined by the same laws of supply and demand that govern all other facets of capitalism.  Fast food work – the functions of the job itself can be performed by virtually any able bodied person.  If you can get yourself to the restaurant at the time you’re expected to be there and can be trained to use the machines, you qualify.  This minimum requirement for employment can be met by a LOT of people in the workforce.  Because of this, there is little reason for fast food restaurant operators to pay wages beyond the minimum.  There is of course something to be said for paying a better wage in order to attract better job candidates – ala the practices of Costco – but in this case, fast food restaurants really don’t stand to gain much by increasing wages.

The other element that people seem to be ignoring when debating this topic is what will happen to the economy if you increase the wages of fast food workers to $15 per hour, effectively doubling the wage.  It has been speculated that there would be a 10-20% in the cost of fast food items if the wages were doubled.  And while this is probably an acceptable tradeoff (especially for people such as myself who rarely eat fast food), this isn’t the only effect it would have.

If fast food work all of a sudden paid $15 per hour, this would become preferable to all the jobs in the economy that pay less than that.   Think of all the jobs such as bank tellers, construction workers, retail clerks, grocery store workers, gas station attendants, house cleaners, trash collectors, secretaries, administrative people… the list goes on and on.  All these employers who currently pay more than minimum wage yet less than $15 per hour are all of a sudden going to find themselves competing with the fast food industry for employees.  So what would happen is that they would have to raise their wages to well above $15 per hour in order to retain their help.

This would have two massive consequences for the economy.  For one, it would drive up the prices of goods and services in every affected industry.  Costs of groceries and gas and building materials and auto maintenance and essentially every consumable product would be greatly increased because of the inflated wages.  This would cause jumps in inflation the economy has likely never seen. Severe hardships for businesses would result – the drastically increased prices of goods and services would reduce consumer demand and the economy would shrink as a result. This is the very definition of a recession.

In a bit of irony, another unintended consequence of this would be the fact that current fast food workers would be largely displaced.  When fast food jobs become more attractive than occupations requiring a higher skill set, fast food restaurants will have a bigger talent pool to draw from.  Employers will always hire the most overqualified candidates they can.  When more talented, motivated, capable workers become available, the weakest fast food employees will immediately become expendable – but instead of simply going from working at McDonalds one day to working at Burger King the next, they will unfortunately have nowhere to go.

Think of it another way: if every job in the world paid the same wage, all the easiest jobs would get filled first… and the more difficult jobs would go unfilled.  Why would anyone work harder for the same pay?

So while it’s apparent that doubling the rate of fast food workers is a colossally bad idea, that still leaves the problem of people working for wages while not being able to make ends meet.  But the question remains: whose problem is this really?

It’s a tough but fair question.  A better question might be how much inflation is reasonable to impose on the economy in order to boost the living conditions of it’s lowest workers?  Is it’s society’s responsibility to provide a minimum standard of living?  I’m not necessarily sure that it is.  While as a society there’s a moral obligation to take care of the weak, the elderly, the sick and disabled, able bodied people have to be held to at least a minimum standard of accountability.  How does it make sense to boost the standard of living of people who aren’t willing to work to achieve it for themselves?

Chances are at some point in your life you’ve read an article or blog post by someone well known or at least famous in their field, or listened to a  motivational speaker, or bought a book or attended a seminar from a well known author or self help guru – someone who in any case considers themselves qualified to dispense advice.  Some of them are better than others, and I know people personally who have greatly benefited from the subject matter of these types of things.  While they greatly vary in tone and overall message – there is one thing that they hammer home universally – you HAVE to take action.

This is of course solid advice.  But it’s challenging to look at someone who’s accomplished so much – whether they’re on TV or have a popular blog or have written a book or three or they’re on a stage alone in a sold out arena and believe in yourself to the point that you KNOW you can duplicate those results.  The point I’m trying to make is that it comes off as easy for someone who’s accomplished so much to say that ‘taking action’ is the only thing you have to do.  Even if it’s the best advice available.   Hearing the stories of the millionaires and best selling authors and all that is great – and there’s a wealth of knowledge to be gained from that.  But it can be intimidating at the same time.

The biggest challenge I think many people face is that you hear these types of things from people who have seemingly arrived; you didn’t know them when they struggled and when they had adversity and doubts and maybe even wanted to quit.  You see them now as this finished product of sorts – something to strive to attain for.  Because of this, I wanted to share the stories of a couple of people who are taking action, and may very well become household names in their respective fields but certainly haven’t achieved that level of success at the time of this writing.  My hope is that you may find some inspiration to hear about some people that haven’t arrived yet – but are working hard every day to achieve their goals.

Meet Jon and Josh Mosher, founders of M2Scientifics.com.

The Mosher boys founded M2 Scientifics when they learned how severely lacking in customer service the world of laboratory supplies and lab equipment was.  While I can’t discuss the specifics of their business model, I can say that they’ve moved forward with a new ecommerce site that they designed and developed themselves, added over 2000 pages of product content, sought the advice of numerous industry professionals, established vendor relationships and attended trade shows all while maintaining family life and their full time employment.

It hasn’t always been smooth, but they’ve learned a lot through this process  and while their business is still very new, they’re already seeing some of the results from their labor, as their site is already generating search traffic and they even are starting to generate a little sales revenue as well!  It’s very possible that M2 Scientifics will be on the radar of a lot of major players before too long.

Meet Jen Lorenski, founder of MoshPitNation.com and OnlineSmartes.com.

Jen Lorenski is an expert in digital content, Google Adwords, SEO and WordPress here in Grand Rapids MI.  She and I have collaborated on several projects all with great results for clients.  I met Jen about 18 months ago when she was promoting Mosh Pit Nation (MPN) in a local restaurant.  MPN is a free service which announces local heavy metal shows all across the State of Michigan.   As a fan of that type of music, Jen started the service when she realized that there was simply no good central location for information on local metal shows.  Purely a grassroots movement, MPN has grown from what began as simply being local to Grand Rapids to include surrounding cities such as Muskegon, Kalamazoo and Lansing, and now has a growing presence in Detroit and beyond.  Jen sells t-shirts and other gear at shows to raise capital and awareness, and is now in the midst of organizing two heavy metal festivals in the summer.

Jen’s day job is OnlineSmarties.com – and works as a contractor for several businesses in the area performing many of the same services I offer.  She began her agency after a mutual split from her last employer.  Instead of seeking the security of employment with another agency, Jen decided to strike out on her own so she could focus on her clients and Most Pit Nation in a way that being an employee in a large agency simply doesn’t allow for.  The rewards Jen has enjoyed have included to freedom and independence that self-employment allows for, as well as providing a great service to the local music community by growing Mosh Pit Nation to over 2600 facebook fans at the time of this writing.  She is no doubt on her way to amazing things.

What do you think?  Have a success story in the making you’d like to share?  I’d love to hear from you – drop me an email using the contact form or leave a comment below!

This is really in its simplest form a PSA for clients and anyone else who may find the subject of interest.  It should be noted and I haven’t exactly been Paypal’s biggest customer – I only began accepting payment from clients through Paypal about six months ago (in order to accept credit cards as a form of payment) and prior to that I’d had perhaps 50 transactions through Paypal in the past 10 years.  The purpose of this isn’t to try to persuade them into action – I know they don’t care.

The reason I no longer accept payments via Paypal is the fact that their customer service is beneath the levels I expect to receive from a company that should inherently value the business of every customer.  In reality, bad customer service sort of comes with the territory of dealing with big companies – and they are notoriously apathetic toward the entire customer experience as a whole whenever there’s a problem.

In short, I took a payment from a client via Paypal back in the middle of December.  The client in question used their credit card to fund the account.  Three months later, the client inadvertently flagged the transaction with their credit card issuer as part of a series fraudulent activity during that same time period, subsequently causing a chargeback.  Having recently accepted a payment via Paypal from a different client, Paypal placed a hold on the funds in my account in the amount of the transaction back in December.

I called my client for an explanation, and after realizing their error, they immediately contacted their credit card issuer to report my transaction as legitimate.  They handled their end of things within days.

Five business days later, the hold on my funds was lifted, but instead of my Paypal balance returning to normal, not only were the funds NOT RETURNED, they hit me with a transaction fee of 2.9% + 30 cents.  Furthermore, they ALSO IMPOSED A $20 fee, leaving me with a negative balance in my Paypal account.

I’ve sent emails and spent an hour on the phone with their incompetent customer service reps, who after dealing with multiple individuals ended up basically telling me that I had to wait 75 days for the credit card issuer to re-release the funds.  They promised to remove the $20 fee, but that hasn’t happened either.

This biggest thing about this is that this is over a relatively small amount of money – under $1000.  I understand their policy with the credit card issuer and generally that’s fine.  It’s not really about the money – I want it back don’t get me wrong – but I am not optimistic that I will ever see it again.  So I am doing what a customer should do – I am taking my business elsewhere.  I know Paypal doesn’t care.  I know they wouldn’t care if I somehow convinced 100,000 of their customers to walk.  They’re a multi-billion dollar corporation with over 100 million customers worldwide.

So that’s not the point of this.  My point is that bad customer service and apathy toward the needs of their customers can’t be rewarded with more business.   I can’t punish them, but I can control whether I do business with them.  So I am in the process of finding a new payment portal for my business needs.  I already use Squareup and have had nothing but positive experiences with that so far.  But I need to set up a recurring payment portal.  Got any suggestions?

It’s no secret that Facebook’s IPO back in May and the subsequent aftermath that followed has been a disaster.  After an initial stock price of roughly $38/share, Facebook barely trades at half that value at the time of this article.  Furthermore, the problems that have followed the IPO (possible SEC violations, insider trading allegations, 40 lawsuits filed, etc.) have been what most would consider to be the exact opposite of what Facebook hoped would happen.

Combine this with the fact that Facebook continues to alienate users by imposing unpopular features such as the timeline, trying to milk cash out of brands and businesses with their ‘Sponsored Posts’ nonsense, and perpetually making people leery of even logging into their Facebook accounts at all with their cryptic and ever-changing privacy conundrums and it’s safe to say that Facebook has made a lot of wrong moves, moves that could have rendered a smaller entity irrelevant.  But there is still hope for the Social Network.

As I pointed out right after their IPO, Facebook now HAS to make money.  It’s no longer optional.   Currently, Facebook is making a play to try to extract revenue from those they perceive to have the deepest pockets.  This is a mistake that is turning off companies and encouraging influential people like Mark Cuban to publicly discuss moving their Social Media activities to other platforms.  Luckily for them, there’s actually a great way for them to make some money and more importantly do so without pissing anyone off.

Facebook could generate billions of dollars in revenue annually by becoming the world’s largest dating site.  Same may argue that it unofficially already is anyway.

This could be executed in a variety of ways, but a paid option that unlocks matchmaking and profile features not otherwise available would be a decent approach.  It could be set up so that you could only see who had a ”dating’ page if you yourself have one.  If you don’t have a ‘dating’ page, you still get the regular Facebook features, and you only see other users’ regular pages regardless of whether they have a paid account or not.  This of course, is just one idea.

Facebook has by some accounts over one billion registered users.  For simplicity’s sake, let’s say discounting the duplicate and fake accounts, and then removing the accounts registered to individuals under the age of 18 leaves us with 500,000,000 registered users eligible to purchase the dating service.

There are many dating sites on the Web already, and they range in price from free to as high as $60/month (eharmony.com).  According to this article on RealSimple.com, Match.com has the largest userbase with 2.75 million people, with memberships fees coming in at $30/month.  A price of $20/month for a Facebook dating account is probably a fair price.

At a very reasonable conversion rate of 1%, that would be 5,000,000 paid accounts spending $20/month.  This is $100,000,000 per month in gross revenue, or $1.2B annually – and would be a way to generate revenue in an under-the-radar sort of way without irritating the masses.

What do you think?  Share your thoughts by leaving a comment below.