McDonalds helps you budget!

[Joan.of.the.Arch]

http://www.practicalmoneyskills.com/mcdonalds/budget/budget2.php

McDonalds has a sample budget for planning how to spend your McDonalds wages. It includes that you have a second job to combine with your McDonalds floor mopping, fry lifting, and service with a smile. It has a line for heating expenses, but fills in $0. And food? No, that is not even listed. I guess budgeting for food is not necessary.

What else do you find peculiar about this sample budget?

[riverwed070707]

http://www.practicalmoneyskills.com/...et/budget2.php

McDonalds has a sample budget for planning how to spend your McDonalds wages. It includes that you have a second job to combine with your McDonalds floor mopping, fry lifting, and service with a smile. It has a line for heating expenses, but fills in $0. And food? No, that is not even listed. I guess budgeting for food is not necessary.

What else do you find peculiar about this sample budget?

Unless its changed since you posted it, I don't see a $0 in the heating line -- it says $50. Food isn't listed becuase if you go through the steps they want you to determine your fixed budget and then allocate your variable expenses with the dollars remaining after fixed expenses are paid. Just becuase there are two incomes doesn't mean you should have 2 jobs... it could be a spouses income listed there -- I list out mine and DHs earnings separately. I've seen a lot of media hype about this today and truthfully don't understand why people are attacking it. Yes McDonalds pays low wages, but personally I'd be offended if the person flipping my burgers made the same wages as me with a college degree, speialized training and 5 years of professional experience. Why is them offering a budgting tool so offensive?

[Barclay]

What a wonderful idea. McDonald's is generally a person's first job while in high school. Teaching a kid to budget their income is a wonderful start. Kudos to McDonalds.

[bUU]

Wow... I guess all the bashing McDonald's got from the Internet this morning got them to change the budget a bit. It absolutely was $0 for heating. I believe it was the health insurance line that they knocked down to an utterly unreasonably low number to make up for putting in a reasonable number for heat.

The bottom line here is that McDonald's cannot even do this "good" without it reminding us just have much "bad" they do by fostering a labor economy where fewer and fewer jobs pay enough to live on. Of course, Wal-Mart is the biggest offender, placing more of its workers onto Medicaid than any other private employer in the country.

[Joan.of.the.Arch]

I don't see a $0 in the heating line -- it says $50.

Huh. Interesting. Let me see if I can find the pdf from which the linked sample was lifted.

\\Edit update: Nope, the pdf has the $50 figure. http://www.practicalmoneyskills.com/...D_Journal2.pdf

[bUU]

You're not crazy. It did start out at $0:

http://static2.businessinsider.com/image/51e43f10eab8eaf06d00003f-480-/screen%20shot%202013-07-15%20at%202.23.27%20pm.png

I can also now see that the way they "fixed" it was simply to reduce daily spending, by another $2 per day. Remember - that's the category from which trivial things like food and transportation are paid-for.

[riverwed070707]

Wow... I guess all the bashing McDonald's got from the Internet this morning got them to change the budget a bit. It absolutely was $0 for heating. I believe it was the health insurance line that they knocked down to an utterly unreasonably low number to make up for putting in a reasonable number for heat.

The bottom line here is that McDonald's cannot even do this "good" without it reminding us just have much "bad" they do by fostering a labor economy where fewer and fewer jobs pay enough to live on. Of course, Wal-Mart is the biggest offender, placing more of its workers onto Medicaid than any other private employer in the country.

But every job isn't designed to make a living off of. McDonalds managers and supervisors don't make $1000 a month, its the entry level positions that do. When I worked as a pooper-scooper at a boarding kennel for pets I didn't expect to be making $30k a year because it didn't fit the qualifications and duties of the job. Likewise, if a HS education isn't even required to get the job and the OTJ training lasts 3 days, it probably doesn't warrant a salary that pays enough to support a family of 4. What it does is provide jobs for teens and college students just starting out and needing money for gas and a cell phone. If thats not the job a person is looking for, they should persue other opportunties or work toward improving their qualifications to get a better job.

[bUU]

The point is that an increasingly bigger percentage of jobs are the kind of jobs you cannot live on, leaving an increasingly bigger percentage of the population without the opportunity to get a job paying wages that they can live on. Between Wal-Mart, Yum Brands (Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut), Target, McDonald's, Sears/K-Mart, Subway, Burger King, Aramark (institutional food services), Starbucks, Applebees/IHOP, Compass Group (another institutional food service), Macy's, Wendy's, Olive Garden/Red Lobster, JC Penney, Kohl's, Dunkin' Donuts, TJ Maxx/Marshalls, Sodexo (a company that basically pays employees dirt so the companies they do work for don't have to get dirty), and Domino's, you've got a big portion of the American labor pool. And these companies have worked hard to change the nature of their operations ("cost reduction") replacing high paying jobs that rely on more skill and knowledge into low paying jobs that don't. Good for their bottom-line: Bad for America.

Left unchecked, business can continue to do this - continue to change the nature of American work from full-time work paying wages someone can live on, into part-time work paying dirt wages.

[Mesem]

I find it quite sad that one's employer is also one's financial manager.

[riverwed070707]

The point is that an increasingly bigger percentage of jobs are the kind of jobs you cannot live on, leaving an increasingly bigger percentage of the population without the opportunity to get a job paying wages that they can live on. Between Wal-Mart, Yum Brands (Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut), Target, McDonald's, Sears/K-Mart, Subway, Burger King, Aramark (institutional food services), Starbucks, Applebees/IHOP, Compass Group (another institutional food service), Macy's, Wendy's, Olive Garden/Red Lobster, JC Penney, Kohl's, Dunkin' Donuts, TJ Maxx/Marshalls, Sodexo (a company that basically pays employees dirt so the companies they do work for don't have to get dirty), and Domino's, you've got a big portion of the American labor pool. And these companies have worked hard to change the nature of their operations ("cost reduction") replacing high paying jobs that rely on more skill and knowledge into low paying jobs that don't. Good for their bottom-line: Bad for America.

Left unchecked, business can continue to do this - continue to change the nature of American work from full-time work paying wages someone can live on, into part-time work paying dirt wages.

I paid my way through college working at Olive Garden. The only people in the whole restaurant who made minimum wage were the hosts. And even then it was only the people who had been there a short time -- several had put in 10+ years and made a very decent wage. Be careful about starting rumors with your ranting unless you have facts to back it up.

[bUU]

I paid my way through college working at Olive Garden.

I could tell you stories of my own that would sound strange to you, because they likely preceded the reality you lived through. Things Have Changed.

Be careful about starting rumors with your ranting unless you have facts to back it up.

Learn about the true nature of today's economy for those less fortunate. You can start here:

http://www.globalpost.com/america-the-gutted-globalpost

[asmom]

Health insurance cost is absurdly low. The rent and car insurance are also low. What a lot of people don't realize is that everything is more expensive in poor neighborhoods from rents and food to gasoline. It is part of what keeps people trapped in a cycle of poverty. You don't make a lot of money and you have to spend a larger percentage of what you make to live.

Another factor is that most minimum wage jobs do not give guaranteed 40 hours and even when they do, you often have a variable schedule working different shifts and with split days off. That is another factor keeping trapped in low wage jobs and poverty cycle. But thanks for the tip McDonalds.

[Petunia 100]

The point is that an increasingly bigger percentage of jobs are the kind of jobs you cannot live on, leaving an increasingly bigger percentage of the population without the opportunity to get a job paying wages that they can live on. Between Wal-Mart, Yum Brands (Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut), Target, McDonald's, Sears/K-Mart, Subway, Burger King, Aramark (institutional food services), Starbucks, Applebees/IHOP, Compass Group (another institutional food service), Macy's, Wendy's, Olive Garden/Red Lobster, JC Penney, Kohl's, Dunkin' Donuts, TJ Maxx/Marshalls, Sodexo (a company that basically pays employees dirt so the companies they do work for don't have to get dirty), and Domino's, you've got a big portion of the American labor pool. And these companies have worked hard to change the nature of their operations ("cost reduction") replacing high paying jobs that rely on more skill and knowledge into low paying jobs that don't. Good for their bottom-line: Bad for America.

Left unchecked, business can continue to do this - continue to change the nature of American work from full-time work paying wages someone can live on, into part-time work paying dirt wages.

Why should employers pay high wages for unskilled labor?

Yes, it's true, jobs requiring no skills or specialized knowledge do not pay well. Your take-away is that this is unfair, and employers should pay more. My take-away is that employees should focus on acquiring skills and specialized knowledge which command higher wages.

[bUU]

The point is that an increasingly bigger percentage of jobs are the kind of jobs you cannot live on, leaving an increasingly bigger percentage of the population without the opportunity to get a job paying wages that they can live on. It's a very convenient dodge to claim that employees should acquire skills to acquire the increasingly fewer jobs that pay wages you can live on. As a matter of fact, it's main impact is to create substantially higher competition for those jobs, driving even those wages down. (That's why wages have been flat, or actually falling against inflation, over the last decade, while profits have continued skyward.) It's a fantastic recipe for creating even deeper gulfs between "have's" and "have not's".

And it's working. The disparity has doubled in the last generation. In that time, the percentage of the labor force with advanced degrees has skyrocketed, and the percentage of the labor force with advanced technical degrees has skyrocketed. If your logic held water, economic inequity would be decreasing, not doubling.

[Baby_nurse]

These jobs were never meant to support you. They were meant to be starter jobs for teenagers. Fact of the matter is if you are competing with teenagers for jobs, then you should expect to be paid a teenage wage.