Does Minimum Wage Increase Help Or Hurt The Appraisal Business?

[ucbruin]

The round baler was a new invention 50 years ago. When he started his square bale business he wasn't competing with round bales.

If he couldn't adapt to a different shaped bale....
His business wasn't viable...
Agree?

 

[J Grant]

Funny you should ask. One of my oil buddies was there once. McD closed the dining room and had three lanes. Breakfast cost $10+ each for him and his son. That evening the found an Applebys and waited over an hour to be seated...about $30 each.

Eat at home make your own food healthier $5 each. Appleby's a chain of mediocre frozen reheated food with cheese sauce on everything...find a local restaurant that local people own and make their own food?

 

[Terrel L. Shields]

Eat at home make your own food healthier $5 each

When on business from Oklahoma in a small town in the Dakotas, you eat where you can, it's not like you have any choices except starving. And eating out of the grocery store means Walmart...

 

[The Warrior Monk]

$17/hour not mentioned but I get your point....

"A lot of McDonald's in the nation have a dollar menu," Kelley said. "Well, our dollar menu is $1.39.""

I'm not pooh-poohing 39%....
But I don't think $1.00 rising to $1.39 to cover the hourly wage doubling is that prohibitive....
Do you agree?

I doesn't happen in a vacuum. When everything else goes up 40% along with it, people notice.

 

[Terrel L. Shields]

Back in the day was 0.12/bale a high price?
And the fact that your 2 man business couldn't complete with round bales seems to support my opinion that it wasn't a viable business in the 1st place...

We charged the going rate. We were out of the haul by time round bales came along. But soon haulers disappeared and it was difficult to find them. It wasn't steady work. Square bales became a niche market (horses, goats, etc.) The last ones I hired cost me $1.25/ bale. So this year I am looking for accumulator and grab combo...mechanization. At a buck per bale I can load 3-4,000 bales and get my investment back. And my hay farm has averaged over 100/bales per acre before. My highest round bale production has been 240 bales averaging about #1000-1200 each. Squares with my baler average #50-60 at most. There is more profit selling small squares but also more marketing to do. I can store about 4,000 squares in my barns but most sells in the field.

 

[Carnivore]

If your Applebee type chains and fast food lanes are busy tells me that the economy is doing fairly well. Fast Food fills the need to save time in a busy day to day life. Applebees is not a bad place to take your spouse and get out of the house. Sometimes you can take your noisy Brats with you.

Starbucks is not a good barometer of the local economy. The common man does not wait in line for a $5-$6 dollar coffee being prepared by a teenager with an attitude similar to the Waiter looking down his nose at you in an Expensive French Restaurant.

OTOH There is a Moral Argument/discussion going on among Corporate Giants who outsource overseas in the name of huge profits, while they themselves live/play under the safety of the USA. I read this recently and I will see if I can find it again to post.

Essentially, the moral discussion centers around the very large population who are middle of the road or lower in the USA. To me it sounds like Corporate Giant CEO's may be feeling some guilt.

 

[ucbruin]

I doesn't happen in a vacuum. When everything else goes up 40% along with it, people notice.

A. That was the "vacuum" example provided....
B. Others have mentioned that if wages for the unskilled rise than everyone else's will too....
If everyone else's wages rise over 39% (in the ND example), then it appears to be a win/win....

 

[ucbruin]

We charged the going rate. We were out of the haul by time round bales came along. But soon haulers disappeared and it was difficult to find them. It wasn't steady work. Square bales became a niche market (horses, goats, etc.) The last ones I hired cost me $1.25/ bale. So this year I am looking for accumulator and grab combo...mechanization. At a buck per bale I can load 3-4,000 bales and get my investment back. And my hay farm has averaged over 100/bales per acre before. My highest round bale production has been 240 bales averaging about #1000-1200 each. Squares with my baler average #50-60 at most. There is more profit selling small squares but also more marketing to do. I can store about 4,000 squares in my barns but most sells in the field.

"Five years later round bales came into being and our job pretty much went kaput."

"We were out of the haul by time round bales came along."

Square bale, round bale, triangular bale....
The preferred shape of the bale had no impact on your bale business....

Good grief!!!

@Michigan CG
Are you reading this????

 

[Deleted member 126639]

It is a negative in a blanket effect first of all. Artificially raising wage for 'everyone' means that has to be paid by the businesses employing 'everyone'. That means higher prices on goods and services for everyone, including appraisers in those states. Perhaps a poor example, but you think fast food prices are going to remain the same, or quality, or serving sizes? Any redistribution of wealth will always hurt those who are the ones being redistributed FROM. It will also hurt any appraiser who has employees working for them, for obvious reasons.

In a sense, it may help appraisers, because if someone is comparing $8/hr to becoming an appraiser making $20-25/hr, that looks a lot better than falling out of bed with no HS diploma and making $15/hr, vs spending years of their life to take on a big financial risk to maybe make $20-25/hr, with poor job security for the future.

The more folks get rewarded for having little education, work-ethic, or drive, the fewer will see any benefit whatsoever in jumping through the myriad hoops required to become an appraiser, to make marginally more in a good year, with prospects looking increasingly more bleak in the future.

The other high level reason it is bad--there is only so much money to go around. In the end, appraisers get paid by lender/clients. Through AMCs many times. In both cases, if every AMC and every lender now has to pay $15/hr to every employee, even the first day teller or first day order assigner, there is even less cash available to pay the appraiser. Some businesses, especially labor heavy ones, will invariably go out of business. People will invariably have their hours cut or flat out laid off. Neither of these can be construed as good in any way for anyone. Fewer clients means a greater consolidation of appraisers working for each one, meaning some of those special lender relationships some of us now enjoy will go away. The local lender will be especially vulnerable, as they tend to have more, lower-paid employees.

Raising the minimum wage does NOT increase the total money supply available to pay laborers. Businesses will not be given fresh rolls of $100 bills from the treasury. Folks, it has to come from somewhere. Where do you think that will be?

Rant over. I tried to stay on topic anyway.

Wow, you really have swallowed the bourgeoisie capitalist propaganda to the extreme.

You cannot prove in ANY INSTANCE anywhere in the world where increasing minimum wages has had a negative effect. In every instance, living standards increase, consumer spending increases, and overall gross product increases.

Raising minimum wages does NOT increase the total money supply available to pay laborers. This is true. But, what it does do is force those who profit from the surplus labor value produced by the proletariat to enjoy a lower rate of return. If your business cannot afford to pay people to a live a decent and respectable life, it shouldn't be in business.

You've already been told that the supply of money is, by a factor of 95%, controlled by banks. What happens when people make more money? They can take out more loans, which means the money supply increases. Part of the reason the economy is bad at present is the majority of Americans are simply not creditworthy borrowers. How much monetary expansion can you leverage from people getting paid under the table or $7 an hour? That's most Americans.

You're a residential appraiser in Florida - are you sure that maybe you're just not consumed with avarice? You'd rather blame those less than you for the fact you're not rich?

I mean, I'm about to get into my Mercedes Benz C coupe to go drive out to a vineyard for a date, so I'm not exactly pure proletariat. But damn, your lack of empathy is astounding. And you still refuse to even grasp the basics of how money works in a modern economy.

 

[Overimprovement]

Eat at home make your own food healthier $5 each. Appleby's a chain of mediocre frozen reheated food with cheese sauce on everything...find a local restaurant that local people own and make their own food?

Because the grocery stores somehow won't have to pass their increased labor costs onto consumers? Grocery stores have profit margins below 2%.