• @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    311 months ago

    They really offered 2 possible outcomes:

    • Increase prices
    • Fire people

    Why not just . . . make less money?

    The increase was $4. The article kept using percentages to make it seem like some big scary change, but the increase is 1 meal per hour per worker. I’m pretty sure any half decent restaurant can handle that extra $4 per worker hourly.

    But no, the solution is clearly to just nuke your vacation policy so you can save $1000 per worker per year. Yeah okay.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        411 months ago

        That’s because investors only make money when the value goes up. The pressure to always make more money than before is baked into the public ownership system we created. I think we should make all companies employee owned instead of investor owned and then you’d fix the broken incentive structure.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        111 months ago

        You bring up a great point. Once I applied for a mortgage and showed that I had a part time job and a small business. I had made some changes in my financial structure so it looked like on paper that year my company was failing even tho personally I made more money consistently over the years. Didn’t matter, my loan got rejected cuz technically the business was making less money.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          011 months ago

          I think this is neat. I prompted chatGPT-4 with your question about the above comment. This was the result:

          Your perspective on the issues with the current focus on continual profit growth in American businesses is indeed echoed in various discussions and criticisms in the business and academic world.

          A significant point of critique is the heavy emphasis on shareholder value, often at the expense of other stakeholders. This shareholder-centric view has been dominant for some time, with the primary objective seen as maximizing profits for shareholders. However, this perspective often disregards the broader responsibilities and long-term vision of companies. Recently, there has been a shift towards “stakeholder capitalism,” where companies are increasingly recognizing the importance of considering the interests of all stakeholders, including society at large, and not just focusing on short-term financial performance. This approach aims to foster a more sustainable balance between short-term pressures and long-term value creation, and helps restore trust in companies as vital contributors to society [❞].

          The pursuit of continual growth and the pressure to exceed previous profit margins has also been critiqued for leading to other detrimental effects. For instance, unchecked business growth can result in increased workload, higher competition, a deviation from the original business vision, lower-quality customer relationships, and faster team member turnover. These factors can contribute to a loss of the unique qualities that made a business successful in the first place and may ultimately lead to less success in the long term [❞].

          Furthermore, in the realm of stock prices and corporate valuation, the relationship between growth expectations and stock performance is more complex than often portrayed. Research suggests that growth expectations might have less impact on asset prices than traditional models suggest. This indicates that the market’s demand doesn’t react strongly to changes in expected returns, challenging the common belief that consistently higher profits directly lead to higher stock prices [❞].

          These critiques highlight the complexities and potential pitfalls of the current American business model, which prioritizes constant profit growth and shareholder value, often at the expense of broader, long-term goals and responsibilities.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            211 months ago

            You know how I know it hallucinated part of that answer? It said companies are now considering their affect on society. Lol yeah, ok.

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              19 months ago

              They claim to do that every few years, just to get a percentage of angry folks to quiet back down a bit.

    • Transient Punk
      link
      fedilink
      English
      111 months ago

      1 meal per hour per worker

      Fat Burger in LA is charging $17.29 for their most basic meal. That comes out to one extra meal per hour, per every 4 employees.

      That franchise owner is really just a cheapskate asshole.