Let’s say that you are making and selling a product. You sell that product for $4 each, but no one really wants it. You won’t sell any. What to do? You change the product you are making to one that people actually want, and now you can sell them at $4 each all day long.
Until someone sees how much you are making on it and offers a similar product, but for $3 each. Your sales drop as customers buy your competitor’s product. So you make changes to make it even better, and now everyone wants it. The problem is that you can no longer keep up with demand, so people who NEED that product offer you $5 each. A bidding war ensues, and eventually you are offered $100 each. Do you turn it down? After all, that would be price gouging…
Of course you take the money. All transactions are a combination of a willing seller and a willing buyer. All sales of all products are negotiable.
That happens every day with your labor. The labor that you perform is the product you are selling. Michael Jordan played basketball like no one else, so he made millions. When people saw the shoes he wore, they wanted to be like Jordan, so millions bought his shoes. He added hundreds of millions of dollars of value to the Air Jordan brand, so they paid him.
Robert Downey Jr made the Avengers movies what they are. Few people would pay $20 to see a movie starring Steve Smith. However, tens (hundreds) of millions of people did so to see RDJ in the Avengers movies. That’s why he makes $40 million per movie. Without him, that movie is a losing proposition. Without RDJ, this movie isn’t going to be made at all. This makes RDJ’s value in the movie industry sky high. No one goes to see a movie because some rando that no one has even heard of was 1 of 40 other nobodies in the costume department. That’s why jealousy fueled rants like this are stupid.
If you aren’t happy with the money you are making, you need to find a way to make your labor more valuable. No one is going to pay you $50 an hour for labor that literally anyone can do, because there will be a line of people behind you who are willing to do that job for $40, $20, or even $15 an hour. In order to make more, the value that you add to the deal dictates how much you will make. Simply saying that the employer owes you “a living wage” as you whine and complain on Social Media isn’t helping.
That goes for literally any job. That’s why Gordon Ramsey makes what he does- he adds enough skill to the deal that people are willing to pay $40 for a hamburger (not me, but people). Find a skill that is valuable and become good at it. It may take some time, but the money will follow.
We can’t all be Robert Downey Jr, Michael Jordan, or even Steve Jobs, but all of us don’t have to be making minimum wage, either.
11 Comments
Sailorcurt · July 31, 2024 at 11:04 am
Very few people really understand basic economics these days. Not surprising given the state of our “education system”.
A job is not something an employer provides for your benefit, it is you providing something of value to the employer for which they compensate you. The company owes you nothing beyond the agreed upon compensation for the value that you provide to them. Want a raise? Provide more value.
Attitudes like Mr. Scruggs’ are a product of growing up in a world of “participation trophies” and economic ignorance. Too many people feel they are owed something by society rather than having a responsibility to produce something of value to that society.
Regarding your initial point: Prices are a method of communication: high prices indicate undersupply for the level of demand and encourages increased production through the potential of increased profit. Fixing prices at a certain limit through “price gouging” laws only serves to reduce the incentive to produce the product. It ultimately doesn’t ensure that the product is available at a “fair” price, it only ensures that the product will not be available at all at any price as production does not keep up with demand. Price fixing inevitably, without fail, every.single.time, leads to shortages and rationing as the artificially reduced profitability of the product does not encourage production to meet the demand.
Even in emergency situations, high prices for vital supplies encourages entrepreneurs to take the risks involved in obtaining the supplies elsewhere and transporting them into the areas they’re needed in search of profits. If the profit potential is removed, the incentive to get the supplies where they’re needed is also removed and the people in the emergency area no longer have to worry about being “price gouged” because the vital supplies they need simply won’t be available at any price – except through the benevolence of charity or our oh-so-efficient government bureaucracy.
IcyReaper · July 31, 2024 at 12:12 pm
But But But, you don’t understand this. He WANTS more money, he MUST be given a “LIVING WAGE”. If someone wants something they must be given it, if they don’t get it, that’s racism.
What I don’t get and I have asked these morons and their politician panderer’s exactly whats the number for the living wage you keep asking for and they wont give a number. And when you explain if you give a no talent hamburger flipper $20/hr the cost of burgers will rise or the business will close because everyone’s customers then has to pay more. That’s how inflation starts but they just stare at you like you are the moron.
GOD, I am sooo ready for the collapse or SMOD to come, that’s the only thing that will fix this madness….
TRX · July 31, 2024 at 12:25 pm
The publishing industry is a good example of the “race to the bottom.”
Yes, there is a tiny group of superstars. There are still a few authors banging out a living from writing, but their numbers are shrinking. There are way too many people who will write a book in exchange for a box of author copies and the cachet of being a “published writer”; why should a publisher pay more than a trivial amount for a book when, to be frank, they’re so bombed with “product” most of them won’t even deal with authors other than through the intermediary of an agent.
> Robert Downey
CGI is coming, with big sharp teeth.
D · July 31, 2024 at 12:35 pm
My son has been working since he was 14 because he *really* wanted a job, so he got started at the local hardware store with an “exemption” from the state saying he could work as long as it didn’t interfere with school.
He earned a few hundred dollars per month and he squandered it on video games when he wasn’t working. He thought he was rich because he had more money than other kids his age.
The entire time he kept complaining that he wasn’t earning enough and it was because he was “too young” to get “a real job”.
As parents we kept telling him to get good grades and take advantage of the opportunity to learn whatever skill he wanted while the roof over his head was free, the food he ate was free, and his clothing was purchased for him.
He ignored it and blamed it on not being 18…and to some small degree he was correct. There are some jobs you just can’t work until you are 18 and graduated from school.
He was super excited when he turned 18 and got a new job….at a national burger joint… He was thrilled it paid a few bucks more per hour than minimum wage.
He got his first paycheck and you would have thought he won the lottery.
Then I laid down “bills” in front of him.
I showed him what his portion of the cell phone bill cost. I showed him what basic single-can-picked-up-every-two-weeks garbage service cost. I put a meter on the circuit to his room and showed him how much his power usage cost. I took the average rent for the area and broke it down to square footage and then showed him how much his room cost. Then there’s basic “I can’t even watch netflix because this is too slow” internet service. Car insurance. Gas. Tabs. Groceries.
He only had a few bucks left over.
Credit to raising him right, he did immediately start bitching about taxation being theft…but I think it was a wake-up call. I asked him how he would buy a house. How he would take his girlfriend out to dinner. How he would afford a kid. How he would fix his car if it suddenly broke down and needed parts.
I told him he needed skills that were valuable. He argued he’d get a $1.50 raise if he stayed where he was for a year. We did the math and I showed him it would be around$3,000 extra per *year* and that was before taxes got taken out.
He started blaming it on the economy any pretty much everything he could think of other than his lack of skills.
I showed him the skills on my resume and my 2023 tax return. I said “I make over 6 times what you make because very few people can do what I do, and if you aren’t going to continue your education to become more valuable, there’s nothing left for me to help you with. It’s time to move out and get on with the life you’ve chosen”.
It finally clicked. He asked if he could stay a few more months if he was working on his education. I said “absolutely”. He immediately applied, tested, and was accepted to become an electrician’s apprentice, and he starts next month.
Reader · July 31, 2024 at 1:11 pm
There’s plenty of different skills, talents, abilities that folks have but recoil at the thought of doing because of some ‘coolness factor’ or feeling beneath them. What a shame.
Stefan v. · July 31, 2024 at 1:40 pm
I get min. wage.
Same as our cleaning lady. She can’t clean, but also gets assigned to production lines when pre-planning is skipped. Stick a blank in a press die, press the pedal, remove the workpiece, insert a new one. Watch that the punched out scrap doesn’t pop out and skew the workpiece, don’t stick two stacked blanks, make sure the blank is oriented to the two reference planes. Don’t trigger the machine while the drive is off, don’t load the die while it is off. A monkey could do it. Nope, too hard….press overloaded, pins and dies break, workpieces out of tolerance…..and if you get testy after explaining it for the fifth time, she boils over and you’re the nasty man. Same pay, but you get to install the die, adjust, fix the machine, fault trace why it is broken.
Even simpler job…stick a workpiece on a square post, drill a transverse hole. See that the swarf doesn’t skew the workpiece. Only drill one hole, it is merely for a grub screw. If you drill two holes because these complex instructions are beyond comprehension, please do not waste time countersinking and cutting a thread…..it is waste. Please don’t countersink two holes. You are here because second level of management is stupid, parsimonious, greedy, venal, vindictive, and….etc. Do not get offended when I get angry after throwing out a third of the run and explaining the procedure a dozen times. There is no time pressure. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. She was much less stupid before the multiple corona boosters, but always evil….this brought it out. A vignette of many other experiences in the post post-modern eutopia.
Reverse engineer ancient cnc lathes, learn obsolete programming languages, take the risk of the machine eating itself or chewing up tool holders. Being ultraparanoid, this never happens. Write new programs to make one-off special orders. The pros charge my monthly salary per day for that job. Repeatedly order material in amounts to cover several order cycles of popular products…the out of tolerance workpieces to set up a run of 60 or 300 are the same, but the subsequent four order amounts are cheaper once you spent the time and material and tooling and setup for one. Skip manufacturer’s recommended maintenance schedules by orders of magnitude and then whine about repair costs. Delay ordering spare parts and complain about production delays.
Substitute cheaper materials that take more expensive tools longer to cut with more risk of catastrophic failure, and significant difficulties further down the production chain, involving adapting other machines or misusing yet others. Just by substituting seamless steam pipe iron instead of silicon bronze for guide rings on doorhandle escutcheons. Save pennies, burn dollars, and patronise and humiliate and bully your staff. While they curse you and your progenitors, they are making other things on the machines, which they would have gladly done to the benefit of the company…but not now. There will be no raises. There will be no terminal sabotage. Value not rewarded will be balanced some other way. Eat out your liver because this is wrong…..a violation of integrity.
jimmyPx · July 31, 2024 at 1:52 pm
As you said, it is simple supply and demand.
For example, professional athletes make a lot of money because there are people who will pay a lot of money to watch them play AND there are few people capable of playing at that level. Case in point the NBA, they make a ton because huge crowds and TV pay to watch them and few men have the size or skill to do it. WNBA has good athletes but pay is poor because no one wants to pay to watch them.
Something union people don’t get is that if you cannot get another job doing the same thing you are now at the same or higher pay then you are overpaid.
As they are finding out, paying unskilled labor $50/hour+ benefits isn’t sustainable long term and they will either move jobs out of the country like John Deere or go bankrupt (all of the Teamster trucking companies).
wojtek · July 31, 2024 at 1:52 pm
They say the lead actress made 700K. Looks like they got everybody cheap for that movie. Maybe covid made them so desperate for work?
Dirty Dingus McGee · July 31, 2024 at 2:20 pm
I have been known to tell “underperforming” employees that I would love to pay them what they are worth, but minimum wage laws won’t let me.
Mike Hendrix · July 31, 2024 at 11:08 pm
I’ve always enjoyed Glenn Reynolds oft-repeated admonition: “The REAL minimum wage is ZERO dollars/hr.”
Aesop · August 1, 2024 at 3:18 pm
Moviemaking 101, yet again:
Tyler Scruggs was a production assistant assigned to the costume department.
By the numbers:
1) A “production assistant” is the only person on any set – from producer to the guy who sweeps up under the snack table – who isn’t in a union or guild.
It is, literally, some bumpkin from Kansas (or in his case, Bumfuck, NM) who wants to break into the movies, possessing zero experience, and willing to be the department gopher and bitch-boy/girl, just to get a foot in the industry door.
That’s how you break into show business “below-the-line”, i.e., as one of the 100 to 2000 people whose names scroll by on a $100M feature film for three minutes after your happy ass has already left the theater.
2) His salary was$175/day, which is $875/week, which is $45,500/yr.
(BP:WF was probably in production for 3-6 months, plus prep and wrap-out time.)
FTR, the median income in the United States is around $37,290/yr.
In California, it’s $54,430/yr.
A typical movie day is a minimum of12 hours, up to 24 hours. Yes, really.
An average day on a big-budget feature is 14+ hours.
Everybody knows this going in.
I know because I only did it for 20+ years.
P.A.s are not paid hourly. It’s a day rate.
Employment, for every-effing-one in the entire movie industry, including RDJr, is at-effing-will. You can (and will) be fired at a whim or whisper, for anything, or nothing.
Including “the producer’s nephew wants a job”.
All of this information was doubtless conveyed to Mr. Scruggs when he filled out twenty pages of hiring paperwork on his first day of work, and accepted his $175/day salary guarantee as a production assistant with the costume department, with no gun to his empty head.
If he found it unacceptable, there are only about 200,000 eager applicants for every job on set, including his, and he would be replaced in about 30 seconds, leaving not even so little as a ripple in the production as he left.
A p.a.’s job is to do every last little shit job on any production, for the department assigned.
Usually, they only work the production department. The folks standing 50 yards from where they’re filming, looking about 16, with a mid-80 IQ, wearing a walkie and an earpiece/headset, and yelling “Rolling!” and “Cut!” for the benefit of people far from camera, so that those nearby know to STFU.
Sometimes, they’re yelling it at trees in the woods, and rocks in the cliff, with o one else around.
I have seen them wrangle pigs.
Cockroaches too. Great big Madagascar cockroaches. (Yes, really.)
Pigeons. On command.
Also Seagulls.
(Pieces of bread and seed were involved for the last two.
Director: “I like those seagulls flying around in the background. Make it happen again.”
2d Assistant Director: “Billy Bob Doofus, throw pieces of bread in the air so those seagulls keep flying around in the background. Stay behind that tree so you’re not in the shot.”
Billy Bob Doofus: Gets some rolls from the craft service table, starts tearing off little pieces, and tosses them in the air between “Rolling!” and “Cut!”. in the sun. For three hours. Is getting the same rate as Scruggs.)
They also wrangle background actors (you call them “extras”), and they are essentially scenery with legs. And not as smart as pigs, cockroaches, pigeons, or seagulls, on their worst days, and worth their weight in gold on their best days, and depending on how well or poorly you treat them.
P.A.s fetch and carry.
They stand in the sun and the rain.
They dodge homeless lunatics and cars gawking the wrong way.
They get bit by snakes, bugs, and animals. Sometimes by extras.
They clean up.
They screw up.
They pass along info to distant crew and cast members.
They run. A lot.
They work from first call to last man out.
They run errands.
Fetch dry cleaning.
Get coffee.
Pick up pizzas or burgers or tacos for 150 people at 2 AM.
All for that same $175/day. Even less ($100-$150/day) on low-budget shows.
For those same 14 hour+ days.
And they’d rather be working on a set, than sweeping up grease at McDonald’s, because they know that eventually, they’ll catch a break, get into a guild or union, and start making a helluva lot more money.
I’ve been working in boom years, when departments were so short, they went from $150/day p.a.’s to $25/hour (base rate) electrician trainees, overnight, because there weren’t any more at the union hall to send out. They went from $750/wk to $450/day overnight, and started accruing benefits and hours towards pensions and health care.
If they got 30 days on a union show, they could then pay their initiation fee, and get into the union. (The Hollywood equivalent of the mafia’s “made man”.)
Provided they STFU, kept their mouths shut, worked hard, listened to people who knew WTF they were doing, and did their jobs as they were told.
2) A Costumer’s apprentice with under 800 hrs. experience in 2024 starts at $30.58/hr.
So if Scruggs had STFU, bided his time as a non-union member, and eventually gotten on a non-union show that organized, or waited until a boom production year and gotten his 30 days on a union show – either of those two ways – (the avg. for that is 2-5 years) during which time, he’d learn WTF his business was, he could look forward to making $70K/yr and up, starting his first union year, along with gold-plated pension and healthcare benefits (think “no co-pay” for damned near anything ex. Rx meds, for which it’s $5).
3) But because he’s an entitled pop-off, in front of God, the Internet, and everyone in Hollywood, he’ll be quietly blackballed, and never get that break. Nobody needs the problems he’ll bring, and he’ll go back to Bumfuck and get a job in a dry cleaner’s or at the Dairy Queen for minimum wage, and wonder WTF happened to his big move.
4) Because he’s an entitled whiny fucktard.
Which is the kiss of death on movie sets. Ask Erik Estrada or Gary Busey.
Or even ask Robert Downey Jr., back when he was more interested in lines of cocaine than the lines on his script.
And there are only those 200,000 eager young people who’ll gladly take Scruggs’ place – or Downey’s, for that matter – on the next 50,000 movies, but without Scruggs’ attitude or stupidity.
QED
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