Raising prices by 1.3% also has some impact on sales. In theory it should be greater than 1.3% (or else why hasn't the restaurant greedily raised its prices already). To get higher wages for the workers you need one of two things.

1. Go upmarket in some way, either sell nicer food with a better margin or higher more oroductive employees.

2. Through collective action of some kind get all competitors to raise their prices and pass the cartel profits to the worker (for instance a minimum wage law could accomplish this).

I don't think that those are the only two solutions. Off the top of my head you could

1. Reduce expenses in other areas

2. Accept the reduced profit

3. Find that the cost is offset by more productive employees either through morale increase or improved recruiting

Profit in most industries is a few percent, esp. retail/food which are often c. 1%.

The markets are highly competitive, and consumers will compare two stores: A, B and choose the cheaper.

I think there's a lot more that goes into where someone chooses to eat than price, otherwise Taco Bell would be putting Chipotle out of business.

As explained above, I don't take it as a given that increased employee wages require increased prices.

Then have a look into how much a taco bell franchise makes: https://sharpsheets.io/blog/taco-bell-franchise-costs-profit...

It's 15% "profit" on paper, but a franchiser is typically in debt for the first 12 years of the store before they make any "net profit".

So we're talking an industry where most of the so-called "capitalists" are in debt.

This is a hyper-competitive market place, and one play only adding on %s to their products will be a hit to their competitiveness.

They dont decided prices, the market does.

I am a google engineer, and a fairly successful one.

I would absolutely despise it if I had to manage my own OS, just like I despise thinking about my keyboard layout or text editor.

Hacker News overrepresents the hacker type which loves the feeling of full control but I'd estimate that at least 33% of engineers, including many very talented ones, don't want that, and only want to focus on the concrete problems they are trying to solve.

Did the even more successful engineers liked the experience more or less than you?

A lot of your relationship strategies depend on slack that will soon be gone. If a chore gets done by whoever is feeling less tired it simply won't get done. Explicitly decide who does what and be prepared to revisit frequently to make it fair.

I got free academic access to this dataset. The data is anonymized and aggregated to the census block level (500 people). It does not allow for the kind of tracking that the article is fear mongering about.

The average census block has a population of 30 people. Millions of census blocks have a population of zero while millions more have a population of only a couple of people. Surely it must be at the census tract level or higher?

Census block group, not census block

>The data is anonymized

Anonymized... for you.

Whether or not that's true, the government should ban this type of business. Not support it with our tax dollars.

No such thing as anonymity data

Wow, this anonymous person leaves your house every morning and comes back!

There is definitely data that can't be worked backwards.

Not full anonymity if you can see where the phones are moving from-to

Another former employee. I'll add that once search engine for apps clearly wouldn't work there was an attempt to pivot to something like Google cards but directly linked to the app (so yelp reviews for restaurants instead of Google reviews). This wasn't a bad idea but they raised the money for a large scale product (1000s of apps) and so invested in scale before proving the market fit. Combine that with Alibaba money splitting focus again and there never was a useful product launched.

(Google employee now: views are my own)