AmbroseBierce parent
I talked with a barista that had worked 10 years at Starbucks and he still made minimum wage after all that time, it was specially worrying since minimum wage in this country it's equivalent to 420 usd a month.
I once decided to plot my salaries corrected for inflation and found out that they only really went up a couple of times in 30 years.
If you are in the US, you also have to incorporate the employer paid benefits in compensation, the big one being health insurance premiums/deductible/out of pocket maximum/provider network size (the premium is easily referred to by looking at W-2 box 12 code DD).
There are also other considerations such as PTO, 401k match, HSA match, DCFSA match, yadda yadda, so the only way to keep up with the market is to always be interviewing and evaluating new offers to compare your current compensation to.
I’ve done this as well. I’m only making twice what I was 30 years ago at 18. (Though to be fair, I was making a ridiculous amount of money for a 18 year old - my first job was in the Qwest network operations center.)
If they worked for a decade and never got a pay rise (other than minimum wage increases), why are they still working there? In an ideal world, you get wage and career progression over time, or move on to a different career otherwise.
> or move on to a different career otherwise.
Folks rarely have this choice. What industry wants a barista outside food service? This is why we get stuck wearing a green apron for a decade, or working call center jobs, or any other crappy job.
People aren’t locked into being baristas. People immigrate from all over the world to the US, and become whatever they have to. Dry cleaners, landscapers, cooks, maids, nurses, etc.
Do those folks make more than minimum wage?
And becoming a nurse isn’t something you switch to after being underpaid as a barista. It’s a career with real training.
I do not see why a barista cannot do “real” training and switch to working as a nurse.
However the world we live in is not ideal, and wages are being systematically crushed by capital.
I know that he was learning programming on the side so his plan was to work on that, I don't know how that ended up.
If it took ten years you know how it ended up.