Should Fast Food Workers Be Paid?

Sixty percent of all fast food workers are under the age of twenty-four, and they want more money. Fast food workers want their pay per hour to be increased from minimum wage to fifteen dollars. That is a big increase considering that waiters and waitresses at medium scale restaurants make within three dollars fifty cents, and seven dollars and fifty cents, not including tips. Fast food workers should not be paid extra because if their wages increased, the food would be more costly and they would replace humans with machines.

To begin, if fast food workers were paid fifteen dollars an hour, it would make the fast food a lot more expensive. Fast food is most certainly not marvelous quality, and it is not right to be paying a lot of money for a standard hamburger. For instance, according to Newsela article, “Most fast food customers want a quick, cheap meal. They will not pay top prices for a burger and fries.” (Newsela con article) In other words, fast food customers do not like soaring prices. This demonstrates that fast food restaurants would lose business if they raised their prices. Also, people with less money go there because it is the only thing they can
afford, and if the prices were raised they wouldn’t be able to afford it. Therefore, if the workers wages were raised the items on the menu would be more expensive causing the restaurant’s customers to decrease.

In addition, there are other problems restaurants might have with having fifteen dollars per hour as the worker’s wages.
There would be many problems but the main one would be having robots work the jobs of humans. According to Newsela article, “The technology is ready. Customers could use self serve iPad stations to enter their orders. There’s a robotic burger flipper that makes up to 400 hamburgers an hour. Restaurants could install one to replace several workers at once.” This means that they are thinking about replacing humans with robots. This indicates that there will be even less jobs. Restaurants might have to have costly machines if they are paying a wage of fifteen dollars an hour. Thus it would not be beneficial to pay fifteen dollars because they would substitute some people with
machines.

Supporters of the idea that hourly wage should be increased may argue that people need more money to live and support a family, but they exaggerate when they claim that working at a fast food restaurant is a job that you have for your whole career. In reality, to have a fast food job you are an inexperienced worker and do not stay there for long. In fact, the Newsela article stated “The average fast food employee stays at his or her restaurant for less than a year.” (Newsela con article) Essentially, fast food restaurants are starter jobs and you don’t need a great deal of pay for those, just enough to live on. This reveals that the workers would make more money at their next job if they are working at a restaurant because it is higher quality food and requires more experience. Clearly, fast food workers do not stay at their jobs for long, so they should not be concerned about how much they are making because it will change soon, only just one year.

In conclusion, fast food workers should not be paid fifteen dollars because a meal would cost a lot more. Also, there would not be as many jobs for people, because robots would have taken it. The cost of Fast food would upgrade, causing less customers to come. There would be less job openings because they would not be able to afford to pay workers that are working so many numerous shifts. It would be to our benefit to not have fast food workers be paid fifteen dollars considering it would be detrimental, because it would case the middle and lower class to have less money.