The Slow Death Of Toxic Sludge

[Kristy]

Somewhat good news:

McDonald’s Corp. (MCD), the world’s largest restaurant chain, said third-quarter profit fell 30 percent as U.S. sales slumped for the fourth straight quarter.

Net income dropped to $1.07 billion, or $1.09 a share, from $1.52 billion, or $1.52, a year earlier, the Oak Brook, Illinois-based company said in a statement today.

McDonald’s has been struggling to draw American diners as rivals offer deals and introduce new items. The company also has lost customers by boosting prices on burgers to make up for rising labor and ingredient costs. Sales at McDonald’s U.S. stores open at least 13 months fell 3.3 percent in the third quarter, trailing the 2.9 percent decline estimated by analysts in a Consensus Metrix survey.

Even better:



My question is no matter how much McSludge's tries to overhaul their image (such as it is) with more of a plastic veneer of "feel good about America" and how they are shamelessly exploiting human suffering to sell shit food made from cardboard and thrown monkey feces why would anyone ever want to eat there? A 30% drop is way too high on the economic scale of good riddance. But people are wising up; soon those golden arches eyesores will be no longer.

[ELVIS]

I thought Toxic Sludge was the Kumbaya band you got kicked out of for being loaded...

[ELVIS]

The company also has lost customers by boosting prices on burgers to make up for rising labor and ingredient costs.

Yay living wage...

[Seshmeister]

If they are making a profit they can afford to pay a living wage.

[Kristy]

I thought Toxic Sludge was the Kumbaya band you got kicked out of for being loaded...

Get the fuck out of this thread you waste of welfare existence.

[FORD]

Here’s How Fast Food Could Handle A $15 Minimum Wage Without Cutting Jobs

by Bryce Covert
Posted on January 23, 2015 at 3:25 pm


Fast food workers have been staging strikes across the country for the last three years to demand a $15 minimum wage, among other things. Which begs the question: Would raising wages in the industry to that level force companies to lay off workers to reduce costs?

The answer in a new paper is a resounding no. Economists Robert Pollin and Jeannette Wicks-Lim of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst looked at a scenario in which the federal minimum wage gets increased to $10.50 in one year and to $15 three years after that, which in the end would mean a 107 percent increase over the current minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. They found that instead of having to cut jobs, fast food restaurants could cover the cost of the increase with savings from reducing turnover, higher prices, and greater economic growth.

To come to that conclusion, they estimate what it would cost these companies to increase not just wages for those at the bottom of their scales to $15 an hour, but also to slightly boost the workers above them to maintain current hierarchies. In the first part of the phase in, when the minimum wage would increase to $10.50 an hour, they estimate that 3.5 million fast food workers would get a raise, with a cost of $7.1 billion for the industry. In the next phase, when the wage goes up to $15, 3.8 million workers would get a raise, coming to a cost of $30.7 billion.

Given that the industry’s sales were $232 billion last year, the cost of a $10.50 minimum wage makes up just 3.3 percent of sales, while a $15 wage comes to 14.2 percent.

The researchers assume, however, that companies prefer nearly any option for covering these costs over reducing profits or pulling back on spending in other areas like buying new equipment. Cutting jobs is also likely a last resort, they note, because it “could impair the capacity of firms to sustain their existing level of operations and retain their customer base.”

Businesses wouldn’t have to resort to any of those measures, however. Pollin and Wicks-Lim note that the reductions in turnover that would likely come from paying higher wages would amount to 20 percent of the increase in costs. A previous study found that fast food restaurants experience a turnover rate of 120 percent, and it costs $4,700 for each worker who leaves. On the other hand, each 10 percent increase in the minimum wage reduces turnover by 2.2 percent. A $10.10 wage then means a savings from reduced turnover of $2.1 billion, or 28 percent of the cost of the raise, and a $15 wage means $5.2 billion in savings, or 17 percent of the costs.

The economists also note that fast food sales track pretty closely to GDP growth. Sales would likely be reduced a bit by price increases to cover the price of the raises — they estimate prices would rise by 3 percent a year in the final four years of the raise increase and reduce sales revenue by 1.5 percent. But sales would still track closely with economic growth and come to a 2.5 percent growth rate per year. The price increase would therefore bring in $3.5 billion in extra revenue while sales growth would bring in $6 billion, both of which could help cover the cost of the raises.

These measures can fully cover cost of higher wages, leaving the industry with $1.1 billion left over, the economists conclude.

Some research has warned of job losses with higher minimum wages, including an estimate from the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office. But other studies also found that rather than cutting jobs, businesses could very well see benefits from higher wages such as improved efficiency and lower turnover. The majority of fast food restaurants in Georgia and Alabama planned to respond to a minimum wage increase by raising performance standards for their workers, for example. A study that reviewed the available research on minimum wage impacts in 2009 found the impact on employment is close to zero and the most precise studies found no impact at all.

Real world evidence also plays out this way. When economists looked at state-level minimum wage increases over two decades, they didn’t find any evidence to support the idea that they hurt jobs, even during times of high unemployment. Five other studies did similar analyses and found the same thing. States with higher minimum wages have also experienced above-average job growth.

While the majority of states have higher minimum wages than the federal floor of $7.25, none has gone so far as to raise it to $15 an hour. Some cities, such as Seattle, are experimenting with wages at that level, and others could follow.

[FORD]

Yay living wage...

More like "yay people are tired of eating a monsatan corn fed cow, between two pieces of bleached white flour bread, with HFCS ketchup and neon orange polymer "cheese" on it, accompanied by fries soaked in Monsatan corn oil, and washing it down with 32 oz of high fructose corn poison."

Which is a good thing..... I honestly can't remember the last time I went to McDonalds.

[ELVIS]

If they are making a profit they can afford to pay a living wage.

What ??

Go away with your two pickled brain cells...

[ELVIS]

I honestly can't remember the last time I went to McDonalds.

It's been nearly a decade for me...

[Seshmeister]

More like "yay people are tired of eating a monsatan corn fed cow, between two pieces of bleached white flour bread, with HFCS ketchup and neon orange polymer "cheese" on it, accompanied by fries soaked in Monsatan corn oil, and washing it down with 32 oz of high fructose corn poison."

Which is a good thing..... I honestly can't remember the last time I went to McDonalds.

I pop through a drive thru every couple of months when I'm in a rush but I wouldn't in the US.

I wonder if many Americans know the amount of shit that is in their food that either isn't allowed in Europe or they are too scared to put in because the publicity would kill them.

Edit - I went to look up a story I had read last week about this and it seems even fucking Fox News noticed it and are running with it.

http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2015/01/26/mcdonalds-fries-in-us-have-more-ingredients-than-uk-version/

McDonald’s fries in the US have way more ingredients than UK fries
Published January 26, 2015FoxNews.com

McDonald’s is really trying to be more transparent about what goes into their food.

After dispelling the pink goo McNugget rumor and addressing what’s really in a McRib, the fast food chain released the latest installment of “Our food. Your questions.” to let us in on how those magical fries are made. Mythbusters host Grant Imahara took us from fryer to farm in a reverse process peek at what goes into McDonald’s potatoes.

While the global burger chain does explain the usage of a few unpronounceable ingredients meant to preserve color and texture, it looks like these practices aren’t being implemented across the board.

After checking out McDonalds.co.uk, a blogger on Boing Boing points out that McDonald’s french fries in the U.K. appear to have far fewer ingredients than those produced in the U.S.-- and no crazy, hard-to-say additives. FoxNews.com did a side by side comparison of the two websites and found the same information.



A side by side comparison of French fry ingredients in McDonald's US and the UK.

Across the pond, Brits are enjoying McDonald’s French fries sans additives like Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Dimethylpolysiloxane and “natural beef flavor.” Dimethylpolysiloxane is “added as an anti-foaming agent” but it’s also a silicon-based organic polymer used to make Silly Putty.

Hmm. Looks like the chain has some more explaining to do to American consumers.

A request for comment from McDonald's was not immediately returned.

[Nickdfresh]

I can't stand Mickey-D's just because their food sucks. I mean, if I'm going to eat shitty fast food I'd rather have a Whopper...

[Nickdfresh]

I pop through a drive thru every couple of months when I'm in a rush but I wouldn't in the US.

I wonder if many Americans know the amount of shit that is in their food that either isn't allowed in Europe or they are too scared to put in because the publicity would kill them.

Edit - I went to look up a story I had read last week about this and it seems even fucking Fox News noticed it and are running with it.

http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2015/01/26/mcdonalds-fries-in-us-have-more-ingredients-than-uk-version/

McDonald’s fries in the US have way more ingredients than UK fries
Published January 26, 2015FoxNews.com

McDonald’s is really trying to be more transparent about what goes into their food.

After dispelling the pink goo McNugget rumor and addressing what’s really in a McRib, the fast food chain released the latest installment of “Our food. Your questions.” to let us in on how those magical fries are made. Mythbusters host Grant Imahara took us from fryer to farm in a reverse process peek at what goes into McDonald’s potatoes.

While the global burger chain does explain the usage of a few unpronounceable ingredients meant to preserve color and texture, it looks like these practices aren’t being implemented across the board.

After checking out McDonalds.co.uk, a blogger on Boing Boing points out that McDonald’s french fries in the U.K. appear to have far fewer ingredients than those produced in the U.S.-- and no crazy, hard-to-say additives. FoxNews.com did a side by side comparison of the two websites and found the same information.



A side by side comparison of French fry ingredients in McDonald's US and the UK.

Across the pond, Brits are enjoying McDonald’s French fries sans additives like Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate, Dimethylpolysiloxane and “natural beef flavor.” Dimethylpolysiloxane is “added as an anti-foaming agent” but it’s also a silicon-based organic polymer used to make Silly Putty.

Hmm. Looks like the chain has some more explaining to do to American consumers.

A request for comment from McDonald's was not immediately returned.

There's nothing particularly damning in the US ingriedients. The fact that they take longer to change their grease makes me more leery than that...

[Seshmeister]

I wouldn't want to overstate it and you're correct that those additives seem to be basically safe but there does seem to be more of a culture of putting a bunch of extra shit/processing over there for the purpose of squeezing just a tiny bit extra percent of cash. It seems to be partly FDA weakness and partly more customer pressure in Europe?

I don't buy into the whole thing of not natural, the organic thing seems to be a bit irrelevant and it's annoying when you see crap where just because something has a chemical name it's automatically bad - Dihydrogen Monoxide comes to mind.

All that said these lists make you wonder

http://www.shape.com/blogs/shape-your-life/13-banned-foods-still-allowed-us

[FORD]

I've only worked at one place that made deep fried food in my life - Skippers Fish & Chips, back in the 80s. And I don't remember our fries being anything other than frozen fucking potatoes. And they were better than McD's fries by far..... especially drenched in garlic vinegar.

Of course we DID get some dirty looks from the Evergreeners when they found out they were fried in beef tallow. The vegetarian Greeners wouldn't eat the fish, but they would get fries along with their salad bar, assuming it was still all vegetable material, including the grease it was fried in. That practice did change while I worked there, due to all the health reports about cholesterol and saturated fats that were coming out at the time.

[ELVIS]

Yeah, don't eat cholesterol, it's only essential for life...

But have some Sodium Acid Pyrophosphate and Dimethylpolysiloxane...

And although the drunken Scot says they're "basically safe", he won't eat US fast food...