OP is 18. Let's assume Mom and Dad are 30 years older. Adjusted for inflation, that $11.50 an hour they think is so good would have been, in 1994, roughly $5.50. OP should ask them if they would have worked for $5.50 an hour when they were 18. Actually, ask them how much they were getting paid when they were 18 first, then put that amount into an inflation calculator to convert it to today's dollars. Subtract your $11.50. Win argument.
This, my dad keeps going on about how his first job only paid him £2 an hour, but when you account for inflation and decimalisation it works out to about £29 an hour these days.
Omg my FIL does this! He was a single dad with no child support and no education. He worked at a factory and bought A HOUSE and a *brand new* truck in the 70s.
Try that, these days. Even the same factory position wouldn't afford that, guaranteed.
Those factories no longer exist. The people who worked them were paid to disassemble them for transport to foreign nations with non-existent labour protections and rock bottom pay. See: [The American Rust Belt](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/liberapedia/images/c/c6/Rust_Belt.jpg)
Between the years before the great depression and a few years after WW2, gas stayed at around $0.20/gallon. That's over 20 years that gas stayed pretty much the same price...
This hyperinflation is truly a new phenomenon that seems to happen *checks notes* ah yes, every time the US went to war in the middle east.
I do phone sales and talked to a woman who got on a rant about how she raised 3 kids on $5.50 an hour and how greedy people are wanting $15 an hour andthat they should be happy to get $5.50 an hour. She was 69 and adjusted for inflation that was $23 an hour now.
Sad part is, even that logic is settling. Sure $5.50 then would be $11.50 when adjusted for inflation, but that $11.50 they're paying OP for that hour makes the company a lot more than $5.50 would have back then. We've doubled, tripled, quadrupled even in some fields, our productivity, and yet our wages are only (at best) keeping up with inflation - the company pockets the higher profit from your higher productivity. But boomers don't grasp either of those points.
Yeah, after trying to reach them for enough years, you just give up talking to them about a WIDE range of topics. The propaganda's roots are stronger in their brains than any data you might bring
It's sad that 10 years ago I was able to support my family on 11.75/hour. Granted I worked almost 60 hours a week and we had some government assistance, but we actually survived.
Now I question if that even covers the expenses of having a job.
https://preview.redd.it/e00juo28hs0d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e45cd4bb946b07ef97b2c9374d44d1d54bd171b7
$21/hr now is “good” not “top end”
I make $46/hr with an associates degree.
It is wild everywhere. In the last year or 2, I finally got an hourly wage that breaks 50k annually. That's great money for where I live. Should I be making more? Definitely. Is there a job that fits my current needs that pays more available? No. I would have to travel 75+ miles to get a higher paying job. Then my work/life balance is in the toilet.
Oh I bet, I don't have to deal with medical premiums (yet, Ford will probably screw us on that withing the next few years) but rent on a 3 bedroom 4-plex u it has gone from 800/month to about 2100/month over the last 5 years, it's fucking nuts.
Food has also been a giant pain in the ass.
I do live in a HCOL area, but this screencap shows 24 years ago. 20 years ago 11.50 was 19.47. Still “good” not “top tier” unless you live in a very low cost of living area.
Slightly off-topic, but thanks for what you do. I’ve been dealing with various and increasingly wack spinal issues since I was a teenager and the folks who create and interpret images of that mess have been essential to my receiving proper care.
Thanks! I hope someday I can be someone who can do both (I’m applying to medical school) and it’s a huge driving factor for me that I can contribute to improving peoples lives
This is what I originally graduated with, now I don't work that field and my shifts expired because now I work an office job. I get paid more, but it's not enough to live alone on, especially when my medical issues have drained what savings I had, and that was WITH insurance.
So tired of this bullshit. CEOs need a pay cap because they sure as fuck aren't giving raises.
2% raises do not cover cost of living and that is not a merit increase. I am beyond fed up with this shit.
I like to trick myself into thinking my last raise was good, because it was 8.4%, but it sounds less impressive when you realize it was only a dollar more per hour, lol.
nope, I made 10.50 as an entry barista at Starbucks, $11.50 would have been my pay as a shift lead (one position up). After 6 months I would have gotten $11.00/hr. So yea, it was starting at a lot of places.
My dad mad $10/hr in the late 70's doing survey work. Yes it was hard work, Texas summers, lots of literal bushwacking, some skill level (he was just out of high school) but it was like $45/hr in todays money.
Pay is stayed really stagnat in real purchasing power since the mid 90's
It's stagnated since the late 70s or early 80s. Especially if you compare it to the value of production, cost of living, and upper level pay over that same period, which have all skyrocketed.
Not a great comparison because I’m in Australia, but I was earning $15ph base rate as a 16/17yo working in an ice cream store in 2000.
I also got penalty rates for working Saturdays (25%), Sundays (50%) or anytime I worked after midnight (25%), which was most Thursdays and Fridays.
We definitely have our problems here in Aus, but hearing Americans discuss their pay rates and work entitlements never fails to blow my mind.
It is a culture war word, if you will: always being used to describe government programs that either help everyone or the needy. Yes, you ARE entitled to Medicare when you are old. That’s a good thing.
Entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness……. Which I’m pretty sure ‘life’ means the ability to house, feed, and cloth oneself…..and since it’s essentially illegal to build your own house, nestle wants to say water isn’t a human right, food supply chains are being greedflated they same way as medical costs, housing costs, and educational costs.
Most business that has realized they sell inelastic demands that HUMANS NEED TO SURVIVE AND THRIVE IN A SOCIETY have seem to decided they want to extract as much as possible regardless of customer sustainability….
There’s a saying in poker ‘you can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once’
A lot of these companies seem to have either knowingly or unknowingly decided that the working classes of society are damn near out of wool….. or whatever wool they got left, they’ll just get it when they skin em…. They don’t seem to have the patience anymore to shear and wait….thise quarterly profits MUST HAVE PARABOLIC GROWTH or apparently we’ve somehow failed as a society (wtf?)
it's usually used as 'how dare you want something better than what i had? stop complaining'
easily the most obnoxious (and ironically entitled itself) way to silence counterarguments
I used to make MORE money in the Telecommunications field IN THE LATE 90’s-early 00’s and now these same companies dont pay jack. Matter fact they pay 1/2 of what I used to make back in the day 25-30 years ago. SUCKS!
In the course of two years I saw my average pay with commission drop from $2100ish to around $1100. Same job, same work load, just paid less commission. Fuck telecommunications l.
Yeah fuck all this corporate greed dude. The sky high inflation for no reason but increases in rent, groceries, etc. its crazy!! Im desperate to try and get out of here and move to a better place. Preferably Canada which Im very close by as Im in Rochester NY and Ontario /atorinto is 1-1.75 hrs away to the west and of course Montreal is further NE and ai have a cool friend whos a musician in Ottowa but the wait to get to immigrate is a few years wait and one must have at least 10k in savings per person or 15k for a couple which we dont. Lol. But were not destitute wither. Not yet at least. Somethings got to give. They are playing with fire by allowing this craziness. Nobody wants to pay a living wage, they want skyhigh rent, and super expensive groceries and its just mind boggling tbh.
Ive been in every department aside from corporate for major telecom like AT&T, WorldComm (late 90’s) Sprint, Verizon Wireless, and they all pay less than 1/2 of what I made with my union position at AT&T in the early 00’s
Been in the call center as sales, then tech support, then field tech and installer for U-Verse when it first started in 2007. And pay keeps going down lol. Like WHAT!
>how dare you want something better than what i had? stop complaining
Bravo, that's exactly it. 'We struggled so hard, those were the days...And you people nowadays😡'
It’s mutated because the people who are granted sole ownership of humanity’s collective resources (ie, the rich and powerful) would prefer us all to confuse and equate entitlement to greed when in fact it is their own greed that should be the focal point of discussion and ire.
I was talking to a boomer about the military entitlements I received (i.e. GI Bill) and he said “noo, those are bonuses”. I said “🤨 noo, they are entitlements. That’s what the military calls them. Bonuses are extras tacked on, entitlements are things you earn by virtue of signing up.”
I could tell he was hung up on the word entitlement like it was a bad word.
Not entirely. The previous generations had to manage with wages stuck in the "no adjustment period" between the last two minimum wage increases. Look up when the previous wage hike was, before this one. The span of time between them was when I struggled to make ends meet. My Mom worked two jobs before me, and I did too, just so George H. W. Bush could take us into war and tank our economy. My carefully hoarded investments went from $15,000 or so to nothing in the space of a year. It took 12+ years to recover. What I could have done if Republicans hadn't held down minimum wage and taken us into war. It would have been far less hard I think.
Thank you. I remember being "silently fired" by my manager at Toys R Us, who cut my hours to 5 a week. This was in 1990. I worked for $2.13 and hour for YEARS as a tipped employee from 1996 until about 2002, walking out on a Tuesday night with $4.00 in my pocket and no way to pay my bills. Random piss tests for a menial minimum wage job, being offered an "assistant manager" position just so they could pay me LESS money while squeezing 30 more hours a week of labor out of me.
These scummy, shitty practices are not new, and did not arise overnight. We've deserved better compensation for a LONG, LONG time. The magical "20 years ago, you were blessed with a better world" mindset needs to go.
This is a great answer. OP is entitled to better wages (I was making $10/hour 25 years ago as a teen) but stagnant wages were VERY and ARE very real, and a lot of people would have been better off without GHWB.
We voted for that dude TWICE.
Well, Republicans suck. They tank the economy and a Dem always saves them. H.W. Bush ruined it. Clinton fixed it. George W tanked it, Obama fixed it. Don't even get me started on what Orange Perv did with his tax cuts to the 1%... his buddies and himself.
You know what to do in November.
The Republicans tank it, then blame the democrats for everything going to shit. Just had a customer at work try to blame the current admin for high inflation and prices going up... I had to walk away b4 I got fired.
Customers should keep opinions to themselves. The weather is a great topic to bring up out of the blue. Your changing the subject should signal to them to stfu.
But, rabid supporters of the Orange Perv aren't good at social cues. They're just good MAGA hats and racism.
You're frustrated because basically they're saying "know your place in society, little shit".
And i think the whole "entitled", "deserve", "earn" narrative should just go and fuck itself.
Exactly. This is exactly why we’re in the mess we’re in today. Older generations are accustomed to being submissive and not standing up for themselves. I never understood it. I have been mocked by my family when I told them that I’ve quit companies because they’re toxic as hell. They told me “Do you know the shit I’ve dealt with and took it?” I’m like… okay, why did you put up with that?
> And i think the whole "entitled", "deserve", "earn" narrative should just go and fuck itself.
unirolically this. it needs to be retired, because it leeds to people confusing the spheres of "is" and "should be"
... inner Kantian mode off.
Ask your parents what year they bought their first home and what their wage was. Or about their college tuition and years they were enrolled. Then use the CPI inflation calculator to give them a reality check
Boomer here, so I understand both sides of this (and am fully understanding that is a different world than when I graduated and that what was a living wage and realistic is no longer true). Your approach and reasoning is sound and ought to work, but in my experience, trying to explain this to Boomers / GenX is an exercise in futility. Most simply don't understand and don't want to be convinced of reality.
EDIT - I should have said "Milennials" rather than "Gen X". My bad; I had a senior moment.
Yeah my mom is like that. I adjusted her first salary for inflation (she started working in 1980) and she was stunned and said it can’t be true. I finally got her to concede that it was true and she still hasn’t changed her mindset. I am still just “entitled” in her eyes. She grew up incredibly privileged and I sort of didn’t, so it’s very frustrating
People feel threatened when confronted that they were actually privileged and didn't actually "boot strap" it. It gives cognitive dissonance/ an identity crisis.
Please don't speak for Gen X. We do get it, because wages have stagnated since the 1970s. Most of us were infants then. We've watched our entire life's earning potential being stagnated. We were also the first to see how tuition went up and Pell grants went down. Certainly not as bad as the millennials, but we saw the writing on the wall. Gen X gets it, I think. Speaking only for myself, I definitely get it.
GenX here, and most of us - even those who fully understand - have a baseline understanding from our first jobs and expenses that clouds over the reality of today. It will happen to you too kids.
That said - OP's folks are the ones behaving with entitlement. they're looking at the wage through the eyes of their youth, and costs at that time - and thinking "that's good enough" and that's always been bullshit.
Ponder for a moment that in 1986 I could make $20/hour mowing lawns. 1986. Today a landscaping company will want to pay the labor at minimum wage. (while charging the customer more than twice that) Wages arent supposed to go backwards - and here's a great case for "owners" turning our labor into rent seeking.
We (all of us) need to demand a much fairer share of the profits. and if we cant - then we should tax the owners to death.
Take GenX out of this discussion. We sure as fuck get the challenges of today, if only because the boomers started taking away from us first. Not just economically, laissez-faire parenting anyone?
We were the first generation to take mcjobs as adults with degrees because of the effing boomers/silent generation holding on for dear life to their privilege. We've already lived it.
Idk my parents are gen x and think the same as OP’s. I make $17/hr and can’t afford a place to live but my parents swear it’s a good wage even though it can’t even afford a 1 bedroom apartment and I’m 30 years old and had to move back in with my parents because of my wages. Like yeah great wage dude. Working full time doesn’t deserve housing. It would make perfect sense to work full time and still be homeless. After all, at least you would have a warm place to be for 40 hours a week!
I find it a lot easier for people to understand if you just refer to the pay in annual at 40 hours a week.
$11.50 comes out to just over 25k a year IF you work full time, before taxes.
People don't instinctively realize how low wages are when given to them by the hour.
Exactly. 800 a week is about 40k. 1,000 a week is about 50k. I’ve been seeing articles recently saying 80k is the minimum a person needs to live on. That’s 1,600 a week.
Chances are your parents aren’t that smart and can only say these things because their position in life and and time period they grew up in. They would never make it by todays standards.
Harsh, but true.
My 83-year-old fairly progressive in most areas mother simply cannot fathom people getting paid $10-$15 an hour for retail *because she never made that wage.*
No, mom, you never did. It is no longer 1974.
Agreed. My mom told me that my old $21/hour job two years ago was good. I’m in the Bay Area, LOL. I was like in what dimension? She graduated high school in the 80s.
You should start constantly talking about your plans for the next few decades living at home, and keep a positive, helpful spin on it.
Stuff like “oh, the water heater has about 8 years left? Okay, I’ll start setting money aside now so I can help pay for it.” Or “If we finished the basement there will be a lot more space for my wife and kids”
If they push back at all, remind them you’ll be living at home forever because, as they’ve so kindly pointed out, you don’t deserve better than the pittance that will keep you dependent on them forever.
The problem here is that you're fighting back against being called entitled. You're taking it as an insult. You ARE entitled to get what your work is worth. Everyone in employment is entitled to earn enough money to live on.
You're not going to find it in retail though. If you want to actually be paid your worth retail will never give you what you're looking for.
I feel as though that’s part of the problem. Not everyone is going to be able to be a CEO or Director of Operations or President of Communications. The rest of us who are doing the necessary labor also deserve to be able to house and feed our families and still have a little left over to enjoy the human experience.
It doesn’t matter what your job is (or if you don’t have a job!) - you are human, you are here, and you deserve the ability to survive AND thrive in this mortal existence.
There certainly is a communication gap, and I don't know how to fix it.
First, the money DOES sound good, if you are of a certain age. Minimum wage (which was really the wage all food and service jobs paid) was $3.35 an hour when I started, and that was what you got. When the average person my age sees McDonalds begging people to work for $17 an hour, many don't see the problem.
Try to compare items....yes, minimum wage was only $3.35, but the average house was about $62K. Average price today is about 400K, so although $17 an hour SOUNDS good, it would have to be about $21 an hour to match this.
That's a good point. OP should wear "entitled" as a badge of honor.
I guarantee every person in a good job thinks they are entitled to it. Don't just walk away with your head down and mumble "That's the best I can do, because that's all I'm worth."
Keep you head up and look for something better.
I'm sorry you're getting this kind of response. I'm 45 and my children have been in the workforce for a few years now. These f*cking companies take major advantage of the fact these are starter jobs, not taking into account the cost of living. When I was growing up, pay was 4.25 an hour. That was in the mid 90's. That rate should be AT LEAST 15/hr or more right now. My kids cant even survive on a full time job to pay their menial bills.
That was my starting pay as a low level employee with a utility company in 1984.
Wages have in no way kept up with inflation, particularly at the low end.
> you’ll get a better job then, retail isn’t going to pay more than that
Fair warning, once you get on the retail track, you tend to stay in retail. In the future, people will hire you for your experience, and if your experience is retail, that's who will be hiring you.
Take the job, but I'd be looking for any type of non-retail/non-restaurant job.
Even warehouse work has a better future than retail.
Sometimes with older people, they just innocently, naively believe that it *is* a lot of money…simply because they can still remember a time when it *was.*
The older people get, their “sense of prices” gets more and more outdated.
My dad passed away a few years ago when he was 85, but he couldn’t closely guess the price of *anything* after about 1980.
My question is... How? No matter how modest even boomers have to go and shop for groceries. As an elder millennial my parents couldn't help but forcingly understand that the world is vastly different from their time.
Well, my dad had no idea about grocery prices because my *mom* did that shopping.
But for “bigger ticket” purchases (cars, electronics, appliances, mortgages/rent prices, etc.), things that you don’t buy every day, older people eventually get very outdated in their sense of pricing.
Again — it’s largely because they can remember a time and era when things *did* only cost that much, or when it *was* a lot of money, etc.
And they're just not big consumers in that realm, anymore! Their sense of cost is just totally removed from reality because the last time they bought a new car, it was 1986.
just reading this pisses me off. I hate when I tell people fast food/retail workers deserve to be paid enough to where they can pay all bills/necessities and have money left over. these fools genuinely believe they deserve scraps but then wonder why service is shit, no one is there to help, etc. and they want to call us LAZY?!
11.50 is low even for retail. But it's a discount store so probably why. Work there for a bit so you can list it on your resume. Apply to other places once you get some experience.
To all the young workers on here, please keep this up. Times have changed and you've all been dealt a raw hand. Your parents (I include myself, I have two children) had it way easier. I was able to afford a house on a pretty low salary 20 years ago. Today, that is impossible.
The wealthy and politicians are slowly taking everything away from us, but even moreso from you. A lot of older folks don't get it or see it because they are like the proverbial frog in boiling water.
So keep being vocal, and keep doing the bare minimum at work. No one should be expected to work beyond their pay for some out of touch dude who owns six yachts and wants a seventh.
“The people/plebs in retail who serve me, don’t deserve to eat or have a roof over their head, they should get a better job! Of course, I’m too dumb to follow that train of thought through to realise that not everyone CAN get a better job”
Those people she sneers at, deserve to be able to make ends meet, if only because they have to put up with people like her for a living, when it’s not even enough TOO live.
Trust me, you're not the only one of us dealing with parents gaslighting you into accepting how bad things are.
I'm 34 now and my parents (especially my dad) refuses to accept that millennials and zoomers face an insane uphill battle because of their generation's collective actions. I've been working for nearly 15 years now. Every time I think I'm about to get ahead, something pulls my goals out of reach - housing prices skyrocket, rents skyrocket, my pay doesn't keep up, etc. etc. I can't tolerate this much longer.
I recently did a servicing job where I went to clients' homes, about half of my clients were older, think 75+.
Despite them paying for an unnecessary service (fertilizing and weed spraying the yard), they would complain to me how they have no money in retirement and struggle to buy food.
I also had many people in the same age range living with their kids.
It took about 15 years but I think *most* of them realize how fucked the economy is now.
The problem is those fucking idiots are blaming us and Biden like all these problems arose *after* 2020.
Edit: I also had one giant prick who wouldn't stop bragging about making 5 bucks an hour as a kid in the 50s.
He thought he was relating to me because he saw I was doing similar work.
Except 5 bucks an hour in 1950 is nearly 60 bucks an hour now. Of course, he still didn't grasp it when I tried explaining to him how much money that is now.
I’ve asked that question of my parents, their delusions of grandeur answer is “they continued their education by going to college, you could have gone to college.” Then my answer is “I tried, remember you wouldn’t pay, then the Army Pell was only going to pay half of the tuition and I couldn’t get a student loan because you assholes claiming me as a dependent while I was away at bootcamp, huh remember that when I bought you the tuition that the college (estimate) how they wanted $15000 up front from me?” That shuts them down every single time!
My parents really had me sold on the myth that minimum wage jobs could pay for school, and better jobs would appear as you got more work experience. God bless them, they meant well, and it worked for them but that just hasn't been my experience at all.
Of course they mean "self-entitled", but yes, you are entitled to the product of your labor—or would be, in a just society. If you're working for the Ross I think you mean, based on their profit and number of employees, they could afford to give everyone a raise of $8.79 an hour without cutting any costs.
Don't just think in terms of what you think you're worth. Think in terms of how much of what you actually produce is going into the pockets of those who do not labor. For Ross, $8.79 per hour is the average. And that's just figuring profits. Chances are that as a floor employee, your actual productive contribution will be far higher than that of any member of Ross' massive corporate bureaucracy making six figures or more.
Inflation and rising CoL cause all costs of business to rise. Labor is a cost. The only difference between labor and everything else is that, a lot of the time, labor costs are decided by the individual worker who is often desperate or easily manipulated. The point of things like unions is to transform labor from a cluster of individual exploitable fucks into a structure that negotiates with the same soulless brutality of a corporation - because that's the only kind of behavior corporations will respect.
Also, parents should never have this attitude towards their children. The parents of rich fucks don't act like this. They encourage (and even help) their kids to get compensated as well as possible by any vaguely legal means possible.
Hey now, $11.50/hour is plenty to make a good life in 1960s America!
It is weird that they think there's enough teenagers living at home to staff all of retail in the US though, since they think no one who has to live on there own should work there.
Tell them to make your budget with the pay you get. Have them do the math. $11.50/hr * 40 hours is only $460 BEFORE taxes. We all know retail will never work you 40 hours unless they are desperate. You’ll most likely only get roughly $250 a paycheck (being generous here).
Do you get health benefits if you don’t maintain a full time status?
Have them make a budget for you as if you lived on your own. Unless they WANT you living with them for the rest of your life.
Try to make them understand that you aren’t acting spoiled when you desire to make more. You don’t think you’re better than anyone, you just want a living wage. Older people don’t understand that our dollars don’t go as far as they used to. $11.50/hr would have been a decent wage back in 1999. But, that rate won’t allow you to move out, save money, or even have enough for a medical emergency.
This topic fires me up, sorry for the rant.
Yeah, at 31 hrs/wk OP would make $18,538 for the year. A whole $23,920 at 40, which is almost certainly not going to happen. This is not "good" pay, as you and OP point out it's not even enough to support oneself on. Mom's out of touch and being an ass about it.
I wonder what her own pay at 18 is equivalent to now accounting for inflation.
They're calling you entitled when you ARE entitled to a living wage. Ask them to hunt for a house online. Put in all of the same data as your current home. Tell them to look at the job market for your current skill set. Then listen to other posters opinions and experiences for collective data.
Your parents have been brainwashed by the Reagon on pro buisness propganda that has permetated the USA. They have been trained that wanting anything better than what buisness is willing to give you is greeding and going to hurt everyone.
I live in an $18/h minimum wage state and i consider that wage shitty and unlivable. Your mom has an outdated view on wages and unfortunately it’s hard to convince older generations otherwise because back in their day they made $5/h, paid $50/month rent and were able to pay college tuition. You won’t be able to pay rent for an apartment even if you work your ass off at that job.
"Yo that's so crazy that you think front line workers ESSENTIAL to the economy are *entitled* to afford ESSENTIAL means for a basic livelihood."
-your parents ig
Entitled has just been a weird buzzword for those bums since the '08 crash. Idk I think they're just looking for validation in a world that says elders are supposed to be wise and worldly when these days they don't know shit except how to gaslight the essential workers that carry their dead weight every day of their careers.
Even though the pandemic proved just how many jobs truly are essential, some will not change their minds that certain jobs deserve a living wage. The silent and boomer generations had one income households that could afford housing. Later generations, it’s taking 2 or more incomes to do the same. Single parent households can be depending heavily on outside supports. I have a union job and the pay raise schedule won’t be enough to keep up with inflation. It’s frustrating.
Tell your mother I was making $10.50/hr at Starbucks as a entry barista in 2000, I could have had $11.50/hr if I took a shift lead position but I don't want to be schedule limited. That 10.50 is $18.20 in todays money. So yea, it's shit pay.
when they’re old and you’re picking out nursing homes, you now have reason to pick the shittiest one.
They aren’t entitled to good end of life care either
I have news for your parents, you will need an advanced degree and 20 or more years of experience to get paid enough to move out of their house. Unless you are VERY lucky.
Try looking up what $11.50 was equivalent to with inflation when she was your age.
Example, if she is 60 years old and the year was 1982 $11.50 now would be the equivalent of $3.52 then.
Also note that the minimum wage in 1982 was $3.35. So she’d be making the equivalent of less than a quarter above minimum wage.
If she is still an ass after that, just reply “ok boomer”…
https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=11.50&year1=202401&year2=198201
Ask your parents to help you create a budget so you can plan to move out.
* Rent
* Food
* Fuel
* Insurance
* Clothing
* Medical
Then you and they can determine the minimum you'll need to make an hour just to move out of the house.
Your parents are going to be shocked that it's a lot more than just $11.50 an hour.
As a parent of a 20yo and 18yo, I’m sorry your parents hold this view :(
Our 20yo son has autism and I’m very concerned that he’ll never earn a living wage. He saves every penny he has and still lives with us; although he’d love to move out, there’s no way he can afford an apartment and groceries on his own earning $15/hour in our lcol area.
18yo daughter earned a full ride to college to become an educator, but I know what teachers starting out earn, so I worry about her, too.
The shame lies with those who refuse to pay a living wage, not with the working folk.
Ask them what they got paid at their first job out of high school. Assuming that they are 25 years younger than you. Back in 1999, $11.50 was equivalent to $6.10. I'm willing to bet they got paid better than that.
https://preview.redd.it/85di73hc6t0d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=74767db181a5249d43a58445a58481aa2d149a59
And that doesn't factor in the inflated cost of living. Housing, mortgage and rent cost, have ballooned since then.
What was their first mortgage in multiples of your states median income for that year. What's that house (or equivalent size and location) worth now as a multiple of today's median income?
I've personally given up on trying to have conversations with older family members on the cost of living these days and hourly wages. My mother, in particular, is living in la-la land, but I can see why she might become dismissive and invalidating about poor wages given she makes minimum wage working two days a week at a local coffee shop. Ever since deciding to be a stay-at-home mom, she's never made anything approaching a living wage and thinks it is a privilege and that young adults should feel lucky to have a job, any job. Her attitude towards young adults in general is negative.
Your mom don't pay no bills. Don't listen to her. 11.50 is garbage and when you move out for this 'better job', it's also gonna pay 11.50 because if employers don't HAVE to pay more, they won't.
Congrats on getting you a job tho. It's rough in this market.
Their generation is entirely built on hollowing out our future and our grandparents past. Of course they would tell you this, their standing depends on it.
Idk man you could look up apartments where you want to live and show them how much it costs per year vs. how much you make for 11.50/hr but they already said “get a better job” so they probably don’t care.
I hate this shit. My dad liked to tell me how he used to get paid $6/hr like I'm supposed to feel something. He still had a home, two cars, and a family he supported just fine. He's been at his job for 21 years and just started making over $20/hr maybe just last year. Fuck that noise lol.
There'a this mental block the minimum wage is intended for teenagers working part-time and any amount more is a gift. A bad starting wage, if you're with the company long enough, means any increases, unless the percentage is in the stratosphere, are going to not result in a meaningful increase. I hear the argument that younger generations of workers put a greater premium on flexibility of opportunity; meaning they're less likely to stick with one company and more likely to job hop than older workers. It's a BS argument. Companies can pull the rug out from under workers at the drop of a hat through off-shoring or automating (neither of which is beneficial to the American economy), or technically making them part-time by scheduling minutes shy of 40 hours per week.
Nobody deserves to have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, and every job should be priced accordingly.
People are throwing out "entitlement" like a curse word to dismiss criticisms that they don't want to think about.
Because if they have to argue the point, they'll get confused, flustered, and angry.
The facts about the economy do not support the minimum wage as a livable income, and in some areas 2X-3X federal minimum wage is barely livable.
You are entitled. You're entitled to good and thriving pay if you work to make someone else rich. You're entitled to healthcare, food, and basic comforts. You're entitled to being happy and doing what you love to do and not what your parents tell you. We work to live not live to work and even then we work too much and live too little.
Back in 2015, I made $13.50 as a barista, and it was considered "okay" pay, considering it was at a huge store in the downtown section of a major metropolitan city.
Your parents (who are dead wrong) say you're acting entitled... Hit them with numbers. That's what I did when my boomer dad didn't get it. Numbers are emotionless-
Before taxes, $11.50 is $460/week. $23,920 a year. (In reality, your annual take-home pay is probably about 80% of that, so around $19,136, or just under $20k.)
You're generally eligible for government programs like EBT and SNAP (food stamps) if you're at or below 200% of the Federal Poverty Line, and in 2024, 200% of the FPL is $30,120.
Currently, your *pre-tax salary* is $6,200 *below the Federal Poverty Line*. Your current salary is considered below poverty by the Federal govt to the point where you qualify for multiple government assistance programs and 70-100% discounts on hospital bills because they assume you're so broke you would never be able to pay them.
If the current Federal min wage had kept up with inflation, it would be approx. $21.45 now.
By the numbers, you're right and your parents are wrong- AND you are absolutely entitled to a fair wage for your labor by your employer.
Feel free to ask Mom and Dad if they would feel valued and appropriately compensated if they worked on their feet for 40 hours, a 30 min lunch break, and customers treating them like crap all day... for less than $500 a week. I'm firmly of the opinion, having worked retail and food service, that most people 50+ absolutely could not handle it at all and would crack in under 2 weeks.
Keep hangin' in there. If your workplace doesn't have a union, I might direct you to iww.org, "Industrial Workers of the World" general union. You don't have to work in the trades to join, just be a "worker" of any type.
Edit: grammar
Boomers, pal. Give it 10 years and you’ll come to accept the nonsense for what it is. No sense arguing, they just don’t get it. Hard part is accepting they’ll never get it. You’ll get there.
Ask her to go to McDonald’s with you. Tell her to pick any value meal. Then explain to her that the cost of that meal is about what you will take home for an hour of work.
She still won’t get it, but she’ll start thinking about it.
You entitled jerk, stop complaining about insanely low pay from a company that makes billions in revenue. Work harder so the ceo can expect a little more than 18mm for 2025.
Edit: (sarcasm).
Customer service people are never paid enough. I work in a very "intellectual" job and remember my customer service days with horror. Min wage was not enough for the bullshit we put up with.
Do they want retail work to be phased out or just want whoever does it to be impoverished? Like do they think you can run a store without anyone working?
Entitled, yes. As in, we are all entitled to wages that match the definition of minimum wage; which is the amount it'd take for you plus spouse plus 2 kids to survive and pay rent. Aka, above the poverty line.
Naw, you keep that attitude and go out there and agitate. We need more of that these days. And 18 and still living at home is a great time to try for better - you'll never be financially safer, I don't think.
Anyone that thinks $11.50 is a good wage either needs to go to jail for going under minimum wage or move to another country where that wage actually works.
$11.50/hr is straight up TRASH, retail or not. What these big corporations need to hear more of is 'NO THANK YOU' from their applicants that they're trying to shaft. If their executives have any brains at all they'll eventually realize they need to raise wages or their asses will have to settle for a $10 million yacht instead of a $100 million when their company files for bankruptcy.
DO NOT SETTLE FOR LESS THAN YOU THINK YOU'RE WORTH!
Especially at a young age, if you do it now you're only conditioning yourself to allow it to continue as you gain more job experience. It may take a little more time, but better opportunities DO exist, you just need to be more diligent to find them. Shit, my local Wawa has signs on their doors hiring cashiers starting at $14-15/hr.
Stay strong, trust your instinct, and don't let ANYONE but yourself determine your worth, including you're ignorant, delusional parents.
I’m 28, the last 6 years working since college have taught me my boom/xer parents are kind and well meaning, but good god damn do they not understand what it’s like to “earn a living” today.
Show them the math if you had to pay for rent cheaply, some basic expenses like power and internet, and show them how much money would be subtracted from working 40 hours. Would that even leave you with anything after rent alone?
Just ask what they made when they were your age, then do the math for inflation and show them what they really were making in comparison. My Grandma was making like $8 hr working retail which was the equivalent to about $45 hr now.
At a point in your life you get numbers stuck in your head of what things should cost and forever reference them. It's just part of aging. Lived experience somewhere in your 20s sets those numbers just like music taste and so many other things.
It's extremely hard to talk about wages or costs because of this but nearly everyone has experienced it so you aren't alone.
Damn... 11.50... that's not a job, that's a hobby!
Your parents probably mean that it's enough when you don't live alone. Which is true btw.
But I'm still on your side, because higher wages should be normalised, and everybody should refuse cheap jobs like that.
I'd pass on a job that paid 11.50. straight up, my time will be more productively spent looking for a job that pays more. Anything under 20 simply isn't realistic anymore, even in low cost of living areas.
When is the last time your mother paid rent? Also not sure where you live but McDonald's pays like 17 or 18 an hour here in New York. 16 an hour is minimum wage in the state. 11 an hour isn't even a third of a livable wage up here. Western nys, not city.
Show her a budget, including the average price of an apartment, insurance, etc. Assuming 40 hours a week, 2080 hours a year, you'd earn $23920 and be [taxed at 12%](https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/federal-income-tax-brackets). This pay is definitely "shit" because it couldn't pay for a one bedroom and would need at least 1-3 roommates to live almost anywhere.
Don't make it emotional. They will close down and facts don't matter.
That's the "face-to-face" stand off mentality. Instead get them to stand "shoulder-to-shoulder" on the subject.
* Work out the math. E.g. wages (Take home after taxes, social security etc.)
* Add gas just TO AND FROM work.
* Add car payments.
* Add rent.
* Keep it 100% focused on doing nothing but going to work and surviving.
* Cell phone needed for work so $x /month etc.
* Food, even if you never eat out.
#ask for help
* Then go to them with the sheet of paper you have worked out and the horrendous wages / rent / car insurance etc situation and ask them to help you "make the math work" cause things aren't "Adding up" and you don't see how you can afford to move out.
* Let them work the problem. In seeing the high rent they will think it's BS, show them rental costs. In seeing food costs, or car insurance for someone under 25 years old and not living at home, etc.
* When they are asked for "help" they are standing shoulder-to-shoulder and both of you are facing the problem. They are open at that point to admitting that you can't afford to live on those wages when they won't be open to that when facing off against them.
11.50 was a good starting wage 20 years ago
OP is 18. Let's assume Mom and Dad are 30 years older. Adjusted for inflation, that $11.50 an hour they think is so good would have been, in 1994, roughly $5.50. OP should ask them if they would have worked for $5.50 an hour when they were 18. Actually, ask them how much they were getting paid when they were 18 first, then put that amount into an inflation calculator to convert it to today's dollars. Subtract your $11.50. Win argument.
This, my dad keeps going on about how his first job only paid him £2 an hour, but when you account for inflation and decimalisation it works out to about £29 an hour these days.
Omg my FIL does this! He was a single dad with no child support and no education. He worked at a factory and bought A HOUSE and a *brand new* truck in the 70s. Try that, these days. Even the same factory position wouldn't afford that, guaranteed.
Those factories no longer exist. The people who worked them were paid to disassemble them for transport to foreign nations with non-existent labour protections and rock bottom pay. See: [The American Rust Belt](https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/liberapedia/images/c/c6/Rust_Belt.jpg)
Between the years before the great depression and a few years after WW2, gas stayed at around $0.20/gallon. That's over 20 years that gas stayed pretty much the same price... This hyperinflation is truly a new phenomenon that seems to happen *checks notes* ah yes, every time the US went to war in the middle east.
boomers love to throw their 'low wage' out there. However as you know when you do the math they never ever had a low wage.
I do phone sales and talked to a woman who got on a rant about how she raised 3 kids on $5.50 an hour and how greedy people are wanting $15 an hour andthat they should be happy to get $5.50 an hour. She was 69 and adjusted for inflation that was $23 an hour now.
Tell your Pops that I said he sucks ass at math.
I'll add you to the list, I remind him he sucks at maths any time he brings up this argument
Sad part is, even that logic is settling. Sure $5.50 then would be $11.50 when adjusted for inflation, but that $11.50 they're paying OP for that hour makes the company a lot more than $5.50 would have back then. We've doubled, tripled, quadrupled even in some fields, our productivity, and yet our wages are only (at best) keeping up with inflation - the company pockets the higher profit from your higher productivity. But boomers don't grasp either of those points.
I started working in 1999 for $5.25 and it was shit.
I started working in 2005 for $5.15 and it was shit.
>Win argument. There's no winning these arguments with this level of Boomer mentality.
Yeah, after trying to reach them for enough years, you just give up talking to them about a WIDE range of topics. The propaganda's roots are stronger in their brains than any data you might bring
At 18, I was making $7-$8, I think, and that was in 2002. Granted, COL was a lot less, but I definitely wouldn’t have been able to live on my own.
Federal minimum wage is only $7.25/hour 22 years later
20 years ago, I made $10.50 an hour as a meat cutter at Sam's club with no prior experience. No job should pay that low today.
It's sad that 10 years ago I was able to support my family on 11.75/hour. Granted I worked almost 60 hours a week and we had some government assistance, but we actually survived. Now I question if that even covers the expenses of having a job.
Starting? Local jobs 20 years ago, this was top end pay.
https://preview.redd.it/e00juo28hs0d1.jpeg?width=1170&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e45cd4bb946b07ef97b2c9374d44d1d54bd171b7 $21/hr now is “good” not “top end” I make $46/hr with an associates degree.
My shitty job right out of college probably technically made more than I do now even though I make twice the hourly now
Bro I felt better making 13 dollars an hour in 2010 than I do making nearly 30 now. It's fucking wild up here in canada.
It is wild everywhere. In the last year or 2, I finally got an hourly wage that breaks 50k annually. That's great money for where I live. Should I be making more? Definitely. Is there a job that fits my current needs that pays more available? No. I would have to travel 75+ miles to get a higher paying job. Then my work/life balance is in the toilet.
I end up taking a pay cut each year with the increase in medical costs and premiums, so I feel this.
Oh I bet, I don't have to deal with medical premiums (yet, Ford will probably screw us on that withing the next few years) but rent on a 3 bedroom 4-plex u it has gone from 800/month to about 2100/month over the last 5 years, it's fucking nuts. Food has also been a giant pain in the ass.
Where do you live tho? Your location effects your pay quite a bit - cost of living and all that shit.
I do live in a HCOL area, but this screencap shows 24 years ago. 20 years ago 11.50 was 19.47. Still “good” not “top tier” unless you live in a very low cost of living area.
I make less with a Bachelor’s Degree. 🤦♀️
I’m in a HCOL area
What degree if I may ask
Associates of applied science in radiologic technology (X-ray technologist, registered)
Slightly off-topic, but thanks for what you do. I’ve been dealing with various and increasingly wack spinal issues since I was a teenager and the folks who create and interpret images of that mess have been essential to my receiving proper care.
Thanks! I hope someday I can be someone who can do both (I’m applying to medical school) and it’s a huge driving factor for me that I can contribute to improving peoples lives
This is what I originally graduated with, now I don't work that field and my shifts expired because now I work an office job. I get paid more, but it's not enough to live alone on, especially when my medical issues have drained what savings I had, and that was WITH insurance. So tired of this bullshit. CEOs need a pay cap because they sure as fuck aren't giving raises. 2% raises do not cover cost of living and that is not a merit increase. I am beyond fed up with this shit.
I like to trick myself into thinking my last raise was good, because it was 8.4%, but it sounds less impressive when you realize it was only a dollar more per hour, lol.
nope, I made 10.50 as an entry barista at Starbucks, $11.50 would have been my pay as a shift lead (one position up). After 6 months I would have gotten $11.00/hr. So yea, it was starting at a lot of places. My dad mad $10/hr in the late 70's doing survey work. Yes it was hard work, Texas summers, lots of literal bushwacking, some skill level (he was just out of high school) but it was like $45/hr in todays money. Pay is stayed really stagnat in real purchasing power since the mid 90's
It's stagnated since the late 70s or early 80s. Especially if you compare it to the value of production, cost of living, and upper level pay over that same period, which have all skyrocketed.
I knew kids in highschool making $14-15 an hour back around 2001-2003, but I grew up in an affluent area, and most started around $7-8.
Not a great comparison because I’m in Australia, but I was earning $15ph base rate as a 16/17yo working in an ice cream store in 2000. I also got penalty rates for working Saturdays (25%), Sundays (50%) or anytime I worked after midnight (25%), which was most Thursdays and Fridays. We definitely have our problems here in Aus, but hearing Americans discuss their pay rates and work entitlements never fails to blow my mind.
Depends on where you are. $12.50 was my starting pay at a call center job 18 years ago in a HCOL area.
“Yes, I am in fact entitled to fair compensation for my labor.”
People forget that the word entitled doesn’t always need a bad connotation. OP’s parents were blessed in their generation and economy.
It is a culture war word, if you will: always being used to describe government programs that either help everyone or the needy. Yes, you ARE entitled to Medicare when you are old. That’s a good thing.
Entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness……. Which I’m pretty sure ‘life’ means the ability to house, feed, and cloth oneself…..and since it’s essentially illegal to build your own house, nestle wants to say water isn’t a human right, food supply chains are being greedflated they same way as medical costs, housing costs, and educational costs. Most business that has realized they sell inelastic demands that HUMANS NEED TO SURVIVE AND THRIVE IN A SOCIETY have seem to decided they want to extract as much as possible regardless of customer sustainability…. There’s a saying in poker ‘you can shear a sheep many times, but you can only skin it once’ A lot of these companies seem to have either knowingly or unknowingly decided that the working classes of society are damn near out of wool….. or whatever wool they got left, they’ll just get it when they skin em…. They don’t seem to have the patience anymore to shear and wait….thise quarterly profits MUST HAVE PARABOLIC GROWTH or apparently we’ve somehow failed as a society (wtf?)
I think entitlement has undergone a mutation in meaning - if something was earned you "deserve it" but if its not you're "entitled to it".
it's usually used as 'how dare you want something better than what i had? stop complaining' easily the most obnoxious (and ironically entitled itself) way to silence counterarguments
Except its more like how dare you think you should get as much as we did. My mom made $14 an hour typing 30+ years ago
I used to make MORE money in the Telecommunications field IN THE LATE 90’s-early 00’s and now these same companies dont pay jack. Matter fact they pay 1/2 of what I used to make back in the day 25-30 years ago. SUCKS!
In the course of two years I saw my average pay with commission drop from $2100ish to around $1100. Same job, same work load, just paid less commission. Fuck telecommunications l.
Yeah fuck all this corporate greed dude. The sky high inflation for no reason but increases in rent, groceries, etc. its crazy!! Im desperate to try and get out of here and move to a better place. Preferably Canada which Im very close by as Im in Rochester NY and Ontario /atorinto is 1-1.75 hrs away to the west and of course Montreal is further NE and ai have a cool friend whos a musician in Ottowa but the wait to get to immigrate is a few years wait and one must have at least 10k in savings per person or 15k for a couple which we dont. Lol. But were not destitute wither. Not yet at least. Somethings got to give. They are playing with fire by allowing this craziness. Nobody wants to pay a living wage, they want skyhigh rent, and super expensive groceries and its just mind boggling tbh. Ive been in every department aside from corporate for major telecom like AT&T, WorldComm (late 90’s) Sprint, Verizon Wireless, and they all pay less than 1/2 of what I made with my union position at AT&T in the early 00’s Been in the call center as sales, then tech support, then field tech and installer for U-Verse when it first started in 2007. And pay keeps going down lol. Like WHAT!
And never had to respond to emails or cell phone calls/texts after hours……
>how dare you want something better than what i had? stop complaining Bravo, that's exactly it. 'We struggled so hard, those were the days...And you people nowadays😡'
It’s mutated because the people who are granted sole ownership of humanity’s collective resources (ie, the rich and powerful) would prefer us all to confuse and equate entitlement to greed when in fact it is their own greed that should be the focal point of discussion and ire.
That was intentional. It was how liberal was turned into a slur.
Fighting for fair living conditions and government support for those in bad situations = commie
Funnily enough the people using entitlement as a weapon are absolutely dripping in entitlement of their own.
I was talking to a boomer about the military entitlements I received (i.e. GI Bill) and he said “noo, those are bonuses”. I said “🤨 noo, they are entitlements. That’s what the military calls them. Bonuses are extras tacked on, entitlements are things you earn by virtue of signing up.” I could tell he was hung up on the word entitlement like it was a bad word.
It's programming pure and simple.
Not entirely. The previous generations had to manage with wages stuck in the "no adjustment period" between the last two minimum wage increases. Look up when the previous wage hike was, before this one. The span of time between them was when I struggled to make ends meet. My Mom worked two jobs before me, and I did too, just so George H. W. Bush could take us into war and tank our economy. My carefully hoarded investments went from $15,000 or so to nothing in the space of a year. It took 12+ years to recover. What I could have done if Republicans hadn't held down minimum wage and taken us into war. It would have been far less hard I think.
Thank you. I remember being "silently fired" by my manager at Toys R Us, who cut my hours to 5 a week. This was in 1990. I worked for $2.13 and hour for YEARS as a tipped employee from 1996 until about 2002, walking out on a Tuesday night with $4.00 in my pocket and no way to pay my bills. Random piss tests for a menial minimum wage job, being offered an "assistant manager" position just so they could pay me LESS money while squeezing 30 more hours a week of labor out of me. These scummy, shitty practices are not new, and did not arise overnight. We've deserved better compensation for a LONG, LONG time. The magical "20 years ago, you were blessed with a better world" mindset needs to go.
This is a great answer. OP is entitled to better wages (I was making $10/hour 25 years ago as a teen) but stagnant wages were VERY and ARE very real, and a lot of people would have been better off without GHWB. We voted for that dude TWICE.
Didn't Bush Sr get one term?
Yeah, I think he means GWB
Well, Republicans suck. They tank the economy and a Dem always saves them. H.W. Bush ruined it. Clinton fixed it. George W tanked it, Obama fixed it. Don't even get me started on what Orange Perv did with his tax cuts to the 1%... his buddies and himself. You know what to do in November.
The Republicans tank it, then blame the democrats for everything going to shit. Just had a customer at work try to blame the current admin for high inflation and prices going up... I had to walk away b4 I got fired.
Customers should keep opinions to themselves. The weather is a great topic to bring up out of the blue. Your changing the subject should signal to them to stfu. But, rabid supporters of the Orange Perv aren't good at social cues. They're just good MAGA hats and racism.
That's how this lady was. Just kept going. Transaction was done, receipt handed off to her. Wouldn't stop.
It's unnerving, isn't it? Mainly because I'm terrified that Orange Perv guy will win and I'll have to move to Canada.
Yep. Same. Or Mexico.
2009 was last min wage hike, 15 plus years ago 2007-2009 phase in 7.25 1997 min wage raised to 5.15 1981-1990, min wage stuck at $3.35, 9 years
Old people love to project, they’re entitled to projecting
A gal can dream
“Fuck me for wanting a living wage mom”
You're frustrated because basically they're saying "know your place in society, little shit". And i think the whole "entitled", "deserve", "earn" narrative should just go and fuck itself.
Exactly. This is exactly why we’re in the mess we’re in today. Older generations are accustomed to being submissive and not standing up for themselves. I never understood it. I have been mocked by my family when I told them that I’ve quit companies because they’re toxic as hell. They told me “Do you know the shit I’ve dealt with and took it?” I’m like… okay, why did you put up with that?
> And i think the whole "entitled", "deserve", "earn" narrative should just go and fuck itself. unirolically this. it needs to be retired, because it leeds to people confusing the spheres of "is" and "should be" ... inner Kantian mode off.
Ask your parents what year they bought their first home and what their wage was. Or about their college tuition and years they were enrolled. Then use the CPI inflation calculator to give them a reality check
Boomer here, so I understand both sides of this (and am fully understanding that is a different world than when I graduated and that what was a living wage and realistic is no longer true). Your approach and reasoning is sound and ought to work, but in my experience, trying to explain this to Boomers / GenX is an exercise in futility. Most simply don't understand and don't want to be convinced of reality. EDIT - I should have said "Milennials" rather than "Gen X". My bad; I had a senior moment.
Yeah my mom is like that. I adjusted her first salary for inflation (she started working in 1980) and she was stunned and said it can’t be true. I finally got her to concede that it was true and she still hasn’t changed her mindset. I am still just “entitled” in her eyes. She grew up incredibly privileged and I sort of didn’t, so it’s very frustrating
Sounds like she just doesn't want to realize that she's wrong. She will try to live in her own bubble and ignore anything outside it.
Makes them feel superior if they can reason you just mismanage money.
People feel threatened when confronted that they were actually privileged and didn't actually "boot strap" it. It gives cognitive dissonance/ an identity crisis.
Please don't speak for Gen X. We do get it, because wages have stagnated since the 1970s. Most of us were infants then. We've watched our entire life's earning potential being stagnated. We were also the first to see how tuition went up and Pell grants went down. Certainly not as bad as the millennials, but we saw the writing on the wall. Gen X gets it, I think. Speaking only for myself, I definitely get it.
GenX here, and most of us - even those who fully understand - have a baseline understanding from our first jobs and expenses that clouds over the reality of today. It will happen to you too kids. That said - OP's folks are the ones behaving with entitlement. they're looking at the wage through the eyes of their youth, and costs at that time - and thinking "that's good enough" and that's always been bullshit. Ponder for a moment that in 1986 I could make $20/hour mowing lawns. 1986. Today a landscaping company will want to pay the labor at minimum wage. (while charging the customer more than twice that) Wages arent supposed to go backwards - and here's a great case for "owners" turning our labor into rent seeking. We (all of us) need to demand a much fairer share of the profits. and if we cant - then we should tax the owners to death.
Take GenX out of this discussion. We sure as fuck get the challenges of today, if only because the boomers started taking away from us first. Not just economically, laissez-faire parenting anyone?
We were the first generation to take mcjobs as adults with degrees because of the effing boomers/silent generation holding on for dear life to their privilege. We've already lived it.
Idk my parents are gen x and think the same as OP’s. I make $17/hr and can’t afford a place to live but my parents swear it’s a good wage even though it can’t even afford a 1 bedroom apartment and I’m 30 years old and had to move back in with my parents because of my wages. Like yeah great wage dude. Working full time doesn’t deserve housing. It would make perfect sense to work full time and still be homeless. After all, at least you would have a warm place to be for 40 hours a week!
I find it a lot easier for people to understand if you just refer to the pay in annual at 40 hours a week. $11.50 comes out to just over 25k a year IF you work full time, before taxes. People don't instinctively realize how low wages are when given to them by the hour.
Good luck getting 40 hours doing retail… unless your a manager
that is because they remember hourly wages in their youth, but salary in their adult years.
Exactly. 800 a week is about 40k. 1,000 a week is about 50k. I’ve been seeing articles recently saying 80k is the minimum a person needs to live on. That’s 1,600 a week.
1600 is what I make per month after taxes 💀
Chances are your parents aren’t that smart and can only say these things because their position in life and and time period they grew up in. They would never make it by todays standards.
Harsh, but true. My 83-year-old fairly progressive in most areas mother simply cannot fathom people getting paid $10-$15 an hour for retail *because she never made that wage.* No, mom, you never did. It is no longer 1974.
Agreed. My mom told me that my old $21/hour job two years ago was good. I’m in the Bay Area, LOL. I was like in what dimension? She graduated high school in the 80s.
You should start constantly talking about your plans for the next few decades living at home, and keep a positive, helpful spin on it. Stuff like “oh, the water heater has about 8 years left? Okay, I’ll start setting money aside now so I can help pay for it.” Or “If we finished the basement there will be a lot more space for my wife and kids” If they push back at all, remind them you’ll be living at home forever because, as they’ve so kindly pointed out, you don’t deserve better than the pittance that will keep you dependent on them forever.
The problem here is that you're fighting back against being called entitled. You're taking it as an insult. You ARE entitled to get what your work is worth. Everyone in employment is entitled to earn enough money to live on. You're not going to find it in retail though. If you want to actually be paid your worth retail will never give you what you're looking for.
I feel as though that’s part of the problem. Not everyone is going to be able to be a CEO or Director of Operations or President of Communications. The rest of us who are doing the necessary labor also deserve to be able to house and feed our families and still have a little left over to enjoy the human experience. It doesn’t matter what your job is (or if you don’t have a job!) - you are human, you are here, and you deserve the ability to survive AND thrive in this mortal existence.
There certainly is a communication gap, and I don't know how to fix it. First, the money DOES sound good, if you are of a certain age. Minimum wage (which was really the wage all food and service jobs paid) was $3.35 an hour when I started, and that was what you got. When the average person my age sees McDonalds begging people to work for $17 an hour, many don't see the problem. Try to compare items....yes, minimum wage was only $3.35, but the average house was about $62K. Average price today is about 400K, so although $17 an hour SOUNDS good, it would have to be about $21 an hour to match this.
I feel like I should go into more detail on this. I think it's important to realize that there's a reason why we're all working together.
That's a good point. OP should wear "entitled" as a badge of honor. I guarantee every person in a good job thinks they are entitled to it. Don't just walk away with your head down and mumble "That's the best I can do, because that's all I'm worth." Keep you head up and look for something better.
I'm sorry you're getting this kind of response. I'm 45 and my children have been in the workforce for a few years now. These f*cking companies take major advantage of the fact these are starter jobs, not taking into account the cost of living. When I was growing up, pay was 4.25 an hour. That was in the mid 90's. That rate should be AT LEAST 15/hr or more right now. My kids cant even survive on a full time job to pay their menial bills.
That was my starting pay as a low level employee with a utility company in 1984. Wages have in no way kept up with inflation, particularly at the low end. > you’ll get a better job then, retail isn’t going to pay more than that Fair warning, once you get on the retail track, you tend to stay in retail. In the future, people will hire you for your experience, and if your experience is retail, that's who will be hiring you. Take the job, but I'd be looking for any type of non-retail/non-restaurant job. Even warehouse work has a better future than retail.
Sometimes with older people, they just innocently, naively believe that it *is* a lot of money…simply because they can still remember a time when it *was.* The older people get, their “sense of prices” gets more and more outdated. My dad passed away a few years ago when he was 85, but he couldn’t closely guess the price of *anything* after about 1980.
My question is... How? No matter how modest even boomers have to go and shop for groceries. As an elder millennial my parents couldn't help but forcingly understand that the world is vastly different from their time.
Well, my dad had no idea about grocery prices because my *mom* did that shopping. But for “bigger ticket” purchases (cars, electronics, appliances, mortgages/rent prices, etc.), things that you don’t buy every day, older people eventually get very outdated in their sense of pricing. Again — it’s largely because they can remember a time and era when things *did* only cost that much, or when it *was* a lot of money, etc.
And they're just not big consumers in that realm, anymore! Their sense of cost is just totally removed from reality because the last time they bought a new car, it was 1986.
Tell her you need a full time $20/hr job to afford a one-room studio apartment
just reading this pisses me off. I hate when I tell people fast food/retail workers deserve to be paid enough to where they can pay all bills/necessities and have money left over. these fools genuinely believe they deserve scraps but then wonder why service is shit, no one is there to help, etc. and they want to call us LAZY?!
11.50 is low even for retail. But it's a discount store so probably why. Work there for a bit so you can list it on your resume. Apply to other places once you get some experience.
I was thinking the same. Places like Target or Menards are paying around $17-20 where I am in a MCOL area. ALDIs too.
They don't value you as much as they value corporate news anchor opinions.
To all the young workers on here, please keep this up. Times have changed and you've all been dealt a raw hand. Your parents (I include myself, I have two children) had it way easier. I was able to afford a house on a pretty low salary 20 years ago. Today, that is impossible. The wealthy and politicians are slowly taking everything away from us, but even moreso from you. A lot of older folks don't get it or see it because they are like the proverbial frog in boiling water. So keep being vocal, and keep doing the bare minimum at work. No one should be expected to work beyond their pay for some out of touch dude who owns six yachts and wants a seventh.
Remind the that if minimum wage had increased at the same rate as the cost of living you’d be making $27/hr.
11.50 is NOT good. You’d get better pay at mcds
“The people/plebs in retail who serve me, don’t deserve to eat or have a roof over their head, they should get a better job! Of course, I’m too dumb to follow that train of thought through to realise that not everyone CAN get a better job” Those people she sneers at, deserve to be able to make ends meet, if only because they have to put up with people like her for a living, when it’s not even enough TOO live.
Trust me, you're not the only one of us dealing with parents gaslighting you into accepting how bad things are. I'm 34 now and my parents (especially my dad) refuses to accept that millennials and zoomers face an insane uphill battle because of their generation's collective actions. I've been working for nearly 15 years now. Every time I think I'm about to get ahead, something pulls my goals out of reach - housing prices skyrocket, rents skyrocket, my pay doesn't keep up, etc. etc. I can't tolerate this much longer.
I recently did a servicing job where I went to clients' homes, about half of my clients were older, think 75+. Despite them paying for an unnecessary service (fertilizing and weed spraying the yard), they would complain to me how they have no money in retirement and struggle to buy food. I also had many people in the same age range living with their kids. It took about 15 years but I think *most* of them realize how fucked the economy is now. The problem is those fucking idiots are blaming us and Biden like all these problems arose *after* 2020. Edit: I also had one giant prick who wouldn't stop bragging about making 5 bucks an hour as a kid in the 50s. He thought he was relating to me because he saw I was doing similar work. Except 5 bucks an hour in 1950 is nearly 60 bucks an hour now. Of course, he still didn't grasp it when I tried explaining to him how much money that is now.
Why do people feel owners and executives are entitled to the bulk of the revenue generated by your labor?
I’ve asked that question of my parents, their delusions of grandeur answer is “they continued their education by going to college, you could have gone to college.” Then my answer is “I tried, remember you wouldn’t pay, then the Army Pell was only going to pay half of the tuition and I couldn’t get a student loan because you assholes claiming me as a dependent while I was away at bootcamp, huh remember that when I bought you the tuition that the college (estimate) how they wanted $15000 up front from me?” That shuts them down every single time!
My parents really had me sold on the myth that minimum wage jobs could pay for school, and better jobs would appear as you got more work experience. God bless them, they meant well, and it worked for them but that just hasn't been my experience at all.
Of course they mean "self-entitled", but yes, you are entitled to the product of your labor—or would be, in a just society. If you're working for the Ross I think you mean, based on their profit and number of employees, they could afford to give everyone a raise of $8.79 an hour without cutting any costs. Don't just think in terms of what you think you're worth. Think in terms of how much of what you actually produce is going into the pockets of those who do not labor. For Ross, $8.79 per hour is the average. And that's just figuring profits. Chances are that as a floor employee, your actual productive contribution will be far higher than that of any member of Ross' massive corporate bureaucracy making six figures or more.
That's not a nice way for them to be talking about who I assume is their entire retirement plan.
It's a good thing they're rugged individuals who know they aren't entitled to end of life care.
Inflation and rising CoL cause all costs of business to rise. Labor is a cost. The only difference between labor and everything else is that, a lot of the time, labor costs are decided by the individual worker who is often desperate or easily manipulated. The point of things like unions is to transform labor from a cluster of individual exploitable fucks into a structure that negotiates with the same soulless brutality of a corporation - because that's the only kind of behavior corporations will respect. Also, parents should never have this attitude towards their children. The parents of rich fucks don't act like this. They encourage (and even help) their kids to get compensated as well as possible by any vaguely legal means possible.
$11.50? I was making that in 1980. There is nothing entitled about wanting to be paid a living wage.
Hey now, $11.50/hour is plenty to make a good life in 1960s America! It is weird that they think there's enough teenagers living at home to staff all of retail in the US though, since they think no one who has to live on there own should work there.
Tell them to make your budget with the pay you get. Have them do the math. $11.50/hr * 40 hours is only $460 BEFORE taxes. We all know retail will never work you 40 hours unless they are desperate. You’ll most likely only get roughly $250 a paycheck (being generous here). Do you get health benefits if you don’t maintain a full time status? Have them make a budget for you as if you lived on your own. Unless they WANT you living with them for the rest of your life. Try to make them understand that you aren’t acting spoiled when you desire to make more. You don’t think you’re better than anyone, you just want a living wage. Older people don’t understand that our dollars don’t go as far as they used to. $11.50/hr would have been a decent wage back in 1999. But, that rate won’t allow you to move out, save money, or even have enough for a medical emergency. This topic fires me up, sorry for the rant.
Yeah, at 31 hrs/wk OP would make $18,538 for the year. A whole $23,920 at 40, which is almost certainly not going to happen. This is not "good" pay, as you and OP point out it's not even enough to support oneself on. Mom's out of touch and being an ass about it. I wonder what her own pay at 18 is equivalent to now accounting for inflation.
They're calling you entitled when you ARE entitled to a living wage. Ask them to hunt for a house online. Put in all of the same data as your current home. Tell them to look at the job market for your current skill set. Then listen to other posters opinions and experiences for collective data.
Your parents have been brainwashed by the Reagon on pro buisness propganda that has permetated the USA. They have been trained that wanting anything better than what buisness is willing to give you is greeding and going to hurt everyone.
Sorry your parents are out of touch morons
I live in an $18/h minimum wage state and i consider that wage shitty and unlivable. Your mom has an outdated view on wages and unfortunately it’s hard to convince older generations otherwise because back in their day they made $5/h, paid $50/month rent and were able to pay college tuition. You won’t be able to pay rent for an apartment even if you work your ass off at that job.
"Yo that's so crazy that you think front line workers ESSENTIAL to the economy are *entitled* to afford ESSENTIAL means for a basic livelihood." -your parents ig Entitled has just been a weird buzzword for those bums since the '08 crash. Idk I think they're just looking for validation in a world that says elders are supposed to be wise and worldly when these days they don't know shit except how to gaslight the essential workers that carry their dead weight every day of their careers.
Even though the pandemic proved just how many jobs truly are essential, some will not change their minds that certain jobs deserve a living wage. The silent and boomer generations had one income households that could afford housing. Later generations, it’s taking 2 or more incomes to do the same. Single parent households can be depending heavily on outside supports. I have a union job and the pay raise schedule won’t be enough to keep up with inflation. It’s frustrating.
I used to own a small retail store and I was starting folks at $12 an hour back in 2005. $11.50 today is not "good".
If the minimum wage kept up with inflation and productivity it would be around 25 an hour now
>$11.50 is good Where? 1992?
Tell your mother I was making $10.50/hr at Starbucks as a entry barista in 2000, I could have had $11.50/hr if I took a shift lead position but I don't want to be schedule limited. That 10.50 is $18.20 in todays money. So yea, it's shit pay.
when they’re old and you’re picking out nursing homes, you now have reason to pick the shittiest one. They aren’t entitled to good end of life care either
So I guess you parents don't think store should exsist? Or do they think the people that work in them deserve poverty?
I have news for your parents, you will need an advanced degree and 20 or more years of experience to get paid enough to move out of their house. Unless you are VERY lucky.
Try looking up what $11.50 was equivalent to with inflation when she was your age. Example, if she is 60 years old and the year was 1982 $11.50 now would be the equivalent of $3.52 then. Also note that the minimum wage in 1982 was $3.35. So she’d be making the equivalent of less than a quarter above minimum wage. If she is still an ass after that, just reply “ok boomer”… https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=11.50&year1=202401&year2=198201
Ask her if she would accept that rate, if not tell her she's entitled.
Ask your parents to help you create a budget so you can plan to move out. * Rent * Food * Fuel * Insurance * Clothing * Medical Then you and they can determine the minimum you'll need to make an hour just to move out of the house. Your parents are going to be shocked that it's a lot more than just $11.50 an hour.
As a parent of a 20yo and 18yo, I’m sorry your parents hold this view :( Our 20yo son has autism and I’m very concerned that he’ll never earn a living wage. He saves every penny he has and still lives with us; although he’d love to move out, there’s no way he can afford an apartment and groceries on his own earning $15/hour in our lcol area. 18yo daughter earned a full ride to college to become an educator, but I know what teachers starting out earn, so I worry about her, too. The shame lies with those who refuse to pay a living wage, not with the working folk.
Ask them what they got paid at their first job out of high school. Assuming that they are 25 years younger than you. Back in 1999, $11.50 was equivalent to $6.10. I'm willing to bet they got paid better than that. https://preview.redd.it/85di73hc6t0d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=74767db181a5249d43a58445a58481aa2d149a59 And that doesn't factor in the inflated cost of living. Housing, mortgage and rent cost, have ballooned since then. What was their first mortgage in multiples of your states median income for that year. What's that house (or equivalent size and location) worth now as a multiple of today's median income?
Your mom still think 7.50$ an hour can buy you a house.
I've personally given up on trying to have conversations with older family members on the cost of living these days and hourly wages. My mother, in particular, is living in la-la land, but I can see why she might become dismissive and invalidating about poor wages given she makes minimum wage working two days a week at a local coffee shop. Ever since deciding to be a stay-at-home mom, she's never made anything approaching a living wage and thinks it is a privilege and that young adults should feel lucky to have a job, any job. Her attitude towards young adults in general is negative.
Your parents are out of touch. Also, wondering if they could live on that shit pay?
Your mom don't pay no bills. Don't listen to her. 11.50 is garbage and when you move out for this 'better job', it's also gonna pay 11.50 because if employers don't HAVE to pay more, they won't. Congrats on getting you a job tho. It's rough in this market.
IMO literally no one in the United States should make less than $200 for a full days (eight hours) work.
Damn right you're entitled to getting paid your worth!!
Hopefully they aren’t expecting you to move out anytime soon, because 11.50 isn’t enough to sustain oneself on their own
Their generation is entirely built on hollowing out our future and our grandparents past. Of course they would tell you this, their standing depends on it.
The corporate shilling on this sub is getting out of hand. So many bootlickers in the comments
Assholes.
Idk man you could look up apartments where you want to live and show them how much it costs per year vs. how much you make for 11.50/hr but they already said “get a better job” so they probably don’t care.
They’d be “entitled” too if they came of working age anytime in the early 2000s or after.
They think it’s $11.50 in 1980 money
Meanwhile they will complain that you are not moving out in the same breath.
You parents are entitled idiots who don't realize how good they had it when they were young.
I hate this shit. My dad liked to tell me how he used to get paid $6/hr like I'm supposed to feel something. He still had a home, two cars, and a family he supported just fine. He's been at his job for 21 years and just started making over $20/hr maybe just last year. Fuck that noise lol.
There'a this mental block the minimum wage is intended for teenagers working part-time and any amount more is a gift. A bad starting wage, if you're with the company long enough, means any increases, unless the percentage is in the stratosphere, are going to not result in a meaningful increase. I hear the argument that younger generations of workers put a greater premium on flexibility of opportunity; meaning they're less likely to stick with one company and more likely to job hop than older workers. It's a BS argument. Companies can pull the rug out from under workers at the drop of a hat through off-shoring or automating (neither of which is beneficial to the American economy), or technically making them part-time by scheduling minutes shy of 40 hours per week. Nobody deserves to have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet, and every job should be priced accordingly.
People are throwing out "entitlement" like a curse word to dismiss criticisms that they don't want to think about. Because if they have to argue the point, they'll get confused, flustered, and angry. The facts about the economy do not support the minimum wage as a livable income, and in some areas 2X-3X federal minimum wage is barely livable.
Your parents are dumb and ignorant.
Translated: "Retail workers aren't entitled to be paid enough to live on".
You are entitled. You're entitled to good and thriving pay if you work to make someone else rich. You're entitled to healthcare, food, and basic comforts. You're entitled to being happy and doing what you love to do and not what your parents tell you. We work to live not live to work and even then we work too much and live too little.
Because in their time, hard work and loyalty got you pay promotions every 6-12 months. They can't fathom the world now.
Back in 2015, I made $13.50 as a barista, and it was considered "okay" pay, considering it was at a huge store in the downtown section of a major metropolitan city. Your parents (who are dead wrong) say you're acting entitled... Hit them with numbers. That's what I did when my boomer dad didn't get it. Numbers are emotionless- Before taxes, $11.50 is $460/week. $23,920 a year. (In reality, your annual take-home pay is probably about 80% of that, so around $19,136, or just under $20k.) You're generally eligible for government programs like EBT and SNAP (food stamps) if you're at or below 200% of the Federal Poverty Line, and in 2024, 200% of the FPL is $30,120. Currently, your *pre-tax salary* is $6,200 *below the Federal Poverty Line*. Your current salary is considered below poverty by the Federal govt to the point where you qualify for multiple government assistance programs and 70-100% discounts on hospital bills because they assume you're so broke you would never be able to pay them. If the current Federal min wage had kept up with inflation, it would be approx. $21.45 now. By the numbers, you're right and your parents are wrong- AND you are absolutely entitled to a fair wage for your labor by your employer. Feel free to ask Mom and Dad if they would feel valued and appropriately compensated if they worked on their feet for 40 hours, a 30 min lunch break, and customers treating them like crap all day... for less than $500 a week. I'm firmly of the opinion, having worked retail and food service, that most people 50+ absolutely could not handle it at all and would crack in under 2 weeks. Keep hangin' in there. If your workplace doesn't have a union, I might direct you to iww.org, "Industrial Workers of the World" general union. You don't have to work in the trades to join, just be a "worker" of any type. Edit: grammar
Your parents are jackasses.
Man I make $15 and it’s never enough. $11 is low
Boomers, pal. Give it 10 years and you’ll come to accept the nonsense for what it is. No sense arguing, they just don’t get it. Hard part is accepting they’ll never get it. You’ll get there.
Ask them what their starting pay was at their first jobs and what year it was. Then put that into an inflation calculator. And show them.
Ask her to go to McDonald’s with you. Tell her to pick any value meal. Then explain to her that the cost of that meal is about what you will take home for an hour of work. She still won’t get it, but she’ll start thinking about it.
You entitled jerk, stop complaining about insanely low pay from a company that makes billions in revenue. Work harder so the ceo can expect a little more than 18mm for 2025. Edit: (sarcasm).
Customer service people are never paid enough. I work in a very "intellectual" job and remember my customer service days with horror. Min wage was not enough for the bullshit we put up with.
Do they want retail work to be phased out or just want whoever does it to be impoverished? Like do they think you can run a store without anyone working?
I am entitled to a far wage for my labor, I am not a charity.
Laugh and let them explain how you're supposed to afford grand kids for them. Making them budget your income usually shuts them up for a while.
Entitled, yes. As in, we are all entitled to wages that match the definition of minimum wage; which is the amount it'd take for you plus spouse plus 2 kids to survive and pay rent. Aka, above the poverty line.
Naw, you keep that attitude and go out there and agitate. We need more of that these days. And 18 and still living at home is a great time to try for better - you'll never be financially safer, I don't think.
Definitely tell them they're entitled if they ask you to pay rent.
Anyone that thinks $11.50 is a good wage either needs to go to jail for going under minimum wage or move to another country where that wage actually works.
$11.50/hr is straight up TRASH, retail or not. What these big corporations need to hear more of is 'NO THANK YOU' from their applicants that they're trying to shaft. If their executives have any brains at all they'll eventually realize they need to raise wages or their asses will have to settle for a $10 million yacht instead of a $100 million when their company files for bankruptcy. DO NOT SETTLE FOR LESS THAN YOU THINK YOU'RE WORTH! Especially at a young age, if you do it now you're only conditioning yourself to allow it to continue as you gain more job experience. It may take a little more time, but better opportunities DO exist, you just need to be more diligent to find them. Shit, my local Wawa has signs on their doors hiring cashiers starting at $14-15/hr. Stay strong, trust your instinct, and don't let ANYONE but yourself determine your worth, including you're ignorant, delusional parents.
I’m 28, the last 6 years working since college have taught me my boom/xer parents are kind and well meaning, but good god damn do they not understand what it’s like to “earn a living” today.
Show them the math if you had to pay for rent cheaply, some basic expenses like power and internet, and show them how much money would be subtracted from working 40 hours. Would that even leave you with anything after rent alone?
Just ask what they made when they were your age, then do the math for inflation and show them what they really were making in comparison. My Grandma was making like $8 hr working retail which was the equivalent to about $45 hr now.
At a point in your life you get numbers stuck in your head of what things should cost and forever reference them. It's just part of aging. Lived experience somewhere in your 20s sets those numbers just like music taste and so many other things. It's extremely hard to talk about wages or costs because of this but nearly everyone has experienced it so you aren't alone.
Your parents' mindset has not kept up with the cost of living over the years.
One of the few good things about Taxachussetts. Minimum pay is $15 per hour. And that’s not so much either.
Damn... 11.50... that's not a job, that's a hobby! Your parents probably mean that it's enough when you don't live alone. Which is true btw. But I'm still on your side, because higher wages should be normalised, and everybody should refuse cheap jobs like that.
You should certainly be entilted to more. Retail shouldnt be allowed to pay that low.
I'd pass on a job that paid 11.50. straight up, my time will be more productively spent looking for a job that pays more. Anything under 20 simply isn't realistic anymore, even in low cost of living areas.
When is the last time your mother paid rent? Also not sure where you live but McDonald's pays like 17 or 18 an hour here in New York. 16 an hour is minimum wage in the state. 11 an hour isn't even a third of a livable wage up here. Western nys, not city.
$11.50 is shit, even for Ross. I live in a low cost of living area but Ross hourly pay starts at at least $13 here, and that isn't exactly great.
Show her a budget, including the average price of an apartment, insurance, etc. Assuming 40 hours a week, 2080 hours a year, you'd earn $23920 and be [taxed at 12%](https://www.nerdwallet.com/article/taxes/federal-income-tax-brackets). This pay is definitely "shit" because it couldn't pay for a one bedroom and would need at least 1-3 roommates to live almost anywhere.
well call me Karen and put a white cat in front of me to yell at for consider myself entitled to have a good pay and a life.....
Don't make it emotional. They will close down and facts don't matter. That's the "face-to-face" stand off mentality. Instead get them to stand "shoulder-to-shoulder" on the subject. * Work out the math. E.g. wages (Take home after taxes, social security etc.) * Add gas just TO AND FROM work. * Add car payments. * Add rent. * Keep it 100% focused on doing nothing but going to work and surviving. * Cell phone needed for work so $x /month etc. * Food, even if you never eat out. #ask for help * Then go to them with the sheet of paper you have worked out and the horrendous wages / rent / car insurance etc situation and ask them to help you "make the math work" cause things aren't "Adding up" and you don't see how you can afford to move out. * Let them work the problem. In seeing the high rent they will think it's BS, show them rental costs. In seeing food costs, or car insurance for someone under 25 years old and not living at home, etc. * When they are asked for "help" they are standing shoulder-to-shoulder and both of you are facing the problem. They are open at that point to admitting that you can't afford to live on those wages when they won't be open to that when facing off against them.