>You can make $11-$13 at what are considered bad jobs, like flipping pizzas at Little Caesars.

Holy moly! 11 whole dollars an hour!?

Okay, so we went from $4.25 to $11.00. That's a 159% change. Awesome!

Now, lets look at... School, perhaps? So I can maybe skill-up out of Little Caesars and start building a slightly more comfortable life.

Median in-state tuition in 1995: $2,681. Median in-state tuation in 2025: $11,610. Wait a second! That's a 333% change. Uh oh.

Should we do the same calculation with housing...? Sure, I love making myself more depressed. 1995: $114,600. 2025: $522,200. 356% change. Fuck.

Counterpoint: affording average rent for a 1-bedroom apartment (~$1,675) requires that exact median full-time wage. $15 an hour affords you about $740 for monthly housing expenses. One can suggest getting two roommates for a one-bedroom apartment, but they would be missing the fact that this is very unusual for the last century. It's more in line with housing economics from the early-to-mid 19th century.

In addition to the other comments, I presume the big box retailers do not hire for full-time positions when they don't have to, and gig economy work is rapidly replacing jobs that used to be minimum wage.

My uncle was running a number of fast food restaurants for a franchise owner making millions. His statement about this topic is simple, "they are not living wage jobs ... go into manufacturing if you want a living wage".

I don't like my uncle at all and find him and people like him to be terrible human beings.

in that case it should be completely uncontroversial to raise the minimum wage and help that .5% of labor out. yet somehow, it's a non-starter. (btw, googling says the number is more like 1.1%. in 1979, 13.4% of the labor force made minimum wage. this only shows how obsolete the current minimum wage level is).