With the $1 -> $8 comment, I suspect he was being sarcastic about robots decreasing prices.


But a cheeseburger and a drink are each on the dollar menu, so you can get both for $2. That's more than the less than $1 from the early days of McDonalds, but there's probably some point in the intervening years where a cheeseburger and coke cost more than $2.

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I don't mean since 1940, I mean since the $15 minimum wage went into effect.

Obviously not sarcasm. The coke I once bought for a dime now cost over a dollar. That dime then is now called 90 cents. So the price of coke has increased (but not its cost).

That 63 cent Egg McMuffin is now called $3.10. So automation explains why Egg McMuffin prices have decreased.

When I was working for minimum wage in the early 1960s, that is about $13/hr today.

That is not the cheeseburger that was served back then. We are discussing retail prices - not the price of discounted loss leaders.

That's right. If you are going to use a burger as an economic index, you have to use the Big Mac.

It's also worth noting, however, that automation must occur in bulk offsite in order to be cost-effective, which has only been made possible by the advent of chemical preservatives. If those chemical preservatives were eliminated--either through official safety regulations or general customer refusal--much of the automation trend would grind to a halt, as it were.

What if I used a coup'n?

Use shillings. That is monopoly money. So it does not cost anything.

Nice.

In the paper, Amanda Y. Agan of Rutgers University and Michael D. Makowsky of Clemson University analyzed the effect of 200 state and federal minimum wage increases on 6 million people released from prison between 2000 and 2014. What they found was striking: Raising the minimum wage by $0.50 reduced the chance that a person would end up incarcerated within a year by 2.8 percent.
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/...divism/571948/

minimum ain't enough...

That clearly says nothing about inflation. All this was discussed previously:
Would someone give me the short version of this basic economics question?

If they had taken that $20 bill from 1998 and invested it instead of buying all that junk food, they might have been able to fill their cart now.

They'd be real skinny too. :rolleyes: