RyanAir Wants to Be Mean, and so Do Most Businesses

Recently, RyanAir CEO, Michael O’Leary, told investors that he wanted his employees to be nicer to customers. It seems that RyanAir employees were getting a nasty reputation for bad hospitality, which one would expect when they are rewarded for being painstakingly aggressive on charging fees to customers. “If it’s a millimeter over size, just get over it,” O’Leary told investors at RyanAir’s annual meeting. “We are not trying to penalize people for the sake of a millimeter.” Unsaid is what they would want employees to do if luggage was over size two millimeters.

Occasionally, CEOs will make an announcement acknowledging some sort of fault of the company, usually a negative effect of a strategic vision. They pledge to change the direction of the company, but they never do. Why? Because the fault is usually a negative effect of a successful strategic vision. Jamie Dimon can pledge that J.P. Morgan will have more oversight of trading, but even when they lose $6 billion on a single trade, they earned $97 billion in revenues last year. To change their aggressive profiteering behavior would require they change their philosophy, and there’s obviously nothing wrong with that.

And so it is in this case. RyanAir’s reputation is built on cheap upfront airfare packaged offset with cost-manufacturing fees. Customers are well-versed in this revenue structure, and if they truly didn’t like it, they would fly with other airlines. But they don’t. Last year, RyanAir flew more international routes than any other airline. Whatever they are doing is working.

“And as a final point to our Sith investors, huuh-huuh, I think we should be nicer to Jedis, huuh-huuh. Just checking, are there members of the press here to record this, huuh-huuh?”

Despite what O’Leary says, RyanAir will not be any more hospitable. “Nice” is a great marketing strategy, but a terrible business strategy. Thousands of business pitch their prospective customers on how easy they are to work with or how helpful they are, but few companies ever made money on actually doing it. That’s because consumers are a blood-thirsty lot who will try to extract every nickel out of a business, and while nice businesses may not be any more gullible, they certainly aren’t as painful for penny-pinching customers to bleed dry.

That’s why TimmyCo will be instituting two customer service plans. For a small fee of $5, customers can speak to a “nice and helpful-ish” customer service agent. If that fee seems excessive, they may still talk to a customer service agent for free, but that one will be “rude and less helpful-ish.” Our expectation is that most people will opt for rude in order to save a few bucks.

So, if RyanAir doesn’t plan on being nicer, why would O’Leary tell everyone they would be? “It takes a mean CEO to run a mean company,” a spokesperson for TimmyCo stated, “and what do mean CEOs do? They lie. Mean CEOs are never sorry.”

* help ful – ish (adj.) – possessing the appearance of being helpful without actually being helpful

 

Those you can trust:

RyanAir is the rare company where employees can punish customers. Usually, it’s the other way around.

Michael O’Leary is one of our favorite CEOs. We’d ask for an autograph, but even we’re afraid of what he would charge us.

Those you cannot trust:

What nice gets you: Most people consider REI to be a “nice” company. As a nice company, they would take back lifetime returns on faulty merchandise. Seems that customers abused that policy, and now it is just a one-year policy.

Information Wants to Be Free…Or at Least Free-ish

Recently, Londoners passing by a number of area trash cans were greeted by advertisements specifically tailored to them. It seems these trash cans were reading the cookies from pedestrians’ smart phones and then running ads that might appeal to them. It came as no surprise that this created quite the uproar. One could imagine the indignation of each Brit as they exclaimed, “Ads targeted at me! Ah, well blimey! I’d much rather see the same ad that everyone else sees.”

The owner of the ad agency, Renew, could only be described as truculent on the matter when he said, “We will cookie the street.” But the city government was more reticent. They demanded Renew stop tracking passers-by.

Privacy advocates claimed victory, but the fault in Renew’s plan wasn’t in the idea, but in the execution.

As the internet has taught us, people are more than happy to give companies their data for free so that they can be targeted with advertisements. They just want something in return. Google has become one of the world’s richest companies on the back of all the free data users just hand over to them, inspiring thousands of other websites to imitate the free-for-data model.

How does Google do it? By developing products that people want to use, and then in its carnival barker huckster way, saying, “Looky, looky here! Free stuff! This email program will allow you to store as many emails as you want. And this storage system will let you store your file online and share it with other users. But wait, there’s more! You search for a place you want to go on the internet, and we link it to a map, and then you can see the actual street it’s located on. Not a map of the street. The actual street! Isn’t that convenient? Isn’t that wonderful? And he best part is that, for all of these great products and many, many more, you don’t have to pay a dime. [And then out of the side of its mouth] You just need to give us your data.” But Google products are generally so good, people don’t mind that they’re not actually free, but ‘free-ish.’

Now, what was Renew giving to potential consumers? Just a spot to dump their soily, greasy, stinky trash. But users were already getting that for free, and if there is one truism of business that shall not be violated, it is that people absolutely loathe to pay for something that they’re used to getting for free. That’s essentially the problem here.

Rubbish Bin 9000: Just what to you think you are doing, Dave?
Dave: I’m throwing out this plastic bottle.
Rubbish Bin 9000: Very well, but first you must watch this ad from Pepsi.

At TimmyCo, we have all sorts of ideas of how to turn the London rubbish bins into marketing machines. In our first model, affectionately titled, Model #1, entertainment will drive marketing. This is much akin to the strategy Youtube used pre-Google. First, we install little cameras to analyze what the user just disposed of, then trigger a sound system to play a sound effect or a song in response. Throw out a McDonald’s bag and a consumer might hear a sound effect sponsored by the fast food chain, “McRib, Chomp!” or “Doo-doo-da-da-dooo, I’m loving it.” McDonald’s could also benefit from marketing to potential consumers. Let’s say someone throws out some vegetable rinds, the trash can could say, “Blech!” And since everyone knows that vegetables are yucky and McDonald’s is delicious, we don’t see any scenario where that person won’t realize their food choice error and makes some hasty tracks to the nearest McDonald’s. More cutting edge trash cans could show entertaining videos featuring the products of the sponsors, or if there are no entertaining videos, then a video featuring a cat riding a Roomba. While each user has stopped for entertainment, we plan to siphon data off their smart phone and match it up with their trash to further target market to them in the future. In Model #1, we foresee that people will make a conscious choice to throw their trash away at one our exclusive TimmyCo ad cans for the sheer entertainment value. Hmm…then again, considering how well this strategy has worked for most internet advertisers on content-oriented sites, it sure does seem like a lot of work for what could be just a little payoff.

So instead, maybe we should just do Model #2, which is what Google is currently doing with Youtube. Want to throw away your trash? Well, watch a targeted ad first. The trash can will only accept trash after you have finished watching the advertisement. Sure, people complained when it happened on Youtube, but that hasn’t stopped them from watching videos.

“So, perhaps Renew’s strategy didn’t fail because they didn’t give away something awesome for free-ish,” a spokesperson for TimmyCo stated, “but that Renew didn’t give away something for free, take it back, and then offer it back to you for free-ish. Ooh, that Google is just so smart.”

Those You Can Trust:

No one. Except Stacy, who tipped this story to us.

The Villain Gets Away: The Story of “Fabulous Fab” Tourre

Last week, the SEC managed to prosecute “Fabulous” Fabrice Tourre for defrauding investors, marking the first trial of anyone associated with one of the big investment banks for their contributions to the mortgage crisis five years ago. To the millions of Americans who lost their houses or jobs because of the financial meltdown, the trial seemed like a let down. Someone had to pay for the outright villainy of the investment banks, didn’t they? But it wasn’t Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. It wasn’t Lehman Brothers head Richard Fuld. It wasn’t anyone on the investment banks’ boards. Nope, it was Tourre. A trader. A midlevel trader.

Anyone who has seen a superhero movie knows how this goes. Villain concocts evil plan, usually to steal lots of money; villain dispatches his/her henchmen to do dastardly acts to execute said evil plan; rather than go straight to foiling villain, superhero slowly works his/her way through a series of increasingly competent henchmen, uncovering clues along the way that reveal the evil plan, until…superhero foils villain. This progression is tactically important as it justifies a ninety-minute run-time for a movie.

The government’s prosecution of Fabulous Fab essentially follows this plan. He is a medium-strength henchman one might see towards the thirty-minute mark of the summer blockbuster. He’s a little nasty, puts up enough of a fight to get the hero sweaty, and then says something pithy before being dispatched in some entertaining way. Now that the SEC has used its mighty lawyer-power to defeat Tourre, taxpayers might expect a bigger fight. Perhaps a manager who ordered his or her subordinates to dump these toxic securities on unsuspecting investors? Perhaps a junior partner who gave permission for traders to save the firm’s bottom line at the expense of their customers’ best interests? Ah, but that will not happen.

Henchmen: But why go after us when the evil CEOs are stealing way more money?
Superboy: Ah, gee willikers, I don’t have that super-power.

Fortunately for us at TimmyCo Finance, we need not worry about Act II in this drama, for the hero in this case, the Federal Government, has to deal with a sinister force working on the side of unscrupulous profit-mongers – the statute of limitations. We are at about the five-year mark for which none of us can be prosecuted for our wrong-doing that sent the nation’s economy into the 2008 freefall. With no impending cases against us, it appears nothing can stop us from riding into the sunset with our big bags full of investor and taxpayer cash. Screen fades to black. Credits roll. Fin.

“It astounds us why any movie villain would even bother with laser cannons and freeze rays,” a spokesperson for TimmyCo stated. “They just need to run an investment bank. They’ll get away with the crime every time.”

 

Those You Should Not Trust:

As The Atlantic’s James Kwak reports, a CEO never has to tell their henchmen to do unscrupulous things. That could be subpoenaed. They just need to create a system that makes it really rewarding to do unscrupulous things. And now you know why we earn the big bonuses.

Why the LIBOR Scandal Wasn’t Really a Scandal

 

 

 

 

LIBOR is back in the news as it is now being controlled by the same company as the New York Stock Exchange. Many people have some vague memory of LIBOR from last summer. Wasn’t there a banking scandal or something? Oh, it was all too complicated.

The Facebook Page of the 1% takes us back to why we don’t remember the LIBOR scandal.

 

Those You Can Trust:

You know what else the American people don’t care about? Bangladesh.

U.S. Economy Creates 195,000 Jobs, Almost All of Them Crappy

The U.S. Labor Department announced that the economy created 195,000 jobs in June, almost all of them being crappy. Analysts spent Friday and the weekend declaring that while the creation of so many terrible jobs was possibly a sign that the economy was finally humming along, it was not yet proof that the American economy is healthy again. Next month, they are sure to say that the July job figures possibly show that the economy is humming along, signifying that this month’s signs were not signs at all.

Most of the jobs created were lousy. A ridiculous amount of them were part-time. They don’t include good benefits, they aren’t intellectually challenging, and most of them don’t actually require the education qualifications we demand for the positions. Moreover, they don’t pay the way jobs used to do before the recession. And that’s exactly the way we want it. The U.S. has one of the largest gaps between the rich and poor, and the corporatocracy intends to keep it that way.

In other news, long-term unemployed people might take this as a sign that companies are picking up hiring and that soon, even they might find a job. Unfortunately for them, there are plenty of newly fired people who will desperately take whatever we throw to them so that they will avoid becoming the long-term unemployed themselves. The long-term unemployed will just have to wait until the jobs we create are so wretched that even the short-term unemployed won’t want them.

Those you can trust:

Remember this graph? Still relevant.

It’s finally becoming cheaper to create jobs in the U.S. That’s because it’s so easy to create a third-world job here.

Part-time jobs offer businesses flexibility and save money! Yes, please. Follow our awesome hiring flowchart to see the benefits of hiring part-time workers.

Life is good for business owners. We create a job, get someone else to train them for us, then complain that we can’t find the qualified applicants who want to work for the awful pay we offer. Then who do people blame? Yep, the education system.

One of our favorite evil companies, Rand, did research where they found that employers didn’t really know what they were looking for in employees, and if given the choice, would select the ones who were unemployed the shortest amount. Oh wait, that wasn’t Rand. It was a researcher named Rand Ghayad. Oh well. Carry on.

Walmart Doesn’t Care About Bangladesh, and Neither Do Americans

The tragic collapse of the Rana Plaza clothing factory building in Bangladesh is the most tragic thing that has happened to Bengalis in the past few weeks, but not nearly as tragic as the gripping poverty that makes it so very easy for overseas firms to make clothing so cheaply there. Recently, a collection of large multinational retailers pledged to finance safety improvements at Bengali factories.

Walmart made news when they refused to sign this pledge. Instead, they said if they actually had any clothing made at this factory, which they didn’t, but if they did, in a strictly theoretical sense, they would ensure that it was a safe working environment, which they wouldn’t have to worry about in this case because they didn’t have any clothes made there, even though there appears to be good evidence that they did.

Americans: Ooh, this looks bad. Oh wait, I just got a text.

Like Walmart, TimmyCo outsources textile manufacturing to Bangladesh in order to sell clothing to American consumers for ridiculously low prices. And like Walmart, we will not sign a pledge to build factory improvements. Safety improvements cost money and once we pledge our support, we’re on the hook for those costs long after Americans stop caring about Bangladesh.

And Americans will stop caring about Bangladesh. They will. Right now, with all the controversy swirling around Bengali safety conditions, that doesn’t sound possible. But when a bigger news stories catches the fleeting attention span of your average Yahoo News! consumer, Bengali workers will resume their traditional place in Americans’ consciousness somewhere among the best mustache grooming kits to buy for the holidays and videos of dogs saying, “I love you.” Do we really want to keep paying for fire escapes and structural stability tests long after Americans stopped caring? Do we really want to pass these costs onto Americans by raising the price on our $9.99 jeans to $10.99? No way. Let the French companies, like Carrefour, shoulder that expense.

Hey wait, the last one is an American media source. It is NBC News, though, so Americans still won’t learn anything about Bangladesh.

Don’t believe us? A fire at the Tazreen Fashions factory killed 112 Bengalis in November. Did anything change after that? Obviously not. In April, an explosion at the Adair Grain fertilizer factory killed 14 Texans. That happened in America and Americans no longer care. Heck, three years ago, BP dominated the headlines with Deepwater Horizon for a much longer time than the Bengali factory collapse and just three years later, it is posting record profits.

“If anything, this is a sign of opportunity,” a spokesperson for TimmyCo stated. “All over Bangladesh, there are factories that aren’t collapsing, meaning that we could potentially remove safety improvements from those factories and turn those $9.99 jeans into $8.99 jeans. Now that’s something Americans will care about.”

Now, that’s something that will get Americans’ attention.

Those You Cannot Trust:

Do you think we should pay Bengali factory workers more? We’ll just find another country that is ready for us to abuse their cheap labor in the “T-Shirt” phase. Planet Money tells all.

The Institute of Global Labour and Human Rights told everyone to write to Walmart to treat Bengalis better all the way back in 2010. Don’t they know that the only way to get Americans to unite on any issue is to have them “like” it on Facebook? No wonder it didn’t work.

For All Your Evil Corporate Needs, TimmyCo Is Once Again Up to No Good

Loyal reader, we at TimmyCo must confess. You may have noticed a slight decrease in content over the past two months. It is perfectly acceptable if you had not been aware of this, as we believe only our most perceptive readers would’ve noticed the change in output at TimmyCo.com. We knew, and if TimmyCo is anything, we are at least honest. Today, we offer our explanation of our whereabouts the past two months.

Two months ago, the stock market was at record highs, the too-big-to-fail banks that triggered the economic meltdown five years back had grown larger than ever, and our fleet of sinister lobbyists had so completely hijacked all Congressional legislation that the government was now powerless to ever stop an evil company like TimmyCo. We admit that this should’ve been our crowing achievement. Evil had won. Good had failed. In fact, good had failed so miserably that none of the executives could foresee a future when good would ever win again. Instead of standing at the pinnacle, raising our fists in triumph, it was the edge of the abyss that caught our attention. Whispers brewed in the hallways of corporate headquarters, simmered in cubicles, and bubbled up until they spilled over into the boardrooms. “With evil being so easy to perpetrate, was it worth it anymore?”

Faced with an existential crisis that challenged our core mission, the board whisked the executive leadership to the TimmyCo Evil Lair on Pineapple Island. There we spent the last two months on extended corporate retreat, reassessing how TimmyCo could fit into a world so perfectly designed for an evil company like TimmyCo. TimmyCo management spent much time soul-searching while doing what we love: chartering fishing boats to reel in overfished stock, exploiting the local labor market for artificially cheap services, discarding plastic bags into the ocean to choke sea turtles, and depleting the island of its dwindling resources in order to furnish our nightly coconut feasts.

No trip to Pineapple Island is complete without a visit to our corporate moai.

The good news is that yes, we decided that we do want to continue doing evil. The bad news is that in this world where the ground is so adequately fertilized for the seeds of dastardly deeds, we are now faced with increased competition. Now every company thinks they can do evil.

Our tiki god promises an upcoming quarter full of surfers wiping out and tarantulas crawling up the chests of unsuspecting sleepers.

Rather than dissuade us, this fact has invigorated us. At no time in our recent history have we wanted to fire employees, rip-off customers, or steal government money more than we do right now. We make this commitment to ourselves and to you. The world may not need more evil, but evil is what we do best.

How Does a Politician Create a Job? Build Their State on Oil.

Politicians have all sorts of crackpot schemes to create jobs. All over the country, politicians are tossing the magic beans of tax breaks and cash giveaways, hoping to somehow grow a functioning job engine to employ their constituency. They all say that they are using these tactics to encourage job growth in an organic way, that these handouts will promote business expansion, the creation of jobs where no jobs existed before. Instead, this corporate welfare has only attracted the businesses of the lowest common denominator, the ones only interested in uprooting existing jobs from another state and taking state kickbacks to make them cheaper in another state.

What voters don’t know is that there is only two guaranteed ways to create jobs in the United States these days. The first is to create a government job. This is unfeasible in this political environment. The second is to find oil under your state.

The state with the lowest unemployment? North Dakota. How did the brilliant minds in this state manage to create enough jobs to drive unemployment down to 3.2%? Why, they found that by shooting water and chemicals into the ground, oil would come out.

Now, this can be a problem for an aspiring job-creator looking to create jobs in a state that is inconveniently located above the absence of oil. They need not worry anymore. TimmyCo has developed a new process to get oil out of the ground in oil-less states.

This process is a lot like fracking, but instead of fracturing the rock to extract the petroleum, we break the rock to put oil in the ground. We call it “frucking” and here’s how it works. We buy oil on the open market and truck it to a job-creator’s state. Then, using a device we call the Fruck Buddy 5000, we inject that oil into the ground. Then, we use fracking technology to break the bedrock again, freeing the oil so that it can be pumped back to the surface. The great thing about this process is that TimmyCo can create jobs in both placing (frucking) and removing (fracking) the oil. Double win for politicians and double win for TimmyCo. The losers are the rock and perhaps the environment, but we’re going need to wait for the results of studies to determine what is, if any, the environmental impact of frucking and fracking.

“Does that seem expensive?” a spokesperson for TimmyCo stated. “Texas spent $100,000 per job for Amazon warehouse employees. Georgia spent $200,000 per job on a Kia factory. Suddenly, frucking doesn’t seem so expensive.”

Things to think about:

• Politicians can’t create jobs.
• Politicians want to create jobs.
• Businesses can steal a lot of money from politicians in exchange for “creating jobs.”

Those You Can Trust:

As the sequester looms, notice how businesses will start pining that they “want a deal.” What the really want is the status quo…more government spending on them.

With all this money being doled out to businesses to create jobs, it might be cheaper to create a government job. “Oh no you don’t,” say deficit hawks. “That’s deficit spending.” Whereas government handouts to business is creationary!

There’s nothing a politician won’t do to create a job. There’s nothing a business won’t do to keep from creating that job.

Those You Cannot Trust:

The process of fracking is awesome! Did you know that we use a 40,000 gallon cocktail of 600 chemicals per fracking site to get you the petroproducts you love? That’s a lot of chemicals! What will oil companies think of next!

 

 

Don’t Name a Storm, Brand It!

Recently, a giant snowstorm barreled down on the East Coast. So remarkable was this storm that The Weather Channel christened it “Nemo,” making it the biggest non-hurricane to garner a name. Now with “Plato” brewing, it seems whether people like it or not, they’ll be forced to endure The Weather Channel’s ridiculous names for storms.

We applaud The Weather Channel for the foresight necessary to tag storms in the age of Twitter, where the meaninglessness can suddenly have a blink of meaning before falling back to meaninglessness again. It was a savvy play, but we would be remiss if we did not point out the glorious possibilities of the coming cash bonanza if The Weather Channel was then able to sell naming rights to the storm.

Naming rights? We know what you are thinking. What business would want to be associated with the destruction caused by a massive supercell? Certainly, Hurricane Skippy, sponsored by Gino’s Pizza Rolls would probably turn out terribly for hurricanes, Gino’s, and, if you’ve ever eaten a pizza roll, your stomach. Just like Frito Lay’s sponsorship of the Tostito’s Fiesta Bowl, there has to be a certain kismet to the storm and sponsor relationship.

Now, imagine this breaking news story…”Hurricane Skippy, sponsored by Eveready Batteries, is set to make landfall around 6:30 P.M., Wednesday. Skippy, sponsored by Eveready Batteries, is currently classified as a Category 1 storm, with wind gusts up to 90 miles per hour. Skippy, sponsored by Eveready Batteries, could bring with it storm surges up to five feet, knocking power out to communities along the coastline. Locals are flooding stores stocking up on provisions.” We’ll give you a good guess at one product consumers will be stocking up on.

The important thing about storm sponsorship is the build-up. After a storm, people are less likely to shop on brand and more likely to chase superficial attributes, such as whether a product is still in stock or if a business’s power is still on. There is no way a business can strategically manage which areas a storm will knock the power out for – believe us, we’ve tried. And even if your business happens to luck out and keep its doors open, there is such societal pressure not to gouge desperate customers that you hardly stand to profit for this bit of good fortune. That’s if a storm has the calamitous consequences that the hardcore stormographers on The Weather Channel foretell of.

The money is in the storm build-up. A good storm build-up can last for days, panicking people into last-minute trips to scavenge survival supplies for this year’s version of the storm of the century. And that’s where a well-placed storm sponsorship can fit in.

Which construction materials store will consumers scurry to when Hurricane Home Depot closes in? “More saving. More living.”

Will people stock up on a few extra canned goods when the clouds from Blizzard Del Monte roll over the horizon? “Before the lights go out, go to DelMonte.com to download recipes that taste just as good cold as they do hot.”

Or perhaps something more subtle? “Did you know birth rates rise nine months after a power outage? Lower the barometer, raise the temperature with Durex condoms, sponsors of the Durex Tropical Depression.”

Don’t get blown without Durex, sponsors of the Durex Tropical Depression.

The best thing is that even if the storm peters out in the midst of all the hype, the products have already been bought. One year later, when everyone has forgotten last year’s sponsored storm, the same sponsors can line up for naming rights once the barometers start whipping weather reporters into a froth.

“The contract could even be structured,” a spokesperson for TimmyCo stated, “so that the naming rights expire on arrival of the storm. That way, the brand is isolated from any unpleasant destruction that could happen after a major storm. Wait a second, this is actually a really good idea. Screw The Weather Channel, why don’t we just do this ourselves?”

Who Doesn’t Want a Hike in the Minimum Wage? [Consumers Raise Their Hands]

In his State of the Union speech, President Obama proposed raising the minimum wage to $9 an hour. Of course, Speaker of the House, John Boehner, wasted no time in blasting it as a job killer and a threat to the very existence of small business.

Smallbusiness, smallbusiness, smallbusiness…blah! If small businesses truly mattered, raising the minimum wage might affect them. But small businesses don’t matter. Most of them can barely be considered businesses because their earnings are such a pittance compared to the might of their multinational brethren. What’s more, small business owners work too closely to their employees; they are not yet powerful enough to remove themselves completely from their employees’ lives. They learn their names, they know their jobs, they actually seem to enjoy being around them.  To quote the great General Zod in Superman II, “He actually cares for these people.” At TimmyCo, we believe that’s what keeps the small business owners from becoming big business owners.

You know who this really affects? Big business. The WalMarts, McDonalds, and TimmyCos of the world are the ones employing the most minimum wage workers and our executives and shareholders are the ones who stand to lose the most from a pay hike.

There is little affection for corporate executives and shareholders, and if the debate pitted us against the needs of our exploited workforce, we’d lose the minimum wage battle every time. Yet if that was the case, the minimum wage would be soaring past a European-like $20 an hour.

That is because we have an accomplice more powerful than our employees are sympathetic: consumers. As mentioned in this article on Black Friday shopping habits, consumers are employees’ worst enemies, even when they are one in the same.

That’s right, once we hear the faint murmurs calling for a hike in the minimum wage, all us tycoons need do is take out our violin and play a sad song for consumers.

Oh, poor we. Oh, poor we.

The Federal Government’s giving it to me.

They say that there’s more that our employees are due,

So we ‘re passing the additional costs on to you.

And with that, the mighty gorgon of consumer outrage rises out of the inky black sea, drowning out any argument for a better wage for employees.

“If we’re really good,” a spokesperson for TimmyCo stated, “we can stir up enough consumer anger that employees actually beg us to keep the current minimum wage rather than lose hours or their job.”

Those you can trust: 

Must we repeat how much businesses hate to create jobs.

Those you cannot trust:

Why did we mention small business in the post? Because thanks to stories like this one, voters actually believe they are the ones hurt by a minimum wage hike. Sometimes, it’s just too easy.

A slight increase in pay will benefit the employee a lot and it won’t cost the consumer too much.