Here's What the Owner of the Oldest Operating McDonald's Has to Say About Minimum Wage

[Machiavelli]

Adam Chandler
The Wire
September 4, 2014

Sixty-one years ago last month, the third-ever McDonald's opened in Downey, Calif., a suburb of Los Angeles and home to Apollo, the third-ever NASA manned spaceflight program. McDonald's went to 119 countries from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; Apollo went to the moon.

A man who witnessed much of this history is Ron Piazza, who owns the landmark McDonald's in Downey —the world's oldest-operating McDonald's— along with nine other golden-arched franchises in the area.

Piazza is something of a throwback. Plainspoken and serious, he is the type of business owner whose name and phone number are printed at the bottom of all the customer receipts...

"I started at a dollar an hour. Poverty is as severe as it was when I was making a dollar an hour. The minimum wage increase, frankly, hasn't reduced our poverty problem.

Do I think it’s fair that people live in poverty? Of course not. But I don’t know how you can say that business is responsible for that."

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[truth_seeker]

I grew up not far from Downey and that store. We had a brand new McDonalds on our main boulevard. It was a favorite teen hangout.

The workers then, were other teens, not adults expecting to support families. Teens work to support cars, dates, school expenses.

But now in most fast food places that I visit, the workers seem to be mostly minorities, some times with poor English skills. Most local teens don't work at all, or at least don't work in fast food stores.

I just heard a discussion on local Lost Angeles AM radio this AM, and they discussed how automation will displace workers, regardless of the wage level. They also pointed out that Seattle with the $15 minimum wage has NOT seen the predicted problems.