What is an item worth?

[Zigkid3]

Try this perhaps: "Walmart wages are so low that many of its workers rely on food stamps and other government aid programs to fulfill their basic needs, a reality that could cost taxpayers as much as $900,000 at just one Walmart Supercenter in Wisconsin"

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/0...n_3365814.html

Walmart has 4,118 stores currently in the US.

That article solely focuses on a specific segment and does not represent the economy as a whole.

This starts getting into the debate of whether or not minimum wage should be raised.
You're trying to debate about workers wages which is not representative of an economy as a whole. Yes it is part of it, but not all of it.


If the minimum wage is raised, then the costs for a company would increase. If the costs for a company increase, it will either have to find other areas where it could cut costs or increase the price (and produce less). so now the prices have increased on a said product because it costs more to make, handle, deliver, etc... So now lets look at two types of consumers the minimum wage worker and the middle class worker. The minimum wage worker will have increased wages yes, but also an increased price on products either way it made no difference to them all you did was increase the numbers but proportionally its about the same. The middle class worker was already above minimum wage so their salary hasn't changed, but now they experience an increase in product prices, so the middle class worker loses out. Overall this bad.

This is because even though while wage might have increased, their real wage which is the amount of buying power they now have is actually different. So you have to look at Wage/Price (depending on the product(s) you're looking at) to see if the increase of wage was actually beneficial or harmful. to see if it is beneficial or not you will need to compare the increase in wage versus the Price x Marginal Production of labor. if W > PxMPL then it's good, if W < PxMPL then it's bad.
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Though I don't see your point in trying to bring up Walmart wages when wages don't really have anything to do with a game economy, the closest you could get to arguing that is the time investment that people make to gather/craft, but thats more subjective to each individual rather than a specific wage policy.