I Can’t Afford to Pay Employees a Living Wage and Still Take Home $9,000,000 a Year Making Egg Salad Sandwiches

I don’t know what happened, we used to be able to hire staff at fifty cents, maybe four bucks an hour (for supervisors) but now, this crazy woke world,  we’re having a heck of a time hiring staff.

Or maybe only relying on selling a million egg salad sandwiches a day for $3.40 each is an unrealistic business model.

You’re probably wondering how I arrived at that business model. I figured out how much money I wanted to pocket after gross, how much I had to pay for eggs, mayonnaise, and three kinds of questionable bread, what the marketing and real estate costs were, and worked backward from there. I think at some point I reached into my pocket, found two quarters, and that’s where the salary rate came from.

I always assumed my employees were street urchins, diseased hobos or a prince who came to America to see how the other half lives to learn valuable life lessons before assuming the rightful throne and continuing his family’s reign of terror under the crushing weight of authoritarianism for the next 40 years. I don’t know when we started hiring responsible adults with families to support, but they took the job, and now, for them to decide that a “livable” wage should be part of the business model — that’s just outrageous. Outrageous, I tell you! Since when does “Living Wage” have any relation to the actual cost of buying things to stay alive? Next you’ll be telling me it’s unfair to not pay writers or actors for a streaming show, even though it’s easier to track viewership than in any other medium.

Teaching the servers to scoop just the right amount, dropping it in just the right spot on the lettuce, which, in turn, is centered in just the right spot on the toast – all this is difficult, which is why people come to Nothing But Egg Salad, the nation’s number one spot for egg salad sandwiches.

It’s only reasonable that we deduct the cost of our training programs from a new employee’s salary. Once that $6,000 is paid off, and the probationary period is over, staff can make up to $3.10 an hour within four months. More, if they waive the health insurance. (Note: We do not give sick days or vacation days, but we don’t open until 11 a.m. so that means staff members are encouraged to use that time to shower. At home.) We only deduct a reasonable $4.00 eating charge per each three-hour shift.

And then the media asks, But Sir or Madam, do you need to keep so much for yourself?

So let me ask: Isn’t this how business works?  If you deposit $100 in a bank, doesn’t the bank teller get to decide how much will be deposited and how much he gets to keep?

Meanwhile, we’re all aware the price of eggs has gone up 500%. This means I have to cut costs somewhere – if you have an egg salad sandwich shop with no eggs in the egg salad, you’re just a Subway. I hope you aren’t claiming that workers are more important than chickens. I hope you are not suggesting some Sweeney Todd scenario. We are not a Subway. People don’t realize how hard it is to make egg salad. It’s also very important to serve it fresh. (Lessons learned.)

As I write this, I await the launch of my new space rocket. Many people have criticized me for hiring street urchins for building it instead of actual qualified engineers, but let me tell you: What those engineers expect to be paid is scandalous, marginally. I know more than they do, having built the world’s largest egg salad sandwich chain as well as the world’s largest egg salad sandwich. Anyway, these things aren’t really supposed to really fly, right?