For most people McDonalds is an after school job for teenagers or full time college students. So I don’t agree with you on this. The manager of a McDonalds, yes I agree with you about their salary.
Another example would be a snow cone stand. Absolutely no reason for $30 an hour and benefits when kids have done this job for just some extra spending money since the inception of a snow cone stand.
You want a caterer that can support you learn a trade, some skills, or get a degree.
The poster you were replying to said that a *full-time* job should be able to support a single adult. As of the 2000's recession, a lot of fast food outlets went to scheduling adults as part-timers in 4 hour daytime blocks, starting with the breakfast shift at 6 am. Unlike "kids" they didn't have school obligations to juggle, which the employers preferred. At the strip of fast food places near my office, 10 am, 2 pm, & 6 pm started to look like scenes from a silent movie, with groups of people walking from one restaurant to another, changing their hat and shirt as they went. They were cobbling together the equivalent of full-time jobs by working at 2-3 fast food restaurants in the same 3 block area. The practice of expecting adults to create a "full-time" workday by working for 2 different establishments each day has become widespread in hospitality; businesses like it because it eliminates the need for paying benefits under US labor laws. This ain't your grandmother's after-school work. (And that's the other issue: these are mostly pink-collar jobs, and in the US, women in their 20s & 30s are now far more likely to have dependents who require direct care from them than men that age are.) At the time, those jobs were paying minimum wage, and though they pay more now, it still isn't nearly enough to keep up with the skyrocketing cost of keeping a roof over your head.
Men have always had the trades as a high-paying option that does not require higher education; but women have been far less welcome in those jobs. (My dad was a finish carpenter/cabinetmaker; I would have liked to follow him into that work, but he was horrified at that idea. He taught me to do the work with the understanding that for me it would be a fun hobby for my own home, not a real job, and at the time, my doing it for pay really wasn't a viable possibility at all. Fifteen years later I might have battled my way onto a crew, but I guarantee you that the other crew members would not have made me welcome there, and that makes for not only miserable working conditions, but in an occupation with that much hazardous equipment in use, could have been downright deadly.) I know for a fact that though women are now welcome to enter training programs for most building trades, they are consistently last-hired no matter how good their marks are, because most employers believe their presence will cause conflict on work crews unless the crew is all-female.
A huge part of balancing out the unskilled labor shortage is taking steps to fix the housing affordability problem. This can be done if localities have the gumption to pass strict zoning and development rules and stick to them. Sure, it's more profitable for developers to build full tracts of larger cookie-cutter homes than to renovate existing properties or to build smaller infill projects, so of course they will prefer that, but if that is not the market sector your community needs, then they should not be getting permits approved for it. Requiring mixed-use development with percentage set-asides is NOT the solution, either; IME the rules on those tend to require that the initial development contain a certain percentage of lower-income units, but most builders pursue subsidies instead of making the units smaller and plainer, so that as soon as the subsidy runs out, the unit reverts to market-rate occupancy, often within 5 years of construction. We need to see single-family-homes of under 1000 sq. ft., with plain rooflines, laminate countertops and plain tile floors, and no HOA fees -- places families can grow into once they accumulate a bit of savings. You can't enlarge an apartment home, and most can't get ahead on equity if they have have to pay HOA fees on top of the mortgage. (If you're thinking early Levittown, you've got the picture.) In the near-in suburbs of my city, I see perfectly liveable modest homes getting demolished every single day, with plans filed to replace them with homes that are 4X the size and 5X the price. That is a king-sized mistake. Pink-collar and early-career workers need housing stock that they can afford on what they make, and they need it near where they work, because the odds are that they will be at least partly dependent on public transit to get there. Regularly using a service like Lyft or Uber to commute isn't really an option when your rent is 70% of your net pay, or if you live 50 miles RT from your job.
