Daniella Genovese
4 min read
In This Article:
Fast-food employees are struggling to afford necessities and a recent report shows they must work more than twice as many hours as the average worker just to afford the meals they serve.
It underscores a broader economic issue: "The affordability crisis has reached every corner of the food economy, including those working within it," Sylvain Charlebois, professor and senior director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, told FOX Business.
In a recent study, LendingTree analysts discovered that employees earning the average U.S. wage would need to work 21.2 minutes to cover the cost of a flagship fast-food meal, which is $11.56 on average across the 50 largest metros. Meanwhile, fast-food workers would need to work 46 minutes to pay for the same meal.
The analysts utilized the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics May 2024 Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics survey to gather average hourly and annual wages for fast-food and counter workers. They compared that against the average wages for all occupations, both nationally and in the 50 largest metros.
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"No one has ever expected to get rich off of fast-food wages, but the fact that these workers can’t even expect a livable wage is troubling," LendingTree Chief Consumer Finance Analyst Matt Schulz said. "Unfortunately, the situation isn’t likely to get better anytime soon."
In the 10 U.S. cities where the gap between pay and livable wage is the largest, fast-food workers are falling more than 42% short of the money they need to cover living expenses. They would need to work more than 70 hours per week to afford the basic living expenses.
In Fresno, California, where workers face the smallest livable wage gap at 23%, they would still have to work more than 50 hours a week just to earn enough to cover expenses. Fast-food workers in Fresno also need to work 66.7% longer than people earning the average area wage to afford the same food, according to the report.
"The fact that a fast-food worker must now work nearly an hour just to afford the very meal they are preparing underscores a growing structural disconnect between wages and the cost of living," Charlebois said. "This isn’t just about inflation, it’s about wage stagnation, shrinking margins in the food-service sector and a labor model that’s becoming unsustainable."
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