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[–]yellowstone10 2 points3 points ago


The giant, glaring flaw in your logic here is the premise that there is an infinite number of customers and the only limit to your profit is how many people you employ.

Since when did I say that? Clearly there's a limit to how many customers per hour you can get - doesn't change the fact that until you hit that limit, adding workers allows you to serve more customers. And sure, there's other variables that affect profit, but we're considering just the one. Ceteris paribus, adding workers increases productivity, ergo increasing revenue.

But guess what? If someone called in sick last minute, we just had to deal with it. Customers got pissed that their food took forever to get done, but dealt with it as well.

And I will bet you money that if you looked at the revenue for those days when someone called in sick, it was lower than the revenue you got on days when you were fully staffed.

So I repeat, if McD COULD run with less people, they WOULD. There is absolutely nothing that increases profit when you have extra people.

You've given the counterexample to this right in your own post! You said, right before this, that you could still run the restaurant when someone called in sick. Hence it was possible for your McD's to run with less people. So why didn't they always run you at that staffing level? Obviously, because adding that one extra person brought in enough extra revenue to compensate for his wage.

[–]WarPhalange 1 point2 points ago


Since when did I say that?

You're talking about workers being able to "produce more product" without taking into account the fact that nobody needs the product.

[–]yellowstone10 -3 points-2 points ago


McD's can always sell more hamburgers by lowering the price. The effect of that price-lowering on revenue would, naturally, have to be incorporated into the analysis of marginal revenue that determines whether it's better to hire another worker or not.