Transcript
Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. This is the episode for Thursday, February 22nd, 2024. I am a few hours late, so just trying to remember which day it was supposed to be for. Today I wanted to talk about how there can be a good economy, but it doesn't always mean that everyone is feeling good, or it doesn't mean the economy is good for everyone. So today I went to a fast food restaurant I normally go to around here, and saw this girl that's been working there probably the last couple times I've been in there over the last couple months, and at one point she thought I was a famous TikToker, and I was like, oh nice, and I saw the guy, and I looked nothing like the guy, but you know how it goes, so I walked in and asked her how her day was going, and I think she said she was having a a very, very, very rough day. And you could see it in her demeanor. She just looked really deflated and sad.
And then I ordered the food, and we interacted a little bit. And we were talking, she started talking about, we talked about the prices, the prices going up on the food and everything. At some point she said, yeah, prices have changed like three times in the last month or something crazy. And then she started talking about how much money she had been making there. I was like, oh, so she's the manager there and she makes $15 an hour. Now for my friends listening in Africa, $15 an hour is a lot of money. But for my friends in the U.S., $15 is not that much per hour. And what she told me was that when she was a regular employee, she made $13. And then she had an increase to $14 an hour. And then she became the manager, and they increased her to $15 an hour. And I was like, what? You got one extra dollar per hour to be the manager of this place? Hi-yi-yi. Like if assume the person works 40 hours a week it's 40 extra dollars a week that's it that's it to manage a lot more people oh my goodness that's uh i don't think that's, a good you know a good balance for the increase in responsibility.
And so it really got me thinking as i was talking with her more talking about prices of other things things that have gone up and talked about like baby formula and how it's become a lot more expensive and talk about rent and things like this had me thinking that so often now we're, news is talking about how the economy is so great in the u.s and yeah i think the stock market has gone up and certain factors that they normally use to determine whether the economy is good like like the stock market going up, unemployment rate, and a few things like this, give the impression that the economy is doing really well. And for many people, maybe it is. But for some people, it's not. And that might always be the case. You think about what happened in COVID, at least when the shutdowns were happening. Some people lost their business. Some people lost their lives. Some people lost the moneymaker in the family, the one that had the strongest job.
But other people made a ton of money. Some people's jobs got easier and they made more money and they spent less. So they had a larger profit individually. Some of them, somebody's businesses really took off because maybe they sold a lot during that time.
So when we say that the economy is doing well, it doesn't necessarily mean that individuals are doing well or different pockets of individuals. So I was talking to this girl and it's like, yeah, there are a lot of strikes that are happening in the U.S. Where workers are going on strike demanding increased wages and other conditions.
But stocks are at record profits in some ways, or so they say. Say so who i don't know i think sometimes we have to have deeper conversations with people to see what's going on and and when we say the economy are we talking about the the average or the median person in the economy this is getting really nerdy but if it's the average if say you know the economy is going up and if we take all the money and we divide it by the number of people and that's the average well that if there's a few that are very very very rich that can skew the average average of the whole thing but if we talk about the median then it chooses like if there's 100 people then it's number 50 how much money does number 50 have versus if it's 100 people let's divide all the money by 100 and then that's the average so maybe y'all knew that, but uh yeah i'm just curious to see how this might impact elections going forward and.
It's hard i feel a little guilty and sad talking about this stuff because i know there's war happening in other places yet how how much do these things end up leading to war where we can't We can't resolve economic issues and we can't talk about what's really going on with people until it's too late, until we stop talking about it completely and then we stop talking at all about anything and we just resort to violence. so, one thing I'll say is that when I did walk out she had a smile on her face so I think she was grateful maybe for the conversation and just reminded me that sometimes just having the conversation about how much we're struggling can just help at least give us some hope or distraction from what's going on so I prefer hope maybe not distraction, alright y'all well I'll talk to you next week take care.
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