I don't think in terms of dollars anymore. I assess price in terms of hours worked at minimum wage and it is bleak.
My first "real job" out of uni had an hourly charge rate for my labor. It was over 10 times my hourly wage.
Terrible job, great way to learn about the alienation of surplus value.
In tech, I'd have to get clients to sign change orders for a similarly ridiculous markup. The worst part was that I had 40+ hours of shit to do to begin with and I was supposed to just squeeze the agreed-upon hours into my schedule somehow; not the company's problem.
fr though one of the things that rang most true to me when I learned about Marxism was having counted nightly bank deposits at the shitty retail McJobs I had and even on the slow nights they were each like 6x the biweekly checks for the entire staff combined
Business owners out here like "PaYrOlL iS oUr BiGgEsT eXpEnSe" too
Whenever you hear that, just say "oh damn, you should just fire everyone then. Imagine how much more profit you'll make!"
