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Your Happy Meal Just Got More Expensive

Minimum wage has been increased from $5.85 to $7.25!

The vote was 315-116, with more than 80 Republicans joining Democrats to pass it.

The bill would raise the wage floor in three steps. It would go to $5.85 an hour 60 days after signed into law by the president, to $6.55 a year later and to $7.25 a year after that.

[Source]

That means someone working a minimum wage job for 40 hours will get $290 instead of $234 or a week’s worth of work. Of course federal and state taxes must be removed as well as social security and medicare.

Do you remember your first minimum wage job? I think mine was $2.35 an hour. I seem to also remember a $2.85 per hour figure. One of my early jobs paid $3 per hour under the table and I remember being thrilled with it because it was over minimum wage.

Jobs I did prior to college included baby sitting and yard work of course. I also worked for a construction guy. He would have his high cost labor just leave debris all over the job site and then on the weekends I would come in and move trash to the dumpster. He (Steve Garvy) would also pay me for odd jobs like once he paid $85 for me to take a machette to a quarter acre of over grown land. The weeds were 12 feet tall. I washed buses (the small shuttles although there was one about 3 feet shy of a city bus). Too young to drive, my friend and I drove them anyway. Our duties expanded to include maintenance including repairing a defective car phone (yes it was wired in), checking fluids, and changing tires (yes, I bent the frame on a bus with the jack). I also slid one sideways in a snowy parking lot for fun. I worked at a Wendy’s for 2 months. I also worked at a K-Mart as a cashier, cashier supervisor, toys department, electronics department, floor supervisor, and night stockman (nothing more fun than playing dodgeball in a Kmart at 2am!). My favorite pre-college job was selling flowers outside of an Amish market in New Jersey.

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Parallel Parking Tip

Do you have trouble parallel parking? If you have a good hand brake and front wheel drive like this Honda Civic then you too can parallel park perfectly everytime! Or you could do it like they do in Japan. My favorite is the Mini-Cooper sliding into the space.

I went to 9th and 10th grade in Medford, New Jersey. I went to 11th and 12th in Germantown, TN. Because of the differing state laws on when you could get a driver’s permit, I missed out on driver’s ed and instead had private lessons. Johnny “Dr. Fever” Caravella pulls up to my house in a beat up Nova. To learn to parallel park we drove to Memphis State University where I practiced until we bumped into one of the cars then we would pull ahead to find another spot until we bumped into those cars and repeated the process. Eventually, I became pretty good at parallel parking.