A daycare around here is literally a full wage, you can’t tell me that’s not enough. Ever.
Comment on Doesn't add up
mechoman444@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I’ve said for years that daycares and nursing homes are extremely expensive, and they’re probably not charging enough. The profit margins for both of these businesses are extremely thin.
I think posts like this are narrow-minded because they don’t take into consideration the cost of operating these kinds of facilities.
Fundamentally, the reason daycares and nursing homes are so expensive is because the overhead is insane, much like in the American healthcare industry. A portable X-ray machine at a hospital can cost over $100,000, and even the metal slab they slide under you can cost around $10,000.
These machines don’t cost nearly that much to produce. The manufacturers are milking the system.
My gas company charges a minimum monthly fee. I’ve never paid less than $70, no matter how little gas I use.
If you want to make these kinds of services cheaper, especially in America, you have to start with the fundamentals and bring down the cost of the things these businesses are forced to buy and pay for.
CrowAirbrush@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
mechoman444@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I actually can.
The daycare my kid goes to is considered a cheap one. It’s $1,000 a month for my son because he’s three, and it’s even less for older children.
They have about 15 kids enrolled, including two or three babies they care for.
I’m guessing they bring in around $15,000 a month in revenue. They have four employees. Three of them are probably making around $20 an hour, and one manager is likely making a little more than that. Four employees working 40 hours a week is already consuming most of the revenue they bring in each month.
Maybe I’m missing a lot of variables here, but when you add in rent, utilities, insurance, food, supplies, licensing, maintenance, and everything else it takes to keep the business running, it doesn’t seem like there’s much left. Aside from payroll, they’re probably making very little, maybe only a couple thousand dollars a month in profit.
Businesses like daycares and nursing homes, anything that provides quasi-medical care, generally make very little profit. They’re there to fill an essential need, not necessarily to generate massive profits like you see with many internet businesses.
I’d even argue that if you doubled tuition to $2,000 a month, it wouldn’t dramatically increase how much money they actually make. Higher wages, insurance, regulatory compliance, facilities, food, equipment, and other operating costs would still consume a significant portion of that additional revenue.
They take care of kids man… It’s a hard job and they’re already getting paid bullshit for it.
Like I said in my original comment, if you want to change this, we need to change it from the fundamentals, not the business model itself.
CrowAirbrush@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Kids are put there out of necessity for a second wage and then that entire second wage gets gobbled up, see the irony there. It’s not working.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What? Nothing you said was ironic… Or made any sense.
L7HM77@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
It’s almost like capital aggregates over time, slowly absorbing or driving out competition, and eventually crystallizing into a single monopolized sector.
If only we had, like, tomes of philosophy predicting this over the last century, and maybe just a smidge of foresight, we could have stopped it before it became a problem. I propose that once a company monopolizes like this and makes itself a threat to the general public, we just absorb it into another branch of government services. This has happened before, usually under wartime laws, but rules and precedent don’t seem to matter nowadays…
The world could be fixed overnight with the right cooperation and motivation.
mechoman444@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Well, no, it can’t.
But I don’t disagree with you. We let things get totally out of control.
What we need is sweeping legislation, and it needs to start with the legislators themselves: term limits, harsher penalties for abuse of power, and reforms to executive authority, especially the use of executive orders.
Lobbying should be outlawed entirely. It should be illegal for elected officials to trade, own, or even discuss individual stocks.
There also need to be much stricter limits on what corporations can do and how much market power they can accumulate.
Did you know the U.S. has some of the weakest antitrust enforcement among developed countries? You know why? Lobbying by corporations that want to become monopolies. It’s complete insanity.
And the worst part is they’ve figured out ways to limit the American people’s ability to speak out against it. Most major media is owned by large corporations. People are drowning in debt and diabetes. Sports are on around the clock across multiple channels. We’re distracted. We’re unhealthy, and we’re uneducated.
To add insult to injury, a small minority of people have somehow been convinced that their race is more important than others’ in a country made up of people from every race and background.