How a $15 minimum wage led to a $16 BLT

If you’re tired of paying $16 for a BLT, look no further than the $15 minimum wage craze to place your blame.

Restaurant owner and entrepreneur Brian Will knows this well — and was confronted by one of his friends because of it.

His friend sent him a text while he was sitting in the restaurant that read, “Hey, Brian, I’m sitting here eating your BLT and at $16, you know it’s only bacon, lettuce, tomato, and bread right?”

“I said, ‘You know Dan, let me break this down for you. I want to give you some perspective. That sandwich might cost $16 but we’ve got $20,000 of rent in that building; we’ve got $6,000 of utility; we’ve got $60,000 of payroll; and then we’ve got our general OpEx expenses that all have to get paid for out of the gross profit margin in that sandwich,’” he explains to Glenn Beck.

The sandwich itself, Will explains, “has about $5 of actual food cost.”

That leaves $11 of gross profit, but $2 of that goes to rent and utilities. $2.50 goes towards fixed operational expenses like TVs, music, mats, and towels.

The labor to make the sandwich is $4.50.

“That only leaves me with a profit of $2,” Will tells Glenn.

When COVID hit, his employees were getting extended unemployment benefits and didn’t want to come back to work.

That’s when he made the switch to $15 an hour minimum, which has now jumped to $16.50 minimum.

“That’s why we have to keep driving the price of these things up. Everybody wants to get paid, and they want a big salary. They want a living wage, but all that does is drive everything up,” Will says.

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