Re: About that self-professed rational liberalism
"That's one reason henry Ford always paid generously: to make sure he had customers for his products."
I actually ran through the numbers on this for Forbes once. Took the number of workers he had, the cost of that pay rise to $5 a day and the price of a Model T at the time.
If every single one of his workers had bought a new Model T each and every year then Ford would still have lost (in revenue mind, not profits or margin, but revenue) some $2.5 million a year.
So why Ford did raise pay could be for a number of reasons* but getting his workers to buy his cars just wasn't one of them.
*The actual reason was that he had a permanent establishment of 13,000 but he was hiring 50,000 a year to keep that many. That's expensive. So he raised pay to reduce turnover and that saved him more than the higher pay cost him.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
