Owner of oldest operating McDonald's comments on minimum wage

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Piazza is something of a throwback. Plainspoken and serious, he is the type of business owner whose name and phone number are printed at the bottom of all the customer receipts.

He started on the McDonald's fryers in 1967 when he was fifteen-years-old and worked his way up through the crew to management to ownership.

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I started at a dollar an hour. Poverty is as severe as it was when I was making a dollar an hour. The minimum wage increase, frankly, hasn't reduced our poverty problem.
Do I think it’s fair that people live in poverty? Of course not. But I don’t know how you can say that business is responsible for that."

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We're an all-American company and we are one of the few countries that was built by its bootstraps. Every one of my managers started as a crew person on french fries, my supervisors, my son, myself. I have four people who worked for me who went on to own their own McDonald's restaurants. I would say that we're a company where more people have come up through the ranks and become successful than maybe any other company in maybe the world."

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Piazza says his managers make roughly $55,000 per year, which he notes is more than a teacher ("a noble profession"), and that his employees can flourish no matter "what schooling you have."

"People think we're a dead-end job. Well, I'm not a dead-ender. I've got 585 employees and 55 managers, they're not dead-enders."

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When the minimum wage is $10 an hour, you lose all that because I’m going to bring someone in at $10 an hour. What incentive did you have to learn your job?"

The way we have tried to bring our employees together is to motivate them, since the fact is, they do need motivation. The way you motivate them is with wage and perks and things that you give them. You take all that away when the government forces people to increase the wages."

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