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In 1974, I made $1.90 an hour working at the Burger King on Skokie Road in Highland Park, Illinois. The only expenses I had were buying a pair of ugly black shoes and even more ugly black polyester pants. I used my parents’ car to drive to work, so they paid for gas and insurance.
That $1.90 is equivalent to about $13 an hour today, which, sadly, is about the average wage for a successful DoorDash driver. In other words, in the most powerful and richest country in the history of the world, the person delivering your Thursday night takeout is worse off than I was in 1974, what with paying for gas and insurance, and to say nothing of the genuine danger involved in delivering food at 2 in the morning — regardless of neighborhood. The worst thing I had to worry about was mopping up vomit in the restroom; that I could be robbed, shot or raped was inconceivable…