Talk Shit, Get Hit: Chick Complains About Yelp Job Publically, Fired 2 Hours Later

[Ryuzaki]

The Complaint: https://medium.com/@taliajane/an-open-letter-to-my-ceo-fb73df021e7a#.3dc8xqw7g

I read about half of it before I couldn't stomach it anymore. It's interesting to think about, because Yelp is an online business like we are interested in. Here's the summary so you can have an idea of whether or not you want to read a ton of peasantry before you click.

So this girl goes to college, collects debt, has no experience in her industry, so she accepts a customer support job at Yelp for minimum wage. She's upset that she has to work for a year with Yelp before she'll be considered for advancement. AKA they filter out people like this by testing dedication and willingness to work hard.

She goes on to talk about her bi-weekly paycheck of about $750 and how her rent is $1250 a month, she chose to live 30 minutes away from work to save on rent and she pays something on the order of $10 a day for transportation. If you're doing the math, That's $1,550 of her monthly $1500 cost of housing and transportation.

So yeah, it's kind of dumb because she signed up knowing what her pay would be and then immediately ran her expenses up higher than her income. She goes on to talk about how she couldn't afford groceries if she chose to buy them but she's still working through this 10 pound bag of rice she bought before she moved. That let's you know that she didn't even stick the job out that long before trying to shame Yelp publicly.

Yes, minimum wage isn't up to a living wage for a single person, let alone living in San Francisco. She mentions that one of her co-workers bailed, quit the job, and moved to the East Coast where the cost of living was cheaper... This co-worker empowered him or herself and was proactive. Bravo.

You know the drill. Idiot runs herself up in debt, takes on more expenses than income, is upset that the CEO of a company gets paid more than a phone monkey reading off of a script, is upset that she hasn't graduated to posting on Twitter all day, and pops off at the mouth. And then gets fired for it.

To top it off, she ends the post with her Paypal and Square addresses to ask for money from strangers on the internet.

Entitlement is crazy these days. Back in my day, if I pulled a stunt like this, my dad would have taken his belt off and whooped my ass... as a mid-twenties college graduate.

This is the same crap as cutting your hand off and then blaming the knife maker you begged to have a knife from. It's always someone else's fault. And now, any idiot can have an audience.

 

[Klayne]

How dare you talk like that about a lady , you misogynistic pig.

Seriously tough, third wave feminism needs to die ASAP.

 

[Sutra]

I'm in San Francisco. People out here love to bitch about rent and how minimum wage isn't enough to live on. That is absolute bullshit. You CAN live on minimum wage even here in San Francisco.

People assume a "living wage" is the same as a "comfortable wage". No. It is not. It's a fucking LIVING wage. So no, you won't be living on your own. No, you won't be going to bars and partying. No, you won't be ordering out food. You won't be doing a lot of shit. But minimum wage isn't about affording you luxuries. You want luxuries? Shut the fuck up and do what you gotta to make more money.

I'm not saying that as just the guy who's willing to live in his car, haha. I've always felt this way. Even when I was making far less money than some of my friends, I lived a much more comfortable lifestyle then them, rented my own apartment (which is pretty much unheard of out here unless you're a baller which I wasn't - and still am not), and I travelled yearly.

You just have to look hard enough for the right apartment, budget your money, save your money, don't rack up debt, and so on.

This shit just gets on my nerves, haha. Even many of my family member complain about this stuff. It's gay.

 

[The Kloser]

Keep in mind that the economy is actually doing really good right now. Just wait when the market re-adjust again and you can't even a minimum wage job then reality will hit hard.

I'm not saying that as just the guy who's willing to live in his car

I still have a hard time picturing you sleeping in you car while parked right outside your day job. How long it has been now? 2 months? Hope the winter is treating you well. Mad props bro!

 

[Sutra]

@The Kloser Yeah, almost two months. It's not the most fun thing in the world, haha. But it's easier now that I've adjusted to it. The winter rain has actually been a good thing. It makes it harder for people to see inside so I feel like I get some privacy. So that's a plus, haha.

 

[RiverStyx]

My first job out of uni paid $6 an hr and was 12 hour days of cold calling. Unfortunately they never bothered telling me that would be the wage before I started. Naively I assumed as I had been temping prior to that at $17/hr I would get something similar at this place - after all it was a professional job with a career path as opposed to a temp job.

I would have gladly taken a second job but there was literally no more time left in the day for me to do so. If this chick is just working a normal 8hr day she could most definitely get a second job. Also she mentions having a defunct car and taking public transport to work. Well, that is just stupid. Sell the car. Also, get some roommates - bingo the cost of your rent is halved and you suddenly have $600 more per month to play with. This is before the second job.

Really, she should have done a budget before moving out there if she knew what the wage was going to be and that it was unsustainable given how she chose to live.

I got a roommate and then left that company after 3 months, and decided that being a financial advisor wasn't for me. I became a full time seller on ebay right after that, more than doubling my salary.

It was also beyond stupid to bitch about her job online and then be surprised about being fired.

Too little thinking, too much entitlement, and a poor work ethic is all I see in that post.

 

[Calamari]

Shut the fuck up and do what you gotta to make more money.

So this!

I switched to this thinking about 2 years ago and haven't looked back.

Instead of bitching about how much money has left my account, I focus on how I can put more into it.

 

[miketpowell]

I'm pretty surprised Yelp pays min-wage in the Bay area for phone support.

Either their phone support really sucks or they get over qualified people working for them because of the name "Yelp".

All I know is we've tried hiring in that range for call reps and it's more trouble than it's worth with all the turn over, need for extra training and constant tardiness and sudden absences.

Based on my experience paying more than min-wage to get better employees is worth it anyways. But maybe Yelp's name brings them in better people for less money.

 

[Steve Brownlie]

I think her reaction is inappropriate since as you're all saying it's ridiculous to get yourself into a position where you don't attempt to solve it with easily available options (room mate... etc). However a fair bit of it, when I read it the first time (I haven't gone back to read it since seeing this thread, I saw it on Twitter first) resonated with me.

For a lot of us it's tough to be employed because we have a vision about how things can be improved and what would work better but when you're down in the 'trenches' management has very little interest in listening. It sounds, honestly, like they are leaving a lot of money on the table if their staff turnover is so high and they genuinely suffer from ridiculous amounts of 'payouts' each month from inexperienced staff, while providing silly benefits like expensive nuts and chucking away food nobody eats every week.

Management at most companies has way too little knowledge of psychology. I worked at one business as an account manager where the bonus was pretty 'on/off'. The target was basically too low for good salespeople and too high for the people who saw themselves as more 'customer service' than sales (a common type of person to have in a role that previously was 100% that but is moving towards more sales as the company evolves and is looking to cross sell more).

Obviously the management felt they were saving money by having such a program - top performers were capped out and low performers weren't getting anything for their sales at all. That misses the motivators that people actually respond to.

I could hit my target without doing anything at all - just speak to my accounts and let whatever happened happen. I had no motivation to do 'more' (beyond shooting 10% or so over target just to be safe) and the people who would likely fall at 80% of target had no motivation to even hit that since it was no better than 0%. So they saved money but royally screwed themselves since they would have made more money with uncapped bonuses that allowed top performers to exceed target, and encouraged those who were struggling to extend for the maximum even if that was just 95% of target. Having everyone give up halfway through the month because they've either hit or missed is just setting money on fire.

I saw a lot of that in her frustrations. She could see that things there could be better, the company could have lower turnover, waste less money, and still pay staff more. Those frustrations weren't voiced in a clear way that people like BS members resonate with, but I can understand where they come from.

 

[backwoods]

What amazes me the most about so many millennials is their naivety and complete lack of good judgement with the interwebs. Teenagers I get posting dumb things online. But when you are 25 and well into adulthood one really needs to think twice before hitting that submit button. It's the internet. And it lasts forever. There is no delete button.

In her rant she actually complains numerous times about hunger problems and "stomach pains because the last time I ate was at work" and "I can’t afford to buy groceries" -- yet her instagram (now private) is full of foodie posts and her drinking quality bourbon. Someone screenshot some of the goodies and posted them here. Let's just say she looks like the fork never had trouble finding her face.

http://alotofrice.pixieset.com/thatsalotofrice/

She certainly isn't helping the stereotypes about the narcissistic, crybaby millennials. I'm convinced they are all just trolling us, lulz.

What is sad is you can see the writing talent and she obviously has the click-bait skills. Why go down that entitlement road? She could have written a thought provoking piece on a related topic about cost of living in SF and the struggles but instead went straight stupid and publicly attacked the person who signs the paychecks.

 

[jamessmith110]

I know most of you won't agree but I do think she has a point in many respects, her rant at the CEO is misguided and it is also a combination of her own inability to budget as you guys correctly, point out.

But It is also indicative of the system, it is designed to keep everyone in debt, and being good citizens, who work long hours, for a low wage and pay taxes unlike Google, and barely have enough money or time to do nice things.

I mean someone has to be there when you want that coffee in Starbucks even if its 4am, and Starbucks still needs to pay those fancy lawyers to avoid taxes, so they need to make a profit.

It's just capitalism at the end of the day, but really she is right and the masses do exchange their 24 hours in the day for a bad ROI, mostly because its safe because they are risk averse, but also because the system means you need money and unless your ridiculously careful with budgeting and even then money has to come from somewhere, if you can fight the risk adverseness your planning your way out, but your out, is still not a way out, we are tapped in a matrix, you start your own company, you employ people, you need fancy lawyers, you need business lunches, you need to put food on your table, you now employ people, you now advance the very system you hated as an employee.

But you lean that employees work hard, they work hard to make you thousands if not millions, and you pay them pennies while turning up everyday in your Ferrari, and they begrudge you and finally one step out and th cycle starts again....

But you don't care because theirs another 100 people lining up down the road, supply and demand and all that until you consider that maybe paying them a little bit more would help staff retention, and maybe better staff retention would actually save money in the long run, whats an extra few dollars, an hour, that's like $120 a month, if it means your going to save $500 a person (recruitment takes time and money, training costs time and money, plus bad customer service costs money above all else etc).

Beyond that,maybe this girl should actually be in media, after all shes actually a pretty good writer, writing this kind of opinion dividing piece, I mean its been shared here, like how did you even find it? and you wanted to share it? Either way it was 100% going to get her fired, if she even worked at Yelp in the first place, maybe all she needed was a conduit to launch her new project, something about cupcakes, and homelessness, maybe she is really allot smarter than all this?

Maybe shes not and she really worked at yelp, and its just some fluke accident, where she stupidly though she would get a raise and moved to media instead of being fired for bring bad publicity, only time will tell.....​

 

[Island]

What amazes me the most about so many millennials is their naivety and complete lack of good judgement with the interwebs. Teenagers I get posting dumb things online. But when you are 25 and well into adulthood one really needs to think twice before hitting that submit button. It's the internet. And it lasts forever. There is no delete button.

In her rant she actually complains numerous times about hunger problems and "stomach pains because the last time I ate was at work" and "I can’t afford to buy groceries" -- yet her instagram (now private) is full of foodie posts and her drinking quality bourbon. Someone screenshot some of the goodies and posted them here. Let's just say she looks like the fork never had trouble finding her face.

http://alotofrice.pixieset.com/thatsalotofrice/

She certainly isn't helping the stereotypes about the narcissistic, crybaby millennials. I'm convinced they are all just trolling us, lulz.

What is sad is you can see the writing talent and she obviously has the click-bait skills. Why go down that entitlement road? She could have written a thought provoking piece on a related topic about cost of living in SF and the struggles but instead went straight stupid and publicly attacked the person who signs the paychecks.

Yeah... I absolutely hate people like this. She's a walking stereotype.

And yeah, millennials have a bad rep but I also see a ton of young entrepreneurs and hustlers. My social circle is mostly hustlers. You have young dudes like Built on the forum hustling super hard.

 

[CCarter]

I mean someone has to be there when you want that coffee in Starbucks even if its 4am

Basic Rule of business: If you increase costs (employee wages), in order to make a profit or stay in business you have to increase prices. Let's look at it from several sides of the equation within a local community/city:

big business

A particular big business is located within a particular community/city. They employ 1,000 customer support reps in the community. That equates to a chunk of the "good employees". You know the people that are decent and won't show up late, and want to work hard for their company, so their company will keep them employed. They are decent people but are low-skilled workers, but since they do a lot less work than other low-skilled workers in the community they are considered to have better jobs - especially if healthcare, dental, and the works are all provided for them.

Artificially increasing those employee wages of 1,000 customer support reps will increase costs astronomically to the point the big corporations have to increase their fees to their customers OR go out of business. Now think about it from the end customers standpoint - How do you feel when you get an added fee ontop of your current bill as a customer? You don't really like the added fees do you?

The reality is everyone gets paid what they are worth to the business. If an single employee actually "MAKES" a company millions of dollars, that means when they walked in the door the company was at $x of revenue and when they walked out the door as a direct result the company is now at $x + $1,000,000. That's an important employee.

This individual did not do that. Think of it like a super speed sports car, there is the main engine that makes the car go 200 MPHs, and then there are the 1,000 screws that hold the frame in place. The engine is important, if it doesn't operate or wasn't created by the founders there is no business, period. But each screw isn't necessarily as important as the engine. If 20 or 50 screws start failing they can easily be replaced.

This individual was a small screw in the equation. Yes if all the screws fail there is a major problem, but the reality is you can get screws rather cheaply and that's good, cause if screws cost the same as an engine - the operation is too expensive to exist.

Does the CEO deserve his millions of dollars? Hell yes. He took a risk, ran around town and got funding for his idea, and more importantly executed on his operation and made it a success. He should be rewarded for it. Everyone reading this has had a great idea in their life time - not everyone has taken the risk to go after it; not everyone has attempted to sit down in 100 different meetings and beg people to fund their idea; not everyone that has gotten funded been able to execute on their idea; not everyone that's gotten execution down has become successful. There are multiple barriers to getting to Yelp's level that are easily dismissed as if anyone could do it and has the fortitude to keep doing it even during the darkest times. That's unfair and not a part of reality of what it takes to get to Yelp's success level.

Many of us can relate to working on projects and not knowing whether there will be success at the end of it, and our projects aren't that hard - most are simple MFA websites, the success blueprints are literally everywhere but still people choose to think it's too risky and stay on the sidelines and go get a corporate job.

local franchises business

Let's look at the Starbucks that's selling $4 coffee. What happens to that local business when the big corporations down the street start paying $20 a hour for customer support in the area? Either the business goes out of business since they can't find employees to fill in their roles cause the low-skilled employees are worth now $20 or they increase the wages of their employees. The problem is the business has to be profitable, and increasing wages of about 10-20 employees by, let's use an additional $10 an hour - since your Starbucks appears to be 24/7 - and a staff of 3 persons working that's $30 extra an hour or $720 a day in new costs. That equates to $21,600 in new costs a month for this Starbucks... That's a lot of extra cost for a local operation. They'll have to shutdown operations OR increase their prices to just cover costs - MAYBE foregoing profits for now.

Prices go up within that particular Starbucks. Anyone that's taken a basic macro-economics course can tell you when costs of something goes up, demand goes down. I walk into your Starbucks and I make $50,000 a year. I get to enjoy your $4 a cup Starbucks coffee every morning, but now it costs me $6 - maybe that does not immediately hurt my pockets, but you'll find me coming back less and less just because it reduces my overall "Starbucks" budget.

So what artificially increasing wages to low-skilled employees has done is trickled down to the local franchise business that has to increase it's prices just to keep decent employees, if not bad customer service will result in customers coming to that Starbucks less and less OR the prices go up which will result in customers coming less and less.

You can't have it both ways, prices can't come down within a company AND costs go up dwindling profits from founders, investors, or the company. If there are no profits, that's a charity, and there is no purpose in running a business as charity, so that operation gets closed and overall Starbucks franchises dwindle in that local area and the investors move to a more profitable area - cause remember they may have been foregoing profits for a while.

You personally wouldn't be creating your website properties/online business to make zero profits would you? You're here to make profits right?

you now employ people, you now advance the very system you hated as an employee.

I personally never hated the system. I may have not liked some of my old employment, but I never hated anywhere I worked, when I did start hating I quit that job within a day of hatred and tried for something else. But the system is perfect, cause it rewards people that are willing to take risks and have the skills and perseverance to keep at their task until it becomes a success. Yes, ALOT of people fail - but if it wasn't for that risk there wouldn't be the opportunity for the major successes either. I do not see a single problem with the system. I see a problem with people thinking the system owes them something for being born. The system is perfect, the cream of the crop rise to the top, the ones that work hard, take risk, and are willing to sacrifice safety for an unknown. Most people work hard but aren't willing to get out of their "safety" zone, and they are not reward - and I agree that's how it should be.

"He who would accomplish little need sacrifice little; he who would achieve much must sacrifice much. He who would attain highly must sacrifice greatly." - James Allen, As a Man Thinketh​

local small business

The problems that the Starbucks had will also get reflected within the local small businesses. They either have to increase their wages or get stuck with employees that will run their business into the ground and go out of business. The reason - low-skilled workers can go to the big business and get $20 for doing less work than at the small business's operation. low-skilled workers don't generally travel outside their local area either, so if all the good low-skilled people - decent hard working individuals make up the rankings of the big business, the small business has to increase wages or get stuck with bad employees.

Same story, prices have to go up, cause that small mom and pop business probably makes mom and pop $120,000 a year to live off of. They equate their "take home pay" to their profits. So increasing their costs would mean mom and pop will have to take less money home. They have to increase their prices too or go out of business - and when mom and pop go out of business, they don't have the luxury of the franchise like Starbucks and investors to just move to a different more profitable area, that's not the business they are in, franchises do that, not mom and pop so they'll be gone...

local low-skilled employees

The low-skilled employee now has their $20 an hour job - yet what has happened in their local economy is prices went up EVERYWHERE. A $4 Starbucks coffee now costs $6. Their local grocery store's prices went up as well. In fact everywhere they turn prices went up cause the other low-skilled employees have to be within the range of the $20 just so the business can remain in business. This usually happens over period of time, but in the end that $20 an hour wage doesn't mean much in that local region since prices all went up.

This is called inflation (The correct term might be hyper-inflation for this community).

What's also a bit ironic and sad is people are calling to "reduce living costs" of the city.

HOW? The employees rent their apartments/houses from someone who considers that apartment/house as a business. Are you telling the landlords to reduce rent throughout the city and forego profits? Most landlords aren't huge corporations, they are individual mom and pop landlords that need that income to continue living the way they live. The government doesn't rent houses, apartments - it's other individuals, unless you really are looking to live in secret FEMA death camps calling for local government to lower prices/cost of rent is like asking the mayor to get involved in lowering the cost of a BigMac at McDonalds - Again... HOW?

This individual

mostly because its safe because they are risk averse

Unfortunately low skilled workers are just that, low-skilled. Yelp isn't going to hire and give everyone $100K a year jobs cause they are good writers. How many writers do you need to writer tweets?

This is America. There is nothing stopping her from starting her own company off of her idea and executing upon it. There is no guarantee of anything - no guarantee her idea is good, no guarantee her skills of execution are good, no guarantee that she will become successful upon execution - but that's what allows a nobody to become a billionaire if you can get all the pieces of the puzzle together. She chose not to play that game - others are playing the game, but no one is chaining her abilities to execution and holding her back from going after her own ideas. There is NO ONE stopping her from going down the CEO's path, except herself...

She also pretty much made herself unemployable for the next 1-5 years. Who in the world would hire someone that's will to attempt to burn down another persons' business after not getting their way - without even putting a whole 1 year into working at the company?

A Stefanie Williams responded to this girl's open letter with an open letter of her own about her own struggles in this life. I copied the part that resonated with me the most:

Being an English major isn’t the problem. Minimum wage isn’t the problem (in this case). Do I like Yelp? Not particularly. Do I like that CEOs make pathetic amounts of money? Not particularly. But turning this girl’s inability to work for what she wants into a conversation about poverty (Poverty! She lives in the Bay Area alone and has a corporate job and can afford fancy bourbon! Not exactly the picture of a third world crisis!) and wage issues, it’s utter bullshit. This is about this girl’s personal responsibility to be an adult and find a job, or two (God forbid she have to give up a weekend day to be a waitress), an an affordable living situation and an affordable city in which to work. Yelp, as bad as they are and as much as I hate the assholes who use it to pretend they are New York Times food critics about the Applebees on Walnut St., is not the issue in this moment. The issue is that this girl doesn’t think working a second job or getting roommates should be something she has to do in order to get ahead after three months of an entry level job in the most expensive city in the country. She believes Yelp should cover the cost of the financial decisions she’s made which include living alone and accepting that salary, two options that any sane person would never make. She believes she deserves these things that most of us would call luxuries. You expected to get what you thought you deserved rather than expected to work for what you had to earn. And that’s the problem entirely.

Work ethic is not something that develops from entitlement. Quite the opposite, in fact. It develops when you realize there are a million other people who could perform your job and you are lucky to have one. It comes from sucking up the bad aspects and focusing on the good and above all it comes from humility. It comes from modesty. And those are two things, based on your article, that you clearly do not possess.

Trust me when I say, there are far more embarrassing things in life than working at a restaurant, washing dishes, or serving burgers at a fast food window. And one of them, without one shred of doubt, is displaying your complete lack of work ethic in public by asking for handouts because you refuse to actually do work that at the ripe old age of 25 that you think is unworthy of your witty tweet creating time.

You wanted to write memes? Darling, you just became one.

Sauce: https://medium.com/@StefWilliams25/an-open-letter-to-millenials-like-talia-52e9597943aa#.z6fmgvq8y
​

The Bourbon in particular. (The one Talia Jane got delivered to her job... at yelp):

--

Talia's latest project, http://www.100cupcakes.com/. She's selling watercolor artwork for $99 of cupcakes, "50%" of the fees will go towards "No Kid Hungry":

Purchaser will receive a downloadable PDF of the 8×10 AND 6-pack of custom cupcakes inspired by each story, (they will also receive the 8x10 artwork piece I believe).

--

On one end there is this bash against elites cause they make millions if not billions of dollars - but then you get into business so one day you can become one of them, right? A contradiction cannot exist. There can't be a bashing of hardworking people the become super successful while expecting people to create products, services that bring new experience to people for charity.

There is a wave of people coming onto the scene that don't want to work hard in this life, they don't want to work in the trenches for years until they get their moment of opportunity. They don't represent the rest of us. I worked hard, I did decades in the trenches, I'm still in the trenches and if one day I arrive at the top making billions of dollars cause I was willing to be in the trenches and you come around knocking on my door asking for the keys to my Ferrari cause you are entitled to it cause you were simply born - that's not going to end well for you.

 

[jamessmith110]

Basic Rule of business: If you increase costs (employee wages), in order to make a profit or stay in business you have to increase prices.

100% and that's why although well placed in sentiment, minimum wage is a flawed concept too, because as you say when governments increase minimum wage, obviously prices go up or the company finds other ways to equalize such as reducing the size of packets or in the Starbucks case making your cup a little smaller or for McDonald's, adding some more ice to your cup, and if they can't do these things they are going to have to cut jobs or in some other way equalize things its a ripple effect.

Does the CEO deserve his millions of dollars? Hell yes. He took a risk, executed on his operation and made it a success. There are multiple barriers to getting to Yelp's level.

100% not saying he does not deserve a kings ransom, not everyone can be a CEO, as you say its about risk and execution, most people are afraid of both, that's why I said her rant at the CEO is misguided.

Anyone that's taken a basic macro-economics course can tell you when costs of something goes up, demand goes down.

This is not always true but in this scenario I do agree that demand would go down, unless they also got a raise in which case the market would essentially be in equilibrium and nothing would change anyway.

You personally wouldn't be creating your website properties/online business to make zero profits would you? You're here to make profits right?

Of course, I'm not advocating not making those big boy CEO profits, I want to advance myself to that top 1%, and although you picked apart my post, I like debating with you and others who have experience in certain areas and are more advanced, if you hang around with people smarter or further ahead in their journeys than yourself, you advance faster, I have learned allot in life from guys, smarter, older, hell even better looking, their mindset blew my mind at times, and helped shape me in ways I could only dream of.

I personally never hated the system. I may have not liked some of my old employment, but I never hated anywhere I worked

Hate is a strong word, I wouldn't say I hate the system as a concept, I was being a little facetious in my post in terms of the lawyer stuff etc, I'm glad you didn't point out my typo that made my maths completely flawed, I did try and edit it but It said it took to much time to submit my edits!

I do think that sometimes people are not always fairly rewarded for their input into a company but your right if they don't like it they need to make a change and step out and take the risk, but i can also see the flip-side of it being a hard decision when you have bills to pay and especially when you have kids, but some people take it and they win, that's why their CEO.

In terms of me personally, I think I just always had the feeling that I was underselling myself, that I was capable of more, even when I was happy in some jobs this feeling just never really went away, others it was simply a means to an end, it paid the bills, I was always planning my way out, but I also had a big epiphany once that I never wanted to be in that situation again, and it inspires me to work harder.

I see a problem with people thinking the system owes them something for being born. Work ethic is not something that develops from entitlement. Quite the opposite, in fact. It develops when you realize there are a million other people who could perform your job and you are lucky to have one. It comes from sucking up the bad aspects and focusing on the good and above all it comes from humility.

100% I don't think people should be rewarded for being born either, I don't agree with all these state benefits (although their are some exceptions), in allot of cases it's because of work ethic and entitlement, and you need to have a good work ethic, because you can't and shouldn't get something for nothing.

I'm not saying people should create products and services for charity either obviously they have to be generously reward, but I do think that their are times when companies could make more efficient long-term decisions and save money, which could then be used to incentive and reward hard working employees (Not saying she is even one of these) without increasing costs.

I mean if employee retention is really as bad as she says surely fixing employee retention is the way forward, due to Opportunity cost and the loss of output such as the loss of a member of staff be that making sales calls or just providing customers with faster customer service when one leaves and then time and expense of not just hiring but also training, and then the fact that the new employee is probably not as efficient as the one that left, until they get up to speed of how things work, and the best way to do things, but I don't think wages on its own is the answer, you need to also increase loyalty etc.

you come around knocking on my door asking for the keys to my Ferrari that's not going to end well for you.

Fine, I'll just take the keys the Castle and maybe the Lamborghini...