Originally Posted by
noglider
Firstly, understand that for any business to sell labor, it MUST triple the hourly wage.
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Secondly, basing anything on minimum wage isn't a good place to start. Minimum wage hasn't kept up with the cost of living. I was a bike mechanic until 1984. In that year, minimum wage was something like $3.50 per hour. Now it's a little over $7. The cost of living has more than doubled, though. In this area, few jobs pay minimum wage. If they did, there would be no applicants.
I work in a service industry where the standard is to bill 1.5x to 2x the pay rate. Triple may be reasonable for a bike shop mechanic, but is certainly not the rule for "any business". That's not meant to be argumentative, just a statement of fact.
Do you know of a better baseline for a living wage? I actually have heard an economist recommend the price of a whole chicken, which is supposedly a good reference point for most developed regions. Without meaning to be a smartass, feel free to express the value as the number of whole chickens you could buy with the money.
What would you consider a reasonable direct labor cost (a bike mechanic doing work independent of a shop). There are reasons this would be worth less than the same quality of work done at a shop, but (if you're not voiding a warranty) I assume it's worth more than a third of what a shop would charge.