Everybody, absolutely, without a doubt deserves to live a good, fulfilling life working the standard 40 hours a week. I'd say 32 hours a week is a far better goal, and with AI, maybe less.

But, local businesses have been under assault by chains for decades. Many of those chains have grown to be absolutely massive. They also tend to peddle us absolute junk that needs to be replaced regularly, instead of lasting decades to lifetimes with some amount of repairability. We're fed manufactured garbage. We're pillaging our earth to support this corporate greed.

These local businesses can hardly sustain at this point. The honest ones are mostly gone, serious compromises to downright predatory practices are required for something relatively local to thrive. Or it needs to meet some strong niche demand that's not addressed at all by the big corporations, and you'll bet that they will once they see there's good profit to be made.

Raising minimum wage is going to kill off even more of the self sustainability and local-sourced livelihood that we've largely lost over the last 100 years. Things weren't perfect in the past, far from it, but the future is full on dystopian. Raising the minimum wage isn't enough, we need to drive the greed out of our governments and our board rooms, and truly support and nurture local businesses and cooperatives so that markets they can serve can't reasonably support huge soulless corporations.

We need to go back to giving a shit about each other, instead of chasing convenience and an easy buck. Only then can we reasonably keep minimum wages in lockstep with (a hopefully more manageable) inflation, and not destroy our local economies in the process, so that we can live in a world actually worth living in.