And soon you’ll be paying more for the service!

From Crain’s, “Minimum wage, labor laws on new administration’s menu“:

(Crain’s) — When Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats take power in Washington, D.C., restaurant operators are expecting them to push a minimum-wage hike and a union-friendly right-to-organize law — moves that could change the playing field for McDonald’s Corp. and others in the food industry.

Mr. Obama wants to boost the federal minimum wage to $9.50 an hour by 2011, up from $7.25 an hour in 2009. The president-elect also supports the proposed Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers to unionize by eliminating secret ballots and requiring only a majority of a company’s employees to sign authorization cards.

“Both of these issues are critical to restaurants,” says Joni Doolin, founder of People Report, a Texas company that tracks employment issues in the food-service industry. She says higher wages will affect mom-and-pop restaurants as well as large chains such as Oak Brook-based McDonald’s. Restaurants will pass increased labor costs on to consumers by raising menu prices, Ms. Doolin predicts.

Blondie has certainly been topical lately.

Frankly, we think their problem is simply marketing. The backward “E”s confuse the buying public.

Comics aficionados will recognize the re-emergence of the themes of economic anxiety that accompanied the Depression Era origins of the Blondie strip, as Dagwood, son of millionaire industrialist J. Bolling Bumstead wooed working-class Blondie. Dagwood surrendered his inheritance to marry her, but even now, he sometimes resents his fall. (And really, an apple cider stand is only one step removed from an “Apples – 5 cents” stand.)

(Cartoon from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.)