 All right, Amazon blinked or Jeff Bezos did, whatever the case, $15 minimum hourly wage now for all workers part-time as well at Amazon. One of the highest paying retailers, by the way, in the country at an average of $26,000 a year. Having said that, will this be enough to put some of the Amazon critics at bay or the Jeff Bezos critics at bay and does it reinforce the argument that higher minimum wages are not bad for business? Amazon's a little different. Marco Lacha Melissa Arma, we've got former McDonald's CEO Ed Rensick. Ed, to you, now people saying, all these people worried about the damaging effects of higher wages, Amazon's proof that they can and will and do work, you say? I say it's a terrific thing, but let's not kid ourselves about what's going on. With this unemployment rate being what it is, blacks and Hispanics are being hired at a rate never before seen in the last 30 years. A lot of this is desperation because you've got to have people to run a company like Amazon, McDonald's, Fatburger or whatever, and you're gonna have to pay more to get in and to get good quality people, you're gonna have to pay more. I think it's great. Melissa, you could make that argument that in a different environment, this wouldn't be doable, daresay for even an Amazon, but this environment might encourage others, not everybody, but what do you think? I definitely think that this puts pressure on companies like Walmart to increase their hourly rate as well, especially going into the holly season. People are gonna be like, well, they already have, but not to this level. I think about an hour. $11 an hour. Yeah, yeah, but Target has planned to get it up to 15 by 2020, so there's gonna be competition for jobs, just like Ed said. However, the reason that Amazon is doing this is because look at the tax cut savings. They went from 35% to 21%. You can't have the richest man on the planet worth $164 billion and then employees on food stamps. That's not good optics. You know, the reality was though, they weren't on food stamps. The fact of the matter was that with average pay packages, $26,000, a billionaire status, but it was not like the old days of the Walmart criticism, but it is going to be very different for an owner of a local retail establishment or a small, non-chain burger place to do the same, right? I mean, it's different cases for different folks, right? Yeah, really, honestly, when people make more money, guess what, they spend more money. And not only that, they feel more independent. They feel more in control of their lives. They feel better. It's going to go back into the economy. People are going to make more feel better. I'm sorry, I wasn't clear on this. And I'll raise this with Ed. My only point was that what works for Amazon Ed might not work for some of those small establishments. I understand the spillover effect and the paid forward effect that you get, but for a lot of those smaller places, it's just not that easy to do. Well, it's absolutely very difficult, in fact. And if you look at, if you just take the total sales divided by number of employees, the total profit divided by number of employees, McDonald's restaurants are about one sixth of the profit per employee that Amazon is, you know, across the United States. So, small local businesses are going to have a hard time with this. And prices are going to go up. There's only one way to recover these labor costs. And that is to increase prices. And it's going to be something to see. I went through this in the late 70s, very early 80s. You're going to have to have better benefit programs. Insurance is going to come into play, better training, better mentoring, more flexibility in the schedule, more job sharing is going to have to happen. There are solutions to the problem for the small guy, but you're going to have to sharpen your pencil and get busy because it's going to be difficult. Melissa's still bullish out there with everything going on. Yes, the down made new highs today, Neil. Look at it. I mean, people opening up their 401k statements towards the end of the year, going into the holidays, they're going to have a smile on their face. It's really hard to not look at your statement and say, wow, gosh, you know, these policies, these Trump policies are working, even though Trump's taking a lot of criticism, you can't, the numbers don't lie. All right, wow, gosh, you got it. All right, thank you both very, very much. In the meantime, which would dictate how this all goes five weeks from today of those impressive numbers and economy and higher wages or what's happening with the Kavanaugh nomination? After this.