rising costs are no joke. Our profitability is down significantly this year, while we've managed to stay profitable, we've lost a ton of money despite 4 major price increases to our customers in the last 9 months. We've also enacted multiple wage increases in order to keep abreast with the market, we had up to 15-20% vacancy on hiring. We were hiring anyone willing to work for a while.

and we're actually the lucky ones.

we don't have a union contract preventing us from wage increases. We're not in an industry where the price is dictated by the market (think agriculture or raw material commodities), we're not in a heavily regulated market where government demands ever increasing reports, proofs, and compliance, and we care quite a bit about our workers. We also don't have a whole lot of Americans on the shop floor, probably because of attitudes like yours. I wish we did, but the harder workers who make these wages are mostly Hispanic and immigrants from Africa.

So we refuse to keep up with inflation and are just trying to hurt and deceive workers? hardly. we're doing our darndest to keep from going out of business for the 100 workers we do have.