Boomer Says It's 'Easy' For A Couple To Make $75k A Year Working In A Convenience Store 'If You're Willing To Work'
His advice is utterly delusional. And it's likely on purpose.
andresr | Getty Images Signature | Canva Pro Baby boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, have become infamous for not understanding the economic realities of our current era, even when they fall victim to them themselves. As a general rule, they remain convinced that the reason millennials and Gen Z'ers can't get a leg up is not because, say, American housing prices rose 432% in 30 years while wages effectively decreased over the same period. No, it's because they're just "lazy" and "entitled."
These boomer hot takes are so unreasonable that it makes you wonder where they could possibly have come from. A recent viral uproar over boomers' economic advice just might shed light on this.
Boomer political scientist Charles Murray said it's 'easy' for a couple to make $75k a year working in a convenience store.
If you're already scream-laughing at your computer screen, you are not alone. Political scientist and author Charles Murray's hot take on the economy, posted in a thread on X, immediately had the internet snarking because it is, in fact, delusional.
Murray asserted that if a couple both get jobs in a convenience store like a 7-11 "at $15/hr in a moderately prosperous state" and both work 48 hours a week they could easily make $75,000 a year combined, more than enough, he said, "to pay for a nice place to live everywhere except a few megalopolises, and even enough to put some money aside to help pay for a baby."
@CharlesMurray | X
Once that baby comes, don't worry, this mythical couple can still do well, because after a year, Murray said this hypothetical strawman could get promoted to store manager and go up to $25 an hour, while his wife could go down to 20 hours a week to care for the baby. That would leave them taking home $67,600, which Murray contends is "less than before, but still enough for a good life except in a few megalopolises."
Murray's take is delusional for multiple reasons, and the internet let him know.
If you're like most people who've had to work tooth-and-nail for everything you have instead of the Harvard-educated son of a Maytag executive like Murray, you've probably been listing in your head the myriad reasons his take is idiotic. For starters, most states' minimum wage is well below $15, and 20 states have no minimum wage at all. Meaning their minimum wage is the federal $7.25 an hour. This mythical $15-an-hour job at 7-11 is virtually nonexistent.
Even if it were, the average American rent for a two-bedroom apartment, which this theoretical couple will need for their baby, is $1,897. That's more than a third of their income gone before even taking taxes into account, let alone the costs of childcare and clothing, feeding, and diapering a baby.
More to the point, Murray's rosy picture relies upon 8 hours of overtime every week, a thing anyone who's ever worked in retail, foodservice, or a convenience store knows is virtually non-existent. In most cases, FULL-TIME hours are non-existent, let alone overtime.
As one Redditor explained, jobs in these fields "don't pay overtime. They schedule people less than 30 hours a week so they don't have to pay benefits. If anything, they will hire you at two different locations owned by the same guy. Then you are working 55-60 hours a week, but with two different paychecks, you still aren't getting overtime pay. I've lived it." So have I. So have most Americans outside the Ivy League-educated elite class.
Murray, of course, has not, and if he had, he'd know that the other detail his ludicrous story hinges upon, getting a $10 raise in just a year at a convenience store, isn't just unrealistic but downright stupid. Although the thing is, he likely DOES know this, because Charles Murray is not your average delusional boomer.
Charles Murray's work has trafficked in right-wing propaganda, including eugenics.
Murray's ridiculous take is ridiculous for a reason: It is likely a performance. Murray is a fellow at the venerable conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute, the organization that essentially ran the George W. Bush administration and which has lurched increasingly rightward in recent years, including towards political takes that used to be called far-right lunacy, or at least propaganda.
Murray is a perfect fit for that kind of laundering of extremism. His signature work, 1994's "The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life," hinges in part on claims that American economic inequality is partly due to Black and Latino people being genetically less intelligent than white people.
To make this point, Murray and his writing partner Richard Hernstein cite research conducted almost exclusively by scientists funded by far-right groups like the Pioneer Fund. (Murray contends his sources' ideological connections are irrelevant in the book's afterward.)
Now, instead of laundering rhetoric about genetic superiority in a book under the guise of science, Murray appears to have moved on to laundering right-wing economic fantasies on Twitter under the guise of common sense and frugality, for the usual audience of boomers, extremists, and bots that made his dumb tweets go instantly viral. So if your Fox News dad suddenly starts demanding to know why you won't just go get a cushy job at 7-11, at least now you'll know why.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
