I don’t know anything about the economics of where you live, so I can’t comment on whether or not that’s a fair wage. Understand that I’m not suggesting that someone who doesn’t want to / can’t hack improving themselves beyond base-level should get a 6 figure salary. But I am saying that a job is really the employee selling chunks of his life in pursuit of his employer’s goals. He’s not going to get that time back. His life won’t be extended because he’s employed. If I’m going to sell a huge chunk of my life to you, I expect to be compensated at least decently for it.
Beyond that, I’m simply saying that paying someone below a real living wage - by that I mean, they can afford a place to live, food, and other basic necessities, not a large TV and dinners out - simply shifts the cost burden to the rest of society. Walmart’s low wages just means that you and I are subsidizing Walmart’s payroll. And it seems silly to me that you and I - I’m no millionaire, and I suspect you aren’t one either - should be on the hook to subsidize the wages of a company that takes in half a trillion dollars per year.
The problem is that “simple” is not synonymous with “good,” “fair,” or even “smart.” If Ford (see? still talking cars! Nothing to see here! 
) were to try to sell a car today using simple Model T technology they’d be laughed out of their own showroom. Sometimes - often actually - simple is not the appropriate strategy.
Flat-rate / commission-only is simple, yes, but again, it increases the likelihood that I will be helping pay someone’s salary. I don’t want to pay other peoples’ salaries. That’s not the direction my tax dollars should be going.
If you can’t afford the lease/rent on your shop, then your business is not viable. If you can’t afford to buy the equipment you need to fix cars, then your business is not viable. Similarly, if you can’t afford to pay your workers a wage that they can live on without requiring me and thousands of others to supplement their income, then your business should not be considered viable. If that means you need to raise prices in order to cover higher wages, so be it. I can afford to spend an extra $5 or $10 for an oil change. So could others if wages were generally higher. However, in many cases, especially corporate cases, corporations could easily afford to cut into their billions in annual profits in order to pay their workers decently. I certainly find the “we can’t afford it / we’d have to raise prices” argument specious coming from a corporation that pays its CEO millions every year, plus stock options, plus a guaranteed golden parachute that will make him rich beyond most of our wildest dreams even if he totally biffs the job.
Hehe. Now we’re getting into another area that I suspect you and I will end up agreeing on; colleges are ripping people off. They’ll happily sell you a liberal arts degree, telling you that the world values creative people. And then you graduate and discover the dude who spent 1/8 of your tuition going to the technical college is vastly out-earning you as an apprentice plumber. But that’s a whole 'nother can of worms.
At the core, we have screwed up as a society by pretending that things happen in a vacuum. That shop assistant you talked about - if $17/hour isn’t enough for him to get by on (again, no idea - he could pull it off - just - where I live) we act like that is happening in isolation, and that he will not then go down to the welfare office and apply for benefits. We pretend we will not pay for part of the income he needs to get by. Not a huge deal with your single shop assistant, but when you expand that idea to the millions of people who are being paid low wages and applying for taxpayer assistance as a result, you realize that we tax payers are spending one hell of a lot of money to keep his wages low.
There’s a dirty little truth in the homelessness problem that it would be cheaper to just give homeless people a place to live than it is to build and staff shelters, etc. But we don’t do it because, honestly, we’d rather spend more to make sure that those people don’t enjoy the same satisfaction out of life that we do. We’re in a similar trap with the wages game. We’ll happily pay significantly more in taxes in order to subsidize their wages instead of expecting employers to pay a living wage. Why? We’d end up saving money if we required employers to pay appropriately, but really at the end of the day, that would prevent people from the embarrassment of having to jump through hoops to receive government assistance, and there’s something ugly in our nature that secretly relishes that concept.
