WHYY did a puff piece about "Popcorn for the People" a 'not-for-profit' gourmet popcorn manufacturing plant in New Jersey (and in Philly) with a mission to provide employment opportunities to autistic adults and other disabled people. It was founded by a 31-year-old autistic man with "help from his parents" so I'm guessing they just kinda funded the whole enterprise. Apparently before he founded this business he just worked retail so he doesn't exactly have a lot of expertise for running a business or nonprofit. They accept donations and corporate giving like a non-profit... but they are also a business that sells products for a profit. This is really sketchy to me.
I was giving them the benefit of the doubt but like... "fair wages" and it's minimum wage? To work a factory job? In NJ that's $15.12/hr so $31.2k gross/year if working 40 hours a week. The NJ plant is in Piscataway so the living wage in the vicinity of the plant (important since a lot of Autistic people can't drive) is, according to MIT, $25.68/hr. So their "fair wage" is 58% of a living wage. Is that "fair?" They contrast this with how a lot of disabled people get paid below minimum wage but if you weren't framing this as an honorable charitable thing to do by employing these poor workers then "Our factory pays minimum wage" would be atrocious! The living wage in Philly is a bit lower than Piscataway but not by much. It's still not even close to being as low as $15.12/hr
Also their website is painful to look at why did they make everything the world's brightest red. And their popcorn is $8 for 60g of popcorn which is not a lot of popcorn. Just feels gross to see what is apparently someone of our own community trying to exploit the disadvantages our community faces to try and do this sort of grift.
