Another bad thing about those types of jobs is that they can start to warp your mind after a while, to the effect that you start unconsciously considering your superiors / managers as role models, and start trying to 'move up the ladder' because the pay is marginally better, when in reality most of the time the _top_ of the "ladder" at such organizations are compensated less than entry-level positions for in-demand skilled workers --
I've been continuously employed [out of what I _thought_ was necessity] since I was 16, and until I was about 26 the majority of my jobs were in the foodservice / warehouse / gofer / etc hard-work-long-hours-very-low-pay category. If I had to do over again, I would have stayed away from those situations by any means available and used that time to build valuable skills [as I later did], which would almost certainly have resulted in better outcomes, sooner.
Hard work leads to prosperity. That's not the same as equating prosperity to hard work.
Most prosperous people achieved prosperity due to earlier hard work and sacrifice of themselves (or their immediate ancestors.)
Clearly, the 'value chain', as you put it, exists as evidenced by the numerous posts on this thread of describing the previous fast-food-type jobs they held that led them to more 'prosperous' positions (at least, affording enough prosperity to spend time posting messages to the internet instead of digging ditches or flipping burgers.)
Sometimes it does. Other times, it's barely enough to achieve survival.
> Most prosperous people achieved prosperity due to earlier hard work and sacrifice of themselves (or their immediate ancestors.)
Or their distant ancestors. Or due to their -- or their ancestors' -- criminal activities or exploitative behavior or sheer luck.
Every single office job I've had, except my first (which was a data entry job, not programming), has been a lot more stressful a lot more often, and I'm including the job where the first thing my coworkers and I did each morning was play a video game to determine who was going to go pick up coffee (Carcassonne on Xbox Live Arcade, if you're curious, took about 20 minutes).
And this is true whether your folks won the lottery or earned their money through hard work.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/29/study-to-succeed-in-america-...
This part wasn't in your link, I don't believe this is true.
Any guesses on when the people working hard at a fast food restaurant will have prosperity arrive?
Honestly, I only made it out (I was probabbly not going to make it through college due to all the work and my own personality when I was young was NOT ready for college) because I got lucky, had some mild technical skills and the .com era came along and companies wanted warm bodies.
I picked some aged old company and they hired me. That company stuck around for a long enough time to establish a career.
Working pizza ... could easily have kept me down due to that and other challenges.
To get more money you have to pry it from people's hands. You have to have something they can't resist not paying you for. That's it.
The suffering of low minimum wage is supposed to "encourage" people to move up the value chain, as the conservative doctrine goes, but it just doesn't work when all your time and energy is spent surviving.