As long as there are people willing to subject themselves to that, then Starbucks will continue to employ them. But each minute of commute you add removes more people from the pool of potential employees. The more skill the job requires, the smaller that pool will necessarily be. At some point a business will find itself unable to hire for any amount of money they can offer, and they will either go out of business or move out of the city. Then the companies that don’t need much skilled labor, such as Starbucks, will either close down most of their locations, or open them elsewhere. The result will be less demand in the city center, and more elsewhere.

You could accelerate this by making employers pay for time spent commuting to and from work, but that will not be a panacea; it will eliminate some jobs that people rely on. The person in your example might end up completely unemployed, and given the choice they might prefer to commute for four hours per day than to be completely unemployed.

"As long as there are people willing to subject themselves to that, then Starbucks will continue to employ them"

Historically some people sold themselves into slavery, should we bring back the good old days?

Also, how does any of this prove that having people travel 4 hours a day is economically productive?

No, it’s relatively easy to prove that all forms of slavery, even voluntary ones, are less efficient than simply paying wages. This is because it removes the capacity for future choice. An employee in a low–paying job today can leave for a new opportunity whenever one appears, a slave or an indentured servant cannot. Societies which use slaves or indentured servants will have less economic success over the long term than ones without.

> Also, how does any of this prove that having people travel 4 hours a day is economically productive?

It’s manifestly more productive than being unemployed. It might be a bad enough job that you can barely tolerate it, but that’s better than starvation. An employer whose employees are this close to the edge is taking a very large risk. If any alternative opens up, or if the job conditions get any worse, then they will suffer fatal turnover. They’ll either have to pay higher wages or improve conditions (or both) to survive, or their competitors will do it for them.

Well blame it on London for not building more housing and having ornery zoning laws not on Starbucks

Minimum wage is a distortion of the market. Without that, this Starbucks would have to pay a higher wage than a Starbucks in a cheap-housing area.

For jobs that pay above minimum wage, that's what already happens.

You're saying that minimum wage is somehow providing a ceiling? This is nonsense. It's a distortion in that if Starbucks was allowed to, Starbucks would pay less, not more. If they had to pay more to attract employees, they would pay more -- nothing's stopping them from doing that today. The fact that they're paying minimum wage means that the clearing price for Starbucks labor is at or below the floor already!

If the minimum wage were lower, then the Starbucks could open a store 2 hours away from the city. The employees there would earn less than the employees in the city, but they wouldn’t have to commute two hours each way either. As it is, the customer base in that location outside the city cannot support the minimum wage that Starbucks is required to pay. (Not to mention all of the other costs that Starbucks has; wages are not the only factor that keeps them out of small towns and villages. Starbucks is really a luxury product compared to an inexpensive coffee machine.)

Yes, but that would mean the employees that work at this out-of-the-way location would be paid less than the city centre, not that those in the centre would get paid more. The issue is that even in the city centre, the labor clearing cost isn't high enough to afford for its employees to live in the city centre. If its employees were paid less, they would have to live in even more undesirable locations -- and there is a floor on how bad living conditions can be, so a rural Starbucks' labor clearing cost would be below what would be required to live anywhere.

That’s only because of a _different_ distortion in the market . Both of them were created by the government in the name of helping people, but it should be fairly clear that all they really do is hurt the very poorest people.

I certainly agree that it would be nicer if everyone could live in as nice a house as they wanted, located in as nice a place as possible, and if they could always eat all the food they wanted without regard for prices. We should aim as much as possible to build our world along those lines. But we must also recognize that it will only happen once we’ve built a Dyson swarm so that we have enough energy that it can be given away, and we’ve developed actual Star–Trek–style replicators (using nanotechnology, most likely, rather than teleportation) that produce as much food as people want without consuming any time or effort on the logistics of growing, preparing, shipping, and preserving food. But most everyone would still want to live in the big city, so land prices would still be a factor.

On the other hand, with a growing Dyson swarm we can start making as many O’Neil cylinders as people want. Even so, there will always be some places that are popular and crowded, and others that are almost empty and peaceful.

Even in novels like the Culture series, where free energy and free living space abound, there is still scarcity and economics. You might have heard of a really great place to live on the other side of the galaxy, but do you really want to pay the price of moving there? Sure, you wouldn’t have to buy any property there, or pay someone to move your stuff (in these books anyone can just hop on the next passing space ship and make their way to wherever they want to go, because those ships can house millions or billions of people.) But you would still have to pay the cost of the travel time, potentially years of it. You would eventually lose contact with the friends you have, and the place you grew up. All of these things are scarce, and it will cost you some or all of them to move across the galaxy. It would be nice to live in a civilization where those were the only costs, but it’s important to recognize that we haven’t built it yet. We can’t just legislate that people are not allowed to be poor until after we’ve eliminated the scarcity of physical goods.

You're conflating minimum standards of living (a room to sleep in, food to eat, clothes to wear) with an end to all scarcity with maximum consumption. We actually don't need that much. The USA absolutely produces enough to feed, clothe, and house everybody -- we've simply decided that the market is more important than doing so. It's nonsense. Make sure everybody is fed, clothed and housed first to a minimum standard, then if you want to have wealth accumulation, fine, if you must.

Minimum wage provides a floor function to make sure people can at least maybe put a roof over their head and food on the table. The market fails quite often because all the true power is in the hands of the 0.1% the only counter balance is either democracy or rebellion because those actually allow regular people to have a bit of power in what goes on in a given economy.