What a $7.25 chicken sandwich shift taught me about capitalism
At fifteen, I got my first job at Chick-fil-A making $7.25 an hour. I remember doing the math on my first paycheck and feeling two things at once: pride that I’d earned something with my own two hands, and mild horror at how many hours it took to buy anything I actually wanted. A pair of shoes wasn’t $80 anymore. It was eleven hours of saying “my pleasure” with a smile.
I didn’t know it then, but that little mental conversion — turning prices into hours — was the beginning of my financial education. Because once you see it, you can’t unsee it: money isn’t really the thing. Money is just time, packaged in a form we can trade with each other.
I’ve been rereading Scott Galloway’s The Algebra of Wealth lately, and he puts language to something I’ve believed for years. Strip away all the noise about markets and money, and what’s left is simple: money has value because other people will trade you their time — or the things they built with their time — in exchange for it. That’s it. That’s the whole machine.
Not All Hours Are Priced the Same
Here’s what’s interesting to me, and where a lot of people get resentful instead of curious (especially in my generation).
At fifteen, the market priced my hour at $7.25. Meanwhile, a professional athlete’s hour might be priced in the millions. Is that fair? Honestly, that’s the wrong question. The better question is: why? And the answer is the same force that sets the price of gas, houses, and concert tickets — supply and demand.
There were thousands of teenagers in Houston, Texas, who could hand a sandwich through a drive-thru window. There is exactly one person on Earth who can do what they do better than anyone else in their field or on the court they are paid to play on. Scarcity commands a premium. My labor wasn’t cheap because I was worthless; it was cheap because it was replaceable.
That reframe changed everything for me. If the market prices hours based on how rare and valuable your skills are, then your wage isn’t a verdict on you as a person — it’s a snapshot of your current position on the supply-and-demand curve. And unlike a verdict, a position can be moved.
Capitalism Is a Mindset Test
A lot of people my age look at capitalism and see a rigged game. I get it. But I’d offer a different lens: capitalism is neither a villain nor a savior. It’s a system that ruthlessly and impersonally prices time. You can get angry at that, or you can learn the rules and play well.
Playing well starts with one word: specialization. Adam Smith made this point almost 250 years ago with his famous pin factory — ten workers dividing up the steps of pin-making could produce exponentially more than ten workers each doing everything alone. Nothing about the workers changed. The structure changed, and output exploded.
The same is true for you as an individual. When you stop trying to be adequate at everything and start becoming genuinely excellent at one thing, the market takes notice. I watched this happen in my own life. As a personal trainer, my hours were worth more than they were behind that Chick-fil-A counter — not because I worked harder (nobody outworks a fifteen-year-old on a Saturday lunch rush), but because I’d built a rarer skill. Today, as a financial advisor with Noel, who is one of the longest-tenured CFPs in South Carolina, my hours are priced differently again. Same person. Same twenty-four hours in a day. Different specialization.
The Second Move: Make Your Time Multiply
But here’s the part that separates people who earn well from people who build wealth, and it’s the part I wish someone had told me at fifteen.
Earning a higher wage still has a hard ceiling: there are only so many hours you can sell. The real unlock is converting some of your earned time into capital. That means savings and investments — because capital is time that keeps working after you clock out. When you own a piece of a productive business, you’re effectively collecting a small share of other people’s productive hours while you sleep, coach your kid’s game, or plan your wedding (speaking from experience on that last one).
That’s not a get-rich scheme. It’s slow, boring, and it works over decades, not weekends. But it’s the difference between renting out your hours forever and eventually owning your time back.
The Takeaway
So here’s how I’d summarize the mindset shift, whether you’re fifteen and holding your first paycheck or twenty-eight and building a career in the finance industry:
First, translate money back into time. Before any purchase, ask what it costs in hours of your life. It will change what you buy.
Second, treat your wage as a signal, not a sentence. If the market is pricing your hours low, that’s information. Get rarer. Get better. Specialize. And as a word of caution find something your talented in, NOT your passion (I will talk more about this in a future blog)
Third, buy some of your time back. Every dollar you invest is an hour that goes on working without you. Start small, start early, and let the math do what math does.
I still think about those shifts at Chick-fil-a, counting hours against the price of a pair of shoes. That younger version of me didn’t have much, but he’d accidentally stumbled onto the most important equation in personal finance: wealth isn’t measured in dollars. It’s measured in the time you no longer have to sell.
Gabriel Lopez
