text: The sad truth is that many businesses pay too much rent to landlords. So the business is caught in a squeeze between staff costs and rent. This should not be taken out on the minimum wage earner. At some point the multi-national leasing companies and the large property owners must realize that you can not get blood from a stone and start to lower their rent expectations. Once again the money in retail flows up to the wealthy not to the workers. Any store which pays less than $15.00 per staff hour needs to re-evaluate their business model. We have too much retail space which has rent priced too high - we need fewer stores, but better stores.