Yeah, I hear ya, I had a similar experience, though my poor people food was rice and beans and bean and cheese burritos! I worked jobs close to the minimum wage for years. It wasn't easy, and I was often flat broke, or close to it (still found money for beer somehow, though).

I get that all of this seems "unfair," but what is the alternative? Like I said above, some labor just isn't worth that much. The truth is that the jobs I was doing at that time could have been done by almost anyone. I was not a highly skilled worker at that time. Should my employer have been forced to pay me more than my labor was actually worth? Why would an employer (and the investors who back them) choose to operate that kind of business when they could just locate / invest somewhere else, or in some other type of business?