As we noted earlier, while the headline payrolls print blew away consensus estimate, printing above the highest expectations, there was a rather unpleasant number in the data: nominal average hourly wages actually dipped by 1 cent to $25.24. What caused this? There are three reasons. First: the continued surge of minimum wage jobs, as seen in the chart below, which shows that in December another 36,900 minimum wage waiters and bartenders were added to the labor force, bringing the total to a new record high of 11.3 million. Putting this in context, here is a chart showing the relative addition of waiter, bartender ... (full story)