I don’t know if you’ll get the correct answer here, but I suspect that many would be surprised to know the real (measured) impact.

Hint: Imagine your reaction if you owned a business employing 50 minimum wage employees and the mandated wage goes up by 20%. Would you:

a. Knuckle under, pay the higher wage, maintain your prices and make less profit?

b. Pay the higher wage, raise prices to compensate and hope that your competition doesn’t transfer jobs to China?

c. Hire undocumented workers for less than the minimum wage and hope you don’t get caught?

d. Lay off 20% of your workforce and try to squeeze more output out of the remaining 40 employees?

e. Follow the competition and transfer your jobs to China?

Which of these possible “solutions” is best for the U.S. economy and labor market?

You will sometimes find people willing to do a phone interview, that’s fairly common. But usually they won’t hire you until after the 2nd interview, and that would almost definitely need to be in person.

This is why a lot of people don’t get out of state jobs. You have to either make sacrifices or take risks in order to get a job out of state.

You might consider getting a job locally that has an office out of state, and try to get yourself transferred there. That might be the easiest and safest way.

Good luck.

Large companies that participate in expo-type events use people for setup and planning.

Convention centers also provide services for a variety of events, not just weddings or parties.

Chamber of Commerce plans get togethers and organizes mixers and meetings of many sorts.

My gut feeling for you would be to pursue the hotel management degree, get a job with a large hotel chain and be their event planner. In the meantime, plan as many parties, weddings and events as you can because experience is a valuable commodity. Keep track of all you do and put in on your resume.

This is your chance to really sell yourself, basically what most employers are looking for are dedicated hard working employees that take their work seriously and work well with others even in troubled situations.

They are interested to see how professionally you appear you could handle with rude or ignorant costumers as well as rude employees who slack off, or become jerks after getting hired. Don’t let that scare you, there are a lot of cool costumers that don’t want to cause a scene or make things difficult, but they ARE out there.

I work for a grocery store and I’ve had costumers imply that I don’t know what I’m doing in regards to following company policies that they don’t agree with. Or simply the way I bag their groceries at the checkout lines even though I’ve been a checker for over a year with no problems from my boss. It has gotten to the point before where I have held my tongue only to call a manager to help diffuse the situation peacefully.

But as anything those are downsides to working in retail. You can always improvise a little and have fun with or at least chat with co-workers who are a lot like you. I would say go into your interview with the mindset of looking forward to the job and selling yourself at every chance you can in order to get it.

If you sound confident and enthusiastic, those are two big things that will help you.

If you did good enough in the interview, it’s not over yet. You will then be contacted possibly by the store manager and have a formal one-on-one interview.

Good luck