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Raise prices then. Wages are usually said to be a lesser part of the cost of a restaurant. Raise prices 10%. The gross goes up $270k, give yourself 20k more, gi

Raise prices then. Wages are usually said to be a lesser part of the cost of a restaurant. Raise prices 10%. The gross goes up $270k, give yourself 20k more, give your employees 250k more. They get a 50% raise, that will make people want to work for you. My hamburger costs $3.30 instead of $3. In Seattle the restaurant industry said it was going to be all doom and gloom when they raised wages incrementally to $15/hour. Restaurants open and close all the time. There were a few that claimed they closed because of wages. Plenty of other restaurants succeed just fine, some put a small specific charge on the bill for this living wage instead of just raising prices. It didn't make much difference.

rjf72 7y ago
You can't ignore economics here. When you raise prices, sales tend to decrease. This sounds peculiar because it seems difficult to imagine that somebody would be "Okay, I will pay $3 for my burger, but $3.30? Oh no way." But of course if this did not happen then you'd see an annual 10% inflation on just about everything. This is compounded further because people buying cheap food tend to be buying it precisely because it's cheap, so they're generally going to be more responsive to price changes than the general population. There are also various cost increases that go along with higher wages such as increased payroll taxes and higher supply side costs as your suppliers also see their labor costs increase. I think the biggest issue here is determining results. Did the wage increase work, or not? The problem is that you can create compelling hindsight arguments showing either argument. And indeed there are now numerous studies that all show different results. None are lying, they're just prioritizing and organizing data in different ways. The problem is this introduces bias. If you want to show it was a good idea, you can. If you want to show it was a bad idea, you can. More needs to be done in terms of formal predictive hypotheses published ahead of time, rather than compiling data after the fact. In other words invite a large balance of both critics and proponents of minimum wage increases. Have these individuals come to a supermajority consensus on exactly what the goals would be in increasing the minimum wage and how the success or failure to meet these goals could be measured. And make the entire process completely visible and transparent. This, actually putting ideas to critical and impartial tests, would also hamstring demagoguery or accusations of such.

rjf72 7y ago

You can't ignore economics here. When you raise prices, sales tend to decrease. This sounds peculiar because it seems difficult to imagine that somebody would be "Okay, I will pay $3 for my burger, but $3.30? Oh no way." But of course if this did not happen then you'd see an annual 10% inflation on just about everything. This is compounded further because people buying cheap food tend to be buying it precisely because it's cheap, so they're generally going to be more responsive to price changes than the general population. There are also various cost increases that go along with higher wages such as increased payroll taxes and higher supply side costs as your suppliers also see their labor costs increase. I think the biggest issue here is determining results. Did the wage increase work, or not? The problem is that you can create compelling hindsight arguments showing either argument. And indeed there are now numerous studies that all show different results. None are lying, they're just prioritizing and organizing data in different ways. The problem is this introduces bias. If you want to show it was a good idea, you can. If you want to show it was a bad idea, you can. More needs to be done in terms of formal predictive hypotheses published ahead of time, rather than compiling data after the fact. In other words invite a large balance of both critics and proponents of minimum wage increases. Have these individuals come to a supermajority consensus on exactly what the goals would be in increasing the minimum wage and how the success or failure to meet these goals could be measured. And make the entire process completely visible and transparent. This, actually putting ideas to critical and impartial tests, would also hamstring demagoguery or accusations of such.