> Forcing them to provide higher wages will result in higher prices, which will reduce their market viability and result in closure of some locations. And it's

> Forcing them to provide higher wages will result in higher prices, which will reduce their market viability and result in closure of some locations. And it's done just that every single time it's happened. But it also has a more permanent effect: labour is usually the biggest cost to a business, and it's often necessary -- or at least, any investment in technologies to eliminate labor come with so much risk that they are often slow to materialize without a solid catalyst. Raise the cost of labor, substantially, and you get self-checkout. Raise it more and the self-checkout aisles start working more easily[0], or are eliminated entirely in favor of electronic tracking and facial recognition. It's all got a breaking point -- it's ~$9.00-~$12.00/hr (locally based on the marquis in front of the local McDonald's) times every required front-end employee vs. a multi-million dollar investment that might eliminate the 90% that labour cost, but might also be completely rejected by customers or otherwise fail horribly. Time is always going to bring that "multi-million" side down, but another way to accelerate it is to raise the cost of labour (either artificially by increasing the minimum wage or naturally as a result of full employment/good economic conditions). [0] Because they kill the "scale" that checks that you've set the item you bought on the "purchased" side in favor of putting an extra person behind some screens and opening up 8 more check-out aisles. Additional shrink from the less strict systems is offset by lower labour costs. Of course, lost sales from people like my great aunt/uncle who are pissed off that they need a manual to operate a Walmart end up creating new opportunities for companies to offer an option to pay someone else to handle that hassle for you. So now you just pay the damn cashier, directly, through DoorDash or whomever.