Minimum wage increases reduce profit margins, they do not increase prices. If the vendor thought they could raise prices, they already would have.

Just to play devil's advocate, maybe stores will think they can raise prices and get away with it if some people now have a little more money to spend.

Then again, maybe not since prices haven't gone up in Seattle.

My biggest concern with raising minimum wage is that businesses that currently operate on very thin margins might need to fire an employee to remain solvent. But that brings us back to foobar's point: if a business owner thought they could reduce their staff without any big downsides, they would have already done it.

I know that economically, even if prices do go up, the amount of available and spent cash will also go up, making it even out or allow the average minimum wage earner to have more stuff in their cart at the end of the month.

I also know that my mom runs a daycare center and if she had to give everyone raises (including those making more than $15, so that there wasn't wage compression), she'd be closed and done for almost immediately.

So yeah, it's a very tough proposition, but also pretty necessary. It can be phased in, even though you KNOW that it'll mean that some minimum wage workers won't get an ACTUAL increase for a long time -- "whatta ya mean, a raise? you just got $1.32 more an hour!!" is going to feel shitty during a 5 year phase-in.

"if a business owner thought they could reduce their staff without any big downsides" - Not necessarily. If the 2008 reduction in labor plus the generally increase in profitability/productivity has shown, many if not most businesses often choose the route of just hiring another body than thinking about their business process and optimizing them. In many cases, especially the larger the organization, the more slack there is to trim in process. It's just not as easy as just adding more horsepower.

Fuck that.

McDonald's Says its Wage Hikes Are Improving Service
Oops!

Except Seattle's raising of the minimum wage hasn't resulted in higher product costs or lower employment. This attitude seems to think that income growth is only for the wealthy, that living wages aren't something that are needed to, well, live, and that actual wages haven't been dropping for the past 30 years while wealth has moved higher and higher up the income brackets.

I'm rather curious which billionaire lobbying group is behind this. I kind of doubt a grassroots movement would have these sorts of production values, this level of clueless "young people like to say FUCK" content, and a WhoIs registration that uses "Domains By Proxy, LLC."

I wonder if they have "LetThemEatCake.com" registered as well?

Fucking hipster libertarians.

When it comes to. blue collar work, there are some real bad jobs. But the differance between a good paying job, and a poor paying job, for rough labor, is pretty much how organized you are. If all the fast food workers were organized, they would be making a living wage, at least until their jobs got automated.