<story><title>$15 minimum wage didn’t hurt NYC restaurants</title><url>https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-15-minimum-wage-was-supposed-to-hurt-new-york-city-restaurants-but-both-revenue-and-employment-are-up-2019-10-28</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ensorceled</author><text>The comments on these types of articles always hurt my brain.  Blaming minimum wage increases for McDonald&amp;#x27;s, Walmart, pretty much everybody bringing in automated tellers for instance.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m always bemused by the arguments against minimum wages, they almost always boil down to &amp;quot;My business can&amp;#x27;t survive unless my employees are living in poverty.&amp;quot; which, in reality for a lot of businesses, is &amp;quot;I won&amp;#x27;t be as profitable if I have to pay a living wage&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;If people really believed this, there would be staged minimum wages: Walmart pays $25 minimum while small, struggling restaurants pay $15.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zaroth</author><text>Anyone arguing that businesses are “entitled” to cheap labor are arguing the case backwards.&lt;p&gt;Some jobs that certain humans perform are not worth very much money to an employer. If the state tells the employer they can’t pay someone that meager a sum, then they simply won’t hire a person to perform &lt;i&gt;just that job&lt;/i&gt;. They will hire someone for more money to do that job plus something additional to make it worth hiring the person, or they will find a way to automate out or contract out that portion of the work.&lt;p&gt;Yes, if a business is not successful in managing around a government wage minimum then they will lose money. Companies are mismanaged all the time. But the general economic theory is based on rational actors, and at the macro level that is the effect that has been observed.</text></comment>
<story><title>$15 minimum wage didn’t hurt NYC restaurants</title><url>https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-15-minimum-wage-was-supposed-to-hurt-new-york-city-restaurants-but-both-revenue-and-employment-are-up-2019-10-28</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>Ensorceled</author><text>The comments on these types of articles always hurt my brain.  Blaming minimum wage increases for McDonald&amp;#x27;s, Walmart, pretty much everybody bringing in automated tellers for instance.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m always bemused by the arguments against minimum wages, they almost always boil down to &amp;quot;My business can&amp;#x27;t survive unless my employees are living in poverty.&amp;quot; which, in reality for a lot of businesses, is &amp;quot;I won&amp;#x27;t be as profitable if I have to pay a living wage&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;If people really believed this, there would be staged minimum wages: Walmart pays $25 minimum while small, struggling restaurants pay $15.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sokoloff</author><text>When businesses won&amp;#x27;t be as profitable as desired by the owners, they are less likely to be started or to choose to make that expansion.&lt;p&gt;If labor was plentiful and cost $1&amp;#x2F;hr, we probably wouldn&amp;#x27;t see nearly as many automated checkout stations or ordering kiosks. If low-skilled labor costs $100&amp;#x2F;hr, you can bet there&amp;#x27;s going to be a lot more automation in place.&lt;p&gt;It seems like most people can grasp the general slope of this demand curve, but seem to be unable (and I think in a lot of cases it&amp;#x27;s rather &lt;i&gt;unwilling&lt;/i&gt;) to reason about whether the curve has a fundamentally different slope&amp;#x2F;shape in the $8-20&amp;#x2F;hr range.</text></comment>