re: Restaurant die-off is first course of California’s $15 minimum wage

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One of the best BBQ places in the country is in SD. Phil's BBQ

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No

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One thing I did notice, good BBQ is lacking in SD. I had some ribs at Coronado Brewing Company, and they were baked. A real smokehouse would kill it.

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This is true. You should have tried Grand Ole BBQ y Asado.

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true capitalism

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so such thing

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not dictating what you should be paying your employees.

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businesses of all industries deal with this all of the time, and have for quite some time

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to be fair, restaurants are dying off anyway

there is probably some overlap, but it's a very unstable industry right now

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You're correct actually, not sure why so many downvotes. I went to a conference in Chicago a few weeks ago - some restaurants in larger cities are shutting down their main dining room and just doing togo and delivery. We live in a day in age where we can get food now through apps like postmates, uberEats and Waitr and that's what the consumer is doing.

Take me for instance. A year ago the SO and I would goto Vincent's a few times a months. Since joining UberEats I now order out once a week. I can now get two meals for under $40 and a couple bottles of wine for from the grocery for about half of what I would pay dining in the restaurant.

I'm going to go ahead and assume you were being serious with your responses, so...

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That is up to the employer. If the employee decides to leave because someone is making just as much as them that is on that individual.

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So you're saying there's a world where you think a manager making $16-$18 an hour will settle for that if the busboy is making $15? Good luck filling that role

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Same as the answer above. If they need to feel superior through a wage gap, that is on them. If they leave to seek employment that meets their wage gap superiority it works out for everyone because the job they vacated will be filled.

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It's not about "feeling superior" it's about being fairly compensated. If you've artificially overvalued unskilled labor like that, you've now devalued the semi-skilled labor that was previously at that level. They will need to make more. It's not a tough concept.

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Not really. Lifting up the bottom doesn't push up everyone else, it just closes the wage gap.

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It'll push everyone else up (see above responses). And it'll make everything more expensive, so those additional dollars of income will be spent on more expensive goods and services.

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short term they'd take a hit, but long term they'd be okay because they'd essentially get more money from a thriving economy overall.

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So according to you, there's no downside. Let's just make $50 the minimum wage. Right? Everyone will win and be super wealthy.

Or maybe that type of artificial overvaluing of labor won't work.

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So you're saying there's a world where you think a manager making $16-$18 an hour will settle for that if the busboy is making $15? Good luck filling that role

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I know I wouldn't care what someone else is making just because of their job title. If they are doing a good job why should I care? The goal is to work as a team and get the job done, not to make sure you are making way more than someone that you feel is supposedly lower than you on the labor scale. Also, you can just cross train them to do multiple jobs in the restaurant if need be. They would be very valuable knowing how to do multiple jobs.

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It's not about "feeling superior" it's about being fairly compensated. If you've artificially overvalued unskilled labor like that, you've now devalued the semi-skilled labor that was previously at that level. They will need to make more. It's not a tough concept.

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Its not a tough concept, but a silly one. To feel that you are devalued because someone else makes close to or the exact same as you is kind of silly. How fragile of an ego does one have to have to care so much about what someone else is making?

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It'll push everyone else up (see above responses). And it'll make everything more expensive, so those additional dollars of income will be spent on more expensive goods and services.

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If the market holds and no one is willing to pay them more, what can be done? Let's say a manager leaves and seeks other opportunities and finds that the market is the same across the board, is he/she going to leave the work market because they can't find a job where they make much more than everyone else or will they suck it up and jut work?

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So according to you, there's no downside. Let's just make $50 the minimum wage. Right? Everyone will win and be super wealthy.

Or maybe that type of artificial overvaluing of labor won't work.

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Maybe we put too much value on labor job titles to begin with. It isn't rocket science and require a special skill, it is fricking labor.

Meh. It'll balance out. They'll increase food prices, we won't have to tip, etc. It's not like this is going to destroy the restaurant industry

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short term they'd take a hit, but long term they'd be okay because they'd essentially get more money from a thriving economy overall.

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Grubhub and UberEats are having as big of an effect on restaurants as anything else. Those who aren't getting on board with those types of services are getting left behind quickly.

I would argue that increasing the minimum wage would cause more people to be worse off than better off. All of these discussions seem to ignore other economic realities, like the fact that when the cost of labor increases, so too do the cost of good produced by that labor. In addition, the price of related goods may also increase. So the people making $15 an hour may not actually be better off financially. And the people making more now have less disposable income. Profit margins for business owners go down or collapse. So one group's purchasing power remains the same, while others who do not receive coordinate raises in their industries suffer.

I don't know what we should do, but I find that people advocating both sides often do so as if a wage increase will have no effect other than to improve the lives of its recipients and fail to engage in a proper cause and effect analysis.

The same vacuum approach sees to be prevalent in the universal basic income discussion, but that's a topic for another day.