re: NY restaurants raising prices to cover minimum wage increase

Those businesses will slowly but surely increase prices in the least obvious ways to pay for the increase. They may not do it immediately, but if you think business owners who put their lives into their businesses are just going to willingly take a pay cut that most of them cannot afford you are incorrect. If you are open 10 hours a day for lunch and dinner 6 days a week and have 8 employees on staff at all times average that $1 increase is $480 a week directly out of the business owners pocket so close to a $25k per year pay cut that you think is meaningless not to mention the 7.65% of those $25k wages in payroll taxes. So you are looking at losing $28k a year for a small business owner who is probably taking Home in between $100-200k a year if they are successful. That shite adds up.